Pitchmarks #10 20th August 2023
“Yes, I get by with a little help from my friends”
Lennon & McCartney
By the time you read this, I will be hurtling around the coast of Ireland on family holiday, the annual camping road-trip some modern version of a National Lampoon vacation. And with luck, I will have persuaded the other inhabitants of the van to permit my renewed acquaintance with The Beatles, whose company I don’t seek often enough in adulthood. Their work - “Rubber Soul”, “The White Album”, and particularly “Revolver” are old, dear friends, and we all need a little help from such allies, now and then.
Golf has brought me a number of other dear friends over the years, and through them I have amassed an archive of happy memories and the sort of experiences money can’t buy - matches that went to the wire, balls that flew through windows. Hours of laughter, some wonderfully creative swearing. The occasional, unforgettable golfer’s funeral. And of late - that is to say in the last year or two - the kindness of many of these friends has enabled me to explore new horizons, both in terms of golf courses and the thing I’d always - ALWAYS - wanted to do…write.
In order to get to the screen most mornings, I walk past a few dozen boxes of the thing I never thought I would have - my own book, “Grass Routes”, and I have to stop myself from opening one up to smell the ink, for there is work to be done. But “Grass Routes” would not exist without the help of friends like you, and so as we hurtle around the Cork coastline, headed for County Kerry, I am here to say thank you, and to ask for a little more help from you, my friends.
But first, I must butter you up, so for those of you who are yet to help me clear these boxes, here is the Prologue from the book, in the hope that it whets the appetite. “Grass Routes” comprises eighteen essays on golf clubs and courses, with chapters 1 (Royal Cinque Ports) and 18 (North Foreland short course, whose breathtaking vista adorns the cover) new material. The other chapters are my favourite instalments of this blog, formerly called “Stymied”, but collected in a volume with gorgeous photographs from the likes of (friends) Jason Livy & Cookie Jar Golf.
I am slightly biased, I suppose, but I think what my new friends at Grant Books Ltd and Hughes & Company have done is a thing of beauty as well as a dream come true, so I hope you will join me on these journeys and perhaps find inspiration for some new golfing pilgrimage or even a journal piece of your own. To have sold a quarter of the books despite my apparently complete lack of marketing nous is a wonderful start; with your help, perhaps we might get to the point where this sort of thing - a dream coming true - might happen again…
READING, LISTENING, PEERING
The rigours of camping leave less time for reading than you might expect, and after a last minute rush to get packed, I now realise I have only brought one golf book - “Golf Dreams”, as mentioned last week, but after the initial process of kicking myself for this oversight, as the rain lashes the van windows, I drift back into John Updike’s collected essays and realise there is not only enough gorgeous writing in here for this latest storm, but for a lifetime.
So in preparation for the next instalment of the previously referenced and magnificent “Duffer’s Literary Companion” podcast (due 1st September; is it tragic that I have diarised this?), I start my READING with the piece my new friends Stephen Proctor and Jim Hartsell will explore next - the chapter named “Farrell’s Caddie”. And I laugh out loud for ten minutes, and then go back to the start to read it again, for it is wonderful. And that last line, which I imagine delivered in a thick Scottish accent that makes me yearn to head north again: “Ye kin tell a’ about a man, frae th’ way he gowfs”…
And my LISTENING this week was self-indulgent…trying to cope with the sound of my own voice, though it sounds to me liked someone has spiked my sparkling water…but it was a privilege to once again feature on the Cookie Jar Golf podcast, recorded in the palatial environment of the West Byfleet GC snooker room. Click here to listen, and I hope it makes you want to get down and check out one of Surrey’s under-rated wonders if nothing else! A place close to my heart, and worthy of a chapter in “Grass Routes”.
The final tit-bit this week is on the subject of PEERING, for this is a non-golfing holiday, so my exposure to the fine grasses of south-west Ireland will be limited to glimpses through the windows as we make our way across this green and gorgeous landscape. So as I try and make out those slivers of dunesland in between the hills and The Atlantic, here’s an old piece from the archive - “Furtive Glances” - on how such occasional, peripheral spots come to dominate the golfing mind…
pitchmarks will return on 3rd September; in the meantime, dear friends, please help by sharing and recommending the blog - there is plenty of material in the archive here, all of which is free to access, though you can also pay to subscribe if you wish.
It would also be wonderful if you decided to buy and recommend “Grass Routes”, and share anything else that you have found through these pages with some of your own golfing friends. It all helps, and if one person uncovers a love for a Goswick or a Pennard as a result of any of this, that would make my day!
P.S. a couple of people couldn’t access last week’s link to a piece on Royal Wimbledon. A gremlin in the system, perhaps. Or maybe a Womble…try here instead.