Jill Edwards, a former chairman and president of both the Ladies’ Golf Union and the Welsh Ladies’ Golf Union, has lent madillgolf.com a veritable treasure trove of golfing lore, namely a chest full of that renowned and much-loved women’s golf magazine of yesteryear, Douglas Caird’s Fairway and Hazard.

A veritable treasure trove

An indulgent hour of leafing through these old favourites was just what I needed after a week that saw Brian (husband) have surgery to reattach his triceps and elbow to the bits they’re supposed to be attached to.  They had parted company after a nasty fall on an icy pavement in London and I chose that very same time to succumb to a dreaded lurgy that has kept me indoors, mostly in bed, for four out of the last five days.  So, what better than a little indulgence of the reminiscing kind?  It wasn’t long before I was stepping back in time.

What are the following ingredients the recipe for:  the month of March, snowy weather, creaky, unoiled golf swings and the Red and Blue courses of The Berkshire Golf Club?  Mix them all together with a liberal dose of competition and laughter and it can only be the Avia Foursomes, the season’s opener, our very own Augusta, signalling the arrival of another year of competitive golf.  Welcome to 72 holes of the unpredictability that only foursomes golf can bring and such was the Avia’s popularity it ended up being over-subscribed every year, with all the best British and Irish players attending, as well as some of the best Continentals.

Get out your thermals!

I played first in 1980 although I didn’t intend to.  I was at home in Portstewart and had gone out for a run along the strand in a vague attempt to up my fitness levels.  Upon my return, Dad (home from the office for his lunch) said, “Douglas Caird rang for you.  He wanted to know if you’d play with Linda Bayman in the Avia.”  Douglas was the editor and publisher of Fairway and Hazard and, along with Joan Rothschild, organiser-in-chief of the tournament.  Linda was an eminent English internationalist who had won this prestigious title on five previous occasions.  Truth to tell, I was in awe and so somewhat horrified at Dad’s easy arrangement with Douglas that “of course Maureen’ll play.”

Linda and I met for the first time in the car park of The Berkshire at the start of the week.  We never looked back, winning on our debut and following it up with high place finishes on a few occasions.  I think we may even have won it another time.  Those details I tend to forget now, but not others.

There was the thrill of playing two great courses and the marvellous opportunity to spend some serious dosh in Keith Macdonald’s pro’s shop, which he and his wife Ivy stocked to the gunnels for the week.  One of the highlights was the totally green window display on one of the competition days each year, a nod to St Patrick’s Day and the large, noisy, visiting Irish contingent.  The clubhouse food was superb and constant.  Coping with more than 300 women golfers for a week, The Berkshire never missed a beat, providing endless supplies of towels and drying facilities for bodies and equipment.  The week finished on a high with a hilarious prize-giving and speechifying from all section winners.

The Berkshire – hard to beat at any time of year

The Avia was an integral part of the season for all those keen to advance their careers and realise their ambitions but above all it was FUN.  A 72-hole strokeplay foursomes tournament was a tremendous test and more’s the pity it has exited the calendar.  Am I the only one sick of all the super-serious golf our young squad players are expected to play?  If golf is made to seem like work it soon will be.  The greatest work is achieved when it’s so enjoyable you don’t even realise it’s happening and the time flies past.  Viva the Avia!

If you cast your eye over the golfing schedules at this time of year, the venues read like the exotic wishlist of a golfer with time – and money – on his or her hands:  Bahamas, Doha, Qatar, Dubai, Oz coming up……….sounds heavenly!

It set me thinking back to my own forays into the exotic some 20 years ago when playing the Asian Tour.  A stray thought popped into my head and, not really believing it could be accurate, I went and rummaged in the nether regions of a very old filing cabinet.  And blow me, there it was – a folder marked “Asia Correspondence” stuffed with faxes (remember them?) and notes chronicling the tournaments, travel, sights and sounds of a unique and very challenging run of tournaments, our very own “Asian Swing”.

The long-forgotten Asian journal

We started off in Taipei, moved on to Manila, then Bangkok, KL and finally Indonesia.  “Gosh, it was great fun, wasn’t it?”  I mused to myself as I settled down to leaf through this stash of memories.  The following jumped out at me instantly and is an extract from a fax to Patricia, sent from The New World Hotel in Manila.

Our Manila base – the second stop on the tour

“I’m not happy – I’m playing badly.  I can’t stand mucking about like this.  This was my day – up at 5.00am, on bus at 6.00am, arrive at club at 7.00am for my 10.25 tee off.  Didn’t get started till 11.00 – we were last off in a fourball.  Off course at 4.30pm (it blew a gale from 10.00am onwards), back on bus at 5.00.  Arrived at hotel at 6.15 and the same timetable to look forward to tomorrow.  Remind me to never, ever consider doing this again.”

