The author Greg McKeown, in his book “Effortless”, talks about a moment of clarity when standing in front of a mirror, dressed in a full length Stormtrooper outfit. Having absorbed from his brothers at the age of six the ambition of one day actually owning such a costume, he found himself on the cusp of buying one, having never examined this redundant desire in the three decades that had since passed.

It’s a charming way to introduce the notion of checking in on such beliefs, of carrying around with us longings that belonged to different times in our lives. And from that moment on, Greg’s wife Anna would occasionally pitch in to ask if some path or possession they sought was, in fact, a Stormtrooper. It became the shorthand code for a method of re-asserting control, not only of the level of actual possessions, but of other, less physical manifestations of the same blind grasping.

I know such urges. I think of the BMX I always hankered after at fourteen - a Raleigh Super-Tuff Burner, the one with the oval tubing, and the stubby Dia-Compe brakes. I can’t pretend I don’t still keep my eye open for those while on the wrong side of fifty, but I doubt I’d ride it in broad daylight. Or perhaps I would, if I had a Stormtrooper outfit to protect my identity.

Another two-wheeled example was the iconic British-made mountain bike, Orange’s Clockwork model. Classic geometry, wishbone stays; a steed to be cherished by the single-track connoisseur. I actually bought one of these, and rode it a little, though it was something like the seventh bike I owned at that time. I managed to shift it to another enthusiast, and delighted in his wide smile as he spun the wheels down the road and back out of my life. The interesting bit was that in some ways it was a relief, this parting of ways. If Thoreau wrote “we don’t own things, things own us”, he wouldn’t have been talking about hardtail bikes or sci-fi apparel, but it’s the same old thing at play. Clutching at stuff, hanging on to that which may no longer be true.

A friend of a friend wrote of the “eBay cupboard”, making this idea of selling easier by framing it as a reversible action. After all, how many things are so rare or so personally important to us that we couldn’t replace them through this global economy if we found their absence too much to bear? Anything in that bracket probably ought to stay, but I look around me in just one room of this house and there are probably only a handful of things I’d be sad to not be able to pick up and cherish. Though I never pick them up and cherish them, I realise. Short pause while I handle my grandfather’s dusty, marble-clad hourglass, and sniff my late father’s pipe drawer. That smell takes me back to about when Greg would have started lusting after the Star Wars kit.

Will there be any golf here today, you may wonder? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. For earlier this week, I finally found in someone else’s eBay cupboard a Joe Powell Smoker in my price range - that strange, hand-built, persimmon weapon that lived in the gaps between driver and fairway wood, between numbers one and four. My oldest golfing friend bought one when we were barely seventeen, and still owns it, of course. But I’d always wanted one, and if anything, it had become more valuable as I drift further down the path of golfing “Essentialism”, to steal another of McKeown’s terms, for it could act as a single club that serves several purposes in my pared-down bag.

In the days when this quiet obsession first took hold, I could hit the occasional ball well with persimmon, and we had no choice, for the TaylorMade Burner and Callaway’s later Big Bertha hadn’t emerged quite yet. But today, even my decent strike has no power, and so, when I take this new baby out for a ride, more than thirty years after the impulse first landed, I will no doubt feel a bit of Greg’s sudden awareness of the absurdity of such a purchase, along with a fresh focus on that other erroneous belief, that I might one day master this game.

That same friend was once asked for his handicap before we began some pairs match or other, and was left furious that he couldn’t even pretend the answer was “scratch”, and I suppose we all carry some notion of wanting to have arrived at whatever our potential might be, without all the hard work that might get us there. That’s another Stormtrooper, I realise, and do I really want to blister my hands and damage my relationships in search of one or two fewer disappointments a round? Or do I really fear that I might put a load of effort in, only to discover that this is my level - a slowly fading game played through a creeping veil of cynicism, with only the occasional miracle to keep the whole thing ticking over…

Perhaps this weekend I will lob a few bits and pieces in the eBay cupboard after all, and try and feed someone else’s appetite for stuff instead of mine. I certainly don’t need most of the things over which I spend my days tripping, and - armed afresh with Greg’s insight - I probably don’t want a fair few of them. But the thing is, I can’t quite give up on the idea of being able to play this game well, to come off beaming rather than cursing, to wake up buzzing on the days when golf is on the cards. Not yet. And this new Smoker - this gorgeous, pear-shaped, grainy lump of artistry - is the key to all that.

The Stormtroopers themselves had their own weapons of choice - the E-11 Blaster - and I bet Greg wanted one of those, too. But I’ll be wielding my battered Smoker instead. At long last.

I’ll take it up the range this morning. It’s my new symbol of hope.

“And I don’t want to know about evil
Only want to know about love”
John Martyn, from “Don’t Want to Know”

Goodness knows why John Martyn’s voice wafted back into my subconscious, after not listening to a single note of his for years. I wasn’t even that big a fan really, though I’d bought Solid Air, his commercially successful record, on which “Don’t Want to Know” appeared. But in he came, those bluesy vocal tones rattling around for days on end, reminding me how some of the best songs are just so simple — an idea or a theme, unembellished… naked somehow. And with this harmony just rolling around inside my head, the days seemed so much lighter, warmer… “only want to know about love”…

My trip to Kintyre is a happy one, and perhaps the last of its kind — a golfing exploration — for a while. I am elated to sprint around Dunaverty, and to finally bask in the aged splendour of Machrihanish. But my final two mornings are reserved for Machrihanish Dunes, and I turn up at the little lodge that services the course without much in the way of expectation. A few friends have been before, but I suppress trying to remember what they said of the course, and head out with my eyes wide and my heart split open by old John Martyn and the rhythm section of the gentle breeze that carries us around.

Much is made of the fact that David McLay Kidd — whose long-held dream to explore the dunes north of his beloved childhood bolt-hole Machrihanish came true a couple of decades ago — was only permitted to move soil in seven of the almost three hundred acres his course roams across. It is the epitome of minimalism in terms of manufacture. But the bit that gets me — hooks me, from the very first couple of greens on day one — is that the greens, those mad, wonderful, flowing greens, fit so well in the landscape he was given to play with. These are more rugged dunes than further down the beach, with shades of the west coast of Ireland in the taller ridges and the endless, glorious views.

As we work our way through the course, utterly charmed by the journey, hole after hole seems to be a refreshing take on the modern world of design — a half-blind drive here, a punchbowl green there, and severe green contours that ought to feel contrived or extreme but never do. Instead, I come away confused by how much fun it is to play, and how long it is since I have come off a course so quietly intoxicated by the childish glee it has provided, and how something still so new can feel as if it has been that way forever.

Over dinner, the group compare notes and I admit to being confused by the day, for I hadn’t really expected to feel this way about a new course, let alone one with such illustrious, revered neighbours. But when I touch on that — feeling as if I might expose myself as architecturally naive, as I certainly am — I can see in the eyes of the others that I am not alone, and that McLay Kidd and his Dunes have got into all of our heads, in my case jostling with old John Martyn.

Sleep comes, albeit after another nail-biting England game in the bar, but I make sure my alarm is set loud, as our times are pinned early for the morning, and I don’t want to miss another bite of this marram-grass cherry. And though a few are still deep in slumber as we push our tees into the ground to explore the course again, we four are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and my early affection from yesterday is only magnified by a second look. By the time we are finished, I am enchanted.

I make a few notes, and now — about six weeks later — I feel like I ought to condense them, and try and build a structure to do this tribute justice, to make the blog’s architecture sound. I can’t tell you whether Kidd’s course is good, or great, or flawed from a design standpoint, for I can’t think or feel anything beyond my love of playing it, and somehow in this world of category and comparison, that is more important to me. So I ignore my notes, and give up on trying to make anything coherent, and instead listen to Martyn wailing on about love as the words pour out. And here comes the truth, and I start to make sense of Mach Dunes and why it just works for me.

For I started playing this game for fun, forty-odd years ago. For the joy of the simple, ancient act of hitting a ball with a stick. Endless loops of Heath Park; endless summer days round Wenvoe Castle. And since then, I have played on and enjoyed more courses than I could possibly count — serious, smart, bucket-list courses that test your brain and your body, and deserve the glory they get. But that feeling of simplicity that I found again in the weaving paths of Mach Dunes, where the turf seems to pulse with its vigour and the burnet moths seem to flutter in bliss? That has been a rare thing in my golfing journey, for it operates on a different register to most of life.

Perhaps John Martyn just caught that refrain, those two siblings of a couplet, drifting through the air one day, and managed to do the hardest thing: to not mess around with the gold in his hands, to leave it to breathe as it is. And perhaps there’s a bit of that here, in the roaming, wild odyssey that hides above Westport Beach. The tagline says “The World’s Most Natural Golf Course”, and of course this is built around that sensitive construction process, and the care with which this precious land is tended by the team of wizards that manage it. But it is also, for me, a reminder that we must not try and control every little thing. We mustn’t let rules, or plans, or — in the case of John Martyn — “evil” get in the way of what comes naturally, for beauty is not rigid.

I glance at the course planner and decide to let David McLay Kidd finish here what he started there, almost twenty years ago, for his last few words nail it far better than the thousand I have tumbled out. I’ve spent two mornings chopping round Mach Dunes, and it has rekindled in me a fire for this simple game that still has me smiling now. Goodness knows what he must feel about it. Love, I suppose.

“This special place offers a simplicity and honesty that feeds the soul”
David McLay Kidd

I doubt I’ve ever heard so much about a place before arriving as with Machrihanish.

Breathless whispers, tearful confessions, and at least three whole books I’ve read dedicated to and inspired by the place, including Michael Bamberger’s magnificent, timeless “To the Linksland”. That volume shifted the course from a bucket list item to an essential mission, a pilgrimage. A case of not “if”, but “when”.

“When” became “now” in July 2026. Waking like a child on Christmas morning, my alarm shifts me from dreaming of Kintyre to heading there in an instant, and the journey, a considerable one, seems to pass easily, entirely spent under the spell of anticipation.

From beside the first tee, very little is visible of the course, for the little ridge that the second smuggles you over hides most of the routing away, though the closing hole comes sliding past on the right, a welcome bailout zone for the famous opening tee shot. To me, all the fuss about the way the course starts — picking your line across a vast crescent of a beach to the promised land of bent and fescue beyond — seems a veil behind which Machrihanish’s treasures are hidden, and I think about how shallow we humans are, always looking for an angle through which to understand, a hook onto which we can attach meaning.

A hook is, of course, the last thing you need here, although the beach is in play, and as we await our turn, more than one golfer can be seen scurrying across the white sand to pitch back up to the links. The right hand side has danger, too, for a ribbon of pot bunkers that serve the eighteenth are obscured from view out that way, but we manage to survive this ordeal, and from there, a remarkable stretch of golf follows. For our approach to the second, we must fire over the inlet that dissects the course, and carry the large, diagonal bank on the far side, beyond which a punchbowl green with steep sides lies in wait, funnelling decent shots towards the hole.

A blind drive unsettles us at the third, though we trust the marker, and our subsequent prize is a nice line into the green, protected by half a dozen deep bunkers. Already, the simplicity of the design, of trusting the natural land to provide sufficient challenge, is clear, and the conditioning of the turf only enhances this. One must stare at the ground, and trust that the ball will follow faithfully the contours, though it often means playing away from the direct line.

A menacing bunker dominates the short fourth, with more sand waiting out right and further back, and the small plateau green requires accuracy, which is a good test ahead of the fifth, whose fairway swings hard left to leave an approach that must clear or trundle through a depression to find the target painted on the hill beyond. At the sixth, mystified as to the line, I resort to the course guide, and notice for the first time the hole names. This one — a short par four packed with thrilling ridges and swales — is called “Balaclava”, and I smile at this, for already it seems to me as if Machrihanish is to some degree masked, its secrets nestled in the pockets of this ancient landscape. And all along, our soundtrack is the steady rhythm of the Atlantic.

The stretch from the fifth is referred to on the flapping leaves of my guide as “the gauntlet”, — “a series of challenging and penal tee shots that demand precision”, but — perhaps helped by a dryish summer even in this coastal location — it is hard to agree with the term “penal”. There are some strange places awaiting your ball if you miss, certainly, and — as I slide my drive right and have the thrill of a true “hit-and-hope” from some virginal swale miles off Balaclava’s line — my sense is of a track that one can play and survive from all sorts of angles, as is the case at The Old Course, reserving its greatest riches for the accurate, patient, resilient golfer. It feels, a third of the way through this opening journey, like a very honest test.

