It’s been very gratifying to get messages from so many of you asking when I’m going to reacquaint myself with the keyboard and get blogging again.  Mind you, it’s going to be very hard to keep pace with the sister who is pulling in record-breaking numbers.  There are obviously plenty of folk out there who relish the challenge of following her ramblings.  It keeps the brain active, that’s for sure.

Well, I ‘m not going to be up to speed with a weekly offering for a while yet, but I thought I’d dip in and out and I’ve had such a wonderful week that I wanted to share it with you.  Firstly, I finished a rather unpleasant, very strong course of medication that has (I am assured) seen off the very pesky, rare, amoebic parasite that has apparently being lying dormant in my gut for decades.  Said nasty piece of work mounted a vigorous attack on my liver, which has now been pronounced clear.  It was quite a battle.  I won at the nineteenth.

Also, this week saw my first solo road trip for sixteen months – a much anticipated journey up to Muirfield for the annual playing of the Madill Trophy (photo above).  First played in 1995, we are homing in on our 30th anniversary of a great match against the men members of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers (HCEG).

I was doing my captaining from the sidelines this year and am happy to report that the girls recorded their first victory since 2016.  We have eight a side and play four foursomes, morning and afternoon.  Despite dire weather predictions we got our 36 holes in, avoiding the rain, but I do have to confess it was a tad windy!  And chilly!

The near zero temps were more than offset by the warmth of the hospitality – a staple of the last three decades – and I was proud to introduce Carys Irvine to our team, the first member of either side to be born post 2000!  For goodness sake, we were even calling Heather Macrae a youngster, which pleased her enormously.  Just goes to show how the game can embrace the generations as well as the genders.

Two matches-all at lunchtime, I more or less abandoned my duties as team captain and enquired as to where I could watch the Scotland/Ireland rugby match.  Former Scotland captain P. C. Brown declared that he would stay and watch the match with me instead of heading home to watch.  It was all rather surreal – a little like Jack Nicklaus saying he’d sit down and watch the Masters with you!  Things went well for me, both on the screen and on the course.  Scotland didn’t score in the second half and we didn’t lose a match in the afternoon, evidence of how destructive my presence on the course had been in the morning.

Talking of the Masters, hubby and I will be heading out there on Thursday 6th April, the first day of the tournament and I will be working for the Americans over the weekend.  Why go on Thursday and why just the weekend, I hear you cry.  Well, there’s the small matter of my stepson’s wedding on the Wednesday.  Shows you how much sway I have in this family…..and how much interest there is in golf!

I’m apparently not the only one in this boat.  Alison White, a longtime friend and lifelong golfer whose resume includes stints working for the PGA, the LGU and the R&A  and who is well known to many readers of this blog, also has a family wedding during the men’s first major.  Her only daughter, Victoria, is getting married on Masters Saturday!  Ah well, can’t have everything.

I have a strong suspicion that might be where my next blog comes from – Augusta, not the wedding!  It’ll be minus pictures, unfortunately, as you are only allowed to take those on practice days.

So, life’s not perfect (is it ever?) but it’s getting closer.

I made my first visit to Crufts yesterday, dog-tired, appropriately enough,  after a long, fruitless football trek to north London to watch the tottering Totspurs go out of Europe with barely a whimper.  It was the perfect antidote, seeing all the top dogs strutting their stuff, groomed to the nth degree, wagging their tails and enjoying life.

There were lots of bright eyes and bushy tails on show at the NEC, Birmingham but I was a bit bleary-eyed because I’d got home at half two in the morning, via foot, tube, train and car.  The cars in the car park at Birmingham International were covered in snow but luckily, the main roads home were clear and after a shower and a mug of hot water, I fell into bed at about 0330.

Such is the schedule of the travelling football fan.  Spurs supporters got off the train at Milton Keynes Central, Rugby, Coventry, Birmingham, perhaps even Wolverhampton (don’t mention Wolves!)  Are we all eejits, stark raving bonkers or just ever hopeful?

The atmosphere before the game on Wednesday night was brilliant, loud, raucous and optimistic (surely we could dig deep and produce one of our better nights).  A friend in Ireland called it a season-defining match, saying “they’ll either make us proud or capitulate….but I’ve a good feeling about it.”  You see, ever hopeful despite having no clue which Spurs would turn up.

Sadly, we were turgid, lacking any semblance of vim, vigour, nous or forward momentum.  In truth, A.C. Milan, I Rossoneri (The Red and Blacks), resplendent in their famous red and black stripes, rarely looked ruffled as they managed their way to a  nil-all draw, to win 1-0 on aggregate and send their supporters into such raptures that they concentrated on their singing and saluting their players and stopped making rude gestures at the few home fans who were still in the stadium.

Near the end, when we were down to 10 men after our World Cup winner Romero was sent off for a brainless challenge, the remaining players stood where they were, separately, making no effort to gee each other up or show any belief that we could score once, let alone twice.  As Milan attacked, a fan behind me yelled, “Go on, score, put us out of our misery.”

I, as ever ever hopeful, urged us on to one last effort and their goalie made a great save, low down to his right.  Then I realised that a goal for us would mean extra time, possibly penalties (ever optimistic) and no train home that night….

