The rowan tree in my garden, planted to commemorate Mum, lost nearly all its leaves overnight this week (top pic) and another storm warning is on the horizon.  The clocks have gone back, Halloween has come and gone, and we are now inhabiting the half-twilight zone known as November.

While the dry-leaf carpet beneath our feet may bring out the inner, kicking kid in us, it all too quickly becomes a hazardous, slippery mush for those of us of a certain age.  When we were young, we “fell”.  Now, we “have a fall”.  What a world of difference between those descriptions of a tumble.

It’s important for us to stay on our feet, not least because the winter golf season has well and truly arrived.

At home in Ireland we used to call this time of year the LDDBC – the long, dark days before Christmas.

Now, some of you will no doubt put the clubs in mothballs until the clocks spring forward and the temperatures start rising.  Others, however, will embrace winter golf and all its quirkiness.  At courses where the going becomes soft underfoot the dreaded edict “no trolleys, no carts” will soon be seen, if it hasn’t already, plastered over various notice boards. The annual great dilemma is set to surface.

Just what clubs will we carry in our pencil bags?  And how can we possibly be expected to play with fewer than fourteen clubs?  It seems of little consequence that most players hardly ever use their full complement of weaponry, preferring to stick to their favourites.  Cries of indignation will still ring through the locker rooms over this issue, I’m sure.

I’ve always loved winter golf, mainly because throughout my life I have mostly had a links or sand-based course at my disposal.  It was always possible for me to shuffle round in my carpet slippers if I so desired (and the dreaded dress rules allowed!) and the joy of only having half a dozen clubs to choose from has always been totally liberating.  My five-club choice tended to be – a five wood, a 5-iron, an 8-iron, a gap wedge and putter.  Sometimes, if playing with six clubs, I’d take a 3-wood, a rescue, a 6-iron, a 9-iron, a sand-iron and a putter.  That way you could keep an acquaintance with the majority of your set.

All that’s needed for a winter round of golf.

We are all told golf is played in the mind and it certainly takes a particular mind-set to enjoy winter golf in this country.  It’s a given you will never have the “right” club in your hand, so embrace the versatility you are being forced into acquiring.  It really will make you a better player.  You’ll be forced to experiment, try different lengths of backswing, different swing speeds – perhaps lots of stuff you’ve previously avoided.  It’ll certainly get you back to PLAYING the game of golf again as opposed to playing “how to swing the club”.

It’s likely to be cold, too – no, it’ll DEFINITELY be cold, so even slow coaches will speed up;  many greens will have less-than-their-best surfaces so we can legitimately be kinder to ourselves when the putts veer off;  and club selection is oh-so-easy when only carrying half a dozen sticks.  Frequently, nine holes suffice and then it’s into the warmth of the clubhouse (someone else’s electricity pounding away!) and the opportunity for a good catch-up chat or the chance to put the world to rights.  What’s not to like?

I am making plans for my own winter participation in this sport I love.  Since last week’s musings I have been up to my club, Delamere Forest, to hit a few balls on the range, endeavouring to hang on to the momentum generated by my trip to Scotland to play my first nine holes with Gillian Stewart a couple of weeks back.  I have found that, for me, having stuff in the diary (albeit spaced out) is key.  To this end I have a couple of golf days inked in, including a trip next month to a very great friend down in Porthcawl.  My car is not going to know what’s going on, having been pretty much on its holidays for the last two years.

Slightly changing tack, I have to admit to not having watched one single televised golf shot since returning home from the Ryder Cup a month ago.  Even I need a break from it all and I do feel we sometimes drown in wall-to-wall repeats and highlights reels of one sort or another.  In this izzy-whizz world I’m beginning to find a blank screen enormously attractive.

In fact, this evening the sister and I will be exchanging an evening in front of the box for an evening in theatreland in the company of the supervet, Noel Fitzpatrick.  I know that Mary McKenna saw him a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed her evening so I’m hoping this’ll be the same.

We’ve been looking forward to this for quite a while.

In the meantime, the windows are tear-drenched and rattling so it’s not even a day to venture out for a few holes of winter golf, no matter how invigorating or good for us it may be.  No, be sure to choose your days for that activity wisely and on other occasions be prepared to batten down the hatches.

Winter is here.

Please, please tell us the secret Hank, Mr Haney, sir.  Spare us years of digging in the dirt and hitting shanks and sclaffs* and make half-decent golf easy-peasy instead of an impossible dream.  This plea comes from the heart but even so I hadn’t the stamina to make it to the end of the promo; lacked the devotion to press ahead and commit to what it took; I guess I just have to admit that I don’t have what it takes; no stickability.

