Pitchmarks #68 - 13th October 2024 - Lost in Translation

Macrolepiota procera, en Paris…

The whole notion of a bucket list is interesting to me, for in casting certain future experiences into what - in my case at least - resembles something more like a garden compost bin than a bucket, we are by definition not only grading things again, but dragging our attention from the only place we can ever really be - here. And yet, if that compost bin were filled with Post-It notes, there’s barely a day that passes in which another few golf courses join the queue for exploration. Not that I’ll get to them all, but maybe that’s the point. There’s a lightness and a hope about working towards something, and that optimism, misguided or not, warrants generating.

Plus there’s the matter of what gets on there (or in there?) Some bucket list items are mainstream, well-known. A city break to Paris, perhaps, or for Dai - my travel partner this week - the train to golf at Prestwick. For him, an itch unscratched, and my clumsily articulated love for that place (here) cannot solve his longing, for when he goes, he will see it through his own eyes, and make up his own mind. Of course, he will love it, for who could really claim to love golf and find Prestwick anything other than magnificent?

Since this blog began, I have plucked a few of those we all know from my own bucket - Prestwick included - but it is more often the word of mouth from kindred spirits that fills the bucket back up, and for me at the moment, it is the quieter whispers that catch me. At Silloth, I cash in one that has lingered for years, but between Scott and Tami and Fran and Jamie I leave with at least two more…Southerness and Dunnerholme. And this week, Dai adds a few others for good measure as we chew through the miles on this voyage…Appleby a shared one. Yelverton, Cardigan. One step forwards, two steps back in terms of emptying out the bucket - only they all feel like steps forward. But Dai has inherited from his forefathers a belief in the power of booked future commitments, and I can live with that justification, too.

Three longish paragraphs in, and you still don’t know which roads Dai and I took, or what language we failed to speak en route, other than the strange dialect of “golf”. But this morning I am thinking more about the feeling of these journeys, rather than the specifics, delightful though they were. For the golfing nut, there’s a magic in such adventures that bears examination. We look outside of ourselves - just as we might if strolling the Champs-Élysées, or ascending the lattice curves of La Tour Eiffel, or gazing unblinking at the Mona Lisa - and in these moments, in these peak experiences, our senses sharpen and time and space fall away for a while.

The journey seems drenched in meaning; the destination seems frozen in time. But it’s all the same, really; it’s just that we pin our dreams on these missions of the heart, though the heart beats on regardless. Perhaps we just need to point it more often…

This particular pilgrimage passes through the sort of place that would grace any golfer’s bucket list, and for most it will stay there. It is out of reach, in general; “an intensely private” club. One of the rarest privileges of this life, and perhaps equally rare, my old camper van in the car park, quietly cooling in the pine needles. So out of respect for what golf’s grand artiste left there a very long time ago, and respect for the dutiful custodians who’ve managed not to damage this greatest golfing canvas, I’ll not go on about how splendid it all is, and how the holes fit so stylishly in the landscape, and how there is a galaxy of charm in every hole, every vista, every leaf-blade.

Such observations are très privé in themselves, and as I bask in a gloriously understated deckchair and try to absorb a view every bit as precious to me as anything The Louvre could ever hang, I am just grateful to be here…here at this week’s destination, and here in terms of the shining, sacred, present moment. I have fallen headlong into my own bucket of lists, and the sides are gratifying steep for an hour or ten. And now, a few days later, I am finally coming down from it all, and clutching at straws to retain some sense of those moments in my notebook, for I’m scared to lose the memories or the feelings, but off they drift, anyway.

There’s something in this searching that is distinct from the object itself, whatever the object happens to be this time. We’re on the move, alive; our candles burning just a little brighter and our grateful eyes a little wider. So we cast around for some way to bottle this fervour, to cling onto what we’ve seen and heard and tasted, only this place has no pro shop, and what little merch there is not for fleeting visitors. We come away empty-handed but with our hearts full to bursting. It is another day in paradise, though maybe one day we’ll learn that we bring it with us, this state, and don’t always need to go hunting for it. But that bucket won’t empty itself…

The few photos I dare to take can’t do justice to the day, or the company, or Tom Simpson or the deckchair, but then one leaps out at me - of a mushroom in the rough - and it takes me back to my childhood somehow; strolling through the centre of it all, my senses on fire. And still with an old PING wedge in my hand. With some understanding that life is being lived out here - intensely, thankfully. Time slows right down, and I see each ridge of the parasol’s scaly cap as a world in itself; each dew drop on the grass as a prism for the eternal, and I never, ever want to soften this focus, but ever so gently it drifts away.

I have no baseball cap or crested gilet to show for my time in this place, but on the way home some sliver of a French lesson drifts down the decades, and Mr Bowen-Jones is reminding us that, in his beloved second tongue, “souvenir” means more like “to remember” in France, and so instead of logoed merch I have this monochrome image of a parasol mushroom, in the silent heathlands north of Paris, and I know I will never quite forget that day. That’s what bucket lists are for. They remind us how to live, and how to love.

Oh, Paris - je pense à toi…