Just in case your reserves of optimism are running low, I rooted out one of my favourite – and most battered – mugs, which features the Sousa quote:  “Dance as though no one is watching you.  Love as though you have never been hurt before.  Sing as though no one can hear you.  Live as though heaven is on earth.”

John Philip Sousa (1854-1932) was an American musician and composer renowned for his marches and in his heyday was one of the most famous performers at home and throughout Europe.  He was director of the US Marine Band for a dozen years, then formed the Sousa Band, recruiting players of the highest quality and playing an eclectic mix of music.  He believed in music for everyone, just like Helen Williams, the woman who keeps me trying to sing, struggling to undo more than 60 years of standing at the back and miming.

You can find Helen on YouTube under Helen Williams Soprano and because we can no longer get together in person, exhaling with gusto, she’s venturing into the world of virtual, long-distance choirs via Zoom.  Her project is called “Everybody Sings!” and we had our first joyous, slightly chaotic session yesterday morning.  The potential for chaos and technical glitches is what I love about Zoom – our bridge sessions rarely run smoothly (the king of clubs is a bugger for going missing; it’s amazing how often he disappears under somebody’s table or chair) – and it’s lovely to see people again, be they in their bedroom, kitchen, study, conservatory, shed, wherever.

Only a profoundly deaf person with their back to me could mistake what I do for singing but fortunately Helen has us all on mute most of the time.  There was one ghastly moment when I realised that I’d unmuted myself and was giving dire voice to something but I consoled myself with the thought that it was brief and would have made everybody else feel like a Callas, a Sutherland, a Pavarotti, a helluva lot better about their own voice.

Golf, get to the golf, I can hear herself pleading, so I’ll do that.  I actually put the golf on, to watch a bit of the live – LIVE – coverage from Colonial in Texas.  Some of the best players in the world have emerged from their enforced hibernation and world ranking points are available, much to the chagrin of those players who don’t live in America or don’t want to travel out; quarantine; travel home; quarantine for however many days the current guidelines recommend/insist upon.  Seems a bit unfair but there you are.

It’s very quiet at Colonial with no spectators but you could hear lots of birds tweeting and I was delighted to see that Justin Rose was going a humdinger, rattling round in 63, 7 under par.  The Olympic champion is a bit of a hero to women golfers at the moment because he and his wife Kate are helping to fund The Justin Rose Ladies Series, a run of seven tournaments for women professionals in the UK, starting at Brockenhurst Manor next week.  There’ll be no spectators, so not much point telling you where they are – although the new, much-touted and very private JCB Country Club is on the list, so that might be worth a look – but Sky will be televising all the events.

I played by myself yesterday morning, first out at 0730, off the 10th.  It was grey and cloudy but dry – it didn’t start tipping it down until I was safely back home singing – and apart from the quality of the ball-striking, the lack of caddies, tour officials and telly cameras, it could almost have been Colonial.  There was no one there to cheer when I sank my pitch – beautifully judged for once, landing just where I wanted it to – for a birdie 3 at the 17th.

It was 41 (FORTY-ONE!!!) years ago this week that Maureen won the Ladies British Amateur Championship at Nairn, beating Jane Lock of Australia in the final and quite by chance I found the card of the match the other day, sifting through my never-decreasing mound of paper.  “Don’t put that in the blog,” she said, “I don’t think the figures were very good.”  That hardly matters now – it didn’t matter at the time – but they look all right to me, with a couple of 2s on the back nine that came in handy, so you can judge for yourselves.  And, for added hilarity, have a look on Twitter where @BBCSPORTNI have unearthed footage of Mo talking about her win and what it means.  It’s priceless.

At least I’ve been there and played the course, however chronic the scoring – though wielding my trusty magnifying glass I think I can spot one of those par things in my column.  The green sweatshirt (below) has worn well, not even frayed around the edges and is still given an outing from time to time, usually when I know I’ll be playing with one of those obsessive collectors of courses who’s been nearly everywhere…….but not quite.

 

Let’s finish with another Sousa quote:  “There is one thing that freezes a musician more than the deadliest physical cold and that is the spiritual chill of an unresponsive audience.”