Through the middle section, I lose my way a little, in terms of my golf and of my recollection of the holes, and almost tear my card up. The two par fives — the tenth and twelfth holes — are spliced by a long par three, and I am glad to find again the middle of the clubface on the charming thirteenth, a mischievous par four that slides along the course’s northern boundary, the green only clearly visible from an elusive plateau in the fairway. Somehow this hole sticks out to me in its playful nature — the thrilling, rollercoaster ride of the front nine now replaced by the simple, open elegance of the back.

At the fourteenth, we begin the journey home towards the little string of houses that run into town, and our reward for negotiating another tricky green site is back-to-back par threes that mug us for our shots and our confidence. The sixteenth, at over two hundred and thirty yards, is barely reachable today in a gentle breeze, and must be menacing in a gale, but I pause to reflect on how irrelevant “par” is out here. Machrihanish is a hundred and fifty years old, and its charms and challenges are far too subtle, far too important to waste time measuring against this notion of par.

The wind, and the turf, and the acres of hazards between our ears are what build it afresh every day, and what the course takes on one hole, it may give on another. To try and describe it is a fool’s errand, for Machrihanish seems to me as much a mysterious beast after playing it as I suspected it was before: a coy, beguiling teaser of a links. That it could be summed up by focusing on a single drive — that daunting first one, which now seems such a long time ago — or by the thinly veiled slight that “it ends softly” in the final two holes is to give ourselves away in our ignorance. Like The Old Course, it has layered depth, I suspect; it requires study.

The tight line of the out of bounds left at the seventeenth only seems out of character because the playing lines through the rest of the course are so open, so vague. A precise golfer might plot their steady way through the holes on a benign day, but the rest of us get to survive and occasionally flourish when a course is presented fairly, honestly. This hole reminds us of the freedom that lies behind us on the far side of The Burn, and if the last has been softened over time as the motor car reached Machrihanish, today’s finish is still charming, with the delicate ridge that guards the front right brought more into focus by the final few bunkers on the left.

We pause before putting out to watch the next group quietly plunge their pegs into that first tee box, and begin the latest edition of the voyage that folk have been taking for a century and a half, and what is for me the acid test of a great golf course — that upon finishing, you just want the time and the energy to “go again” — is in evidence, not least because I feel like I have barely skimmed the surface of Machrihanish’s depths. Some things in life are obvious, and accessible. Others require time, and dedication, and close attention, and this place feels to me like it sits at the far end of that spectrum. Tucked behind a marram grass balaclava, perhaps.

Old Tom Morris is reported to have said — when extending the original twelve holes to eighteen in the late 1870s — that “the Almighty had golf in his eye when he designed this place”. By the time Old Tom had finished, we assume golf was coursing through his veins…

In the summer of 1865, a group of 153 pioneers, mostly from South Wales, set sail from Liverpool in a tea clipper named “Mimosa”, bound for the foothills of the Andes, in Argentine Patagonia. Their mission — to create a distant enclave of Welsh heritage amidst a period of cultural and lingual erosion — wa…

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“This is the finest day care facility in all of Oxfordshire,” David suggests, with a mischievous glint in his eye, casting his gaze across the congregation before us. Stewart nods, and adds his own observation, but he is not sure whether our request for him to repeat whatever it was he said is as a result of our poor hearing, or of his soft voice. In truth, it is probably simply a function of the racket this room full of outpatients are making, delighting in their weekly ritual, but we interpret Stewart’s lips as supportive of this notion of “day care,” and of the value of this fixture, the Wednesday Foursomes.

I offer the thought that all that really needs to be remembered mid-week is where Huntercombe is, and Stewart hears me okay, but his expression suggests that perhaps this element is not always as straightforward as it ought to be. Right on cue, a couple more folk emerge from vehicles that slide past the entrance door, and I realise that for some, this drop-off facility is probably not that distinct from respite for the non-golfing family back at home. There is plenty of experience in the room, certainly, and I am not the only one having trouble reading what appears to be shrinking font on the menu. “You need longer arms,” David suggests, and for perhaps the eighth time in the couple of minutes I have been sitting here, my sides ache from laughter.

Graham — I will call him that as I think that is his name, and I can actually remember it, rather than simply designate him one as I have for David and Stewart — is in charge of the draw, and, as I am Mike’s guest today, he assures me that the “random” draw can happen to turn out however the ringleader desires it. This pleases me, not least because I know I will not forget Mike’s name in a hurry, so I am already a third of the way to survival.

Graham asks after my handicap, and I wince whilst muttering seven-point-one, and notice a hint of amused surprise in his eyes that anyone would bother with a decimal place. Why I bother with a handicap is another question I grapple with, for I only put the one decent, completed scorecard in decades into the system to see what might happen, and can only assume the extraordinarily penal result was some sort of deferred penalty for all those years of not caring. I can’t pretend to care about it now, but neither can I play to it, and particularly in foursomes, where the burden of pressure to look after one’s partner sits high in the chest.

“I can’t play to it,” I declare, and Stewart chimes in with “I’m off thirty-one and I can’t play to that!” but Graham is a kind soul, and explains with a smile that the cruel world outside of this haven needn’t bother us today. “Would you like another shot or two?” he enquires, and I am off nine by the time the strange tray of coloured, numbered balls is cast into order. Mike’s name is read out, mysteriously followed by mine, and I wonder if the rigging of such matters that FIFA seems to carry out as a matter of course is born of such kindness as Graham’s. Two more names emerge either side of ours, both of which I write down on the scorecard I will not use and can barely see, for reference later. And then I am urged to go, for once your pairings are declared, the charge of the foursomes begins immediately: “Dismissed!”

Alastair, my partner, pulls a ball from his bag and suggests he plays the evens, which suits me not only as I will stroll — no, canter — around with Mike, but because we are to start on the sixth, and the opening drive is well within the reach of a road. We survive that early hazard, and have barely stopped for breath by our third hole, at which point an errant two-ball is spotted ahead. Pressure is applied by a pace of play that belies our aggregate age out here, and “a gentle word” has the nervous pair ahead pick up their pace and disappear from view.

At some point, Mike hits a chip and run that caresses the gorgeous contours through which Huntercombe’s routing is cast, and comes to rest a few feet away. I brush the ball away into the path of Peter, Mike’s partner, then tickle my putt down to a couple of feet, and this too is conceded “in the interests of fraternity,” and I breathe a sigh of relief, for I seem to be inflicting regular inconvenience on Alastair, who smiles throughout such ordeals. It is lovely to be playing in company where the match standing — if any of us can actually remember what it is — is of scant importance, and this is the way the Wednesday Foursomes operates, and has done for half a century. Peter recalls a new-ish member joining the tribe, and nervously asking one of the old hands if this format was a serious one. “Serious? No,” came the answer. “Desperate, of course, but never serious.”

We catch glimpses of other fours striding around the course, for the assembled troops started from many tees, swarming across Willie Park Jnr’s understated jewel, and as we turn right from the eighteenth to play our last five, Graham is thrusting his trolley across in front of the patio. Peter asks him how it is going, and Graham’s one-word answer — “awful” — hangs in the air for a while. But we know all too well that it can only be his form that is behind this declaration, and that — no matter how many duffs or thins, shanks or slices — the overall vibe is one of gratitude for this marvellous place and this valuable ceremony.

By the time we shake hands, and reenact that other timeless Huntercombe custom of a choc-ice in the sun, we have more or less worked out the score, and somehow, despite my patchy play, Alastair and I have sneaked home by 2&1, though the lore of the club dictates that any wider margin than that is reported as such anyway. The other fours arrive, and linger over drinks, and it strikes me, as the sun glints through the trees and across the slowly browning runway of the last, that I could play this sort of golf and only this sort of golf for the rest of my days and not tire of it, not yearn for a single thing to change.

Huntercombe as a course is an endless joy, its fabulous, rolling greens perhaps the finest, most maddening collection in the land, and as a club it is that rare entity that knows what it does well, and sticks to it. Its members are delightful and it has a Secretary that completely “gets” the place, so everything is done with a gentle style that feels close to effortless. It is also, on a Wednesday and without a shadow of doubt, “the finest day care facility in all of Oxfordshire”.

With grateful thanks to my playing partners, and to Marcus and Huntercombe. I love the place more with every visit! Happy Anniversary, the Wednesday Foursomes… ❤️

From its position, planted in a dusty field in rural France during a blistering heatwave, my phone blinks into life, and — having certified that nothing terribly urgent has occurred overnight — I examine an invitation that purports to be from a golfing friend, or at least try to. I fail to open the summons, and then in the evening, when the same routine is enacted in order to check our ferry times for the mission home, I realise my error.

A slew of concerned messages make it clear that I have been “hacked,” shattering the serenity of a rustic camping break, and no doubt causing hassle to many others in the process. A few days of lurking anxiety and guilt ensue, for it is clear this issue has been passed down the line of contacts I use this email address for. My mail provider, meanwhile, helpfully regards me as dangerous and blocks my attempts to warn others for a day that feels like a month.

Time softens the fury, as it does with my golf, such that this morning I can almost smile at the absurdity of the whole thing. Technology is meant to make our lives easier, not harder, and yet as I sit here typing, the wonders of communication connecting me with thousands of friends all over the world, it feels like a burden, a modern cross to bear. That I have been hacked is ridiculous, for I am more than capable of hacking myself, it seems.

At this level, interacting with the grey forces of automation, the endless interrogation over passwords and these new “Passkeys” feels like the Spanish Inquisition, and I am as lost over many of these boundaries as I am over a swift, breaking four-footer. Not to mention the greatest of all insults: “Face Not Recognised.” This lands as a savage blow. I know I’m getting older; I can feel it in what remains of my sinews every time I stoop to repair a pitchmark, and yet the bleak truth of these three words is akin to “Out Of Bounds” in their judgement. Technology offers few free drops, it seems.

Plus there is the question of what the menacing swine of a hacker expected to glean from this intrusion. There are few riches around here, and if one were to objectively analyse the contents of an ill-ordered email account used for golf writing, I’m not quite sure what the outcome would be. Pity, perhaps, or a desire to help restore order. Google — the same entity that let the nasty “phish” swim in these waters in the first place — instructs me to check which, if any, of my documents have been examined during the occupation of my identity, and I am relieved to see that only my spreadsheet of golf courses played this year has been opened before I change another forgotten password.

In some ways, this is pleasing. Given that I have roamed from Denham to Dunaverty, and Hunstanton to Huntercombe, I imagine the cyber-criminal nodding in quiet approval — of my golfing taste, and of the sheer will it takes to actually get around these joints. If they were a golfer too, there might even be a little envy in viewing this itinerary, but of course they can’t be a golfer, for we have a code of conduct, and hacking someone’s emails is a malicious act. We may be feeble at times, and desperate, but we are at least honest, kept so by the norms of our beloved sport. This is the act of a cheat, a “nudger,” as one reader delightfully puts it, and golf puts nudgers out to pasture pretty swiftly.

But the greater lesson in all this for me was in the sudden realisation that I am myself a hacker — at golf, at least — and have, in truth, been one for a very long time. In the first giddy throes of this love affair with our unassailable mistress of a game, I was hopeful, and confident, and actually capable to some degree. But that phase passed through me and out the other side like a virus, with what has become normal service — hacking — emerging in the late 1980s. Just typing this is depressing, for that seems a very long time ago, and the forecast in those days on “Tomorrow’s World” for the sort of technological life we would lead when this future arrived seemed to stop with automatic vacuum cleaners.

Since then, my good shots — and they are “my” good shots, unlike the errant ones for which blame can be cast at the tools (”bad workman!”), the wind, the turf or a distant train — are rarely strung together. Frequently, the intervals that separate them are entire holes, if not days. I often joke that it takes me a dozen holes to warm up when something marvellous manifests on about the fourteenth, but the truth is that it then seems as if I need a couple of holes to cool back down, for such “form” is only ever transitory, and often momentary.

I have hit buildings, cars and trains with my golf balls, and spent more time in the jungle than Benedict Allen, and yet still I keep going, keep hacking, the lines on my face and the scratches on my arms bearing witness to a miserable streak of play. I have folded divots over my ball on the simplest of pitches, and lost balls in the practice net at Liphook and off the edge of the St George’s Hill practice green (another savage blow, and it was a new ball). I can do, it seems, extraordinary things with a golf ball, but I have no idea which version will show up, and often feel like I play fast to get it over with, or before my playing partners have time to stop and watch.