My friend in Ireland messaged:  “Oh God, that was an awful watch.”

“At least you weren’t there!”

“So true…and I’ll be in bed in 10 mins…”

That was timed at 2212!!!

Ah well, there’s nothing like live sport…

Now I’ve got an apology to make, on the subject of tampons as useful for stemming nose bleeds.  The DWD (dog-walking dermatologist) is pretty sure she did not advise such a thing and that I should issue an errata (or erratum cos it’ll be singular), which I’m happy to do, quoting her in full:-

“I’m pretty sure I was talking about using them for other leaks of a motoring kind, cos I was talking about the Mongolia Rally.

“Anyway, if you shove a tampon up your nose, you’d need to cover it in Vaseline otherwise it can damage the lining of your nose and worsen the bleeding.

“Wouldn’t want you to cause harm to your readers and get myself a terrible reputation!!!”

You’ll be glad to know that far from signing any sort of non-disclosure agreement, I let the DWD know that I’d be using her denial and wise advisory words in full.  Also, there will be no pictures to accompany this element of the blog.  At least, none with any connection to the subject.

 

Finally, mulling over small fields (nerd alert, this is golf), no cut, shedloads of dosh and suchlike, I came across “Shark Attack! Greg Norman’s guide to aggressive golf.”  It was written with George Peper and published in 1988 and Jack Nicklaus wrote the introduction, which included the phrase:  “…there are certain things that no one could ever teach Greg Norman – his courage, his charisma, his determination and his unparalleled belief in himself…”

So here’s a bit of Greg we could all emulate – if we put our minds and our backs to it.  It’s the short putts that he would work on “to hone not my touch or my stroke but my nerves…

“The idea is simple.  You try to make 25 short putts in a row.  Start with 2-footers.  That may sound easy but try it.  Note when you get to the last few balls, how tense you become.  If you have no trouble with the 2-footers, go to 3-footers.  I bet you don’t make 25 of them in a row on your first try.  In fact, you may be there quite a while….”

Good luck.

 

Many thanks to everybody for reading and encouraging me to continue exercising my brain cell every Thursday.  I’m attempting to modify the habits of a lifetime and get the blog finished before 0400-ish on a Friday morning but that’s a monumental undertaking for the easily distracted and the organisationally impaired.  And it’s blooming freezing at this time of the year with the heating turned off during the day.

It’s all very well being told “to heat the human, not the house” but I feel a bit of a prat sitting at the keyboard wrapped up in my fisherman’s jersey and warmest gilet, with my best cashmere Travelwrap (a bit grubby now because it’s a regular at Tottenham games but I’m scared to wash it) over my knees.  In fact, no sooner had I got tucked in and settled than I felt the need to go in search of my woolly hat and fingerless gloves – any excuse to delay writing a word.

They’re not exactly new resolutions but I’m still intent on reducing my amount of stuff and spending more time on the golf course.  I hesitate to say “play more golf” because at the moment my good walk is punctuated with a series of physical jerks that could scarcely be described as swings or shots; contortions and clouts, more like, as my foursomes partner this week would be (un)happy to confirm.

Our winter comps are over 13 holes and we were just about in credit on Tuesday, with six blobs and seven scoring holes for a not-so-grand total of 15 points.  We were far from last but the runaway winners had an otherworldly 31 points.  I don’t care what level you’re playing at, that is good going in foursomes.  Well played Jenny L and Sue J.

Lots of people don’t like foursomes because it’s an unforgiving format and it’s hard to score well if one or other of you is off your game – and heaven help you if you’re both misfiring.  It can test patience and stretch friendships (and relationships) to the limit.  I’ve always loved it because it suits my lazy nature and if you hit a poor shot, it’s up to your partner to sort it out.  The only rule, really:  Just get on with it.  No sorries. (Every sorry equals a gin and tonic.)  No tuts. (Don’t even go there!) And, in my case, do not play with your spouse.  NEVER EVEN CONTEMPLATE IT.  DO NOT BE TEMPTED.  I could partner Dai in a fourball but foursomes?  NEVER.

Apart from the fact that he was likely to visit boondocks that I never even knew existed, the main problem was that our approach to the game was very different.  I’d evolved from being a bad-tempered little sod, a stormy petrel who threw clubs, into something a little more laidback and less obnoxious, capable of treating the two impostors just the same – more or less.  Dai?  Not so much.

Mark Garrod, who runs the AGW’s PYP (Association of Golf Writers’ Pick Your Pro), our annual competition in futility, was the Press Association’s golf man for many years and played quite a bit of golf with Dai, one way and another.  He recalled a time they were playing in Phuket, in Thailand and Dai’s first five shots all finished in a lake.  Ever droll and understated, Mark said, “He took it well, of course,”……

Mind you, Dai and I shared an aversion to water on a golf course, perhaps because our balls were invariably attracted to the watery depths, never to be retrieved.  One of the reasons I love Whittington is that there’s no H2O to speak of:  not a lake, not a river, not a sneaky little burn meandering its way across the fairways to trap the unwary and the unskilled.  Saying that, I was at WHGC on Wednesday afternoon and put five balls in the water.

