And so the golf season rolls on jostling for space with the footie, the Rugby World Cup, the cricket, the US tennis, the cycling and sundry other endeavours.

A few of my friends will be attending the Interflora World Cup in Manchester this weekend, where qualifiers from twenty countries have spent months preparing and practising artistic creations that will blow your mind – and many a hefty budget.  It’s been described as a cross between the Olympics and the Chelsea Flower Show.  Good luck to them all – it’s wonderfully inspiring to have a chance to see passionate folk reach for the stars in their particular sphere, whatever that may be.

Frequently, however, passion and endeavour are not enough to help you achieve your dreams.

I feel for Adrian Meronk this week.  His world came crashing down on him when he failed to merit a pick from Luke Donald, Europe’s Ryder Cup captain.  Bidding to become the first Polish player to play in the biennial competition, Meronk failed by a whisker to achieve one of the six automatic berths on offer but did feel he had done enough.

He finished fifth in the European Tour points list – the top three made the team automatically;  he finished eleventh in the World Points list – the ten ahead of him made the 12-man team;  he won three times in the last twelve months and defends his Irish Open title this week at the K Club;  one of his three wins was the Italian Open on the Marco Simone golf course which happens to be the Ryder Cup venue;  and finally, he leads the category for hitting greens in regulation with an astonishing 73%.  To put that stat in perspective, Tiger Woods only achieved 75% once in his long and illustrious career and that was in 2000, his year of years.

I’m not going to enter into any diatribe over who should or should not be in.  There are as many opinions as there are golfers and, as Patricia keeps reminding me, they are the captain’s picks, not yours, not mine.  The only way to be completely sure you’re on that team is to have qualified automatically and I do hope Meronk can channel his upset and disappointment into a good defence of his title this week.  For what it’s worth, I think he’s a class act.

Another class act on display in the last seven days has been the United States Walker Cup side which overcame a three-point deficit after the first day to trounce the GB&I lads on the second day, hoovering up ten of the fifteen available points.  That all added up to a final score of USA 14.5 to GB&I 11.5 – as seen in the featured picture at the top with a proud captain, Mike McCoy holding the trophy aloft.

In the Madill household the home side’s effort is categorised as a BBU – a performance that is recognised as “brave but unavailing” and believe you me, being Irish sports fans we are very well acquainted with BBUs.  I’m readying myself for a few of them in the rugby.

Many pals were up at St Andrews for the Walker Cup and it was joyous for them being able to walk up the fairways alongside the players instead of being corralled around the perimeter, unable to get within 50 yards of those swinging and grafting.  It is simply the best way to experience high-class golf and the only time at the Old Course where, as a spectator, you really have the opportunity to experience the intricacies and nuances of the most famous course on earth.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t up in the old grey toon last weekend but I had a run of being present at four consecutive home Walker Cup matches – from 2003 at Ganton to 2015 at Royal Lytham.  Sandwiched in between those two venues were the matches at Royal County Down in 2007 and Royal Aberdeen in 2011.  GB&I triumphed in three of these clashes and lost the other by a solitary point – it really was a golden era for the home side but the overall tally still makes for dispiriting  reading if you are from this side of the pond:  USA victories 39, GB&I victories 9, with one match halved.

It does make you wonder how long such a one-sided contest can remain relevant and perhaps it’s time to do as Jack Nicklaus suggested re the Ryder Cup all those years ago and include players from continental Europe.  It’s a topic, I suspect, that is constantly lurking near the agenda of meetings of the great and the good in the amateur game.  However, with no news forthcoming at the moment from that quarter, I think we can safely assume that the 50th contest in 2025 at Cypress Point will remain a GB&I versus USA clash.

The sister is already making noises about attending and is covertly mounting a campaign to elbow the match to the top of my list of must-dos for that year.  It’s tempting………very tempting – and could my golfing education really be called complete without attending an away match?

But before that rolls around there is a great deal of nail-biting ahead for those of us who are spectators, whatever the sport or passion.

How far do you think a single-stem rose “creation” would carry me in Manchester?

Not so long ago, Maureen noted that over the years I’d demonstrated an aversion to the practice ground, undoubtedly to the detriment of my golf, if not my back.  Anyway, the last couple of Saturdays, I’ve enjoyed a group practice session with a few others, the first very enjoyable, the other nearly as chilling as a dinner invitation from Hannibal Lecter.