For goodness sake, what on earth is she wittering/whittering on about now?  Is there much more of this?  As an increasingly bored and disinterested copytaker really did say to me once – only once??! – as I was struggling to string a coherent piece together under the strains of a looming deadline and very little info of any interest whatsoever.

In the days before computers and t’internet, you used to have to file your story by picking up the phone, often reversing the charges (younger readers can give up now) and dictating your well-chosen words to a copytaker, a professional typer-up of stories good, bad and indifferent.  If you were lucky, you’d get a chirpy soul like the man who coped with Danielle Ammaccapane – enunciated carefully letter by letter – by saying, “Ah, normal spelling…”  I still love that man, whoever he was.  As for the sour woman who could do no better than the dreaded classic, “Is there much more of this?”….Well, I now feel much sorrier for her than for me.

Dai used to talk fondly – well, irascibly if truth be told – of Deaf Jim, one of the Birmingham Post’s stalwarts, who was a bit hard of hearing and used to panic when he realised that his correspondent was ringing from America.  It wasn’t as though Jim had to pay the phone bill but he took it very personally and of course, his hearing got worse.  You can imagine what that did for Dai’s, shall we say, demeanour when he was at the Masters, say, right up to deadline.

Dai at his keyboard, by Harold Riley.  No more copytakers to worry about, just technical gremlins.

Ah, deadlines.  What a joy to have a proper cut-off time, beyond which you could do nothing more.  It’s all 24/7 now, non-stop around the clock.  Rest is a four-letter word.  No wonder AI is the in/coming thing – no need for food, sleep or reflection if there’s no human involved.

Now, where was I?  Ah yes, Hank.  I was scrolling down my emails the other day, not making much progress because I kept reading and clicking on stuff that might be interesting when I came across Hank’s 1-SHOT SLICE FIX, under the auspices of performancegolf.com but also as featured in, apparently, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, ESPN, Golf Digest and GOLF.

From Hank’s website, hankhaney.com.

Hank is a big cheese in the world of coaching – legendary even – and his credentials are beyond question.  He coached Tiger Woods for many successful years until they had a big falling out and those who can afford it travel many miles and pay big bucks to have lessons with Hank.  He knows what he’s talking about.  I like to think of my stock shot, a left to right thing sometimes known as a slice (I play golf right-handed) as a wee fade, possibly a cut but who wouldn’t be intrigued by the blurb that promised nirvana:  a quick, permanent fix.

Here are some quotes:  It Takes No More Than 5 Minutes Of Practice Swings…and Then ONE SINGLE SHOT On the Range…(It looks prettier and more compelling in the original layout)….to eliminate decades of horrible slicing habits and start crushing ultra-controlled drives down the fairway…Shot after shot…consistently….

Who wouldn’t be intrigued but I started to lose the will to live, let alone improve as Hank went on and on about how good he was/is (I know, Hank, I know), how many thousands of people he’d taught over the years and then all these happy people, all men, mostly middle-aged at best, who’d spent years spraying their balls to the right (I didn’t last long enough to see if there were any lefties included) and now couldn’t slice if their lives or the lives of their loved ones depended on it.

Come on Hank, there’s no singing this week (half-term) so I’m not in a rush but please get on with it, you’ve made your point, cut to the chase, how much?  What do I have to pay for this nugget?

You’d have been proud of me – or thought I was bonkers – because I made it to the nitty-gritty.  The price was $47, a snip but there was some sort of caveat that involved signing up to Performance Golf – cancel at any time, that sort of schtick.  That’s when I gave up.

A little slice of heaven….

Trouble was, I thought I’d gleaned enough to try it out on the golf course and since this week’s comp was a Texas Scramble, what better test event?  Apologies partners.  Not surprisingly I didn’t get it quite right but I did hit a few drives well left – not my usual miss – and couldn’t be sure that my trusty fade would pop up whenever I needed it.  We weren’t last but weren’t that far off the bottom.  Perhaps I should have paid up.  Perhaps I should have hit a few balls on the practice ground.  Perhaps I should just have stayed in bed…

Ah well, there’s always next week.

*a stroke in which the sole of the club scrapes the ground before striking the ball; any horribly mishit shot.

A Mary McKenna special, November’s photo, serene enough to calm the soul of any sclaffer – or Halloween bride of Frankenstein…