Pitchmarks #67 - 6th October 2024 - Hayling

“We are asleep. Our life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming”
Ludwig Wittgenstein

The day had a strange start to it. Outside swirled an ethereal silence, the nearby motorway noises swallowed by thick fog. The last week or so had been cold first thing, so I pulled on various dark layers in anticipation, and then Rob and Steve pull up, the car’s exhaust fumes creating a plume of silvery clouds in the cool air.

We are heading for Hayling, an hour south of here and a place that has become a firm favourite for me. Rob has played it once before, a while back, but for Steve, it’s the first dose of links golf in many years, and for me, the fifth time in as many years after somehow living half a life without Hayling in it.

By the time we arrive at the coast, all fog has risen or been blown away by a breeze from the east, although this is blended with the sun - a rare visitor in recent days. We report in, and the welcome in both shop and bar is warm and helpful, and following an early altercation with the coffee machine - a case of not being able to follow direction that will seem familiar as we make our way across the golf course - we bask in this crisp light and gaze across the course and beyond from the magnificent terrace.

At the first, the breeze is helping for a change, and we make a decent start. A faint trace of moisture on the greens combines with the last remnants of a recent top-dressing to provide clues of the plights of the few groups before us - clear journeys laid out, plotting each ball’s path from hopeful first putt to eventual gravitational surrender. I take advantage of one of these, and lag my long birdie putt to within the range of this friendship, though I am slightly puzzled by a gentle left turn at the end.

We move on, and by the fourth, I cannot stop looking at these tracks on the green, though the sun is wicking away the dew. From a similar spot on several holes, balls had not only taken different paths towards the same result, but some putts had swung right where others carried on, and once or twice, I detected a stubborn refusal to follow the contours at all, which had me confused, perched back on my haunches, frowning.

I start to wonder if there is something strange going on here; whether the golfing gods or the ball itself - or balls, more accurately, for the vibrant gorse that provides such definition and habitat across this shingle spit has swallowed a couple already - holds an agenda of its own. Several of the tracks I follow make no sense, and a few of my failures will leave an equally perplexing map for those behind.

As the front nine goes on, Hayling reveals more and more of a complexity that goes under the radar. Not only are the holes brilliant, they are gorgeous, too. We play to wide fairways from tees that reveal only part of the picture; much of the course’s defence comes in the form of angles and gentle disguise. The turf, after three weeks of inland golf, is sublime - firm, tight, far healthier than it ought to be on such a thin sliver of soil. The balls bounce and run and chase, and here and there, we tumble into bunkers whose revetted faces are artworks in themselves.

I delight in watching Steve step upon the holes I remember best - the wonderful eighth; the devilish tenth. We all hit great shots now and then, and all suffer terribly, ghastly mistakes, though Hayling makes it clear what is expected of us. The twelfth shines even more strongly this time, the green site reminiscent of Rye, perhaps, or Carne, or somewhere of that ilk. Hayling makes good use of the open, flat sections of this strip, but is even more inspired in the section at the westerly end, where the dunes come into play.

Most of the hole names are wonderful, and beautifully succinct. But “Widow” stands alone as a name and a challenge - the tight tee shot to an angled ridge must avoid cavernous scrapes, and left - towards the boat masts that are weirdly quiet despite the growing wind - is dead. From the brow of the hill, the fairway swoops down to a green protected by this hole’s only bunker, but its position is so genial as to affect every player and every approach, even though the green it sits beside is vast.

Three lost balls and quite a few strokes later, we stroll from the green to begin the long walk in, but it strikes me looking up towards the plateau just how much the land falls away to this furthest point. It’s a staggering hole - tough, fun, dangerous. And from here, even without the wind we must battle today, the course builds as the finish line starts to come into view.

As Rob reflects later, it is not so much that Hayling has so many great holes, though it does, but more that the appeal and challenge are never diluted by soft ones. Even the spare hole stands alone, though we don’t play it today, and it is this consistent quality of design and presentation that makes the relative anonymity of Hayling so hard to understand. Driving home, it takes barely an hour to reach the heart of the Surrey heathlands, yet so many drive a further hour each way for the links of Sussex and Kent, and never pass this way. It is a well-kept but delicious secret, and it is no wonder that the locals like it that way.

As the roads get busier and we prepare to disconnect from these glorious few hours in golfing company, Steve asks me how these Sunday morning ramblings come to be - how they get written - and I am a little embarrassed at my answer. I’d like to know what I plan to write in advance, just like I’d quite like to know what my arms plan to do following address, or what the ball has in mind. It would be good to have a stack waiting to go, or to be able to pretend to Steve that I have some formula that I can rely on, and can thereby write with confidence rather than abject terror.

But the truth is it feels rather like the tee shot on “Widow” more often than not. I have some vague sense of where I’d like to end up, but not the slightest idea of how to get there, and though I spent my childhood bored by the austere nature of eighties’ Sundays, these days they seem to roll around very quickly, with the page becoming blanker all the while. As I stumble through my answer, I know I’ve nothing in mind yet for today, and time is running out.

But much like the occasional decent shot that came from the stick at the end of my arms today, ideas and themes sometimes emerge without warning, and dare me to embrace them. Rob describes Hayling as “dreamy”, and I latch on to that like some fleeting swing thought that might make everything ok. A few weeks ago, another golfing soul mate had sent me the Wittgenstein quote with which this haphazard effort began, and this notion of dreams has been lurking every since.

We forge our paths in the realms of the rational, but this game we choose to play - through which we both suffer and grow - is at times deeply irrational…mysterious. But to sit in the back of that car and now at this old desk and wonder if that day at Hayling was more than just “dreamy” but the subject of an actual dream seems no less absurd than poking around in ferocious gorse for a ball that has horribly betrayed us. And the more I think about that cherished day, the stranger - and the more dreamlike - it seems.

The swirling fog, the Kafka-esque bunker episodes. The haste that clouded our operation of a perfect logical coffee machine suddenly clears to reveal a cappucino. Such challenges appear in dreams, tripping us up and beguiling us in equal measure. On the fifth, I flushed a persimmon five wood into the low sun and it disappeared forever, and I was suspicious then; more so now. The twists and turns of the subconscious mind in a dream-state are as if played out on the links, somehow - piercing drives followed by duffed chips, bounces possessed by either “Death or Glory”, to pinch another great hole name from Hayling.

Oystercatchers and stonechat for a fantastical soundtrack, with the occasional toll of “Warden’s Bell” across the course. And once - an interminable time after my ball took an other-worldly path, swinging violently left past the copse in which a White Egret sat, casting a disdainful glance at us that felt deserved upon my drive - the sound of urethane clattering into tin. I peer at the aerial map on the club website, and it seems impossible that someone could hit the greens shed from the fifteenth tee, and perhaps it is, outside of our dreams and nightmares.

Most of the day had seemed somehow detached, slightly extreme in places - as if in a dream. I pinch myself every time I come to Hayling - because it is so good, because it lives so near. Because it feels so very wonderful to be golfing on the very edge of the delicate coast, with friends like this in tow, as Autumn starts to encroach.

If Wittgenstein was right, and “we are asleep”, then may a few more of my dreams place at Hayling, please. It’s as good a place as any…