The regular reader (many thanks for your perseverance and support) will have realised by now that I’m a sad soul  – but I’m quite happy with that.  For instance, the other day at Hoylake, aka Royal Liverpool, I spent several happy minutes watching people trying to sink a putt (best of three) along a humpback length of matting.  If they sank one, they’d win a golf ball (a Titleist proV1 admittedly) and be entered in a draw to win a Scotty Cameron putter.  Men, women and children were lining up to have a go.  Some came close but no one holed out while I was watching.  We all had fun, though.

That was on Wednesday and the place was packed but it was a glorious afternoon, absolutely perfect for wandering around, checking out the new and already dreaded 17th in relatively benign, sunny conditions.  “It’s 130 yards and they’re scared of it,” Sir Nick Faldo said.  Mind you, even he, three times winner of the Open, admitted that he was glad he didn’t have to play it.

When I played the little fecker (the 15th in the normal scheme of things), it was blowing a hooley and I knew I hadn’t a hope in hell.  I hit quite a good shot, some sort of finagled rescue but it went over the back into a ghastly sandy wasteland and I thinned my next effort into one of the front bunkers.  The ball eventually re-emerged in my hot little hand.  Nul points.  Who knows what carnage it’ll cause this week.

 

The sainted Rory (don’t worry I know he’s only human and fortunately he still seems to be well aware of that too) was playing with Tyrrell Hatton, Tommy Fleetwood and Viktor Hovland and they were followed by quite a horde.  One young man who’d manoeuvred himself into a good spot close to the action told his mates, “I’m going to shout out my undying love for him (Rory).”  They didn’t give him any stick or laugh,  just nodded.

On Sunday, Rory had pipped home hope Bob MacIntyre to the Genesis Scottish Open title in a thrilling finish at the Renaissance Club, near North Berwick.  The left-handed Scot from Oban had set the target thanks to a brilliant birdie at the difficult 18th but the Ulsterman grabbed the spoils with two cracking iron shots at the 17th and 18th and two birdie putts.  It was his first win in Scotland as a professional.  Hope it doesn’t scupper his chances of winning at Hoylake…

Here in Lichfield on Sunday night we celebrated Rory’s victory with a spectacular fireworks display.  Well, officially it was to mark the end of the Lichfield Festival, nearly a fortnight of performances of all sorts.  It’s a great opportunity to widen your musical horizons and on Sunday two of us took the chance to watch and listen to Hsuan Wu, a young percussionist from Taiwan.  She graduated with distinction from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and is already a seasoned collaborator, exploring not just music but dance and drama.  She wowed us and baffled us in equal measure.  Quite amazing.

It was a very busy sporting Sunday and I scuttled home from the concert to watch the Wimbledon final, keep an eye on the golf and cricket and the Tour de France, not an easy task, hence the g and t, in a Singapore sling glass from Raffles Hotel, unbroken after all these years.

This was the last week of term for our singing class and I, who can ill afford to do so, had missed several sessions because of my gallivanting,   Should I just knock it all on the head or take a deep breath and dive back in?  I dived back in.

It was great fun, even though we started with a piece I’d never done:  Thank You For Being A Friend.  Lovely song but blooming complicated and I didn’t make much of a fist of it.  What’s more, we finished with Abba’s Thank You For The Music, which is also too hard for me and makes me laugh when we get to this line:-

“I have a talent a wonderful thing ’cause everyone listens when I start to sing…”

All I have is visions of rooms clearing in seconds as people rush for the exits…

Years ago our school music teacher – yes, we had one – wrote on my report:  “Shows no aptitude for this subject.”

Nothing much has changed and I’m just grateful to Helen, the boss, a soprano with perfect pitch, who keeps us in order, more or less and Clare, the pianist, who is beyond talented.  How they can tolerate such a musical incompetent is beyond me but I’ll see you next term.

It was well received.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of my nearly nieces (the nephew’s long-time partner but not yet married) made the mistake of asking me where I’d been on my travels, so I told her.  “Blimey,” she said, “you need a holiday to recover.  Time to relax.”

Suppose that’ll mean a few trips to the Horse and Jockey, whose hanging baskets are a blaze of colour (see above).

