“Don't leave it all unsaid, somewhere in the wasteland of your head.” - Morrissey
About eighteen months ago, I was invited on the Good-Good podcast (here), to talk about the blog (this blog, although it was called Stymied at that stage) I’d been writing as a sabbatical project. It was another lurch from my comfort zone, much in the same way as writing still is, but I enjoyed it, and the show’s hosts were both encouraging and generous. A rambling conversation; the sort we might have had if we’d been strolling round a golf course somewhere instead of wired to our headphones.
During that interview, it was suggested that if I kept despatching missives at the frantic rate I was, I’d soon run out of things to say about golf, but a social media comment soon afterwards declared otherwise - Tony Dear, a gifted writer himself whose piece in edition seven of McKellar (sidenote: you need to read McKellar if you love golf…) was simply the latest in his long streak of gems, suggested that “Richard could write 2,000 entertaining words about his shoelaces, a divot or the club car park”.
To know people like Tony were reading my little, almost apologetic blog was humbling, and so I had a crack at the car park topic (linked last week and again here), and retain vague intentions to cover the lace and divot subjects before my ink runs dry. But my fragile confidence was slowly growing, and by the time those kind folk at the Good-Good permitted my return a couple of weeks back (here), the reach of the blog - now called pitchmarks - has grown from a couple of hundred to almost a thousand, and we have a new topic to discuss - Grass Routes, a book of essays that somehow grew out of Stymied, amid a sort of midlife course-correction.
Another fun conversation, though the best material was before the record button was depressed, as I sat silently watching the three hosts’ coffee-fuelled, early morning banter from my dark front room ten thousand miles away. And then we begin, and talk about the writing process itself, and the place of golf in our lives, and every few minutes I mention funerals, for some inexplicable reason.
But the truth is that such occasions interest me, and when people are gathered to pay their respects to a golfer, I am fascinated by how these otherwise sensible individuals, successful and rational in every other aspect of the lives that the eulogies seek to report, have this dirty little secret hiding in the closet, alongside an old white glove, a handful of tees and a selection of discarded putters, each of which gave up the ghost long before the owner they betrayed.
In the podcast I struggle to remember the exact words about shared golfing journeys that made me want to write about funerals a while back - “great days with good people in fabulous places”, I think it was - but in recalling these words pour from a heart torn apart by grief, I am stunned not just by the brave delivery of the tribute (Mrs K, that’s you), but by the clarity of the words from which this salute was read, as those assembled shuddered with emotion. And I ponder on life’s brevity (“Vita brevia est”; Don, that one’s both for and from you), and on the importance, nay urgency, of saying what we must say, whether in person or on paper. Life offers few mulligans.
So the pod ends, and is sent out to another audience, and we get some nice comments back, and there is a sudden take-up in orders for the southern hemisphere. Royal Mail’s pricing these days is such that I might as well fly some books and my old sticks to Melbourne and play one or two of the modest tracks there while delivering them on a pushbike, but I stay put for now. And then, out of the blue, another social media comment hits me just as clearly as Tony Dear’s did last time around, and I am off down another rabbit hole (or a hole “dug by animals” if we are sticking to Rule book definitions. I seem to dig a few of my own holes out on the golf course, from which there is little relief…).
PBauldy’s twitter response to the pod is both funny and kind, and I spill my coffee when I read it. He said “"Richard couldn't sell water in the desert. Lucky what he's selling is gold", and my instinct tells me he is right about the first part. At the end of the recording, I couldn’t even remember the URL for the book’s sales counter, and the sort of confidence required to brazenly peddle (Chip & Al, one for you…) one’s wares does not come easy to me.
I once “sold” phone packages for BT for a month, back in the days when phones used to have cables attached to them, and I recall spending at least an hour reassuring someone that their daughter would have a grand time in the very same university department from which I had just escaped for an uncertain future. Whether she invested in “Friends & Family”, I don’t recall, but the point is that I have always felt awkward selling anything, and so, as I explain on the pod in response to the suggestion “eighteen months ago, you were a nobody”, I remain a nobody to all but this little community but I now have a large pile of books behind me, literally blocking the door to the downstairs lavatory (Michael, I’m borrowing this from you!).
But the second sentence warms my heart, as do the other kind reviews from those of you who have managed to locate Grass Routes despite my best (worst?) efforts to stay in the shadows. And I start to wonder if PBauldy is right about the water and desert bit, or whether I am simply the victim of my own narrative again. We all feel uncomfortable outside our comfort zone, but as Jimmy suggested as the pod wore on, sometimes that’s when the best stuff happens; the best writing appears. Maybe even the best golf. It definitely feels to me like the more vulnerable I am, the better the connection that emerges - between me and the jumbled words, and between those words and the people who for some unfathomable reason choose to read them.
So perhaps it is time to step outside the safety of my territory and into the headlights again, as I did once doing karaoke at the Christmas party (that one’s for you, Robert), or do each time I dial into a podcast. Or writing a book. It all feels like a stretch, but every time I seem to feel better for having done it. But I was born English, and so a reluctant, self-deprecating approach to salesmanship not only feels like the right approach, but is probably hardwired into my genetic code. I’d rather continue to have to use the upstairs loo than suggest that I think my little book is actually rather lovely and that I think you ought to buy it, though in truth it smells terrific (the book, that is) and I can’t stop looking at it.