So, perhaps there is something worse than no audience at all after all……

I wish I could pretend it’s because I’m getting older and have been under lockdown but that would be a bit of a lie – I’ve always been a bit of a dozy bugger, alert (isn’t that a word of the moment or has that moment passed?) sometimes but often enough lost in another world, not paying enough attention to what’s going on around me.  Not really an ideal trait for a journalist but it takes all sorts.  And congenital nosiness helped.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I didn’t really notice the Twitter hoo-ha set off by Mel Reid when she mentioned that a couple of women wouldn’t have gone amiss in the charity game at Seminole.  Then it started to filter through that she’d been hammered for expressing the crass opinion that golf had missed a trick, going back to the same old, same old (men only).  Where was the innovation, the forward thinking, the message that golf was a game for everyone?

It seemed like perfectly reasonable musing to me, the sort of thing that might occur to someone sitting watching a welcome but rather dull event – at least it was live, more or less – but, blimey, it was like lighting the blue touch paper.  Some of the comments were beyond vitriolic and reminded me that misogynistic numpties have not yet gone the way of the dinosaurs; they may not be well but they’re alive.  Having once been excoriated on Facebook (admittedly only by one numpty but I suppose it only takes one) for a throwaway crack about a then-would-be-presidential candidate Donald Trump, I resisted the temptation to dive belatedly in to the debate.

One of the reasons I desisted was because, looking more closely at the tweets of the critics, it became apparent that reasoned debate wasn’t on the agenda.  In fact their vocabulary didn’t seem to extend much beyond four letter words that began with ‘f’.  I’m quite good at those sort of words (not a proud boast but a legacy of sharing an office with a talented Scot, an art editor with a way with words of a certain kind) but occasionally know when it’s unwise to use them.

It does get tiring to have to fight your corner all the time, to have to justify your existence, prove that you’re worth it and that females are people too, more than capable of quite a lot of things, including batting a little dimpled ball around quite effectively.  It’s just the way things are though, a variation on “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”.

As James Thurber was well aware, the battle of the sexes, the war between men and women, is a force of nature, part of life, never-ending, unwinnable (except by us) and, if played properly, great fun…..If you’ve never read Thurber, seek him out.  He was born in Columbus, Ohio, a few decades before Jack Nicklaus, another son of Columbus and the Thurber Museum is well worth a visit, once such excursions become possible again.

I sat in on a WIJ (Women In Journalism) Zoom discussion about regional journalism earlier this week and a young woman asked how you made yourself heard in a room full of men who were all talking loudly and, often, at once (I paraphrase but that was the gist of it).  The answer is, in essence, practice.  You get used to it.  You pick your moments.  You make sure you make your point.  You learn.  And, if you’re lucky, the person chairing the meeting will know what they’re doing, run it properly and make sure everyone is heard.

If you’re really lucky, you’ll be used to noisy, chaotic, opinionated family Sunday dinners where everyone talks over everyone else, taking positions they know will wind somebody up and relishing the challenges.  You’ll then be able to practise the art of survival at the bar of the golf club – and bars everywhere else (this was in the olden days) – where you’ll be mangled if you can’t hold your own.  You learn to cope in your own way and all that training will hold you in good stead in any number of situations.

Growing up it never occurred to me that some men thought it odd that women played golf, that it was a subject worthy of comment.  Now I know – thanks to Hannah Holden, the equipment editor of National Club Golfer – that only 14 per cent of golfers in the UK are women, a shocking figure.  She mentioned it in a recent podcast with Alex Perry, discussing the Reid rumpus and it’s well worth a listen, if only to be amazed at the antediluvian attitudes that still prevail in some quarters.

It’s completely daft when you think about it because golf’s the perfect game for families and if clubs don’t broaden their base, they’ll die.  The game’ll survive in one form or another but if it’s to flourish, the future’s got to be mixed.  There are lots of initiatives to that effect, so it’s just a question of making them work.  Go to it girls – and boys.  Nil desperandum.

My clearing photograph this week is of a formidable bunch of women, not all golfers but all wives of golf writers, a trade that was male-dominated – must have been all that heavy lifting; typewriters were weighty items.  Glad to see I’ve been entrusted with a bottle.

 

 

 

 

Well, did you watch it?  And don’t ask “what?”  I am, of course, talking about the first live golf to grace our screens since the middle of March.  The Taylor Made Driving Relief skins match between the partnership of Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson and that of Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff took place at iconic Seminole, venue of next year’s Walker Cup match.  It was golf but not as we know it.