Hmm, methinks I detect a bit of a “poor me” attitude there.  I HAD forgotten the awful travel arrangements, however.  The courses were usually a minimum of an hour away from the tournament hotels and, no matter your tee-off time, you had to catch the provided transport and all travel together to the course.  It was considered too dangerous to do otherwise.  It did, however, mean that every player was at the course all day every day for as long as play was taking place.

And then, another reminder of the travel we endured between tournaments.  Here’s another extract from another fax on the occasion of leaving the first tournament in Taipei:  “Because Thai Airways are part sponsors of the tour we flew to Manila via Hong Kong and Bangkok with an overnight stop at the airport there – a total of 18 hours travelling.  And, wait for it, a direct Taipei/Manila flight is ONE hour!!!”

Ah yes, it was pretty grim, come to think of it.  But we did have some deliciously exotic and interesting food – didn’t we?  Cue another fax extract, this time to my niece, Emily, from The Ambassador Hotel in Taipei.

Never did acquire a taste for sea urchins!

“Last night we had a big dinner hosted by the sponsors.  It was fifteen courses of Chinese food, most of it inedible, with things like sea urchins, which are like big fat worms.  Half of the stuff we couldn’t recognise but it was fun experimenting.”

That was written during the first week of a five-week tour.  In week five I found this entry in my notes:  “Boy, I can’t wait to get home and have a decent steak and a bottle of good red wine.  I don’t want to see a grain of rice for a year!”

All this leafing through old notes and faxes has made me wonder if my 2017 specs just happen to be a very strong prescription of the rose-tinted variety?  It was certainly an arduous tour and it was essential to acquire a degree of resilience.  Your time was not under your control, so routines and attitudes had to be adaptable and fluid.  But, heck, it WAS great fun.  I saw escalators on a golf course for the first time in my life and on the few days we did manage some sightseeing a whole new cultural world was laid out before us.

Clubs already waiting on the next tee.  Wow – caddies AND an escalator!

And I’ll never forget the surreptitious queuing outside the tournament director’s door at the end of the week to collect your winnings – all paid in US dollars and in cash.  And how could you not enjoy spending time with a host of great players and friends?  Many of them notched their first wins in Asia before moving on to further success worldwide, thanks in large part to the experience gained and skills honed on the Asian Tour.

Now, where’s the TV remote so I can look at the golf in Dubai?

You can’t write about Ireland again, Maureen said.

Why not, sez I, it’s our blog, we can write about whatever we want.

Last Saturday, we flew over for the 125th Anniversary celebrations of Royal Portrush Golf Club Ladies’ Branch and I realised just how hardy golfers have to be in this neck of the woods (not that there are many trees withstanding the north Atlantic gales).  Even the locals conceded that it was “baltic” i.e. bloody freezing, blowing a hooley and, just for the hell of it, raining more often than not.  No wonder Darren Clarke, reared in these conditions, barely noticed the wind and the cold when he won the Open at Royal St George’s; for him that far-from-summery Sunday in July 2011 was a relatively benign golfing day.

Lady Margaret: how on earth did she even swing?

Our friends, playing in the 125 Flag Competition on the Valley course, were so muffled up they were unrecognisable.  How Lady Margaret Scott and her long-skirted, tight-jacketed contemporaries of the 1890s, clad in weighty, rain-absorbing wool, coped without Gore-Tex and fleeces beggars belief.  I confess.  I’ve become a southern softie.  Maureen and I repaired to the warmth of the welcoming ladies’ clubhouse for soup, delicious wheaten scones, cakes, tea and chat.

We were also able to play the age-old game of identifying the battered and bedraggled male golfers who’d battled to what is still the final hole on the Dunluce course, several hundred yards short of sanctuary.  They were all a lot older than the last time we’d seen them play but we managed to identify quite a few of them, some from their set-up, some from their swings – although not one was as free-flowing 0r powerful as it used to be – and some from their gait.  It was good fun and we had some laughs but most of all we were lost in admiration for their dogged determination.  I have included the photo (taken through the window) because of the rainbow not the tiny, muffled up, barely visible figures!

The boys battle on towards the pot of tea at the end of the rainbow.

