Hannah Green (above with the Australian Open trophy) must be enjoying life at the moment.

The 29-year old Australian has risen to No 7 in the world rankings due, in no small part, to her stellar play over the last two to three weeks.  Now in her ninth year on the LPGA tour, Green recorded her seventh win on that circuit at the HSBC Women’s World Championship which was played three weeks ago at Sentosa golf club in Singapore.  Every win is special but this was made doubly so by the fact that she had her husband Jarryd Felton on the bag.

Jarryd obviously carried out exemplary caddy duties because the duo then travelled together down to Adelaide for Hannah’s next start in the Women’s Australian Open which has featured for many years on the Ladies’ European tour (LET) schedule.

It had seriously rankled with the sports-mad Aussie population that the last time a home player won their national Open was way back in 2014 when Karrie Webb topped the leaderboard.  This year’s edition was at the beautiful Kooyonga golf course and Hannah and Jarryd wowed the home supporters by carving out a one-stroke victory.  The huge media interest and subsequent column inches, photographs and videos about the wife-husband partnership will provide oodles of material for the family album.  A home player lifting his or her national open is second only to winning a major…………….perhaps.

And did I mention Hannah already has one of those – a major?  The 2019 Women’s PGA Championship.  I doubt it’ll be her last.

Ah, Kooyonga.  The Adelaide club holds a special place in my heart.  It was the venue for the 1979 Commonwealth Tournament and my first overseas outing for a British team.  We had a lovely week or so of preparation before the serious golf began – it gave us time to get over the huge journey and to adjust to the significant time difference.  We were assigned members of the home club as caddies, all good players, and we had the benefit of several practice rounds with them.  But, how times have changed!

Back then we, of course, carried yardage books – or rather, notebooks.  I don’t recall my book having too many yardages in it.  It tended to be filled with shorthand notes that would indicate to me, for example, that a good tee shot on the fifth might leave me level with the third banksia tree on the left.  From there, into a one-club wind, a five iron would reach the middle of the green.  Nary a number hit the page.

This may sound mad in this precise, laser-measured era but it worked well enough – up to a point.  My caddy was unable to be present for one of the final practice rounds so I played a few holes solo with much consulting of the notebook and assiduous learning of the borrows on the green taking place.  I was challenged, however, by the unfamiliar array of trees, undergrowth and flora – very foreign to a (not so) wee girl from Norn Iron.  Without my caddy by my side, just which of these exotic-looking things were banksia trees?  Were they those low ones over there or that run of taller ones at the back?  No idea whatsoever.  Cue much relief when my caddy returned and I was a big step closer to having numbers in my book.

I made many friends at Kooyonga, particularly Dulcie Doherty who was the hostess for the British team.  She looked after us so well – nothing was too much trouble and she and I kept in touch from then onwards.  We corresponded for many decades and I looked forward to receiving a lengthy missive each January, filled with news and observations about the grand slam tennis (one of Dulcie’s passions) which takes place at that time of year.  When she celebrated her 80th birthday Dulcie and her husband, Jack, hired a Harley for a day and I still have at home the photo of the two leather-clad octogenarians.

I’m still in Tenerife looking for the sun and obviously can’t access any photos from home so I emailed Gill Stewart to see if she could put her hand on her copy of that 1979 team.  Within a matter of minutes she came up trumps and sent me the photo below.

I believe a copy of this picture was still hanging in the locker room at Kooyonga as recently as five years or so ago, along, I’m sure, with photos of all the competing teams.

Our captain that year was the inimitable Carol Comboy of  Cheshire, which incidentally has just been awarded “County of the Year 2026” at the prestigious England Golf Awards ceremony in Manchester.  The county has been recognised for its  “outstanding commitment to supporting its 95 affiliated clubs and delivering impact at every level of the game”.  Congratulations are in order all round.  Carol, a trailblazer herself, would be so proud of you all.  Keep up the good work.

Finally, many thanks to all of you who took the time and trouble to send congratulations re my honorary membership of the PGA.  It is much appreciated.

I’m back in England next week so my search for the sun will continue there for a while.

You realise – with a lot of a gunk – that you’re getting on a bit when twenty-five years, a whole quarter of a century, seem like no time at all ago; or, completely the opposite, a lifetime ago.  To digress, as so often, I’ve used a semi-colon there and am feeling haunted, hunted, panicked and incredibly guilty…was it the right thing to do?  Probably not.  And Jeremy Chapman, whose funeral I attended earlier this week, would have been down on me like a ton of bricks.

