As the frustration mounts over the interminable wait for the takeover of the club to be completed, as campaign has now begun on twitter to get fans to send pens to Pappa Smurf, just in case the hold- up is that he hasn’t got a writing implement to be able to sign on the dotted line.

The campaign is called Pen4Ken, and his home address in Monaco has been published on Twitter. Should we reproduce it here or would that be irresponsible? Do write in and let us know. At toellandback towers we’ve lucky enough to have Bates phone number after he rang my assistant editor last season, so we’ll probably be texting him a photo of a pen as our contribution.

We’re all getting impatient to see the back of Bates as we urgently need the takeover to go through to allow some much-needed investment in the playing squad, and there is only a week left before the current transfer window closed. And in his press conference yesterday Neil Warnock admitted we have "not a cat in hell's chance" of promotion without this investment.

"It would be great for me to sign three or four good players on loan or permanently but it’s not to be. All managers know what the situation is at their club and that’s why, as a manager, all you can do is do your best, try to put out a team who’ll give everything and get every ounce of energy out of them."

Things must be getting bad if we can’t even get any players in on loan, not even to fill in during the period before Green and Somma are back from injury. Only last season we were sarcastically chanting “we all dream of a team of emergency loans” as that was the only way that Simon Grayson was being allowed to strengthen his squad, but now it seems that even that opportunity is being denied to our current manager.

So let’s bombard Bates with pens in one last effort to really get under his skin. And Ken, please take the hint this time and shove off.

Photo: Action Images

marko added 23:14 - Aug 24 When he called me in April a mobile number and a landline number showed up on my phone....god I am so tempted to tweet it. I thoroughly enjoyed speaking to him and Mrs B, who was lovely, but we have got to move on- we are well into the second decade of the 21st century, we are owned by a man who just 13 years younger than our club (alledgedly, as he does not have a birth certificate), yes it's unpalatable than tripe such as Dawson, Jarvis and Fletcher go for ridiculous fees but that is the name of the game these days y ken?

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