I was only away for two weeks but it seemed longer, perhaps because there was quite a lot of dotting about.  Train from Lichfield to Inverness; car to Dornoch for a few days there; bus to Inverness; coach to Glasgow; plane to Belfast International; car to Dublin; ferry to Holyhead; train to Chester; train from Whitchurch to Lichfield (via Wem and Crewe).

“That’s expensive,” the woman from the Woodland Trust (doing a promotional stint in Lichfield) said when I told her about the train to Inverness.  She has relatives in Perth and found the cost of taking her own family up to Scotland by train prohibitive.  A senior rail card helps a lot and I missed mine when I left it under the mattress at my friend’s in Dublin and had to do two journeys without it.

The dreaded online booking just requires you to indicate that you have a railcard but the inspector – they’re still using real people on the trains but who knows how long that will last, given the imminent disgraceful culling of  ticket offices – needs to see the card.  Of course, if you’re buying a new one, you’ll probably have to store it on your phone.  Heaven help me if I ever leave that under a mattress.

Even I, Luddite though I am, have got used, however reluctantly, to storing tickets on my phone –  footie, cricket, theatre, you name it.  I’ve still not quite cracked inputting my golf scores on my phone – the signal persists in cutting out at crucial moments, m’lord – so it’s just as well that I haven’t played many competitions recently.  My partner and I wimped out on Tuesday, very wisely, as it turned out – about half an hour after our tee time, the heavens opened and we’d have been washed away.  Thank goodness they have a couple of roofs at Wimbledon these days.  Some of the tennis has been spellbinding.

The Lichfield Festival is in its second week, so friends and I managed to squeeze in a couple of performances.  First up was Mick Doran, principal percussionist of the English National Opera orchestra, with his A-Z of Orchestral Triangle Playing.  It was a brilliant, classy performance, funny, informative and poignant and I’ll never underestimate the triangle again.  Look out for Mick at the Proms and elsewhere, though goodness knows where the ENO is going to end up.

The golf nerds out there will know that another of the world’s famous Mick Dorans is an outstanding caddy, who has won numerous tournaments, including Ryder Cups, working for Lee Westwood, Costantino Rocca, Justin Rose and Eddie Pepperell, to name just a few.  Look out for Mick at the Open at Hoylake.

Post triangle, we went to a concert featuring two musicians from Africa, one of whom, N’famady Kouyaté, from Guinea, is now based in Cardiff.  He plays the balafon, a traditional wooden xylophone and he didn’t have his band with him, just his phone to provide the accompaniment.  His balafon didn’t seem to cause him too much trouble, seemingly a relatively low maintenance instrument, fairly easily portable.

Gaspar Nali, from Malawi, had to do a bit more tweaking and wrestling and mopping of his brow.  He plays “a one-string home-made three-metre long Babatoni bass guitar with a stick and an empty beer bottle”.  He also plays a cow-skin kick drum and sings.  Quite amazing.  Not too many of us in the audience spoke Chichewa, so we hadn’t a clue what Gaspar was singing about because he didn’t give us a synopsis but it all sounded brilliant.  There was dancing by the end.

The Knife Angel is also in Lichfield this month, raising awareness of the horror of knife crime and the devastation it causes.  The huge, impressive statue, incorporating thousands of blades collected by police forces across the country, was created by sculptor Alfie Bradley at the British Ironwork Centre.  It’s an amazing place in Shropshire, on the A5, more or less opposite Oswestry Golf Club.  Read all about it – and more – at britishironworkcentre.co.uk.  Alfie also has his own website.

Better squeeze a bit of golf in, so many congratulations to Matteo Manassero on winning the Italian Challenge Open at Golf Nazionale in Viterbo.  It was the Italian’s second win on the Challenge Tour this season – his wife Francesca, a non-golfer, caddied for him both times – and marks a bit of a revival for the man who once took the European (now the DP World) Tour by storm.  Now 30, he had won his four main tour titles by the age of 20, the first in 2010 at the ago of 17 years and 188 days after an outstanding amateur career.  He’s still the youngest winner in tour history and has not lost hope of rejoining the top flight.

