The other night, I was spending a quiet night in, playing bridge with friends – well, two of us were Irish, so it wasn’t always that quiet.  Anyway, about 10 o’clock, there was a knock at the door and off I went to answer it.  It was the police, two officers, a man and a woman.  Fortunately, I was dummy so they had my full attention while the others played on, albeit keeping a close ear on what was happening.

The police officers were asking after the car, wanting to know where it had been, what it had been up to.  Not a lot was the anwer; it had spent a large part of the day sitting in the car park at the golf club, getting wet while its owner battled through the rain.  Turned out it had been involved in “an incident” somewhere else entirely.  Oops.  Somebody had cloned the number plate.

I was given a crime number – not sure that’s the correct title – and warned to keep an eye out for parking tickets, speeding fines and sundry other delights coming my way.  No wonder my carefully-laid plans to have a stress-free Thursday and Friday ran into the buffers a bit…You just never know what’s going to crop up.

For instance, my packing was more or less done – all but the toothbrush – but then I had to rearrange to make space for my new holiday pyjamas, an early birthday present from a kind friend who didn’t want me to risk being embarrassed by my rough and ready sewing repairs.

I’m no sewer (looking more closely at that word made me laugh and reminded me that my needlework is shit) but my pyjama trousers had been sitting waiting for repair for weeks and as I steeled myself to attempt to contact the DVLA, I devised a cunning plan:  set the stopwatch and see if I could sew up the long leg before the phone was answered.  There was no need to be neat, there were no Sewing Bee judges to keel over with horror at my ineptitude and I settled down to my task.

Determined not to get annoyed or frustrated, I ended up finding the whole exercise surprisingly therapeutic.  Now, either that means that I’m in dire need of some sort of therapy or it means that nearly 60 years of golf has made me relatively philosophical and accepting of the day to day vagaries of life.  Sometimes you land in a divot hole, sometimes you don’t; sometimes you get a decent lie in the boondocks, sometimes you’re a foot off the fairway and can barely see the ball.  Hey ho.

The first problem was that I wanted to talk about renewing my driving licence and there didn’t seem to be a category for that.  Anyway, I pressed a button and settled in, threaded a needle (first go!) and started stitching.  I must say that the hold music, the stuff they play while you’re waiting interminably, is quite brilliant, so soporific and mind-numbing that it’s a miracle anybody lasts long enough to speak to a person.

My first human, after about 29 minutes, was Karen, who was very pleasant but she was in the tax department, so couldn’t help.  She very kindly passed me on and eventually, an hour and 4 minutes in, Richard answered.  He was something to do with vehicles, opined that the music was rubbish and said he’d transfer me to the driving licence team.   Aaagh.

By this time, Zen though I was, I was wishing my sewing box, an old Black Bush whiskey tin, still contained the original bottle and contents.  Anyway, seconds later, Zoe was on the line and was able to answer my questions.  What a pity it had taken so long.  More than an hour.  Even I had finished the jim jam repairs but only just.

My intention was to get to bed early this week after staying up late to watch the end of the golf from Canada but that doesn’t seem to have worked out.   No matter.  It was worth watching the RBC Canadian Open at the undulating Hamilton Golf and Country Club in Ontario – at the expense of a brutal US Women’s Open Championship at Lancaster Country Club in Pennsylvania.  Apologies and congrats to Yuka Saso, of Japan and the Philippines, on a hard-earned second USWO title but it was Scottish lefty Bob MacIntyre who grabbed my attention as he won for the first time in America.

The young man from Oban had found it hard to settle in the States, summoning his mum Carol to help with the cooking and housekeeping, then, because he seems to go through caddies at a bit of a rate, he called in his dad Dougie to carry the bag.  You couldn’t make it up.  On a soggy old day, a bit dreich, they won and lit the place up.

Sporting success is usually a family affair, one way or another and until the MacIntyre’s hogged the headlines my caddying story of the week came from the Alps Tour, one of the many places golfing hopefuls can ply their trade as they attempt to work their way towards the top of the game’s slippery pole.

Brandon Kewalramani, an American in Europe, won for the first time, at the inaugural 2024 Alps de Roquetas de Mar at Club de Golf Playa Serena and dedicated his win to his mom Veronica.  “She was again on the bag this week with me,” he said.  “She means the world to me, she sees what I go through and the hard work that I put in.  I was thinking about what this win would mean and I kept thinking of how much it would mean to win it with my mom on the bag and here with me.  I’m so glad I was able to do that.”

The MacIntyres will know exactly how he feels.

Just to let you know, there’s no Mo this week, she’s conserving her energy for the big trip to Pinehurst.