Jeremy, of the Sporting Life and Racing Post, among other publications, was once described as the Tiger Woods of golf betting tipsters and was a man of many talents.  Correct grammar was one of his things; punctuation was not to be messed with.  Of course, I’m now a complete mess, with commas, semi-colons and colons scattered to the four winds.  As for apostrophes, well, I’ve accepted that they’re a lost cause, with apologies to Jeremy and the equally great Lynne Truss.  Sometimes life really is too short.

Not being a gambler, I didn’t follow Jeremy’s tips avidly and would donate a few pounds to his coffers every year at the Open.  The only time I ever won anything – a substantial (in my terms) 30 quid, I had to leave early and Jeremy, ever trusting, gave my winnings to Dai…I never did get them in my hot little hand.  My ever-lovin’ put them in what he called “central funds”.  I’m still cross!

As is often the case with funerals you learn lots of things you didn’t know about the person who’s died and wish they were still around so you could learn more.  Racing, golf, boxing, musical theatre, cabaret, page lay-outs, writing, you name it, Jeremy was a master of it.  Condolences to his wife Christa, who drove him everywhere (he never mastered driving) and all the family.

Now where was I?  Oh yes, time and the passing thereof.  It was 25 years ago this week that Annika Sorenstam, like Jeremy an avid cruncher of numbers, became the first woman golfer to record a score of 59, 13 under par, in a proper professional event, on a proper golf course.  It was at Moon Valley in Phoenix, Arizona, in the Standard Register PING, an event that the incomparable Laura Davies, won four times in a row.  Annika, known from then on as Ms 59, had a putt for a round of 58 but breaking 60 was a magical feat in itself.

I was there.  Really.  I was.  And it was one of the triumphs of my journalistic career:  it took a lot of pleading but despite the eight-hour time difference I managed to persuade the subs at The Times to give me top billing, above the men’s European Tour event.  It meant I was given something like 450 words as opposed to 250.  Some career, eh!!  Mind you, you wouldn’t even get the results in the paper now, let alone words from somebody who’d been sent there to report on the event (and others).

I only realised it was a special anniversary when I got an email from the ANNIKA Foundation billing a “More Than Golf” virtual series session with Annika and Charlotta, her sister, called Achieving Your “59”.  Oh, lovely, I’ll sign up to that, I thought, that’ll be very interesting and great to revisit the day itself.  The glitch came when I was told that to sign up required parental consent…Ah, a bit tricky that.

Turned out the event wasn’t for old dolls like me wanting to reminisce about a great day.  A closer inspection of the small print revealed that the session was intended for “female junior, collegiate and young professional golfers”.  Not for the likes of me then.  Fair enough.  The chances of me improving my golf by 30-odd strokes – and the rest – per round are non-existent.  Odds of several million to one wouldn’t give even the most clueless bookmaker or tipster a single sleepless second.

The Standard Register, the Turquoise Classic I think in a previous incarnation, was a great event for us European watchers.  There were big crowds; Laura ruled the roost for several years in the mid 1990s; then in 2000 Charlotta beat big sister Annika and Karrie Webb in a play-off for her only LPGA victory; in 2001, Annika had her 59 in the second round and went on to win.

Looking up the LPGA media guide, 2001 was the year Annika had eight wins, six seconds and twenty top-ten finishes “en route to her fourth career Rolex Player of the Year Award, Vare Trophy [stroke average] and money title.”  She was quite a player.

Sadly, not all numbers always add up.  The day after Jeremy’s funeral, I went to watch Spurs play Atletico (Atletic nowadays I think) Madrid in the Champions’ League and although we won 3-2, we lost 7-5 on aggregate.  It was a good match and for a while we had a sniff of a mega upset but we had too much to do after a dire first leg and who knows when we’ll be in the top comp again.

I’m featuring Gandys at the top because at long last, on the day of the match, I got to their wee outlet shop in Covent Garden (I also managed to nip in to the Apple store where I discovered that the only thing you can do with the flood of mail in Junk is delete it!).  Just as well I decided to go because I discovered that a sustainable business isn’t always sustainable.  Gandys are, apparently, on the way out, unable to make the bottom line add up.

The company, starting with flip flops, was founded by two brothers whose parents were swept away by the tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004 – the boys and two younger siblings survived – and they’ve done great things since, helping set up schools and orphanages in Sri Lanka and Nepal and elsewhere.  It’s worth looking them up and reading all about it.

In the meantime, there’s 60 per cent off sitewide on gandysinternational.com.