You can’t keep a good Italian down and it was great to see that Federica Dassu, who played on the tour with Mo and has been at the heart of Italian coaching for years, popped up at Woodhall Spa this week where the seniors, men and women, have been braving some wild weather.   Thanks to Sue Spencer for sending the pic of her and Feda (left).

 

 

 

 

 

There are oodles of lovely things going on in the golfing world at the moment – lots of Open days at clubs up and down the country and captains’ and presidents’ days being contested fiercely and with no mean level of skill.  It’s high season, too, in the elite amateur game and I’m just home from a most enjoyable week at Royal Dornoch where female junior and senior teams from the Continent of Europe and from Great Britain and Ireland put on a sparkling display in the Vagliano Trophy matches.

The Europeans were the winners of the senior contest by three points and the standard of play in the high winds and driving rain of Saturday was more than a little impressive.

It was the juniors, however, who served up a battle royal with the match finishing all square at nine points apiece.  The home captain, Janet Melville, was understandably delighted as this was the first time in its relatively short history that GB&I had avoided defeat.  For general morale and also, I suspect, for the future of the event, it was a hugely important result.

These junior players were all fifteen or sixteen years of age and it begs the question, “how have they all become so good so young?”  The answer, of course, is a mixture of things with access to places to play and high-quality teaching both being very much to the fore.  We must keep that up.  Elite amateur golf used to be a destination in itself.  Now it tends to be a slither of a timeline in a player’s career, a transition into the paid ranks and not deemed to be particularly vital if the top team honours are not achieved.

Am I the only one who hears myself sounding more and more like my parents when I say I had the best of times?  I had a decent number of years in amateur golf at a high level and followed that with great times on the Ladies’ European Tour from the mid-eighties to the end of the nineties.  I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Maria Dunne, the captain of the senior home team, was a wonderful career amateur in her day and now is a mum of two.  She has no regrets about not turning pro and it’s a bonus to have this experienced and engaging character at the head of our international teams. I wouldn’t be too quick to accept a lift from her, however. as the following picture would suggest her prowess in plotting her way round a course is with clubs on her back, NOT in a buggy!

The smorgasbord of delights available for us this week includes the US Women’s Open at Pebble Beach.  What a glorious setting for a golf course!  My only visit there was covering the 2019 men’s US Open and it was my last visit to America before lockdown.  Gary Woodland won that one, holding off Brooks Koepka, largely courtesy of a sublime chip shot from the actual putting surface on the 71st hole.  Odds on there will be another exciting finish this weekend.  Pebble Beach does tend to produce great winners.

Now to the story of the week as far as I’m concerned.

There will no doubt be a number of our readers who will remember Laura Baugh, the blonde bombshell who was the poster girl of the LPGA back in the 70s and 80s?. Laura never did win on tour but had ten runner-up spots and lots of lucrative sponsorship deals.  Her second (of four) marriages was to Bobby Cole, the South African professional and winner of 13 pro events.  Together they had seven children, one of whom is Eric Cole who is now 35 years of age and a rookie on the PGA Tour.

Eric has bounced around on mini tours all his life and graduated to the big tour last year from the second-tier Korn Ferry tour.  At the moment he is in prime position to win Rookie of the Year honours and has banked just shy of $3 million.  He recently finished a ten-week stretch of tournaments and you’d have thought he deserved a week off.

Not a bit of it.  He had promised to support and play in the Frank B Fuhrer Jr Invitational in Pennsylvania, an event he had won in 2014 after a special invitation from the host.  That win gave him a much-needed injection of funds and he has supported the tournament every year since.  This year, however, was especially important to Cole as it was to be the last edition of the tournament after the death of Frank Fuhrer last year.  But it wasn’t going to be easy.

With the ten-week stretch of tournaments behind him Cole’s flight to Pittsburgh was cancelled and he drove for nearly eight hours through the night to make it to the venue.  He opened with a course record 63, shot a 72-hole total of eleven under and won by nine shots.

“Mr. Fuhrer passed away last year … this was the last year of his tournament, so I felt like it was a really important thing for me to be there and play in it,” Cole said. “It was cool to be part of the last edition of his tournament. To be there, one, and then to win the last edition of his tournament was awesome.”

The first prize was $20,000 which Cole immediately gave back to the Fuhrer family for use in charitable causes of their choosing.