“There's more to life than books, you know. But not much more.” - Morrissey
So here we go. I will try and sell you the book, and see where it takes us. A few hundred have already been carefully packaged up, and the gentleman in the shop at the end of my road smiles each time I cross the threshold with another handful of brown parcels. But there are still plenty here, and while it is true that if one were contemplating a life in sales in the twenty-first century, a golf book would not be the obvious choice of product or topic, there is something about the tactile, analogue nature of a book that remains precious to me as our lives drift into digital automation.
More information is available in the palm of our hands than we could possibly ever need or want, but no webpage or tweet will ever bring me the same delight as my old friends “The Snow Leopard”, or “The Creative Act”, or “Preferred Lies”. Or the smiling handshake of a golfing friend.
In this age of artificial intelligence, no-one would imagine a physical book as the most efficient means of connection, but neither would shoelaces (Tony D, are you there?) get through the design phase. They come undone, and snap, and we spend hours of this one life tying them - hours that will not find their way into our own eulogies for they bear none of the emotional tags that other experiences, including golf, offer. And I get the same sense of connection - of inspiration - from a good book.
So as I ponder what to write next, this notion of word of mouth drifts in from the ether, and I consider how many of the things that someone might mention at my funeral have come out of listening to the recommendations of others. Many of the records I listen to - on vinyl where possible; “we’re not animals” (M, if you’re reading this), the books on the shelf above me.
Most importantly for this audience, the “good people…in fabulous places” that have crossed my path because of another’s recommendation - a mission to Kington grew from the essays on Cleeve Hill (Sean, Dai, thank you!); what feels like a pivotal friendship with a de facto Bodhisattva grew from an introduction on the first tee at Huntercombe (Alan, Malcolm, take a bow).
Every time I send something out - an essay or a book - someone takes the time to tell me what chimed with them, which bits changed them, and I am humbled, crushed by their kindness. “Only connect”, said E.M. Forster, and as I read these words, sent to me by my trans-Atlantic angel, I wonder what else anyone might ever need to write but these two words. For life is all about making connections, and this is where great art - be it books or eulogies or songs or paintings - locate their magic.
The golf writing that has moved me most - Bernard Darwin, Alistair Cooke. Charlie Price, Henry Longhurst, Pat Ward-Thomas; the list goes on - makes me want to put the book down and drive towards the tee, so when Paul Daley writes back that the “rich prose within [Grass Routes] makes me want to visit the featured golf courses” I want to weep, for this is exactly the feeling I find in his many glorious books.
So to make me feel less awkward about hawking this book of mine, I’m going to do what I do when contemplating golf trips - not relying on some sponsored, formulaic ranking but listening to and relaying what arrives by word of mouth, the sort of recommendations that light up both ends of the dialogue.
When Andy Picken writes that Grass Routes “left me with a warm glow and smile and a desire to throw the clubs in the car and get golfing immediately”, I want nothing more than a free morning ahead, so that Andy & I might meet again on some tee and find another new adventure in this life. For the hours we spent looking for our balls in the sunshine in Ireland this spring were precious…“great times”.
Or when Ant Salmon, whose hand I finally got to shake at the glorious Tandridge a while back says “it’s the essence of golf, beautifully articulated”, my heart skips a beat, and I feel so lucky to have reminded him, from the other side of the planet, of “the umbilical cord [he] cannot cut”; that which runs between Auckland and his golfing home, Rye. These places mean so much to us.
When John Francis writes that “Whenever I read a piece I’m transported…the words paint pictures in my imagination" it is I that am transported, back to that eleventh tee at the Honourable Company, and the delightful look on John’s face as the head of his ancient hickory driver follows the ball up the centre line of the mowing pattern, leaving a naked hickory shaft and its whipping gentle vibrating in the breeze. His journey across the ocean to Muirfield and beyond was a true pilgrimage, but my overnight kip in a layby in order to meet him for another day in paradise was no less meaningful for me. “Only connect” I remind myself, and so often, for me, golf is the medium.
Brian Fearney writes of Grass Routes containing “universal themes that resonate with many of us I’m sure. But selfishly it felt like he was speaking directly to me, which is the wizardry of his writing” and I am stopped in my tracks, and have to go and have a lie down. For it is this oh-so-personal element that feels transcendent to me, and I feel blessed by the “great days with good people in fabulous places” that this golfing life has brought me.
The art I love best - that of Joni Mitchell, and Mark Rothko, and Milan Kundera and, of course, our own Tom Simpson - seems as if it speaks to me from beyond the songs or the canvas or the pages. Or the delicate, genial bunkering. Sometimes from even beyond the grave, but these days of golfing awe remain etched across my heart, and the words that are collected inside the gorgeous cover of “Grass Routes” (another true artist, thank you Jason Livy) are my best effort at keeping them all alive.
So I shall end with a third quote from Morrissey, for while I am no fan of his solo stuff, The Smiths’ “The Queen is Dead” would come with me to a Desert Island were I ever to be invited, and of course, that masterpiece came to my attention via word of mouth. And because Tony Dear quoted Morrissey in the McKellar piece I mentioned earlier, and it is in such connections and threads that we weave and derive meaning. And because, in this long and rambling piece that barely mentions golf, I have “at least tried” to sell water in the desert…
“When they bury me in a church and chuck earth on my grave, I’d like the words ‘Well, at least he tried’ engraved on my tombstone” - Morrissey
The driver/brassie is repaired & now reshafted so my Ben Sayers is ready for our next adventure ⛳️