I spent the day as a football mascot - it left me struggling to walk

On Saturday 29 November, I visited Huddersfield Town to write a piece with a difference: a day as the club mascot Tilly the Terrier .

This was either the assignment I was born to do, a madcap idea that snowballed thanks to Huddersfield’s help or both – I’ll let you decide that. It contained things that I’ll never do again but thoroughly enjoyed.

The following is a list of everything I learned on a day that I’d foreseen as funny and silly (and it was both) but ended up being entirely heartwarming…

1) For a fair while, there has only been one Huddersfield Town mascot: Terry the Terrier. When supporters asked where Tilly had gone, Terry would mime sleep (which somehow raises more questions than it answers, given the time lapse).

That produced an interesting reaction when Tilly returned