What a great guy and what a story.  Hopefully, he has now had an opportunity to recharge his batteries and regroup.  I for one will certainly be rooting for this remarkable rookie from now on.

 

It won’t surprise regular readers – Maureen, who’s the numbers person, assures me that we have more than one – to learn that you should treat everything I say with extreme caution.  I’m fond of a fact but they can be slippery things, hard to tie down, even harder to verify, so this blog is more of an opinion thing, designed to amuse, if possible; inform, every now and again; and even more occasionally, make you think.

Today, though, I give you due warning that I could, as the wee pic above indicates, be going potty.  Thursdays are the bin day hereabouts and this week it was the garden and recycling bins, plus the annoying blue bag recently introduced for paper and cardboard for some reason that escapes everyone but the bod whose idea it was.  Anyway, I go out to put the bins away and there’s no sign of my blue bag;  next door’s bag is there, empty, so is next door’s but one and so on.  But no sign of mine.  Bugger.

I come back from the morning dog walk and look up the council website to find somewhere to report the loss of my blue bag, discovering in the process that if your black bin is lost or damaged you have to pay for a new one!  How mean is that?  That doesn’t apply to the garden or blue recycling bins, who knows why.  I decide to hold off reporting my loss – the bin cycle doesn’t end until half past four in the afternoon – and put the kettle on.

Then, lo and behold, I see it:  the missing bag.  It was sitting there in its usual place beside the washing machine, large as life, overflowing with cardboard, on my usual route in and out of the house, impossible to miss let alone walk past several times without spotting it…Duh.

As you can see, I’ve accumulated a lot of pots over the years but not that many plants – they’ve all died – so at long last I’ve decided to tackle the problem.  The next step is to empty the weed-ridden pots, clean the ones that are still intact – Monty Don recommends just soap and water apparently – and dispense with the ones that are beyond repair.  Then I have to find plants that will thrive on neglect.  All suggestions welcome.

It was the Centenary Trophy on Tuesday, a medal comp, anathema to most  and my score reflected a woeful short game and putting that belied the quality of the putter – the implement, not the numpty wielding it.  When your ball-striking is as dodgy as mine is, you have to rely on your short game.  Perhaps I should find out where the practice area is.

At least I had one or two of those par things and can bask in the reflected glory of bringing in the winner.  Anne plays – played – off 10 and came home in 37 gross, two over par.  Fantastic.

A couple of days before, on the Old Course at St Andrews, Alex Maguire, from Laytown & Bettystown, played even better, posting a 64, eight under par, the lowest round of the week, to win the St Andrews Links Trophy by five strokes from Albert Hansson, of Sweden.  What could be more special than winning a trophy at the home of golf?  And in such style.

Maguire, who’d just won the East of Ireland Championship at Baltray, said, “It feels great…what a place to win.  Walking up the last, I got my dad to push the trolley up the last hole to have a special moment.  There’s so much history here that I’m delighted to add my name to it…

“My dad and mum love coming out to watch and they’re so proud of me.  They think it’s very special to be over here at the Old Course.  It was their first time here, so to walk away with the trophy here…is pretty special.”

He can say that again.  What a place to win.  A memory to last for ever.

It’s been quite relaxing not having to make my way from Lichfield to N17 (that’s north London, home of the mighty – !!! – Spurs, for newcomers to this space) every fortnight or so but, heaven help me, I’m really looking forward to the new season.  We have a new manager, an Australian called Ange Postecoglou, who was a huge success in his two years at Celtic and sounds like just the person we need.  The more I read about him, the more impressed I am and I just hope we give him time to work his magic.

Will the sainted Harry (Kane) still be with us?  Who knows.  But at least he’s wearing the new kit in the pre-season pics…

Sadly, I’m unable to splash out on the new kit because we’re sponsored by Nike and they’re on my banned list – they’ve ticked me off, so to speak; not that it’s made much difference to their profits.  Also, white is not a colour I dare wear often – too easy to get mucky and I’m not a tidy person.  Show me a bit of jam, soot, mud, tea, coffee and I’ll show you a stain.

Mo’s got herself a mini trampoline as part of her fitness regime and I was at a pizza party the other night where the sainted Alice was gingerly testing out a full-size version.  Not sure she was too enamoured.