Pitchmarks #46 - 19th May 2024 - Most of my friends are Duffers...

“Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught
Or half a page of scribbled lines”
“Time”; Pink Floyd

Although as usual the sound of my own voice disconcerts me, the name is reassuring. I am lying in a hotel room in Suffolk, listening back to the latest episode of the Duffer’s Literary Companion, and as I reflect back on yesterday’s outing at the ineffably gorgeous Aldeburgh, the “Duffer” label certainly rings true. But I’m not sure how “Literary” my ramblings are, or what possible value I have as a “Companion” on such journeys…unfamiliar with scorecards, more or less teetotal…

But this podcast series is precious, like good manners and fresh air, so despite my presence, I can’t not listen, for I love how passionate they are, and how generous. Stephen Proctor and Jim Hartsell share with those of us lucky enough to have found this thing their own tribute to the people who’ve gone before them, and I adore hearing them read from Darwin and Finegan, Longhurst and Price.

George Plimpton was right when he said “the smaller the ball used in the sport, the better the book”, but Stephen and Jim take us on literary journeys beyond the modern sphere and into the realm of the romantic. Soundbites exchanged for symphonies; striped fairways swapped out for rugged links. Golf played with balatas or gutties; golf played for glory, not greed.

Jim asks me about music, and I am delighted, for one of the key motifs that emerged when pulling together “Grass Routes” was of neglecting those things that meant so much to me growing up, and golf and music were always entwined in my heart, somehow. As the rain batters the window outside, Stephen describes my nostalgic leaning as a paean to “the joy you experience as a child”, and I am glad to be alone, for I sob quietly at that, thinking of my dear parents and the innocence of youth.

A pause emerges on the recording, as I scrabble around to pull from a box a recent purchase, the vinyl edition of Joni’s “Blue” that I’d always wanted, and I try to explain what that record has meant to me, and how now - at last - having it in the format in which it first emerged seems like full circle. But of course I fail, just as I will stumble when Jim asks me to describe what I’d earlier called indescribable - the glory of Durness golf links, perched on the edge of the known world.

But in trying, I suppose we transmit to those who listen some blunt sense of an experience we each have to find for ourselves. A while back, when the roads fell silent and we all peered out of our windows at a freedom removed, I started to fall back into those old friends - the vinyl records and the dusty hardbacks - and the shadow of Darwin seemed to hover over me as it hung above Woking’s suddenly deserted Dining Room.

And in his love for “The Links of Eiderdown”, and his sadness for the lost “ghost holes” of Rye and Sandwich, Darwin awakened something in me, something akin to that which Jim’s beloved Pink Floyd can also generate when I pull another vinyl friend from its sheath. A longing in my heart that needs to be heard; a gentle shove from the phantoms of the past to explore and embrace and celebrate this world, with what Ray Bradbury called “zest and gusto”. Bradbury and Darwin would have got along.

These two new friends read aloud from My Book (those words still sound so strange!), and I cringe at how protracted my sentences are, and feel bad that they have to wait so long to draw breath. But then they choose - for this month’s Darwin Award - a piece on a place I love unreservedly, Minch Old, and Jim says that in reading it, he has “just got to get to this place”, and my gratitude for this gift knows no bounds. For in all the chaos that life has brought since I packed up my desk and walked out from under Darwin’s gaze, this sort of thing, this connection, is something I will never, ever tire of.

We share with each other that which is out of the ordinary, and in doing so we craft our own path and meaning. It’s an energy source that may never run dry, this - a heartwarming, life-affirming, breath-taking kindness. To know that people have stood with jaw dropped in front of the thirteenth at Cleeve Hill, or made the pilgrimage to that blissful strip of dunes at Borth? Or that one day Jim and Stephen and I might get to wander round Minch Old together? As a result of the fumbling descriptions that just tumbled out of my head and onto the page, just as naturally as they “jumped off the page” for Jim? That is, to quote title of the piece from which that new, potential mission of theirs has emerged, “Simply Wonderful”.

And then I spot that a previous guest - Lorne Rubenstein, whose “A Season in Dornoch” might be as important to me as “Blue” or “Dark Side…” - is listening, and his last five words split me apart. He writes “I feel my pulse slowing”, and I feel the same way when I read his work, or listen to Duffers. Or step out of the street and onto the links, or out of the wind and into the hollow dunes. Anything that nudges us towards silence seems sacred to me.

I can’t explain how grateful I am for all this, or for Stephen’s love of Hoylake, where I’ve now been, or Jim’s profound connection to Dunaverty, where I’ll go soon. These are the places where we find “the game boiled down to its essence”, as Stephen puts it, and somehow when I turn up in such places, I am getting closer to the core of who I am, and who I want to be. We “Duffers” speak the same language, and the lyrical secrets of golf’s forgotten dialect whisper quietly from every hairy tee-box and every battered flag.

So when Stephen mentions Corrie, and another friend recommends, alongside earlier mentions of Nick Drake and Pink Floyd, that Van Morrison’s “Common One” is worth looking out for long journeys, I close the notebook for now, and pull on my trainers, and head into town. To visit the vinyl shop, and to find a map of Arran. And “I feel my pulse slowing”…

“Up, and down
And in the end it’s only round and round, and round”
“Us and Them”; Pink Floyd