I heard only this week the most wonderful story about a golfer who had such terrible trouble playing a specific par three that he would often simply concede the hole and suggest they advance to the next tee. When I’d finished laughing about the calm acceptance of one’s frailties that the tale spoke of, I realised I have dozens of holes where it might be in the best interests of my self-esteem to limit the damage in this way. And that list includes the same hole he woke up in the night sweating about.

If I was counting, I expect most of my scores would start with an “8” if not a “9,” and I wonder if — as the memory of my pre-hacking days fades into a distant and suspicious ghost of a feeling — one miracle per round might edge closer to an actual 1% success rate. Surely I wouldn’t keep playing if things got that bad, but — skimming what feels like a confession above — I might have already crossed that line.

The odd triumphant swipe seems to soften the pain, but the collateral damage that the hacker suffers is cumulative, and punishing. I am in a rut, I decide, as a way of framing this misery, though the rut is the best part of four decades long and unfathomably deep, not to mention hairy. As ruts go, it is a phenomenal one. But the last few days seem to have solved most of the irritating effects of the computer hacking episode, so I am taking from that a small dose of optimism into a far more pressing, if less sinister, mission: to stop my own, habitual hacking.

Off to the range. Please don’t watch.

"A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life."
Charles Darwin

Thursday afternoon. Checked into the hotel, stared out the window at the twin heavenly landing strips of Machrihanish beach and the first fairway of the old links, between which my ball will have to choose when Friday morning arrives. Either will suit me just fine.

But dinner isn’t until later, and the sea air rules out a nap, so what to do with a spare hour or so? I grab a lift to Southend, and arrive on the opening tee at Dunaverty with a six iron, two golf balls, and a thirst for hitting shots. Right away, the course suits my eye: wide, firm fairways, and the greens, hiding behind their electric fences, make a mockery of the more polished, pampered grasses of the famous links. At the first, a gentle chip and run goes sliding by along with the return; at the short second, which slides down the hill past a couple nursing their G&T’s in the shade of a static caravan, my tee shot goes bounding through as if landing on tarmac.

The third brings me back up the slope, then on the fourth, a slightly dragged approach disappears into the punchbowl that hides the green, and when I come over the brow to spot it right behind the hole, I am in love with this place, and all it stands for. My taxi is booked for six, so a fast trot becomes a jog between shots, and - inspired by the view of the beach beside which the fifth unfolds - I decide to step on the gas in the hope of catching all of the holes whilst in Southend. By the time I begin the climb to the tenth green, I am completely out of breath but unable to stop running, for I feel as if the course deserves such energy, such enthusiasm for the next shot, next wild view, next funky little green.

A few steps higher, at the top of the course, the plaque on a bench glints in the sun that descends over Islay, and - long before the words come into focus - I know what this spot must be. And I read the words, and shed a tear for the blend of joy and pain that they speak of, and for my own lovely family up and down the line, and for the delicate threads that tie us to other souls. This life seems blindly random, bulging with distractions, and yet it is the connection to certain people and places that bring with them a strange feeling of belonging, something we surely yearn for. I nod once more at the names on this small metal plate, which must mean the world and more to the friend who presented it, and spring back to my feet, for the taxi won’t hang around for my little reverie.

The course works me and my ball inland a bit, up towards Coniegian Water, then at the seventeenth, the river straightens up to threaten my approach. Another six iron - what else could it be? - hangs dormant in the breeze for a while then lands soft as a feather behind the hole, where the slope trickles it closer and closer. And I rattle it in, and hit two more flush down the last, and arrive in the car park with seconds to spare, which I spend gazing back out at Dunaverty Rock, spellbound by the sound of the waves and the dunlins and the shrill shriek of the oystercatchers. My legs ache from the contours I’ve covered, and my face stings from sweat, but the smile I wear runs from ear to ear, and I feel as if the ground I walk on shares this joy, somehow.

The button on the side of my watch holds this adventure to a pause, and - as the distant crunch of gravel warns of the tyres that will carry me back - I realise that barely twenty seconds remain of this spare hour of mine, and I wonder what other hour I could possibly find that could yield so much. Darwin - not the one I often quote, but his bearded explorer of a grandfather - warned against wasting even an hour of this gift of a life, and yet for so long I held this sort of play as somehow an indulgence, a selfish waste of our precious time.

Dunaverty has reminded me, just when I needed it most, that much of life’s value for me can be found in these little strips of land between the town and the sea, and in the folk who frequent these spaces. Goodness knows how many hours I have spent under the spell of golf and of golfers, but - fully forty years down this wide, green fairway - I couldn’t bring myself to deem one single moment of it, let alone an hour, a waste. This happens to be my faith, this ridiculous, belligerent, un-winnable game, and Dunaverty turns out to be another remote chapel for such worship.

Blessed are these ways…

With grateful thanks to Jim Hartsell, Jamie Darling, and Don Wilson III, for the impetus to finally make it to Southend. I couldn’t be more grateful, friends…

Driving steadily west, we speak of many things, Michael and I. Of England, and France, and parenthood. Of art, and legacy, and writing. But mainly of golf, our common vice, towards which we voyage once more.

We also share an admiration for the stylish prose of Simon Barnes, though Michael cannot forgive him for dismissing golf as a sport on the grounds that it is not dangerous. And that thought, along with its cousin — a slight sadness that Barnes couldn’t bring himself to sink a little deeper into this world of shanks and bogeys, for he’d have depicted the game’s infinite flavours like no-one else — hangs around on my shoulder as we plot our merry way through thirty-six holes over Royal Porthcawl’s spectacular links.

Danger lurks early here. Halfway through my first downswing, some unknown panic arrives, and this sudden haste must bring my head up, for the club just about catches the ball, and flies a foot or so off the ground for a little way. More danger awaits at the other end of this pitiful blow, as the rains of a month ago have brought a bloom to the rough, which is heavy in some of the hollows. And Porthcawl offers many hollows.

A different malfunction sends my approach long and right, to leave a nerve-wracking chip down the green, but that bit goes well, and I am in danger of making an indecent four until I stand above the putt, and every part of my body and mind says “no”. But Michael is smiling, and the impatience with which he relishes every next shot just gets sharper with his opening par. We are off and running, or at least walking as fast as we can.

From the second tee, my ball swings towards the Severn Estuary but stays on our side of the fence; at the third, though, the pull of the tide is too strong and I am leaking ammunition early. The waves crash in and then drag their swell back over the pebbled shore, and as the afternoon light grows softer, and my ball pocket lighter, my confidence waxes and wanes like the moon that hangs above Port Talbot’s distant towers. Of all golf’s many dangers, the fragility it exposes in my psyche might be the most hazardous. Somewhere else Barnes quotes some other fellow, to suggest that “sports do not build character. They reveal it”, and if that’s the case, as a cowardly pitch from uncharted territory left of the eighth moves about three feet in total, I’m in trouble. Or danger.

But Michael reminds me at regular intervals — as if this is my medicine, and the required dose an hourly one — that we two play golf not by the general code of “not how, but how many”, but the opposite. Nothing in our game has regard for score unless we are going well, and the phrase “there are no pictures on the scorecard” doesn’t work if you can’t be bothered to mark one in the first place. Perhaps a different danger in golf is this way — our way — of playing, for the hunt for perfect, beautiful shots is both optimistic and utterly doomed.

Another few balls decorate Porthcawl’s nether regions, and we explore the new seventeenth green, and manage to avoid hitting the clubhouse down the last, which slides down to the surfing breakers we have been gazing at all afternoon. And I fall asleep quickly after dinner — the sea air and our latest trip in this maddening game just the tonic for my aching bones and a worried mind. Through slumber, the game rolls on, and one bunker I dream of seems to shrink as I gradually empty it, the revetted wall of turf working ever tighter as my wedge digs deeper into the earth.

Barnes misses out on golf’s splendour, of course, but the flip side is he doesn’t have to go through this sort of torture, and by the time five o’clock arrives here on Rest Bay, I am no longer capable of rest, and head out with some trainers on, to make the most of this time by the coast. Left of the third, I view the large “Danger / Pergyl” sign from the perspective of the genuinely imperilled, and further left of that, I find my dragged ball from the previous afternoon.

Delighted by this re-mooched missile, I jog on to the back of the green, where the boardwalk turns right, and up by the fifth green fail to find another lost friend that flew out of a bunker and over the dry stone wall at the Welsh Black cattle a few hours earlier. From there, my route is as haphazard as that of my many strewn golf balls, lurching left and right through the quiet streets of the town until I finally spot the pink roof beneath which will be served another fabulous hazard: the full Welsh breakfast.

Soon, we go again, and though my golf is not much better than the day before, there are enough good “how’s” to play with a permanent smile, which is directed between shots at the larks up above or the sea far below. All morning, the delicate sun seems threatened by a rain that glares from dark clouds, but the irrigation cycle that this firm turf will welcome waits until we are in the car before letting loose, and we are grateful for this clemency, and staggered by the condition that this quiet little club have their course in. The turf looks as happy as we are.

Michael is by now flushing most of his — some vague feeling he hunts for, described by a rolling of his wrist, as obsessed by his grip on the club as by the game’s grip on us. And — though I still follow a zigzag rollercoaster up and down Porthcawl’s marvellous, rolling pasture — I hit a few that make me want to carry on, to not join Barnes on the other side of the golfing divide. I still set the same ball I presented at breakfast, the same ball that camped out on the beach last night, on a little peg on each tee, and somehow manage to complete each and every hole with it, though it lives a charmed life.

Down the tenth, I chop left of even the rough-mowers’ path, and have no right to keep finding the damned thing, for Michael and his own trusty sphere are furlongs to the right of me. But still this ball hangs on with me, looks after me, climbs into and out of bunkers with me, and those bunkers do not close in around me after all, though I visit most of them, and take home a fair bit of their sand in my hair.

By the time we cross the bridge back into England, Michael is gently snoring — perhaps not dreaming of his own sandy traps but of the putts that never dropped for us this time — and I am ready to turn back into life, into the stream of traffic, into the daily grind. Another injection of this dangerous game, just in time. Another walk on the strangely wild side…

“All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them.“
From Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five”

I’d known I might have some time to actually read on holiday for months. An arrow spanned our little trip, guarding the calendar against all the other threats and commitments, and eventually the moment came for my last-minute packing. I hurriedly made a list, and the last item unticked simply said “books.”

Writing this a full thirty days after the holiday ended, I remember that I’d meant to find my copy of Don Quixote and finish that epic mission (see here: “Tilting at Windmills”). But my memory neglected that plan in the midst of my preparatory haste, and so, while standing in a charity shop as the dog paid through her little black snout for the latest bout of post-Brexit daylight robbery, I spotted another supposed classic going for a pittance. Slaughterhouse-Five was a title I’d missed in adolescence, but enough people love Kurt Vonnegut to pique my curiosity, so it went in the bag, along with my internet friend Tony Dear’s latest.

Tony’s stuff is often a source of delight via LINKS Magazine, where his topic ideas are as wonderful as his apparently encyclopaedic memory. The Story of Golf in 50 Tournaments seemed a nice companion for Vonnegut — the chance to dip into nostalgic territory felt like a break from the somewhat heavier material the back cover of Slaughterhouse-Five promised.

It turns out the latter isn’t really about the bombing of Dresden, partly because Vonnegut’s brilliant, meandering opening chapter admits that neither he nor his oldest friend from that time can actually remember much themselves. From there, the novel and its lead character, Billy Pilgrim, shuffle in and out of time, the wider mysteries of life woven into a narrative that only seems to regard Dresden as its unifying theme. It is, from the first page, the masterpiece I’d been promised, and I finished it in a few hours, my focus broken only by fits of laughter at the playful genius of the author.

Tony was up next, and — having read the introduction when it first arrived a few weeks back — I was delighted once again by the mention of Wordsworth on page five, and the reminder of his phrase “spots of time,” used to describe those moments of our lives that are somehow fixed, as if through a camera lens, every detail rendered permanent by our attention, or by some deeper meaning we attach to it.

Tony calls these “distinct, vivid memories.” Where some people insert here the moment they learned of the fate of JFK, or Martin Luther King Jr., for me it might be standing at the bar as some stranger told me Kurt Cobain had died, or the fast-taken corner that sent Liverpool past a bewildered Barcelona. Or the day Covid-19 closed all of our doors, and all of our tees, or better still the day they opened again. Our sharpened focus in such spots of time encases fine detail the way a fossil does, and though golf hadn’t really found the Lake District in Wordsworth’s time, I like to think he’d approve of us pinching his term to examine our sport this way.