How so?  I was up having an indoor lesson with Rachel Bailey, one of our pros, who’s trying to encourage us to do a little work on our games during the winter, ready to blossom in the spring.  There were a couple of us there, having our games exposed by the numbers on the screen as we hit into it.  We decided that doing a bit of pitching and chipping would be less depressing than seeing how glacial our swing “speed” was. Then, encouraged, we headed off to play Nailcote Hall, a par three course of considerable complexity.

Well, it was too complex for me anyway.  Ball after ball tailed off into the water and there was that sinking, sinking feeling that I’d never get round, doomed to spend the rest of my golfing life in the dropping zone.  Even so, Nailcote has a special place in my heart because I once spent a wonderful day there, at their Par 3 Championship, chatting to Max Faulkner, Open champion at Portrush in 1951 and Bert Gadd, from a long line of golfing brothers.  I didn’t say much because they regaled me – and the rest of their audience – with enough stories and anecdotes to fill a library of books.  They were both well in to their 80s but sprightly wasn’t the word for them.  It was a magical day.

 

No drenchings on the golf course so far this week but it’s been murky and foggy and not particularly pleasant; time to root out the mittens and hand warmers and the hair-crushing bobble hats.  Fingers crossed for a bit of blue sky for today’s Friday Frolics Christmas Bash (Secret Santa included).

I thought I had it tough when I had to give 16 shots in a Round Robin match last week but Sue Spencer, one of our best golfers, an England international (senior division) and a sweet swinger, had to give an eye-watering 31 shots.  Claire Hicks, her opponent, hasn’t been playing long but is proving a quick learner, hits the ball miles and uses a distance device, not for show but because she already knows how far she hits each club, a skill that still eludes some of us.  Against Spenny she recorded her first gross eagle – a three on the par 5 2nd – and won 5 and 4.

Claire was a bit more wayward next time out and lost to the redoubtable Jenny Smale, who was only giving a shot a hole (!!) and  admitted that she played damned near her very best.  That’s one of the good things about the RR:  you have to play well to win a match; it keeps the best players on their mettle.

There was some sad news earlier in the week when the PGA announced that Sandy Jones, their former chief executive, had died at the age of 74.  Sandy, a Scot from Gartcosh, had a long and distinguished career in golf administration and was a fair player too.  He never looked back after finding his mother’s old clubs stashed in a cupboard at home.

Dai and I played quite a lot with him and his – and our – great pal Bob Cantin.  Every game they played was competitive and their long-running bet, with attendant bragging rights, lasted many years.  I know the inestimable Pat Ruddy says there’s no such thing as a bad golf course but we were playing a particularly ghastly desert creation in Arizona and Sandy summed it up succinctly as “a waste of a perfectly good desert”.  That still makes me smile.  Condolences to his wife Chris and family and friends.

In between watching World Cup matches and marvelling at some amazing results, not least Japan beating both Germany and Spain and England managing a draw with the United States, I flicked over to the golf and drooled over the pictures from the ISPS HANDA Australian Open.  The men and women are playing on Kingston Heath and Victoria, two of the glorious courses that are part of Melbourne’s famed sandbelt.

Cameron Smith, the Open champion, now a LIVer, who won his national PGA title in Queensland last week, is the star attraction but admitted that his golf was “pretty shitty”.  He had a 71, one over par, in tricky, blustery conditions, to be eight shots behind leader David Micheluzzi, a local who is starting to find his form after struggling with performance anxiety when he first turned professional.  If he’s still ahead of Smith come Sunday, he could well be holding up the trophy.

Admittedly, I’m paying more attention to the surroundings than the players, enjoying seeing proper golf courses that require a lot of imagination and variety in the shot-making.  It’s a positive joy after the dreary diet of smash and gouge that makes up so much of day-to-day televised golf.  And how lovely to see natural-looking bunkers instead of traps.  Blissful.  (And being thousands of miles away, in a different hemisphere, I’m in no danger of having to play out of them.)

The sublime, world-class courses are one of the reasons that there have been so many outstanding Australian golfers over the years, whatever the state of the track they started on.  There’s a lot of competition, of course and heroes to emulate, so the Aussies have always more than held their own on the fairways of the world.

Dai and I loved our trips to Australia and he used to say that if he’d discovered the place when he was 19 or 20, he’d have been an Australian.  Here he is at one of our favourite places, Historic Court Barns in Tanunda, in the heart of the Barossa wine country, not far from Adelaide.  He’s wearing shoes, so Elvis, the tame, wing-clipped galah, who preferred pecking at bare toes, has to make do with nipping fingers.

That pic reminds me that I’ve been neglecting my Australian friends, so I’ll root out the address book and make a real effort to send them all a Christmas card and thank them for all their kindness and hospitality over the years.

And thanks to everybody for reading Mo’s and my blogs throughout the year and encouraging us to keep going.  Now that we’ve hit December, we’re signing off for the year and hope to be back in 2023, fit and firing.  I’m off to wrap up my secret Santa and unwrap the Christmas decorations.