Talk of the Toon is born

5th May 2020

Welcome to the new Talk of the Toon website and our very first blog post.  As we remain optimistic about the chances of a Takeover being imminent we aim to bring you all of the latest news and discussion in one place.  Set up by father and son (more about that soon) during Coronavirus lockdown we hope you enjoy the site and what we have to offer.

We supporters have endured a disappointing 13 years after the dizzying heights of the entertainers where we came oh so close.  The fact that my son and his friends all talk about their favourite players from the entertainers even though they have never watched them live tells us that we are in desperate need of a return to better times.  Hopefully it's just around the corner.  As Keegan said...

Thinking about that quote held up in St James' Park still sends shivers down my spine.  Let's hope his words come to bear very soon.  You never know, he might even be back!

So why do we need another website about Newcastle United?  And what made us set it up?

We hope that this website offers something different.  On our front page we bring together the latest from a number of news sources and local blogs.  We also offer our own take on what is happening.  It's a ball ache looking at different websites to find the latest news and discussion.  Our home page solves that problem keeping everything in one place.  Our custom designed souvenirs (currently hidden while I double check we're not going to breach trading standards - they're lush though!) are not only unique but proceeds from them go to support local charity work.

The main focus of the website is around community.  My son has been lucky enough to be involved in the Newcastle United Foundation's Performance Centre from an early age and as such loves all things about the team.  We've benefited a lot from Newcastle Foundation over the years as have many others and we want to try to give something back.  As we sat in lock down my son came up with the idea for this website and I wanted to help make it happen.  It's been a chance for me to teach a 10 year old boy how to set up a website and how to design what we hope are high quality souvenirs to support the running of the website and raise money for a good cause.  At least 10% of any profit made (if any!) will be donated to Newcastle Foundation.  It's been a break from working from home and from school work aside from our allotted hour's exercise per day and it's given us some quality father and son time.  What's more, it's been fun! We're even using our own website now to keep track of takeover updates and we've probably spent far more than we'll make buying our own souvenirs!!  We won't focus much on ourselves in our blog although we do hope to inject some personality and opinion into them.  We hope you don't mind our indulging you above just this once though to give you an insight into who we are, where we are coming from and why we made the site.

What else?  Well we also hope to use the website to encourage aspiring young writers to write for a real purpose and audience.  Even better if we encourage reluctant young writers to engage.  Our youth blog will begin by featuring posts from my son Harry and his friends.  In time though we aim to extend this and offer other young fans the chance to submit their articles and have them published on the website.  They'll be included every now and then in the same feed as the current news and hopefully you'll read them along with other news!  While commenting won't be available on youth articles please do comment on our main blog posts.  We invite you to discuss anything Toon related in the comments and you are of course entitled to your opinion on our posts however you feel about them.  We will read the comments and will take note of any feedback, especially as we are learning as we go.

So, a website is born.  Hopefully our next post will be to comment on an official announcement that our club is finally sold.  Let's see what the coming days bring.  My gut is telling me tomorrow is the day! You heard it here first (or I could be completely wrong!!).