The deep, reflective quiet of the pandemic brought an awareness of how I’d fallen out of love with golf, though I’d been positively intoxicated by it through my teenage years. The years since — playing more, trying new courses when I can, and trying to cement these personal spots of time by writing about them — have somehow wound back the clock, letting me leap through time like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim to the simpler days when golf ruled my life.

For those of us who love golf, watching it played by the masters, at the peak of their ability, can be to experience awe. On one level it’s only a game, and a daft one at that; on another, we watch the drama unfold, the hopes and dreams of the protagonists shifting in the breeze like the flags they hunt, and know they’re welded to their present, and ours. In real time, Jack’s win at the 1986 Masters — the first edition I watched, with no idea who this “Golden Bear” was — was a rollercoaster ride, a staggering feat of momentum that hasn’t faded with time.

Tony brings that moment and a few dozen others back to life brilliantly, including the strange echo of Jack in Tiger’s 2019 comeback win on the same creeping bent turf. He paints the pictures in words, filling in the details no photo could offer for context. That golf — already a few hundred years old, and now a global business — can still produce these peak experiences for us and for our heroes says something about the depth of this pursuit.

In here are the charges to glory of Palmer and Zaharias, Jones and his own heroine, Joyce. “The Duel in the Sun”, “Hogan’s Alley”. And many other pivotal moments in this sport we love, frozen in time — no, “unstuck in time,” à la Mr Pilgrim — for us to rediscover whenever the spirit moves us. And when our modern professionals slip beneath the old standards of golfing conduct, as one or two have done of late, what a joy it is to be able to immerse ourselves instead in such moments of distinction, respect, and decorum.

Tony closes with Rory’s career slam at Augusta in 2025, well aware that the text could soon be out of date — and so it proved, when a successful defence of his green jacket followed in almost equally dramatic circumstances. A simple register of champions is just a list of names and numbers but, armed with Tony’s marvellous companion, the iconic moments that make up the timeline of our game are rendered with the love and care of a writer who describes the sport as beautifully as his subjects play it.

So I tick the box marked “books” on my packing list, and recommend both to anyone who’ll listen. Unlikely companions, perhaps, but masterpieces in their own, delightful way. And then I wait patiently for another Open to unfold, and wonder what stories, what spots of time will lie hidden in the dunes at Royal Birkdale this week.

Time will tell, no doubt. It always does.

“That's one thing Earthlings might learn to do, if they tried hard enough: Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones."
From Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five”

Read some excerpts from Tony’s book via his Substack blog, here. Then buy the book from the publisher, Back Nine Press, or from Amazon. You can thank me later!

16th Hole - 147 yards, par 3, si 13

Alex is waiting on the next tee, where the sun glints off the iron heads of his clubs – tools that, like mine, have been replaced with a less elegant but more reliable edition of the weapons we carried in childhood, and, in those few steps until I reach him th…

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There is a passage in my beloved 1974 copy of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that changes me every single time I read it. A father and son on a motorcycle trip fill up at a gas station in some forgotten town off the beaten track, and engage in a leisurely conversation with two locals. Something does not quite seem right, and then the father—effectively the author, Robert Pirsig—realises what is different. It is that the two gentlemen with whom their delightful conversation is conducted are in no hurry, and that this state is so rare that it feels strange.

Five decades and a whole lot of hurry later, an idea germinates from two spots on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, culminating in a plan that is to take place on a tiny island that sits very much on my side of that vast body of water. Many messages are sent and read, calls made, logistics considered. Ferries are booked, and long- range weather forecasts pored over, in order to determine whether ferries might actually run.

My front door clicks shut with the moon high and dominant in the sky, and I drive almost without pause to Silloth-on-Solway, where I will spend three blissful hours stretching my legs ahead of the final section up to Oban. A few minutes ahead of me on the winding roads of the west highlands, no doubt trying as hard as I am to see clearly as the light fades and heavy rain batters Scotland, is Pam. She has peeled away from a damp tent at Royal Troon, where the latest Open Championship is being fought, but neither of us will catch the Claret Jug being lifted in person or on a screen, for we will spend the intervening days in the study of a version of golf that is poles apart from the professional game. We are heading to Coll.

Pam is an enthusiastic and well-organised golfing traveller, and despite her concerns over parking and the short commute to the terminal, we manage it, largely thanks to her. I stop on the hill above Oban a little before 11pm, pulling the van into what appears to be a cemetery car park, and wake about five hours later to the ambient soundtrack of the whole journey this far—driving rain. Down in the town, Pam checks into and out of a B&B without ever seeing the sleeping owner, and before long we are on deck as the iconic CalMac craft leaves port heading for the Inner Hebrides.

A few people raise eyebrows at our golf bags, and the one or two who stop to quiz us assume that we will be playing on Tiree, where the golf course is well-known. But these last few weeks have been spent looking forward to arriving at a different track on Coll—a nine-holer that hibernates from season to season, only flowering in the early part of the summer, each year since 1975. And therein lies the hook that had us scrambling for ferry spaces and car parks. For the golfers on Coll build their links afresh each year.

We peer at the Tiree course through binoculars, but on approach to Arinagour, we cannot see the fluttering flags upon Coll, for they lie over the brow of a central ridge that spans the island. But we do spot what is almost certainly Campbell, who is at the front of the line of those waiting on the rampart to greet passengers—the golfing waterproof gives that away. It is a wonderfully warm welcome, and we are delighted to then meet Margaret, Campbell’s “better half ”, and their friends David & Anne. That all four came down to see us arrive seems slightly over the top, but as time goes on, we come to realise how important the ferry is to these island people, and how their days are metered out by certain fixed points, in between which lie these acres of freedom.

Over the first bout of an extraordinary streak of hot tea and homemade cakes, Margaret—who was born here and lived in this very fisherman’s cottage for the first sixteen years of her life before heading away to Glasgow—explains the fine art of shopping on Coll. There are a couple of local stores, and they are well supported, but certain items are easier to obtain when an islander has reason to pop over to the mainland. But if you tell anyone you are heading for Oban or beyond, news spreads like wildfire through the community, and you head off with a handful of shopping lists, and return with stuffed bags of produce for your neighbours. Margaret tries to pretend that she and Campbell keep quiet in such circumstances, but you can tell that they look out for each other, the Coll inhabitants, and these two have been doing so, and returning for long swathes of time to Margaret’s parents’ old terraced cottage, for longer than they care to calculate just now.

A discernible lull in the rain on the windows has me gazing out at the bobbing fishing boats, and Campbell quickly detects that I am keen to stretch my legs. So Pam and I chuck on our own waterproofs, and he drives us up into the centre of Coll, through farmland and past an occasional ruin, each of which makes me glad that I am so lousy at DIY, for they might otherwise tempt me as “projects”. His driving is cautious, given that you can see for hundreds of yards ahead, but then it occurs to me that this unhurriedness is a great part of the charm of such places, and that I am yet to settle into that comforting rhythm.

Near the fork in the road at Arnabost, where we shall veer left towards Grishipoll, another vehicle comes into view, and this sense of leisure, and perhaps respect, is further enforced. Campbell and the driver talk for several minutes, and nothing in their conversation ever feels forced, or an intrusion. Instead, it is just that same cadence Pirsig observed...simple, human interaction without the sense of the clock ticking for some state other than just this. I notice and try to release my ow impatience to set eyes on the course that Campbell has once again helped shape, for this is Scotland in June, and though the skies will be pitch black and riddled with stars by nightfall, there are still hours upon hours of the light ahead.

Eventually, their chat peters out, and motion resumes. A smart, metal gate sits on the right of the road, and I jump out at Campbell’s request to unloop the old rope that tethers it closed, keeping the sheep within the confines of Cliad Farm, on whose land the course lies. We unload our clubs and Campbell points us in the right direction, starting from a tiny platform to head down the hill for the first. He will not play this afternoon, complaining of a pain in his side, but he is pleased to see us strike off, and it is hard to mask the joy of my initial glimpse of the course. Everything here suits my eye—the rustic, weather-worn markers on the tees, the simple but carefully mown lines. The pitch-and-putt on which I grew up was often very tatty, but in those unraked bunkers and well-worn greens the spirit of the game, of “playing it as it lies” was present, and it occurs to me that nowhere since have I quite found that stylistic sweet spot again. But Coll was hewn from the same cloth, and it was love at first sight.

We cross a stile to play the second from the other side of the deserted road, before the third takes us down to an impossibly wonderful brook at the far end of the routing, the green perched just this side of it. Once upon a time, the golf went beyond this point, up into Cliad’s hillier terrain, but at some point, due to the complications of the livestock and other demands on the land, the fourth was altered to come back up the hill. If the first three were charming, the fourth is where Coll digs its heels in, for the second shot must carry a deep ridge thick with long grasses. Gauging the distance is a matter of judgment, and over multiple plays neither Pam or I manage this correctly, and I wonder whether Campbell and his friends ever do.

The fifth is played over the brow of a mown hill, and it is equally perplexing, if a little less dangerous. All around are the most wonderful, delicate wildflowers, and if another golf course ever felt this natural, I am yet to see it. From the sixth tee, you play down towards the rusting frame of a football goal, and from there swing slightly left to another tricky target. In some strange way, the seventh reminds me of the Road Hole in the way that the existing features of the landscape are utilised to play around. The drive must be carefully placed to the right of the corner of Coll’s tip, for the fencing that protects that area is as fierce as the green that awaits beyond. It is golf that you have to think about, and that it uses a less-than-desirable factor as such a brilliant hazard delights me.

From there, one walks a little further right to play the eighth tee shot back into that field, from where my favourite shot on the course is demanded. The green is perched up a steep, mown slope, so that you either have to fly the ball up there in such a way as it stops, or take your chances running one in. It is an exquisite piece of design, and that Coll has been put together by voluntary enthusiasts over a few decades, and mown out more or less to the previous year’s design each May seems to mock the seriousness of the modern game on the mainland. The eighth defeats us, of course, and we stroll around the base of the granite lump that dominates this top end of the course to find the short ninth, a gorgeous pitch up the hill.

Though time is slowly falling away as a concept, we have agreed when Campbell will swing by to pick us up, and are delighted to find that we have leeway to flit round again. This time certain holes seem easier, but we suffer in different places, and my face aches from grinning by the point we hear the gate swing open again. On the way home, I sit in the back, not so much lost in thought as lost in feeling. I had arrived here from a busy spell, paddling like fury beneath the surface to just about stay afloat, but never quite on top of things—the logistics of this trip included. But in the space of an hour and a half, and probably eighty swipes at a succession of old balls, I felt as if the gentle breeze across Coll had not only wiped that hurried slate of the past month or so clean, but perhaps that of a few decades.

This was the golf I played over Heath Park, come rain or shine, from dawn through to dusk some days. Some flags in a field, a little gentle maintenance, a club and a ball and my imagination for company. Who could possibly care if the bunkers were not raked when there was simple adventure like this to be had? And yet, I had fallen away from the spell of this habit, from the healing power of play. To follow the herd, to play by the rules. There is some vague sense of yearning that lurks in me for that boy, clipping wedges round the park for all eternity, or so it then seemed. And now, on the cusp of fifty, turning grey and pining for a state I think I may never know again... until I find Coll. And only then do I understand why I came.

Margaret is waiting for us when we return, and insists that we dine up at the hotel, where Pam is staying. We tidy ourselves up as much as possible from a small bag of luggage, and delight in the chance to learn more about this lovely couple and their lives on and off this magical island, but not before a pre-lunch refreshment in their “Sitooterie”. Sitting sideways on, across the road that runs through Arinagour, this lovingly maintained shed is the hub of their social lives. Neighbours and friends from all over Coll will descend, often unannounced, for some tea or something “a wee bit stronger”, and Campbell will fold open the doors and pull some chairs onto the slatted deck, from where the ferries and fishing boats and this blessed ocean view can be gently absorbed, like medicine for the soul.

And it occurs to me that perhaps time is not simply passing slowly here, it is passing by altogether. As in not stopping, not mattering. The people are not obsessed by the past or anxious about the future, for they are immersed in the present, like the sheep that wander past the Sitooterie and the herring gulls that circle around the trawler. And by living this way, they wear a sincerity that feels such a gift to bestow. The Coll community, both permanent and interim, are just that—a community, connected deeply to one another, and to today, and to this beautiful, isolated place.

Dinner is wonderful, and we find sitting on the hotel bar the repurposed Scotch bottle that serves as the green fee register and the membership database for Coll’s golf course, reconciled each season by Campbell’s great golfing friend David Moore, Jr and his wife Margaret. Davie and Campbell have battled out a thousand duels over the Coll links since its inception, and he suggests we head over in the morning to meet them. And we try to fix a time, but that is not really how things work here, so we settle on “around nine”, and delight when our acceptance of this vagueness is recognised, for it means we are “on Coll Time now”. Coll Time is only ever approximate, even in the case of the ferry, for things change, and the islanders are not willing to worry about things beyond their control.

