The beginning of the week brought the news that Mt Etna, Sicily’s far from slumbering volcano, had erupted yet again.  That is the twelfth time this year, apparently, so it is not a place for the faint-hearted resident – or tourist.  Or even visiting golfer, as I remember from my tour days.

Back in the mid-to-late nineties I played in three successive Italian Opens at Il Picciolo golf course which is situated on the slopes of the aforementioned Mt Etna, which served as a constant, grumbling companion for the week.  On one occasion the sponsors arranged a trip to the summit for those of us involved in the tournament and it was a truly remarkable experience.  It was nature at its rawest, and finest, and if ever a human is to feel insignificant it’s when looking over the rim of a belching crater with the wind whistling round your ears and the smell of sulphur in your nostrils.  Unforgettable.

Those tournaments were unforgettable for other reasons as well – and it isn’t the golf I’m talking about.  Always on the lookout for a bargain in accommodation, not being flush with funds, most of us stayed in an ancient old pile which had once been a school before morphing into a convent – or perhaps it was vice-versa.  Think grim, think foreboding, think unwelcoming, think Colditz and well, you’ll begin to get the picture.

When we players and caddies stayed there, the building had been converted into hostel-style accommodation with a variety of rooms enclosed within its ancient walls.  There were dormitory rooms, some with as many as six or eight beds; there were double rooms; and there were singles.  Regrettably, I had a single.  The high point was the discovery of a communal refectory and a bar, plus the fact that we were only about ten minutes from the course.  That meant minimal exposure on the narrow, twisty hairpins populated by seemingly suicidal Italian drivers.

Right from the off one of the Canadian players announced there was something sinister about the place, an energy that wasn’t good and when she returned from an exploratory investigation of the curved grey passageways, she was as white as I have ever seen any human being who is still the right side of the daisies.  She had, to use her own words, been halted in her walk around by a “putrid wall of smell” which had driven her back.

If you had asked me at this time if I believed in ghosts of any kind, I would have laughed and answered in the negative.  My fellow player’s calm acceptance of and belief in this bad presence was quite chilling in itself.  It was also a great deal more persuasive than any argument she could have put forward as to the existence of the supernatural.

And so began a long, long week and I discovered it’s not just so easy to laugh off your fears when going to bed alone in a five hundred year old building.  Disturbingly, the caddies, who liked a laugh as much as the next person, made sure they  never walked anywhere in the building on their own and the expected practical joking from them never surfaced.  Much much later, with the week safely in the rearview mirror, one or two of them admitted (rather shamefacedly) to seeing disturbing, ghostly figures at the end of the bed.

They needn’t have been shamefaced.  No one laughed.

A year went by and the Italian Open rolled around again on the schedule.  Where to stay?  Should we try the convent again?  It wasn’t THAT bad really, was it?  And it was great value.  Surely we had just blown things out of proportion in our own minds?  Yep – I’d give it another go; but this time in a room with at least three others.

The moment I crossed the threshhold I knew I’d made a mistake.  The high-ceilinged dorms had multiple, out-of-reach, uncurtained, arrow-slitted windows that allowed shifting moonlit shadows entry to the rooms all night – not a recipe for calming or defusing any night fears.  Whether it was an over-active imagination or not, the whole experience was uncomfortable, worse than the previous year, and not helped by trying to perform in professional sport when totally sleep-deprived.

Some, of course, were immune but I’d say at least eighty per cent of those who stayed there disliked the experience intensely.

Roll on one more year and we’re back at Il Picciolo again.  This time I splashed out on a nice hotel down on the coast and closed my eyes and crossed my fingers for the 40-minute, white-knuckle ride to the course.  A decent night’s sleep armed me with enough courage to get through that little test at the beginning and end of each day.

My third visit to Sicily therefore, with a friend caddying, was the best of the lot.  I was truly able to enjoy my surroundings and experience a beautiful part of Italy.

The week after we got home Mt Etna erupted – again.  This time the lava flows reached the very edge of the golf course, threatening the fairways we’d been trying to hit only days earlier.  Beautiful Sicily is certainly not for the faint-hearted but there is one thing that it is:-

Unforgettable.

[Ed:  No pics with this blog because who can snap a ghost?  Especially when your hands are shaking and your mind is scrambled.]

It’s a load of nonsense, isn’t ?  Thinking that you’re in charge of your life, that you’ve got things running along to your satisfaction, everything tickety-boo.  Every now and again it might look as though you’ve got things under some sort of control but then, boom (or it might just be a less dramatic pffft, say), something happens to throw your well-laid plans off course – aft agley, I think, was how some famous Scottish poet put it.  Awry, always awry.