The first novelty was seeing the players in shorts as opposed to what my mother used to refer to as “waiters’ trousers” – ie black and shapeless trews.  That received a big tick from me and I can’t see why men’s professional golf should ever consider that shorts are not de rigueur in proper tournament rounds.  What a great time this is to ditch outmoded notions that golf and some golfers hang on to.  We are slowly, slowly emerging in to a new world and golf, with its naturally inbuilt social distancing, has an advantage over most other popular sports.  Let’s make the most of that and be unafraid to make our great sport more attractive to 21st century living.  (I can’t believe that dress code in golf is STILL an issue!)  Below Phil Mickelson and Patrick Reed sport the dreaded waiters’ trousers so hated by Mum.  Tiger also seems to be a fan of this particular article of attire.

The next oddity was seeing four of the best in the world carrying their clubs, doing their own yardages with rangefinders and assiduously wiping down their clubs after each shot.  They looked like US!  Well, not really, but you know what I mean.  Virtually every club in the land has players who look like that and because of that their shots and quality of play stood out for me even more.  They were simply golfers….not the super heroes we are accustomed to seeing, attended by agents and with caddies weighed down with enormous tour bags trailing in their wake.  Strip away the trappings of the circus that normally surrounds these players and their skills stand out even more.  The only difference between them and us now is the quality of their golf – apart from that they looked like any fourball of young guys out to enjoy a game.  I loved it.

If there were ever a lesson that there is more than one way to play this game it was encapsulated by these four markedly differing swings.  Rory is arguably the most orthodox of the four;  Dustin has a very shut position at the top with a bowed left wrist position;  Rickie is flat and laid off going back; and Matt Wolff’s backswing loop is reminiscent of that of the late great Jimmy Bruen, Ireland’s answer to Bobby Jones.  Where they become more similar is on the approach into and through impact and as long as you find a way to repeat that action you’re away in a coach.  As one very fine champion said to me many moons ago – you don’t hit a ball on the way back.

It was lovely to get a look at the Donald Ross creation that is Seminole, home club of Rory’s Dad, Gerry.  It’s all about the angles in to the pins so that puts a premium on driving the ball into the right area.  The greens are not overly large and tend to have the upturned saucer look thus repelling rather than gathering approach shots.  Inevitably greens will be missed and a nifty short game is of paramount importance – hopeful Walker Cuppers take note.  Frisky sea breezes add up to a wonderful test of all golfing skills and a rare treat awaits those who do make the two Walker Cup sides in 2021.

At this juncture I must give a nod to NBC and the TV production.  It’s incredibly difficult to cover 18 holes of golf with only six cameras and apparently at times the players were held back from playing until the TV folk were in position.  The amount of filling-in required when no golf was being played was therefore extensive, leading to numerous ads and even at one point a lengthy phone call with the Donald.  I can forgive them that in light of the aim of the whole deal which was to raise money for charitable causes aligned with the coronavirus pandemic.  In total more than $5.5 million was raised – an outstanding effort.

So, all in all, there was much to enjoy and laud about the event, recognising the collective effort of all involved.  Two final observations – the commentator (I think it was the excellent Steve Sands) had a few words with Rory after the world No 1 had hit his approach on to the 18th green.  As Rory walked up on to the green, clubs on his back, the commentator mused, “This is probably the first time a pro carrying his own bag has walked on to a final green facing a putt worth $1.1 million.”

And finally,  wouldn’t it have been a great opportunity to have had two top female professionals involved?  Lip service is being paid to equality and inclusion across most of the golfing world now but, alas, action still falls some way behind.

I confess, I haven’t really been paying that much attention to golf recently, apart from sparing a thought for all those poor souls trying to rearrange schedules and anticipate an approximation of normality, then finding themselves juggling madly as the plates spin out of control and the plans made one day are obsolete the next.  Selfishly but pragmatically, I don’t worry about it because there’s nothing I can do about it.

The Curtis Cup, scheduled for Conwy, north Wales, for the second weekend of June this year, seems to have been rearranged for June next year, same weekend, same venue.  Mark it in your diary and keep your fingers crossed.  After all, if there are no airlines running by then, it’ll just have to be the boat, like the old days.  Separate cabins presumably and plenty of time to perfect your skills; the nets must be better nowadays, so you should lose fewer balls overboard.