The Moores live a good chunk of the year in a static caravan (the sign on which says, simply, “Moorefield”, in tribute to the great East Lothian links) out towards Cornaig Bay, at the north-west corner of the island. Davie’s father had come out here for a holiday in 1975, and quickly discovered that he “couldn’t exist without golf ”. So the Coll course was carved out that summer, but Davie waves a hand out the window as the kettle whistles behind him, and casually mentions the six holes that were also “out there”, on the gentle slopes down towards some unnamed and idyllic sandy bay.

Pam and I want to drag Davie out into the drizzle to show us where these holes were, but we are all too busy enjoying the stories of these two pioneers of golf on Coll, and as they exchange tales like blows in the lifelong match they’ve fought, I flick through a near-complete folder of Coll Magazine, which features each summer a report on the golf course and their Open, which at its peak around the early nineties had up to twenty players. At first, it was played with only three or four clubs, though neither veteran can remember which number it was, but the details do not matter to me for it is all about the spirit, and I cherish this time in the caravan with these four locals, pouring out their love for this remote spot and its people.

We finally drag ourselves away, in order that Davie can finish the maintenance job we interrupted some time before, and though Campbell does not like the look of the cloud lingering above the waves out west, he is willing to drop us once again inside the gate, in order that we can digest all that we have seen over a few holes. His final warning is that “you’ll be wet within the hour”, and though by now we have ditched all time-pieces, we are on our second failed attempt at the fourth when the heavens open, and we conclude that Campbell can actually smell impending rain, so in tune with this environment is he.

We shake hands once more, and stand looking back over the ridges and hollows, the waving grasses and the sodden, bright yellow flags, and I feel a pang of sadness to leave Coll behind, as we will in the morning. On the way down to the boat terminal, we notice once more the stranded cars by the road, and the friendly waves of the people we pass, and try to imprint something of this unhurriedness, this supportiveness on ourselves before the boat casts off. For this is a real community, where people look out for each other, and care about each other, and that is the common string that makes it all work, that makes living out here—where nothing much is convenient or fast—not only possible but wonderful.

We go through the motions of the ferry in reverse, as if caught in some vintage movie, and wave for what seems like forever at David and Anne, and Campbell and Margaret, and we all carry on flapping until we can barely make out faces. And Pam and I make for the coffee bar, and offload our reflections and photos, and slowly inch our way towards the world that awaits us on the mainland. And I like to think our hosts made the short drive up to the house, and carefully flicked on the kettle, grateful once more for the electricity that Campbell helped install in that ancient family dwelling, and then to the Sitooterie, for not only is there not a great deal else to do on Coll, but nor is there anything much better to do anywhere.

The weeks turn into months, and as I sit here thinking about those few days out on Coll, they seem a thousand years away. The impatience that I carry sometimes is like a psychic inheritance to some degree; I recall traces of it in my father before me. But what is all this impatience for? For something other than this? Some time other than now? There’s nowhere else to go. Above my desk I keep an image of the red marker beside the sixth tee at Coll. And every time I look at it I. yearn to feel that light—or sometimes heavy—rain on my skin, and the breeze in my hair, and that turf beneath my feet. And I yearn to live like they do, with trust in each other and ourselves. Rooted in the present moment, and how things are, rather than how they might be.

For you could change the golf at Coll - make it shinier and neater, perhaps - but I think that to do so would be a betrayal of something very special. It would show a dis- satisfaction with the natural order of things, and as far as I can see, as I watch the raindrops on the grasses of that photo blur as teardrops form in my own eyes, there is nothing any of us could do that would make it better. It exists in its own dimension, between June and August, for about fifty years by now. And it runs on Coll Time.

7th Hole - 161 yards, par 3, si 15

The breeze has picked up a little, nudging a single cirrus cloud across the blue sky with an urgency that wasn’t there when we started,so I need an extra club here today. The green is small, a tight entrance guarded by two front bunkers, and although there’s more room at the back, it’s a tough shot if your ball goes thr…

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“Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter. They are places that make us feel something larger than ourselves, as though we are held in a place between worlds, beyond experience.” 
Kerri ní Dochartaigh, from “Thin Places”

To be drawn to a place is to surrender logic for a moment, to relinquish reason. It is to act with the heart for a change, and be willing to let that loyal keeper of wisdom lead you where it will.

The rental car slows down to swing left, where tarmac turns to gravel, and as the steady horizon gives way for the valley ahead of us, we shudder down singletrack, a fertile oasis opening up before us as the giddy descent goes on. For in the sweetest little cove, down by the sea, hides the Covesea Links, and in that gloriously literal moniker lies a theme that will scream out to me for the next three hours. A sense that Covesea’s angelic creators know what it is, and how valuable it is, and are content with and consumed by keeping that going, not trying to be something other than it is. This is both refreshing and intoxicating…

We don’t even get to the open door of the shop before Angela greets us, her eyes glinting in the early afternoon sunshine that has bleached her domain. It is the warmest of welcomes, and we spend a few minutes chatting in the world’s most charming portacabin, though my stolen glimpses through the door of the links taunt me, so we strike off from the first, and marvel at the newly built green, tucked round to the right of where the hole used to run. That this target, with its wicked slope off the left up which my ball is unwilling to run, seems so settled is a sign of things to come. Angela’s partner Andy has a rare ability to make things look like they’ve been there forever, and this extends across the little amphitheatre through which we play. It’s as if Covesea exists outside of time; is its own continuum.

Michael McAllan, our host and Covesea’s honorary professional, approaches the car park in his own vehicle as we stride up to the new second tee, and we pause to watch him split fairway and green in turn after a four-second warm-up. To meet at last after many messages back and forth is a delight, and our smiles go from ear to ear as we contemplate these extraordinary surroundings. Across the course goes the cracking sound of Michael’s MacGregor persimmon, followed by the thwack of my blonde PING laminate, but Simon is barely hitting shots at this point, entranced by the light cast across waving fescue.

The third brings us back in below the coastal dune, a narrow green perched up above play, and a teasing approach. From there, the fourth sprawls across the central plain of the property, swinging right up to a rippled green, and as I stand over my fourth putt, I wonder if Angela and Andy have to pinch themselves each morning to live and work in this bubble, this idyll. That it feels like hard work some days, I have no doubt, for conditions like these don’t occur by accident even on this heavenly soil, but Andy’s smile as he leaps from his tractor is every bit as wide as ours, though partly hidden behind some magnificent beard.

We talk a bit about the course, and his and Angela’s path to this existence, and somewhere deep in my soul there is an unspoken rumbling, as if I was meant - in this life or the next - to do this thing: to inhabit and caress and curate and bequeath something so unique to the outliers of this game I love so much. I drift away in thought as the chat goes on, but Andy has sand to spread, so my inner soliloquy finds an abrupt end staring at the fifth, an unforgettable par three up a steep hill. That the banana-shaped green falls away on its north, east, south and west flanks isn’t apparent from here, but we don’t need any more intimidation, for the silhouetted flag way up above us is daunting enough.

Michael and Simon hit sublime pitches, their crisp strikes seeming to echo across this hushed pleat in our island’s rocky mantle, but my own attempt strikes the larger ball first, and I am glad to hear Andy’s diesel engine in the distance, from where he can’t see the scar I hastily repair. I carry my ball up to the green, and watch the others eventually putt out in between breathless gazes across the ocean. Beyond the first green is the iconic Covesea Skerries Lighthouse, and I yearn to come back and explore that one day, for an interest in such beacons is a trace memory of my infancy on the Kent coast, a very long way away.

From here, we plunge down into the interior for the driveable sixth, then blast over a vast rock for the blind, short seventh. It’s thrilling golf, but the course is honest and open, leaving the golfer to trip themselves up. Behind, a threesome are meandering around the full width of the fourth, and something Andy said about a facility where the total beginner and the expert can play alongside each other suddenly rings true.

Covesea has turf that most other courses would kill for, and views and holes that imprint on the memory, but it is also playable and welcoming and wonderful for us all, and when we finish, via the clever, rolling eighth and the devilish, postage stamp ninth, I don’t have words to adequately thank Michael for having us here, for it has been an unbridled joy. We let him escape back to half-term and his children, and stop by Angela’s desk to plead for more time on the links, which she grants as we cheer.

This time I pick up more details - the number plate on Andy’s trusty Defender, and the honesty box by the cabin’s door. Something about the honesty box - a photographic cliché for the intrepid golfer - seems more relevant here, for there is an honesty, an integrity, about both Covesea and its custodians that goes beyond the chart of fees or charges, modest though they are. I feel as if this place has a value and an importance way beyond such metrics; it is a space where the simply transactional is eclipsed, perhaps. I think of the passage that lies atop this piece, of the “thin places” that somehow hint at a deeper mode of existence, and I sense it in the calm, centred demeanour of Andy and Angela, and I can see it in Michael’s eyes, though I probe no further on their own private meanings for this sanctuary.

At the fifth - by now the only people on the property - Simon and I both hit recovery chip shots that threaten to disappear but don’t, and so we stay around the green for what feels like aeons trying in vain to hole one. It is the unhurried, unbound practice of my childhood, this, the simple act of focus on one single task, and when Simon eventually convinces his ball to drop, the sound of urethane on aluminium seems to ring across the hollow like a prayer bell of sorts, a sound which might just as well be heard here as in any temple grounds.

Covesea seems to exist as a paean to the ancient game, an archetype of pure golf in an area rich in the more formal, championship chapters. Somehow Andy’s blissful incarnation of a soulful, vulnerable style of golf has bypassed the modern age in favour of the discarded joys of innocence, and I am - as Andy was when he first came over that brow and into the cove - utterly smitten by the place itself, perched between land and sea, and - by the time we retrace our tyre treads back out - between day and night. “A place between worlds”, indeed.

I’m no architect, nor - these days - a greenkeeper. But I know what I like, and more clearly what I love. And what’s more, I have come to see - no, to feel - love in the work of others, and more often than not, I find that the source of an urge to pursue, a theme to explore. There is love in the glorious prose of Robin Down, whose exploration of Covesea in his second volume of “Golf in the Wild” triggered this whole mission. And love in the eyes of Michael, surveying a place that means more to him than anyone other than Michael should try to explain. And love in the urgent, camera-wielding smile of Simon, his clubs left by the tee in search of the perfect shot.

But most of all—in this place now lodged deep in my memory—I see love, in all its complicated and delicate robes, dripping from Andy and Angela, doing what they were put here to do. Theirs is an act of worship, I suspect. They’re in the right place…

“…why are some places thin and others not? Why isn’t the whole world thin? Maybe it is but we’re too thick to recognize it. Maybe thin places offer glimpses not of heaven but of earth as it really is, unencumbered. Unmasked” 
Eric Weiner, from “Man Seeks God”

The Links Diary is available from here: https://www.thelinksdiary.com/issues

Prologue

The phone rings, for perhaps the tenth time already this morning. But on this occasion it is not work, but Alex. True to form, he is cutting it fine due to a train delay, but will be here in five, in soft spikes. I tell him to look for the path that runs round the front of the clubhouse – heading away from Jessie’s Pond, past which his taxi will…

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Some things in the calendar are fixed, immovable, sacred even. Wednesday last I’d been invited back to New Zealand, and if the weather forecast had predicted the apocalypse instead of passing showers, I’d still have been “on” for it. In fact, when the apocalypse does arrive, I’d be hard pressed to think of anywhere I’d rather watch it.

It is familiar territory for me, New Zealand, and as I walk around the top corner of the car park, the generous fairway of the first comes into view, a glorious carpet of green and brown, the recent dry spell and gentle breeze wicking the last remaining drops of moisture from the sea of bent and fescue. I pass through the empty bar, whose quiet ambience feels more like a temple, and into the locker room, where the collection of jackets and slip-ons confirm that there is, somewhere ahead and almost certainly in the heather, a golfing society.

These visitors will have another of those classic days that only seem to occur here, two bouts of golfing struggle either side of a wonderful lunch, taken under the painted gaze of a handful of New Zealand chairmen. As I peer at the modest notices beside the classic lockers, I think of one of these fearsome creatures, whose legacy is still spoken of in whispers decades after he passed away. For on one of these signs, it is noted that “the playing of 3-ball, 4-ball and “Greensome” matches…is deplored”.

