Pitchmarks #35 - 3rd March 2024 - Mid-Herts

“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played”
Alan Watts (from this magical short recording)

A kind invitation arrived, to go and join a fellow lover of this old game at Mid-Herts, and so we fixed a date, and I remember driving through the rolling hills of the Home Counties, arriving in the car park, and pulling in under the pines as the morning sun cast shafts of golden light across an adjacent fairway.

And we met, and drank coffee, and before long we set off across the heath, chatting every step of the way as the golf course introduced itself to me. A James Braid design, the layout is on a tight footprint, but the routing is such that it never feels cramped or claustrophobic, and the way some holes lie near others is pleasingly social on a busy morning like this, though the golf flows well and our morning flies by.

Around the greens, the mowing lines have brought back some lost run-offs, and while there are relatively few bunkers, the grassy hollows provide plenty of adventure and intrigue for the errant shot, of which I hit many, and Peter only a few. The card may say 6,000-odd yards, but I seem to need to hit an awful lot of four irons through the fresh air above St Albans, and I am charmed by the course and the conditioning, and once again staggered by the strength in depth of golf in England. A course I’d barely heard of, and yet it is a delight, and golf thrives there, judging from the roll-up attendance.

And that’s about where my notes end from that morning, back in the vault we call 2022. Somehow, I failed to do much more than jot down some bullet-points, and the same applied to a hurried loop at Berkhamsted on the way home. Perhaps I’d been side-tracked by other things; I can’t quite remember. But I’d been carrying this lurking sense that I hadn’t quite debriefed Mid-Herts properly; had failed to identify let alone absorb the lessons the morning had offered me, for golf always offers me something.

I peer at my sparse reflections from this distance of almost eighteen months, and try to see what remains unwritten that I might salvage. I can see that, a little later on, a different ink has been used to add “music, rhythm” to the notes, and at the top I’ve also written “silver haggis”, and “gold parrot” without explanation, as if those couplets would not lose their meaning to me later.

I stare at the notebook for a while and wonder what is happening to me, for I cannot believe so long has passed since that gorgeous morning out golfing. The piece about music and rhythm drifts back, and I recall Peter talking about the cadence of life, and perhaps we talked about the golf swing, and how rhythm is so essential to good golf. I’ve some sense that he - or perhaps a family member - had played an instrument, and that this had interested me greatly, as had a discussion about another of his passions - sailing.

I’ve often thought of the art of routing a golf course - and Braid was a master at this, particularly on tight properties - as something akin to music; the change of pace of certain holes and challenges; the art of building towards a crescendo at a course upon which matchplay would have been the norm.

This stream of consciousness leads me to something else that stood out in our morning’s dialogue - a takeaway that feels far more meaningful than haggis or parrots regardless of their material, but about which I’d managed to record not a single mark. From somewhere deep in the murky recesses of my mind, I remember standing on a green, and staring back at the tee, and Peter mentioning that Seve used to look at holes backwards in order to work them out, to understand the architect and their intent.

This amuses me, for I will forever picture Seve peering out from a bush, or chasing his ball from the Lytham car park, and I think about how often we put ourselves in situations we could do without, on and off the course. It is interesting to imagine that swashbuckling warrior plotting a strategic route then feeling a compulsion to lash at his drives so the ball completely disregards all thought of restraint.

But sometimes in order to move forward we have to look back, and in failing to really think about Mid-Herts while the game was fresh in my mind, I’d risked letting this message and the splendid contours of yet another fine track drift away from me. And so as I close the notebook, I vow to not only sharpen that habit of using the past as a marker-post to the future, but also to remember “to smell the flowers along the way”, as Walter Hagen once said, in between claiming eleven majors. For it is through these very moments, while the music plays, that we build our own pasts and futures.

Once again, thank you Golf. And thank you, Alan Watts. And thank you, Peter.