“Nobody has satisfactorily said why”

Golfing Letters from America, revisited…

The voice of Alistair Cooke, presenting his weekly Letter from America via BBC Radio, was an integral part of the soundtrack of my childhood. Somehow his calm, hypnotic delivery would emerge from an ancient, battered Roberts wireless in the kitchen, and for fifteen minutes we would cease making any sounds of our own, and instead listen to the latest tra…