The next sentence affirms that “Few members engage in this form of Golf Masochism”, and all are reminded in no uncertain terms to play swiftly, and let faster play through. I smile, as I always do when marvelling at the sparse language and direct message of this masterful warning, and of the fear it must strike into the heart of a newly elected member. They’re lucky the message was not delivered in person, from the stories you hear of the author…

Perhaps a regular Stymied reader will not be surprised to hear that I too love fast play, and far prefer singles or foursomes where possible, but as I mull over this theme, it does occur to me that foursomes itself is equally Masochistic, though you’d normally get it over with in two and a half hours. The look on your partner’s face as you carve another one into the jungle; the agreement to offer “no apologies in foursomes”, though your golf warrants “all apologies”. And it’s not just you and I who suffer at this format. Cast your mind back to the 2004 Ryder Cup, and Tiger’s facial expression as Phil’s drive sails towards a fence, permitting a Clarke/Westwood bogey to win the match, a withering look that painted a thousand words.

As we weave our way through the serene landscape of this heavenly routing, it occurs to me that heathland golf is heavily Masochistic, too. It looks wonderful, heather, for about a month every year, and it is environmental gold both for the species that rely on it, and the golf clubs who seek to protect their land. Over ninety per cent of this habitat has been lost both locally and globally, so this patch is not only a custodian of some of the very best that golf has to offer, but of an ecological treasure. But put your ball in there, and you step into the realms of severe punishment, of suffering.

Once in a while, perhaps as the blue moon hangs above the pines, you will hit one so pure from the brutal heather that you remember deep down that such escapes are possible, but on every intervening occasion, the thick, woody stems and heavy flowers will either swallow the ball or violently repel your club, and you will know what it is to struggle, to be humbled. You must take your medicine, but it’s a bitter pill, every time.

My host and I have one of those rare days when the ball sails straight more often than not, and so the heather does not bother us much today, and our game is a delight - a brisk walk in great company, with a few sticks and a ball in hand. But in the days that follow another of the signs in that locker room floats back to me, the one that represents the sign-up for the July Medal. In a time where most clubs are fully loaded of a weekend, this latest surge for scorecards is clearly still absent here, as each line of the A4 entry form remains entirely blank, and it will likely do so until after the prescribed date, when the notice will come down and the Medal itself will remain where it has always been, locked in the cabinet.

The following day, I am standing between two gentlemen who know this sort of golf, and club, and I’m delighted to note a kindred spirit as one declares, in discussing the ritual of medal play, that “the simple presence of a card anywhere about my person automatically causes my game to disintegrate”. The other man notes that Bernard Darwin - whose unrivalled ear for a fine turn of phrase would have surely delighted at the capitalised Golf Masochism - regarded the occasional medal as something that must be “endured” in order to then enjoy the finer pleasures of a foursome, and that marking a card was “an atrocious pleasure”.

So by the time I am typing out this paragraph (assuming you’re still there), this Masochistic notion has moved beyond the original, deplored formats to include foursomes itself, heathland golf, and now the keeping of score. Golf appears to us in many guises, but I am starting to run out of examples where it isn’t Masochistic, and I suddenly realise, as if struck, at long last, by a bolt of common sense, that golf is inherently so.

The game itself, whose claws dug into my imagination as I watched some freak occurance soar in the sky as an eleven year old, is nothing more than a litany of disasters, bearable only for the occasional miracle. We travel and travail together out there, and share a language and an understanding that runs deep, but we’ll never beat this game and perhaps that’s the point. It’s a mysterious Masochism, this golf.

I think about the rest of the game, and fail to think of a form that isn’t absurdly difficult. Then I think about my own golf, and the fact that I make the same, simple mistakes I made thirty years ago, and know that if I’m lucky enough to still play in another thirty years, they’ll still recognise those traits a few hundred yards away. I look at the old blades in my half-set, whose sweetspots are employed about as often as the hosel, and whose unforgiving, forged steel heads were too harsh for me back then, let alone now. Or the hickories that sometimes venture out, every one an antique within one bad swing of breaking. As if the game wasn’t hard enough…

Or there’s the membership process, the internal workings of which are like an unwritten sequel to Catch-22, or the interview, or the dreaded, traumatic play-in. The whole game is puzzling to the non-golfer, but to the initiated, it’s perhaps stranger still, and yet we still turn up, slip on our Masochistic uniform, and head out full of hope like the deluded fools we are. Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”, but we’re helpless despite the logical arguments against this pastime, for the connection - the addiction - overrides all else.

So having spent a few more minutes thinking about this game, wondering why on earth I play it, let alone spend time thinking and writing about it, we are none the wiser but the clock is ticking, and later today I have a time booked, so it is back to square one. The dictionary suggests that Masochism is “the enjoyment of an activity that appears to be painful or tedious”, and as I pick up the strap and walk towards the tee, I know we’ll be enoying it plenty today.

The last time I wrote about this place, hidden away near the gilded sands of the Norfolk coast, I included at the end a photo of a road sign that winks at you as you wend your grinning way towards the links. The sign simply reads “BRANCASTER SLOW DOWN”, but as I pass it again — conflicted by respect for the quiet village it serves and my eagerness to arrive before the rising tide does — I wonder if the slogan is perhaps not a request, or an order, but a rhetorical instruction. For it seems to me that the very location slows us down, cuts us off from the hustle and bustle. And our chosen clubs will certainly help, for we are a visiting side from the British Golf Collectors Society, wielding relic hickories against our kind hosts. Cast into golf’s roots for a morning, we have no choice but to swing easy.

Over coffee, we congregate one by one, and I meet Carolyn, whose ball I shall be dispatching to various strange corners of the golf course, and Sara, against whom we shall battle. Outside, Simon is at his car boot, grappling with what clothing to cram into a bag with barely enough pocket space for the second ball he and Sara will not need. We are in receipt of a menacing weather forecast, but glad that the lightning symbols seem to have taken themselves away since the previous evening. Wooden shafts or not, we can all do without an electrical storm. And behind Simon, his forecaddie is shaking with excitement, for Brancaster wouldn’t be quite so wonderful without dogs.

“Niblick” is a gorgeous spaniel whose energy and silky — soon to be sodden — coat belies eleven years of scampering through this landscape. He leads the way as we shuffle across the narrow strip of sand that splits the car park from the golf course, glancing left at the beach and the gently advancing waves as we go. And then the vast iron memorial gate swings open, and we spill — Niblick first — into the kingdom of Royal West Norfolk.

The boys take the odd holes, and — hoping to make a good impression with these three new golfing companions — I swipe at my drive, trying to ignore a momentary panic in the backswing at the slick feel of this old leather grip. Somehow, the ball flies off more or less where I’d hoped it might, and the thump of ash on ball echoes around us. Simon extracts a brassie, and I realise that not only is he taking us on using our mode of tool, but that he is also left-handed — a further challenge in terms of sourcing equipment. His is the first of a great many flushed strokes, and as we stroll away after the girls, he talks of the difficulties of sourcing these southpaw sticks. Left-handed putters, he confides, are almost as “rare as rocking horse poo”, but as Carolyn and I will discover to our cost, Simon will only ever need the one he has, for he is lethal with it.

It is — like the one I am carrying — a Braid-Mills putter, as in from the Sunderland factory of Sir William Mills, who later diversified his aluminium castings into hand-held bombs for use in the Great War. But we will not require Simon to putt on the first, for Carolyn and I take an early and prolonged inspection of one of the delightful-looking but vicious pot bunkers that guard Brancaster’s six thousand four hundred yards of fine turf. Sara, by contrast, is using modern equipment, but the golfing pedigree in her DNA quickly becomes apparent, and she is devastating with it — each towering iron shot like a grenade for my confidence, if not Carolyn’s.

With my partner’s help and patience, we are still within touch after the first few holes, but then comes the wild eighth and a crisis between my ears. From the centre of the right hand fairway, a simple mashie up the length of that landing strip looks daunting, and I just can’t visualise the shot, so attempt instead a mad carry with my brassie to the other fairway and approach, running parallel to us as the inlet gently starts to fill with seawater. It’s a shot I could empty a carton of balls on with modern weapons, so there is little surprise when my ball is eaten by a small bush in the wastelands, and even Niblick — whose incredible nose for a missing sphere is the stuff of legends — cannot find it.

Then at the ninth, with the angled green looking like a distant mirage in the desert, Carolyn lays us up perfectly in front of the gaping chasm that threatens short, and I lunge at the pitch with my own niblick, knifing the turf so the ball gently flops into another part of the non-golfing landscape. By now, at two down, we are in receipt of a shot under the Sunningdale — no, the Bangalore format — for we are the Collectors, and included in the parcels of heritage we hunt and preserve are bits of the old golfing language, and that this strange system for encouraging the losing team comes from an ancient golfing outpost seems entirely appropriate. Somehow, with this gift of a shot to hand, we scrape an unlikely half in an unmentionable number, but as we turn into what seems to be a growing breeze, carrying on its back some threatening clouds, there is little respite at the glorious par three tenth.

Sara’s ball hangs atop the black sky like a pearl, strong against the wind, and seems to land like a feather beside the hole — just about managing to stay aground, though Simon’s putter will again not be required. Carolyn fires an almost equally pure strike down towards an epileptic flag, but the contours drag us away, and we find my sorry ball on the sandy bottom step of the descent into another hellish bunker, this one clad with vicious sleepers to compound the agony. Simon kindly offers a drop, though it is marginal whether we are due one, so I take his advice swiftly, and the ball settles on nearby turf and the whole world seems to grind to a halt.

Anyone who has had the misfortune to watch me pitch would have moved well away, for — apart from the peripheral stare of Sara’s ball, stone dead beside the hole — all I can see or think of are sleepers, and the utter impossibility of this old tool and this old owner applying the pre-grooved club face to the ball. It’s hopeless, as in I relinquish all hope, and yet somehow manage to flick our ball over the towering timbers — and from about twenty feet beyond the hole, my partner somehow rams in a nett two. I make a mental note to learn more about Bangalore, for I feel it might be a place that suits me.

We speak of holes-in-one, given the slim margin by which Sara escaped one here, and it turns out she has already performed the trick on that very hole with that exact club twice before. “You know how you sometimes stand over the ball and it just feels so right?” she asks, and I have some vague shiver, as if my body recalls the sensation of such a moment back in the eighties — though no ball of mine ever flew so well as hers, and they never topple in. The way these two are playing, on another day they might never need to putt, but Carolyn and I — by the thirteenth green, from behind which we somehow scrape another indecent half — are committed Bangalorians, though soaked through from a wicked deluge that lasts the entire hole. We drift slowly off into the losers’ column as the warm, bright lights of the old clubhouse draw closer.

It is the right result, made palatable by our received strokes and the marvellous company, and our defeat is softened by a lunch that is as delicate and wonderful as the golf course itself, perched up above the track to the beach, with bright afternoon skies having swept away the clouds to bleach the links and the sands golden. This is how they will always appear in the directory of my mind. On my way out, I stroke young Niblick, his gaze still unblinking on the old door of this fabulous clubhouse from a position in the open boot of his master’s car. The outward journey up Beach Road into Broad Lane is as melancholy as the arrival was joyous, and — as I pass the old sign on Mill Road once more — some theme about authenticity tumbles around in my head.

So much has changed since I first breached the causeway to this golfing Treasure Island, perhaps a dozen years ago now. And so much more since my last visit, for the high tide of last autumn. And yet — my soul soothed by the wild, fresh air of the linkslands and the quiet, polite splendour of the Smoke Room — I am reassured that some precious things manage not to change too much. In just a handful of places — Rye, of course, and this Royal West Norfolk, and not so many others — the magic dust has not been polished away by some mad lurch for uniformity or cash, and in such instances their charm seems to shine ever brighter for that scarcity.

The game has moved on, mostly, and that’s fine. But — thank goodness — this place still knows what it is about and is willing to protect such fine traditions.

This place is Still Brancaster.

I was about six months into my first role as Secretary of a golf club when the Murray Scott Bowl came around. In old, traditional golf clubs, there is often a calendar of events that the committed member will seemingly prioritise above all other options in their personal and domestic diaries.

Woking is no different in this regard, the likes of the “Match Dinner” and “The Wooden Spoon” pivotal dates in the cyclical nature of Club life, and the source of many entertaining stories. For the New Member - a label which many of the old school would continue to bestow on a newcomer for anything up to a decade - these events were not only a great chance to meet the rest of the Club community - and of course severely deplete the lower reaches of the wine list, to the delight of the stock-taker - but also part of the whole experience of membership.

