“People don’t take trips, trips take people.” - John Steinbeck
Another early alarm, though I am stirring long before it rings. For today I will head north, on another golfing trip. I’ve a blend of excitement and guilt as I drag my sticks and a bag down to the train station, while those in suits around me on the platform have a look of “quiet desperation”, as Thoreau might have put it. Why am I heading away from my family again; what do I imagine I have to say about golf or life that is of any real value? Why am I taking this trip? And where will this trip take me?
But in the crisp light of the early hours, I have this sense of anticipation that is only enhanced when the sun peers out from behind The Shard. By the time today’s journey is over, the light will be failing, but for now, it is another glorious moment to be alive, and I want to wrap up this cool, dry morning and take it along to the links of Scotland’s northeast fringes, where a good friend Simon and I will spend a long weekend. While many of our golfing connections escape the southern autumn for Florida or Portugal, we’re instead piling on the layers for the highlands.
Before long we are pulling our clubs from the carousel at Inverness, and we clamber into our wheels for this trip - a Defender 90 that is familiar to Simon, for it wears the same badge as the yellow version that lives upon Cleeve Hill, where we kindred spirits tend to meet. As The Beast - as I call it while we try and find a name as appropriate as its cousin Eric’s moniker - hammers along the road, the horizon opens up before us and the space seems to engender a rambling conversation.
In between the frantic rhythm of the windscreen wipers, two road signs catch our attention as we approach the Dornoch Firth. We take the left hand fork, aiming for Durness, but to the right another arrow promises Golspie, Dornoch and Brora. All destinations are poetic for this sort of golfer, but I want to slow down and take a photo of the latter sign, and maybe even find a cloth and polish it, for it sports a patina that betrays the wild conditions in which it lives.
But now, writing this, I am glad that this signpost remains a little filthy, for this suits the sort of golf I love - honest, rugged, authentic. That’s the moorland we are soon driving through, that’s what we find up Cleeve Hill, and that’s what I think we’ll find near Cape Wrath in the morning. In the middle of the weather, however it turns out. We tend to like things to be clean and neat and predictable, but late November in Scotland might not quite fit that bill, and not only is that ok, but that’s why we’re here. For the adventure, and for the chance to play it as it lies…