Regulars to this space will be aware of my predilection for nostalgia, and in watching the ‘85 Open video last week, in between the ghastly ad breaks from the 151st edition, this trait was taken out and polished up. Those ghastly outfits, the ramshackle infrastructure, the glorious, romantic notion of chasing a golf ball around for not that much money, but for the chance to drink from a large claret jug.
My weakness for the rose-tinted rear view mirror goes beyond golf, it seems. My mother’s Olivetti old typewriter arrived a few months ago, on which I had imagined writing for decades on end, way before modern technology took over our lives.
So I polished off a layer of unidentified scale, and ordered from some arcane vendor some new ribbons, and lo and behold, the Lettera 32 needs no charging or software updates; it just works. You hit a key, and it types the letter. Only the backspace just takes you back a space; for some reason it doesn’t magically remove the error. It’s a bit like playing blades, this, an unforgiving process. But it feels authentic.
I wind some paper in, and show my wife, and she takes it and starts to pound at the keys, and that noise begins, the one I recall from a different house in a different century, in what seems a different universe. I dwell for a moment on how noises can transport us, and imagine the long-lost clackety clack of metal golf spikes on concrete, another din from the distant past, and then she hands me back this precious tool, and I find one line typed at the top of the otherwise blank page: “Off we go, back to the olden days”.
I find myself slightly embarrassed at how delighted I am at this prospect, so I put the typewriter back in its case and revert to the faint whirring noise of the laptop, and pour my heart out about my latest trip up Cleeve Hill, for which I am already nostalgic…read it here:
So a few weeks pass, and I am preparing to send out copies of “Grass Routes”, this collection of such essays that I feel utterly blessed to have published, but I want to include some sort of thank you for the kind folk who are buying it. And slowly but surely, I realise that the old typewriter is the tool for this little exercise, and over an hour or so, I move a handful of words from the mystical realm of “The Cloud” to this leaf of A4 in front of me.
The air turns foul once or twice, as I strike the wrong key or fail to apply the exact pressure to the space bar that this temperamental device requires, but an overall message finds the page, leaving a little tidying-up with Tipp-Ex, though even with two children of school age in the house, locating this is broadly equivalent to finding the sweet spot of the Bridgestone irons that arrived from eBay (or “the olden days”?) last week. But I find some, and let it dry (can you imagine having to wait for something these days?), and then re-feed the paper through and hope to find the exact spot for my corrections on both horizontal and vertical axes. You know what happens next.
But I come to accept that this thank you note doesn’t need to be perfect, and that in fact it means more to me as it is, with the odd letter in the wrong place and my inconsistencies clearly visible in the varied depth of ink as delivered blow by blow. For writing is all about this…letting go of things, accepting that perfection can’t be found. So is golf, of course. And maybe life is, too. We make mistakes, and sometimes we can find the Tipp-Ex in time and put them right, and sometimes we instead learn from our errors, and move on.
Before writing the Cleeve Hill piece, I’d needed to pause from writing to get the book editing finished, but then the strange fear returned, and I got caught up worrying about what I’d write next, or whether anyone would like it. Concerned that this new format of bringing in other stuff was complicating things, or that people won’t be interested in the same random avenues as I am. I couldn’t blame them, if that were the case. But in the hunt for Tipp-Ex, I realised it doesn’t really matter anyway, as nothing lasts forever, not even the thrill of a long putt toppling in, or the pain of watching a new ball slice out on to the railway line.
Today’s guest piece has more than a hint of nostalgic beauty to it, too. I knew the name Dan Miller somehow, had noticed his novel “Machrihanish” somewhere along the line, and, after I caught his attention with a piece on the marvellous Aberdovey, we arranged a couple of glorious wintry days visiting his new habitat of Goswick Golf Club (see here for more on that). I love the way he writes, and that he has moved his life across the Atlantic to be nearer the links. You may recall that the brief for guests in this Old Friends series is to write about a club that moves them, a weapon they either love or hate, and Dan’s “The Linchpin” certainly hit the mark for me; this is the sort of thing that pitchmarks exists to celebrate!
Reading, Watching, Listening…
By the time this edition sets sail, I will be in the middle of nowhere, a camping trip to the centre of Wales, and so Watching will be restricted. But before I schedule this post (which the Olivetti can’t do for me), I have time to consume one more bout of glorious footage, one that also brings this nostalgic feel to the surface again. For almost twenty years ago, I got to visit Sand Hills Golf Club for a day, a place that makes my definition of “the middle of nowhere” feel like Piccadilly Circus; a golfing experience that I will carry with me to the grave.
But this week, Reading becomes essential, in between bouts of fiddling with camping stoves and kindling, so I have Dan Miller’s Machrihanish with me, as mentioned above. And before I go I dip into the other companion I will pack, Darwin’s “Playing the Like”, and as all the noise around Hoylake quietly recedes and golf “news” goes back to the perpetual carnage of the professional tours, I slip into Bernardo’s reflections on John Ball, of whom much was said last week. And as usual, the prose is amusing and insightful; I love the idea of this modesty: “On the occasion of another victory the Royal Liverpool Golf Club had his portrait painted and hung, where it still stands, upon the stairs. It is alleged that for several years Mr Ball steadily refused to pass it and confined his visits to the club-house entirely to the ground floor”…
And to order to prepare myself for a glorious fourth visit to my nearest great links - Hayling Golf Club - with some Tom Simpson architectural heritage on display and one of golf’s finest bells (below), Listening was an easy choice while carefully packing the camping kit. Golf Badgers is a collaboration between Royal Liverpool’s Course Manager James Bledge and Sam Cooper, the man behind “Links from the Road”, the diary of a campervan mission around the UK in which he played every links course these islands offer. Clearly, like Dan Miller, a kindred spirit, it would seem.
Episode 14 features not only the sublime Hayling but the two men charged with maintaining that fine stretch of windswept gravel - Greig Easton and Graeme Roberts, and it rekindled in me a desire to talk about and celebrate those unsung heroes of this game we love - the greenkeepers. Hope you enjoy it a fraction as much as I enjoy hitting balls across those fine surfaces!
Thank you for your time!
Thanks, Richard, for reminding me of the joys of writing from the heart. Easy to lose sight of amid the day-to-day grind of working through the have-to-do list. And thanks for your ode to the beautiful simplicity of the manual typewriter. That was the tool of choice when I started my writing career as a sportswriter, back when cutting and pasting copy was done with paper and glue, not control-c and control-v...and woods were made of persimmon and balls covered with balata.
I read this as I finish packing my bags for a four day sojourn at Sand Hills, in the company of my wife and our two 20-something boys. Marvelous intersections we have!