To participate in such days is a rite of passage on Hook Heath, along with smashing a window with a violent hook down the 14th, watching your ball drift merrily towards Jessie’s Pond at the last, or dragging heavy furniture around the patio to attempt a doomed recovery, while what feels like the rest of the world hold their breath before exploding with laughter, spilling their refreshments and building memories in the process.

To feel confident running a Club it is important to get through that first, full cycle - and from there, the form is known and the second and subsequent years should hold fewer surprises, but while this was my first Murray Scott foursomes, I felt by this stage that I had some idea of what the afternoon would entail. The cards were all prepared - names, handicap allowance (back in the days when you could be reasonably expected to understand such figures), tee time - and I had dutifully ticked each player in as they rushed from car park to the spike bar to the carvery.

I recall a slight surprise over the fact that this board competition was being played off the modest yellow tees, but double-checked and was reassured, albeit without being given any solid reason. The justification would become clear…

Having walked through the Dining Room, winking at the great Bernard Darwin as I passed beneath him, his painted gaze watching a scene he’d have known a hundred times - the Woking membership deep in conversation, corks popping, laughter ringing through the walls of this charming and delicate Clubhouse. Feeling confident that all was as it ought to be, I returned to my desk, to catch up on the inevitable mountain of paperwork, whose predictable, steady flow makes the role akin to that of Sisyphus, forever pushing his boulder up the hill.

The Captain walked in, and asked if I had been briefed on “the form”. I was then told in no uncertain terms that my most important act of the day would not be to prepare the competition as I had so far, or ensure a decent menu for the critical prandial element, or even to work out the scores (and he would himself reinforce how secondary this latter element is a few hours later when declaring “I lost the card somewhere…we did ok…put us down for twenty-something”).

No, the key task - one that is not written down anywhere, but whose continuity relies on the sense of mischief of a few dozen Members - is simply in the announcement to the (eventually) silent Dining Room that the afternoon’s start times would be delayed by 30 minutes, to avoid rushing lunch. I thought he was joking for a while, but, after finally lashing a spare knife against a wine glass long enough to bring an expectant hush from those sat under Bernardo’s watch, the resultant cheer shook the timber frames of the building, and all present roared with a tribal laughter. No wonder they play off the yellow markers, I thought to myself.

Such occasions punctuate the year for the staff and members at the Club, a celebration of all that is good about golf - this strange game that seems so mysterious and unfathomable to the outsider, yet which builds the strongest of connections for the lucky few who “get it”. Among the many formats available, foursomes is an even tighter niche than golf itself - the responsibility shared with a playing partner through the inevitable cock-ups bring great humour, and the Bye-Law of “no apologies” reigns supreme. It will test the strongest of friendships, but all those that survive the test (and nearly all of them do) are even stronger for the experience. It requires humility and patience to play foursomes well, and as we all know, some golfers just aren’t built that way.

Murray Scott was a Past Captain of the Club, and the glass bowl for which those gathered are in theory competing (though few give a damn about the result, even if most can put an actual, factual score to their efforts) was given to the Club in his honour. He was a regular in the lunch then foursomes roll-ups, and the event that bears his name is played in the appropriate spirit, or should I say after imbibing the appropriate spirit.

Those 30 minutes, like extra time in the World Cup, are frantic - perhaps 20 of them are spent on pudding, with the dregs poured out of any bottles in sight. A further 6 are spent in the ritual of necking Kümmel, another peculiar custom in the wooden panelled bars of the finest clubs in Britain, outside of which virtually no-one even knows what this clear fluid is. The slim glasses, whose aniseed stench floats across the Clubhouse, are banged back down, and so begins a dash for the changing rooms and then the tee, shoelaces flapping as the players hurriedly emerge into the light, try to remember where their clubs are, and which end to hold.

One year, a previous incumbent in my chair was busy checking the scores when a fellow competitor overheard the likely winners conversing on the patio. Legend has it one said “thank goodness we didn’t drink wine at lunch”, and as word of this outrage spread through the field, a steward’s enquiry ensued. The pair, halfway through working out what their speech should comprise, apart from the non-negotiable final Woking line (“have a drink on us”), were informed that while they had returned the highest Stableford score, they would not be placing their unusually steady hands on the fragile glassware. At some point, the decision was made that they were guilty of “not having lunched appropriately”, and the next best pair instead bought the drinks, and were listed on the board.

As disrupting events go, Covid-19 was a category one player. World economies, international politics, technology, the health and security of millions of people, etc, etc. Nothing is quite the same as it was, and at times in 2020 the prospect of people ever enjoying a raucous club lunch in the way they had for decades seemed impossible, and for spells it was. In a game whose appeal for many lies in friendships and golf’s innately social nature, the ever-shifting landscape of infections and public fear ripped the heart out of many Clubhouses, while the courses, when open, got battered by play, as golf was one of the few things we could actually do, albeit without being allowed to rake a bunker, or shake hands. Or share a ball…

In the UK, the guidance was shifting as fast as a post-WHS handicap. Beyond the binary “Open”/”Closed” and “Working”/”Furloughed” designations, for hospitality there was a string of confusing developments that would fit better in the works of Kafka than in the 21st century. For a spell there was no food, not only on the tables at the Club, but on the shelves of the supermarket, for those brave enough to step outside in this Bladerunner-esque nightmare. And very few toilet rolls.

Then takeaway became an option, and the ever-popular bar hatch at the 14th re-opened, through which members had been passed swift chasers to build strength for the final loop of four since time began. It hardly mattered whether the required social distance was one metre or two at that point, since it was obvious that, for many, the school lesson in which they learned what a metre actually looked like lay beyond the scope of their memory.

Having negotiated the queue, which would at times spill out onto the green behind them, so thirsty were these wretches that all hope of a safe interaction would disappear before our eyes as the failing hearing of a customer would force the staff member, trapped in the bar behind like a rabbit in the headlights of particle transmission, to lean right in. Later we would be seen frantically checking pockets for masks, while others walked around with a plastic face shield as if welding could take place anytime, unannounced.

At some points we ate inside, sometimes out, but the one constant - an inevitable one given the often daily shifts in law, guidance, perception and compliance - was that very few could actually remember what the latest position was. Buried under emailed directions, and hammered by the insistent, terrifying signage and endless sanitisers, we did our best, and that all-important constituent of a good Woking member - the aforementioned sense of humour - was present for nearly all, with plenty of fresh material from which to draw.

The patio would sometimes be standing only, its absurd designation as an “indoor” space linked to the smoking regulations, despite the cold wind whipping leaves under the Wisteria, and the constant flow of golf ensuring a more or less equivalent danger from incoming balls. For a short period, alcohol (and let’s face it, for the members it was going to need a certain amount of this to retain any sort of will to live through this prolonged, apocalyptic nightmare) was only available with a substantial meal, triggering further debate about what that might represent.

Perfectly good sandwiches would suddenly be served with a salad garnish, which would be swept into the food waste a few minutes later, as the government placed an outer limit on how long you could take to eat the sandwich (but not the salad, obviously). The tables would be smothered in chemicals, and the whole cycle would start over. Perhaps my standout moment was when some parliamentary buffoon - I forget which one, they blend after a while - publicly suggested that a Scotch Egg was not the foulest creation of western society, as I had long suspected, but in fact the textbook example of “substantial fare”, heralding great laughter across a nation that was fed up of being told what to do.

Our liberties stripped away, with planes grounded, and at one point even travel over some notional boundary of Zone 2/Zone 4 no longer permitted, it was no surprise that golf surged. If you are reading this, you love the game already, beguiling mistress that she is, but those on the fringes of the sport had no other option but to watch daytime television or spend a bit longer home-schooling their offspring. So as the world started to open up again, the demand kept going up.

Friendly golf, visitor golf, society golf. Corporate golf, tournament golf, inter-club golf. Gradually the golfing public, starved of alternative entertainment, forced down the doors of clubs all over the country, and a fixture list that would normally exist with plenty of slack built in - in order that, for the two or three thousand pounds a year you were investing in membership, you might be able to simply decide to play golf, and be able to do so - was suddenly at breaking point.

So at Woking we shoe-horned in most of the postponed fixtures with something of a blitz spirit in evidence. “This virus won’t stop us” was the message, and the Club sought to put everything back as close as possible to what had existed before. Every board competition got played, bar one, and the Murray Scott Bowl, scheduled not once or twice but three times in 2020, fell foul of another late wave of infections.

In the winter months, as a third lockdown kicked in, we returned to the devastating routine of staring at each other’s bookshelves on conference calls, but the work never stops at a golf club, and after threading my way through the deserted streets of north Surrey one morning, the sign-writer and I shouted at each other from beneath our stinking masks, to get the Club ready for what we all hoped was the final re-opening of this creaking, leaking building.

We’d just about survived, it seemed, albeit with collateral damage, and the various timber boards of the Club would simply depict the winners with no mention of the challenges of finding sustenance around the fixture, or of adopting a flinching mechanism to limit human contact. The history of the Club would read as a continuous one in the shadowed gold leaf of the wooden tablets hanging in the corridors, as if nothing out of the ordinary went on in that year. With one exception…

If you walk in the door at Woking today, you will hear it slam behind you, and feel the draught of cool air rush under it, where the front end of this temporary structure of 1902 has sunk, and the door no longer fits. To your right you will have the spike bar, now open again, and often full of laughter. The Dining Room is to your left, and as you peer in, Darwin’s twinkling eyes face the same way from right above you.

Take a few more steps and you will come to the board for the Murray Scott Bowl, and alongside the list of winners, all celebrating their unique contribution to Club life by posting a decent score despite the boozy prelude, you will find the only entry that could have been chosen for this competition, at this Club, in that awful, dreadful, unforgettable year.

It reads:

“2020 - Lunch Unavailable”

“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it.”
Albert Einstein

“That’s a really good opening hole”, Mike purrs, looking from Worplesdon’s opening green back towards the tee — and he’s right. After dozens of loops of this majestic heathland, I suppose I take its quality for granted a little, and it is rewarding to watch someone absorb the effortless charm of this club and this course for the first time. A nice wide fairway, though trouble aplenty lurks on either side for the greedy, and then an approach up the steady hill to a green whose subtle borrows give an early indication of the putting challenges ahead.

We skip up the second, both our drives fading to where the tall oaks between that hole and the next impede our lines for the second shot, then suffer a little at the quietly tricky third. Worpy’s short holes are a perpetual and tremendous challenge, and they begin with the treacherous fourth, played in front of a packed, sun-bleached patio to a target carved from the hill before us. A cavernous bunker eats Mike’s ball, I three putt, and we move on.

On the fifth tee, we are waved through by the four in front, and - naturally - find the same flanks of heather that held up their group, though we make it through, admiring on the way the double valley that crosses the approach and another devastating green complex. After the gentle first loop of four holes, it feels as if this is where the course begins to bare its teeth, and if Abercromby later became famous at Addington for his half-par holes, he certainly learned a good deal of that craft while working with Willie Park Jr here. To average four and a half at the fifth would seem a good bargain to strike, especially when starting a round there.

As we stroll onto the next tee we are - as we have been in our previous games together, at Woking, and New Zealand, and Addington - deep in conversation. In the context of habits, physical and financial, Mike refers to compound interest as a key to most things, and we riff on that for a while as we negotiate the beguiling sixth. At a little under five hundred yards, the last quarter of which slithers down the hill towards the third, it is another half-par classic, but despite us each hitting fine fairway woods at the pines behind the green, we walk off unrewarded, via the rear bunkers.

That I only find my sandy lie via an over-enthusiastic eagle putt from near the front-right edge brings a furious silence for a while, as I berate myself. But as we make our way round to the seventh tee, I finally realise that the spot where my second came to rest is the safest place to aim, away from the heather and taking the rear bunkers out of play; from there, one might alternate between safe pars and happy birdies. It has taken a great many larger numbers to reach this understanding, and I wonder if this too is a form of compound interest: learning a course’s lessons over time, from bitter experience.

Mike is as delighted with his first glimpse of the wonderful eighth as I once was, with its disguised lines from the tee and the wild tiers of the green, rising up to taunt one’s short irons. Like so many great short fours, the number on the card gives no clue as to its beauty or challenge, and we are thankful for a front hole location, for neither of us seems equipped today for the tight plateau that awaits at the back. Then the ninth - a grower for me, with its gradual slide to the right and a sliver of a green that welcomes approaches from the tighter, left hand side. Repeated plays bring an eventual understanding, but despite my briefing on the tee, neither Mike nor I can execute, and Worplesdon wins another hole from us.