The 125th Anniversary Dinner was in the big clubhouse, which was beautifully turned out – even a connoisseur like Elton John would have swooned at the flower arrangements, real works of art – and the occasion oozed fun, friendship, love and laughter.  No, that’s not me being soppy and sentimental or even a bit maudlin in vino veritas;  I was on water for most of the night and unusually clear-eyed.

Sporting the 125th anniversary earrings.  Maureen noted that I’d cleared the bar!

125 Glorious Golfing Years

It was emotional when Maureen read out her letters from Violet Hezlet, whose family went all the way back to the start of it all and recalled her lessons in course management from Zara Bolton.  Zara, the elegant Englishwoman who captured the heart of an Irishman and moved to Portrush, played in the Curtis Cup in 1948 and later captained the team.  The women of Royal Portrush were always at the top of the game and passionate about promoting it and encouraging girls and boys to play.

Some of those boys and girls achieved great things in golf but the really great thing is that most of us, whatever our level, continue to play and enjoy the game and the lifelong friends we made.  I can think of no greater legacy.

Maureen’s away this week, so I’m in sole charge of the blog and admit responsibility for this post; perhaps the power has gone to my head……There were plenty of serious topics about but the Ryder Cup will loom large next week; the leaking of the health records of Justin Rose and Charley Hull and their TUEs (therapeutic use exemptions) is part of a story that will run and run; the Solheim Cup is next year but many congrats to Marta Figueras-Dotti on being named as one of Annika Sorenstam’s vice-captains, another great choice (and already one of our q and a’s); and well done to the Ireland team of Leona Maguire, Olivia Mehaffey and Annabel Wilson, who won the bronze medal in the Espirito Santo in Mexico.  They finished just a shot behind Switzerland, who were a whopping 21 shots behind the champions South Korea.

So, of course, I’m going to muse about headcovers or “those little hat things” as a non-golfing friend calls them.  I’m not alone in finding this subject of interest:  the latest newsletter from the LET has a feature called Head Covers On Tour but I’m not proud and I prefer headcover to be all one word even if the computer doesn’t.  Many of them have names and they all have a story and they don’t complain if you drop them or keep them hanging about during a photo shoot.  The main danger came from Meg, the lovely but bonkers collie next door, who likes to attack the fence if she thinks anything is threatening her side of it.  Good thing she couldn’t see the furry animals being snapped.

Headcovers posing in the garden with Kerikeri the kiwi. Meg the collie is behind the fence!

First up is Dornoch, the moose who protects my driver.  He’s a bit heavy and unwieldy so doesn’t get out much but he reminds me of a Canadian friend called Lorne Rubinstein, who once spent a year in Dornoch and wrote a lovely book about it.  Its title is A Season in Dornoch, Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands, and the foreword is by Sean Connery.

Caradoc, a battered old red dragon that I gave to my husband many years ago, covers the 3-wood and reminds me to douse my fiery temper in a way that Dai rarely did his when he was alive.  I get a lot of practice because it’s a club a bit out of my league and is serviceable rather than spectacular, specialising in the sort of worm burners that irritate the hell out of opponents.

My rescue club has a new cover, as yet unnamed, a retro, old-fashioned looking red and white knitted thing with a big pompom and the Ricoh Women’s British Open trophy on it.  I think I’ll call it Woburn because that’s where I won it, in a press putting/chipping comp conducted by Master Professional Luther Blacklock.  I was chuffed to bits and am very proud of it.

The lion with a multi-coloured mane is a John Daly confection that looks after a precious persimmon driver made for me by a craftsman called Peter Broadbent.  I don’t know if I could hit it now, having got used to drivers with heads at least twice the size but I still love it.  And I love the cover because I bought it in Augusta, from John Daly, who was manning his (very posh) stall in the car park of the Hooters just down Washington Road from the golf club that was then run by Hootie (Johnson, the chairman of Augusta National at the time).  From Hootie’s to Hooters was a very hot trek but worth it.

Dornoch, left, with the John Daly lion, right, and their respective drivers

Lastly but by no means least there’s Gilly the Galah, a pretty ghastly creation that sheds vile pink fibres every time he’s touched.  He still squawks if his beak is pressed but he has pride of place near my front door because our inimitable captain Jayne Fletcher bought us all one when we reached the finals of the Mail on Sunday.  It’s a fantastic team competition that attracts entries from several thousand clubs and is fiendishly difficult to win.  We (Whittington Heath) were beaten by Farnham from Surrey in the final at El Rompido, in Spain – Sale and South Moor were the other semi-finalists – and we all had a ball.  So Gilly, named after the Spurs (and Dundee) legend Alan Gilzean, is, quite simply, the greatest!

Gilly the Galah