We were working out how far we hit our irons and I was more than happy to put on my glasses and help with the assessments.  I didn’t relish doing my own measurements because I already knew the answer:  no distance at all.  In fact, most of my shots endangered the young professional diligently honing his game a little to our right.  The golfing readers will be ahead of me and will be making a mental note to keep well behind me if we’re playing together.  Yes, I started shanking and didn’t stop until I put the irons away and used my trusty rescue.

Instead of putting in the time and effort to learn how to hit my irons properly (a depressing, tiring, fruitless business in my case), I have solved – ok, avoided – the problem by  keeping them in the bag.  The poor wee souls have rarely hit a full shot in anger, destined never to reach their potential, confined to a bit of a pitch here, a chip and run there.  It’s a strategy that has its limitations but it does make club selection fairly straightforward.

In far-off times, my favourite club was my 3-iron but who even owns such an implement nowadays?  Certainly not an old bat with commitment issues.

And my fitness and flexibility leave a lot to be desired.  I played three undistinguished rounds in four days earlier this week and wondered fuzzily if I should join a gym again…Weights, however light, are good for you at any age apparently.

Perhaps I should get the bike out?  But not so long ago it was too wet and now it’s too hot and just looking at the Tour of Britain on the telly makes me want to lie down.  How do they do it?  And how do you have a mountain stage in Suffolk?  Or perhaps I just misheard and the King of the Mountains had conquered Snowdonia?  They wouldn’t even have noticed the titchy incline between Threapwood and Malpas that makes me puff pathetically.

And if you get on your bike and overcome the early wobbles, you still have to watch out for potholes (we specialise in those in our part of Staffordshire), dozy pedestrians spilling off pavements and even dozier drivers tootling the wrong way round one of the biggest roundabouts in the county.  Wow, how did he (it was bound to be a he, surely!) manage that?  Sue M and I, who witnessed it, still haven’t puzzled it out.  Fortunately, we don’t think there was anything hurtling round the right way.  No reports of mangled wreckage anyway.

The good thing about my bad golf is that it’s made me look twice at a recent email from WHGC:  Invitation to Membership.  It’s a rather quaint way of telling me that the subs are due and inviting me to renew my membership.  It’s gone up, of course but I got out the old calculator (well, it’s on my phone like nearly everything else) and divided the total by 365, to see if it was still worth my while.

All being well with the calculator, the sum comes out at £4.79 a day and that includes the house levy (your food and drink starter fund), GolfGuard insurance (a whole £2.50), a large locker (£50) and something called a Ladies’ Golf Union fee (£21).  That’s a bit puzzling because the LGU has been defunct for quite a few years now, subsumed into the R and A, I thought or England Golf or whatever but certainly no longer an entity onto itself.  Amazing how long it takes the admin to catch up with the times…

Talking of catching up with the times, I played golf at a very familiar course the other day, for the first time in ages.  It brought back many happy memories of past battles, particularly with the brother-in-law who’s a member there and of a Maureen birdie barrage many moons ago – they ran out of red numbers on the scoreboard, oh stellar stuff!

No danger of that with me – I’m not even sure I managed one of those par things as my chipping and putting failed to make up for deficiencies elsewhere.  My opponent was not at her best either – neither of us relished the heat and humidity – but she recovered her game just in time, hit some proper shots (irons included) and finished me off at the 16th.  Fortunately, the team won, so all was well.  As dad used to say:  “Every result makes somebody happy…”

It’s a phrase I’ve been using a lot recently and I keep recalling the advice Jack Nicklaus gave his old friend Kaye Kessler, a wonderful journalist who covered the great man’s career from the start but whose own golf was at best intermittent.  “Don’t take that swing out of town,” Jack said.

Finally, the very best of luck to two of Whittington Heath’s finest:  Sue Kershaw and Rachel Bailey.  They’re heading out of town this weekend, undertaking a daunting hundred kilometre walk alongside the Thames in aid of Peaches, the womb cancer charity.

Sue, left and Rachel ready to go.  Good luck both.  Take it steady, no need to go like bats out of hell – though it’s forecast to be a scorcher.