The tenth these days is magnificent - freed from the smothering rhododendron curtains that used to border it - and as the red flag silk reflects across the rippled surface of the pond we must carry, I reflect on how much the course has changed in the twenty-odd years since I first played it. Not in character, nor in the bare mechanics of the holes, but in the presentation of this masterpiece. By the careful management of the woodland, the heather has thrived, and with it the turf - simple agronomics, but beyond the vision of many a golfer. Today’s playing corridors give the width and options that the architects would have wanted, while the fascinating greens and careful bunkering - Abercromby’s brilliant contribution on his architectural debut - reward thoughtful play and punish all else.

As Worplesdon itself builds through the back nine, it occurs to me that it is not so much that the latter holes are better than the earlier ones, but that the course’s great strength is in its consistency: hole after hole that has stood the many tests of time, survived the whims of golfing fashion and equipment. The patch over the road - two very distinct back-to-back par fives, a staggering par three, then another softly sadistic two-shot hole - is one of golf’s finest little parcels of land, and the finishing stretch is as good as any I know, but they are built on the foundation of the front nine, the slowly growing drama of a sublime routing that chops and changes direction through pristine heath.

At the sixteenth, you must club up at least one, and not miss short or left, and preferably not right. Survive that intact and the seventeenth tee will interrogate you, with a string of bunkers out right and a pine limb or two wide left. From the fairway - as if Mike or I found it - the green taunts you, sliding up a steep ramp from which one last heather-clad bunker stares unblinking at your ball. Then you turn right, and spot the comforting clubhouse in the distance, one last par-four-and-a-half to go. It is a stunning finale, but Worplesdon deserves to end this way, for it is woven from such quality right from the start. Drive it in the fairway - heather lurks right and a fence-line hard left - and you must then carry the bunkers or chase one in through the front-left corner. For the flat-bellied youths, it is probably a drive and a flick; for Mike and I it is two solid blows, and that we share nine strokes between us seems about right.

Our drinks are well-deserved, and we return to this notion of compound interest once more. It shows in the club we are lucky enough to meet at today: day after day of thoughtful management, year after year of a respectful, articulate membership. Worplesdon is cherished by those who frequent her, but in the steady progress of the last few years it feels like a work of art whose canvas is being carefully restored. We talk too of our golfing journeys, and of this writing craft, and - as he has been ever since we first met - Mike is both a sounding board and a leader; his role as a coach not constricted to the day job. He is kind, and empathetic, and challenges me when I require it, and so the conversations flourish and deepen, eighteen holes at a time.

I recall, in writing this, that I actually walked way past my ball in the eighteenth fairway, despite having seldom found the short grass from that tee, and that sort of sums up how these rare days in Mike’s company go. We are there to golf, but also to absorb what goodness we can from our shared experiences, and our thirst for improvement. We talk and we listen, and by the end of the day it feels like one more hefty deposit into our friendship, and into the ongoing education - Stoic or otherwise - of this marvellous game that brings us together. As usual, I suspect Einstein was right: compound interest may well be the eighth wonder of the world. Which would make golf, as far as I can see, the ninth.

“This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner”
Shunryu Suzuki

The Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki wrote about the notion of “beginner’s mind”, or “shoshin” - a state in which the painter, or the student, or the monk acts from a place without preconception. Unhindered by experience or expectation, shoshin enables a freedom that may manifest in fluent self-expression, and we might here consider those first works of art that create a high that is hard to follow. To Kill a Mockingbird, perhaps - a novel that left Harper Lee unable to follow it for 55 years. Or The Velvet Underground & Nico, an album of which Brian Eno observed that it may not have sold many copies to begin with, but “everyone who bought one started a band”.

Or perhaps Citizen Kane, for which Orson Welles’ lack of both funding and an understanding of what might normally be possible proved the secret sauce, a recipe that rings true in Bernard Darwin’s love of Arthur Croome’s one and only design, Liphook: “He did it wonderfully well — all the better perhaps because he had not much money to do it with and must rely as far as possible on kindly Nature.” Arthur was the business manager for the illustrious firm of Fowler, Abercromby, Simpson & Croome, and a brilliant and insightful journalist in his own right. But it quickly becomes apparent, when strolling the sun-drenched fairways of this heathland pearl, that plenty of the magic dust of his colleagues rubbed off on him, and we get to reap the rewards.

Tom Simpson lived round the corner, and made this place his golfing home, and perhaps, for those of us lucky enough to have seen a few of his works in the flesh, this knowledge should be recommendation enough. If this was his sanctuary between all the travel, his place of reflection, then it should be no surprise to find Liphook a sublime track. There’s little doubt his influence can be seen here, and the club are rightly proud of this part of their heritage, for it is a course that quietly whispers of its strategy, subtle greens and cunning angles daring you to attack then forcing you to defend.

It even has, in “Bohunt”, a hole that fits his description of “the mad masterpieces that remain in the memory” - with a ridge of heather tumbling down to a devilish green in the hollow behind. Even the bell you must ring - to enable those behind in the fairway to try and solve the blind puzzle - is tucked away. But on a more general level, it is the greens that light up and defend Croome’s legacy. As a set, their contour and intrigue is a match for Woking and even Huntercombe, and the turf is presented as if stripped from some other glorious dimension. But we three suffer early on with a putt or two raced by, learning the hard way that above the hole lies danger, and so it turns into a thing of fear to be holding one’s putter.

We struggle on the first - a long par three that sits astride a gentle left to right camber - and all the way to the last, a rollercoaster par five that tucks in under the verandah. All three of us have short birdie putts to close out on a high, but it more or less sums up our putting day to mark down only one par achieved from all of that. Perhaps we ran out of shoshin on the practice green; another lesson learned. But though not one of the field played to their handicap, and I doubt anyone averaged only a brace of putts per hole, everyone is beaming after three hours in the warm embrace of Liphook, and I think of the quote in the firm’s brochure - very likely from the hand of Croome also - which says “we lay out courses for the enjoyment of all and sundry”. Across a bar full of smiles and chuckles, it is clear that over a hundred years later, they are still hitting that mark here.

And one final note, for it ties into all of this. One player in our midst, whose group were off early, began the round at “Birch Hill” with a single, heavenly blow, taking the dreaded short stick out of commission. Receiving a shot at this stroke index seven opener, he promptly recorded a nett zero on his scorecard. This might become the very definition of “Beginner’s Mind” for me, and I wonder whether he ought to have just simply walked in, his work complete. I suspect that’s what Croome might have done

…

You could argue that my third golfing home found me, rather than the other way round. We’d found a place to live in Carshalton, a sweet little village in north-east Surrey, and from there, my train from Hackbridge took me up to London and its bookshops, where I spent my working hours. Often, the carriage would already be busy, but the sliding doors of the trains had full-length windows, so I’d happily stand and gaze out as we rattled along the old passage to Victoria Station.

I would tend to look east - partly to watch the geese and ducks and other bird life circle around the protected habitats of the Beddington wetlands - but also to catch a glimpse, above the raised bank of the railway cutting, of the dawn patrol at Mitcham, greeting the new morning with a few holes, and this precious peek of the holes I would come to know like the back of my Foot-Joy glove would remind me each day that - in moving to London - I’d left golf behind.

I think I remember the players always smiling as my carriage slowed down for Mitcham Junction, and while the commuters around me swapped the adjacent tram service for the London train, I would sometimes spot more golfers hurriedly fastening their bag to a trolley, or lacing up in the car park, and there must have been days when I felt like just jumping down on to the platform and heading for the first tee instead, for the day job certainly wasn’t inspiring.

At some point, this gazing out of the train took its toll on me, and out of the blue I wrote to Mitcham’s Head Greenkeeper, Dave, to try and get some idea what it was like to work on a golf course. I can’t ever remember seeing the person who occasionally cut the grass over Heath Park, and at my second golfing home, Wenvoe, the green staff only ever seemed to come into focus when they were punching holes in the greens. At that point, I’d not seen Caddyshack, so didn’t have Bill Murray’s demented, paranoid character to fall back on, but I liked the idea of working outside, and of somehow being back nearer this game that I missed, so I posted off the letter in the days when stamps cost pence, not pounds.

A short while later, I got off an early train, and walked up to the green metal door of the shed, perched at the far end of the car park. Dave opened the door, and showed me round over a cup of tea, and I gazed up at the cab of the vast tractor, and across the middle of the Common from the tenth tee. And a couple of weeks later, someone on his small crew left, and he called me back, and the three Operations Managers to whom I’d become a sort of assistant tried to disguise their surprise at my resignation.

For I’d decided not only on a devastating pay cut, but a leap into the unknown, into a modern apprenticeship of sorts - four days a week on the tools, with periodic early morning weekend shifts for a bit of overtime, and one day a week studying turf science in a branch of Guildford College. And though money was tight, and the work hard at times - physically hard - there quickly developed in me an understanding of the less obvious benefits of this package.

There were the views, and the solitude at times - often my company would be the little owl who liked to watch the sun rise from a post between the ninth green and the tramway, or the kestrel who lurked over in the Turkey Oaks beside the fifteenth. Through the ditches that drained the common would scuttle newts, and frogs, and - only once, through the sense of scared delight still lurks in my bones - a grass snake. One morning, a proud mother led her tiny Mallard chicks across the twelfth apron, her head held high to ensure I kept my ride-on triple at a respectful distance, and with the throttle down. Over the little brow and under the young birch saplings left of the next fairway would develop fly agaric in the late summer - the classic toadstool of the fairy tales, and with my rose-tinted spectacles on, my five years caring for this common seem like a fairytale, too.

And somehow, the nature of the work itself held a lesson for me. One would finish a particular job - perhaps laying down fresh stripes on the vast plateau of the sixteenth tee, behind which I once found a tightly curled adder, or, in winter, stripping out bramble to return a little corner to the state of acid grassland that was the local conservators’ precious commodity. And at that moment, a glance back at the results would bring a rare satisfaction. How often in life can we look instantly at the fruits of our labour, and catch such a clear sight of a job well done, a tangible sense of satisfaction?

If the course was quiet when we finished, I might hit a few balls before cycling home, or play a few holes, and somehow it wasn’t important whether I did play, but the knowledge that I could. The few years before this change had been properly lean in terms of golf, and access to the courses on the south side of London was either difficult or prohibitively expensive, but Mitcham seemed a valuable antidote to all that - golf on the Common, for the local community, and the trains and trams would often spill golfers off at the station. It was like the old days, in many ways.

I loved the short third, from the vast new tee we built one autumn, and the gentle swing round to the right of the fourth, under the watchful eye of south London’s white van drivers. And the little ridge that guarded the fifth, and the steeper climb that protected the adjacent seventeenth, part of a very strong finish to the course if never my card. The eleventh, with its pair of fairway bunkers like a warning pair of specs, was always a shot harder than it ought to be, but the hole that I’d wrap up and take home if I could would be the ninth, with the tramline along the right reminiscent of similar hazards at Woking and Prestwick.

The original holes on the Common had been played over by Princes, and when that august club decamped to Pegwell Bay, Mitcham Golf Club took over some of the old main and ladies’ courses, with other parcels returned to the dog-walkers. It’s not so easy to imagine what the old course would have been like, but the turf has always been marvellous over what were once lavender fields, and the famous Mitcham Bounce kept most golfers entertained.

I then discovered the surprising degree of welcome that visiting greenkeepers were afforded elsewhere, and started to broaden my golfing wings, and in that phase of life - sometimes with a fellow turf student, and often by myself - I would complement a growing interest in golf architecture with visits to some of the many glorious pearls in Surrey and beyond. A spreadsheet from those years brings back memories of first trips to Deal and Rye, Hankley Common and Liphook. And in the summer of 2004, a sponsored trip across the west flank of America, and the chance to walk and play through some of golf’s sacred spaces, but each time it was back to humble Mitcham I returned, and the fine sandy soil and subtly charming holes always seemed a home for me.

Life is an emerging picture, and evolution rumbles in the threads of most days, but I suspect I will ne’er look back on so distinct a phase as those five years on Mitcham Common, or with such fondness for the simplicity of those times. It was more than just another golfing home for me, Mitcham; it was the place where my connection to this game was restored, where my understanding of what golf is, and how it works, and what it means began to grow. My last morning roaming around that life as a greenkeeper felt like I was turning my back on something integral to who I am, or who I’d like to be. And though the years have slipped away, that connection to the land, and that feeling of contribution, have only grown stronger. It will always be a golfing home of mine, Mitcham Common. And all that from a funny old letter…