Coming To The Boil

It’s a while since I’ve given any thought at all to Bubba Watson but watching the men’s European golf yesterday, there he was.  “What on earth’s Bubba doing in Denmark?”

The two-time Masters champ, who took himself off to LIV, is playing as an invitee, a wild card and he’s still a player worth watching because there’s nothing predictable about him; if you want to see the unexpected, shots beyond the imagination of others, Bubba’s your man.  You want him to miss fairways and greens in the wrongest of places simply because his powers of recovery are often magical, beyond belief.  Dull he ain’t.

He’s playing in the Danish Golf Championship at a new venue for the tour, Great Northern, in Kerteminde –  “the garden by the sea” – on the island of Funen, a couple of hours from Copenhagen.  You can read all about it on the DP World Tour website in a piece by Mathieu Wood.  It’s a Nicklaus Design course, described as “the passion project of Thomas Kirk Kristiansen, a fourth-generation member of the Lego Group family”.

It looks spectacular on the telly, with dramatic elevation changes and lots of water and to avoid building hospitality stands in front of the clubhouse, the two nines have been flipped, so the 18th this week is the usual 9th, a wicked-looking par three with a green surrounded by water.  Daunting enough on a calm day but if the wind blows…

In the US, the men are playing in the FedEx St Jude Championship in sweltering Memphis, Tennessee.  I was there once, when it was the FedEx St Jude Classic and the great, the charismatic Seve Ballesteros was completely ignored by hordes rushing past him to catch a glimpse of one of the pro-am celebs, a bloke called Michael Jordan.  It was an eyeopener for me – I knew nothing about basketball and had never heard of Jordan and couldn’t believe that the maestro Seve was being upstaged.

A lot of the basketball fans knew nothing about golf and had eyes only for their hero and one over-enthusiastic eejit desperate for a better view dived under the ropes and hurtled across in front of the 1st tee just as Andy Bean (it was a long time ago, look him up) was hitting his drive; he managed to semi-abort and an untimely death was avoided.

I have no memory of who won the tournament but I still mourn the loss of one of my all-time favourite earrings, part of a pair that featured a spider in one ear and a web in the other.  Think the centrepiece was a moonstone and whichever one I lost, it slipped out of my sweaty ear lobe and disappeared into the thick, lush grass at my feet never to be seen again despite my desperate, on-my-knees-grovelling efforts.  It was the sort of rough to be avoided at all costs, however strong you were.

It’s too hot for golf here, for me anyway (36 degrees Centigrade) so a large part of my week has been taken up with skulking inside, behind closed curtains, studying kettles.  I need a new one because my faithful Kenwood (quiet, quick) slipped off the bonnet of the car as I was cleaning the dust off my windscreen and window wipers.  It looks fine but after boiling it up without any alarms I noticed a pool of water on the kitchen counter.  Oops.

Inspired by the Rare Tea Company, founded by Henrietta Lovell, who wants us to enjoy proper tea again and ditch the bags, I started to look at kettles more closely, pondering a temperature-controlled model that allows us to brew our teas to perfection. It’s time, surely, to revive the tastebuds and sip with sensitivity and feeling, not glug mindlessly….

The Rare Tea customer support team have been very helpful – thanks to Thomas and Will – and Which?, which is a must for its reviews on items of all sorts, has put numerous kettles through their paces.  I’ve been trawling through the results, with the added complication that I’ve been considering plastic-free models, heeding a friend’s dire warnings about microplastics.

There’s the super-duper SAKI Luna Pro – not a bit of plastic in sight – but you have to order it from America and since it retails at about $169 or thereabouts, it’s a no-no, even for me at my most extravagant.  That’s too much of a stretch for somebody who thinks £40 is nearing top of the range.  Then there’s KitchenAid, Cuisinart, Bosch, Sage, Fellow, Haden, Ascot…. You’ll be beginning to understand why I am still without a working kettle.

It was a relief to forget the kettles for a while and head out to observe the eclipse the other evening.  We broke out the colanders, as instructed but never did work out how to use them properly.  Fortunately, one of our number had a pair of slightly battered cardboard glasses designed for viewing an eclipse, however partial and they did the job well enough.  In the end, though, the clouds won.