[Editor’s alert, added post publication of blog:  Hold off on that date, the R&A confirm that the match will go ahead at Conwy next year, all being well, pandemics permitting, but there’s no date yet and it’s unlikely to be June.  Apologies for the duff info.]

The WATCs (World Amateur Team Championships), the Eisenhower Trophy (men) and the Espirito Santo (women), have been abandoned altogether.  Scheduled for Hong Kong originally (in October), the competitions were moved to Singapore because of fears of social unrest and now, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the International Golf Federation has bowed to the pressure of “events, dear boy, events” (as Harold MacMillan put it) and is looking ahead to France in 2022.

At the moment I’m paying £20 a month for Sky Sports on NOW TV – sub taken out just before lockdown – and have glanced at it a couple of times, watching a bit of Alastair Cook’s century in his last test, a bit of the Miracle at Medinah and the battering at Brookline.  But with hardly any live sport anywhere – don’t think Sky are covering the Cactus Tour in Arizona (which, whether you think it should be playing on or not, should help give event organisers some tips for events post virus) – my watching is sporadic in the extreme.  Then, the other day, I saw something that made me jump for joy, an event that I put in my diary at once.

It wasn’t the second round of Phil versus Tiger – I refused to pay money to watch the first so-called match, which proved a wise decision since it was, by all reasonable accounts, an unmitigated fiasco.  Things have been tweaked for the re-match, a  couple of American sports superstars added to the mix, charity included and if I’m not in bed asleep, I’ll be gorging on reruns of Old Tricks, NCIS, Morecambe and Wise, whatever.  Quality stuff.

It is a made-for-TV thing that I’ve put in the diary – Sunday 17th May.  It’s the TaylorMade Driving Relief charity event that pits Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson against Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff in a team skins game.  Who knows who’ll win?  Who cares?  It’s being played in Florida, at Seminole, one of the world’s great golf courses, designed by Donald Ross and, usually, a very private place.  Rory’s Dad Gerry is a member there, Ben Hogan practised there and it’s considered a classic.  The course is the star here and I’ll be glued to see how it holds up in the face of today’s booming drivers unfettered, devoid of championship nerves.  Also, pandemics permitting, it’ll be hosting the Walker Cup next year, in May.  Well worth a visit, even if we have to walk there.  Better start soon I suppose.

The sad news this week is that Dinah Henson, nee Oxley, has died.  Born in 1948, she was a quiet, private person, a golfer of rare quality who, despite her many achievements, refused to realise just how good she was.  That’s a perfectionist for you.  She won the British Girls in 1963, the English Girls in 1965, then trained on to win the English in 1970 and 1971 and  the British (Matchplay) in 1970.  She played in the Curtis Cup in 1968, 1970, 1972 and 1976, the Vagliano Trophy, the Commonwealth, the Espirito Santo (WATC) and was British Golfer of the Year in 1970 (the year Tony Jacklin won the US Open).  The woman could play but she met her husband James thanks to a wayward shot that smashed his windscreen.

In 1970, Dinah’s year of years, Pat Ward-Thomas, of The Guardian, waxed lyrical about her talents.  (Don’t think he ever wrote for the D/T, despite the note at the bottom of the piece.)

Rest in peace, Dinah.

On a lighter note, I’m sure you’ll be glad to know that my blood donation passed muster and made its way to Colchester General Hospital, so I don’t feel quite so guilty about not sitting up all night sewing scrubs or making masks.  My granny did most of the embroidery on the gingham apron we made at school; I think she also knitted the hooded cape for Rosebud, my rubber dolly; she most certainly had nothing to do with the tent-like nighty I made in Domestic Science, an item that was always destined to be cloths for the car.  Sewing is not my forte.

Nor is sowing but I’ve been weeding madly and preparing the ground for the wildflower seeds that came through the letterbox a few days ago.  Wish them luck.

Finally, just to encourage those of you who are following an unbalanced diet this lockdown, here’s my meal of the day.  I’d been eating healthily (mostly) for weeks but I think I’ve cracked.  I had a takeaway pizza (delicious) a couple of days ago and yesterday I succumbed to my version of the bean sizzler that was a speciality de la maison at Whittington Heath.  Will I have the strength of will to go back to salads….

Bon appetit.  Enjoy your meal.