Learning to chill; accepting there are things you can’t control!

Nothing too traumatic this time, just irritating and time-consuming, especially because it led to a journey during rush hour, a stop-start affair that reminded me why I’d succumbed to buying an automatic car.  I’ve had it for a month or so and I still feel I should have ‘L’ plates or some sort of sign to warn other drivers that I’m a bit of a beginner, not quite comfortable with the new (to me) motor.

Not so long ago, I was waiting at traffic lights, first in the queue and when they turned green, I pressed the accelerator – and went nowhere.  I panicked, of course, thinking ‘how on earth have I managed to stall?  What the hell do I do now?’  I raised a hand in apology to the driver behind, who slid past successfully – and then I realised that I’d put the car in park!!  No wonder it hadn’t moved.

Then, the other day, just as I was leaving singing, as it was starting to rain, my front passenger window wouldn’t budge.  I’d put it down to chat to a friend but when I pressed the button to put it up, nothing happened.  The other three windows all worked; the button that I suspected locked the windows (I haven’t read the entire handbook yet) was not engaged; and I checked that there wasn’t some sort of gunge causing an obstruction.

Bugger.

A lot to absorb.

I cried off an afternoon cuppa with friends and headed for the local garage.  They had no more luck than I did, so it was off to the nearest Honda dealer – I’d bought the car near Chester, so that wasn’t the most convenient option.  Anyway, to cut a long story a wee bit shorter, making my way through the sort of traffic queues that had persuaded me to go automatic, I got there before closing time.

I knew from their expression that they thought I’d pressed the lock button inadvertently and they strode confidently to the car; still the window refused to budge.  Turned out the motor had given up the ghost.  Turns out each window has its own motor.  Who knew?

Fortunately a clever technical bod managed to close the window, so I was sent on my way, under strict instructions not to open that window.  On the drive home I could feel my fingers twitching, anxious to do just that; the moment you’re told not to touch, that’s just what you want to do.  The car, barely two years old, is still under warranty, so I just have to plaster over the cracks and wait for the call that the part has arrived – better not plan too much in the meantime.

Why is something telling me that I’m not really ready for the electronic age…

Perhaps I should stick to the bike…

It’s a bit of a miracle that I’m even able to watch any television at all these days, given that there is so much streaming, so many channels and an infinite number of gizmos to operate.  However, I did manage to see a bit of the golf last weekend, when Scottie Scheffler strolled to his second consecutive victory at Muirfield Village, making this winning stuff look easy.  It isn’t, of course but he’s developing a rare knack of winning the big events and he’s starting to get in the head of his competitors.

“Scottie doesn’t make mistakes,” Rory McIlroy was quoted as saying but that’s not true.  He’s human, so like all of us he makes mistakes.  The thing is he doesn’t let them bother him and he makes a lot of pars where others would be making bogeys – or worse.  Then he has a run of birdies – or eagles – and, whoosh, he’s free and adding another win to his increasingly long and impressive list.

McIlroy, meanwhile, has admitted that he’s finding it hard to get himself motivated since completing his Grand Slam and he looked a bit grumpy in the first round in Canada.  Perhaps that was just indigestion…

All hail to Maja Stark, who played steadily and sensibly and kept her nerve to win the 80th US Women’s Open (presented by Ally), at Erin Hills in Wisconsin, last Sunday.  She became the third Swede to win the title, finishing two shots ahead of Nelly Korda, the world No 1 from Florida and Rio Takeda from Japan.

Liselotte Neumann, the first Swede to win the title, in 1988 and Annika Sorenstam, who won it three times, both sent Stark good luck messages before the final round and the 25-year old, ably advised by her caddie Jeff Brighton, did them proud.

How the new champ kept her cool at the 18th I’ll never know.  That hole was the stuff of nightmares, a par five with an elevated green and a piggy front pin position – for instance, Korda’s first pitch came back to her feet; another player putted off the green back down the hill; and Stark’s playing partner Julia Lopez Ramirez ended up with a triple bogey eight that included a shot from the scoring tent.

Stark, still short of the green in three, waited and waited and waited while Ramirez went to and fro and those of us watching were in a cold sweat, thinking that she might never finish the hole.  Eventually, Stark got to play and putted up the hill, pin high, giving herself three putts to win from 35-odd feet.  She rolled the ball up to a few inches and that was that.

Bravo.  Bra gjort!

A place to relax and allow the world to do what it will when you can’t find a photo of the new US Women’s Open champion!