“In prehistoric times, cavemen had a custom of beating the ground with clubs and uttering spine-chilling cries. Anthropologists call this a form of primitive self-expression. When modern men go through the same ritual, they call it golf”
Anonymous
“They have been playing golf for eight hundred years, and nobody has satisfactorily said why”
Alistair Cooke
I have a few other strange rituals, besides golf. Most of this week was spent under canvas in the heart of Wales, and like the pastime that this blog primarily deals with, camping has been part of my framework for a very long time. But in the usual mad rush to get packed up with all the stuff one needs to survive a weather forecast that looked apocalyptic a week ago, it is easy to wonder why we don’t just book a hotel like the rest of the world, just as it is to question why we don’t find something less demanding than golf to attempt. This is leisure time, after all.
Alistair Cooke’s quote (above) both begins his glorious collection “The Marvellous Mania” and concludes my own book, “Grass Routes”, and this question of why was very much on my mind as the camp began, having written up a recent visit to Broadstone, where my golf brought into question not only how I’d performed, but why I bothered.
But the Meteorological Office turned out to be overly gloomy, and on the day we were promised thundery showers at this pitch high on a hillside, we basked in the warm sunshine and watched red kites and buzzards sail across the blue sky. We spent our days in the great outdoors and talked with words not emojis. We swam in the river and ran up the mountains, and coming home we felt enriched by it all - by the friendships we serviced, and the contact with the ground beneath our feet, and it reminded me of the feeling I’d had returning home from Broadstone.
That journey comprised a confusing blend of having loved the golf course, and the brutal, failed trial it provided, and some notion that the day had been a roaring success despite all that. It would probably be easier to not golf, just as it would to not camp, but there is something more than the simple facts that lurks behind both these compulsions, a depth of connection that enhances our lives.
And so, as I arrive home with more than a week between me and my blades, I have moved on, for now, from these questions of how and why, and am focusing instead on when and where, for once again absence from golf has made my heart grow fonder.
To begin, the week ahead has some treasure lined up - I will get to stroll the heathland corridors of New Zealand once again (a previous musing from the archive here), and sweep the dew from it’s neighbour West Byfleet (and another, here). And then on to Woking, where I shall stand for the thousandth time in awe of the central bunkers on the 4th, in which my ball will probably finish, and hold my breath as the inevitable slightly thinned approach hangs in the air above the patio behind the 14th (and for more on the paradigm shift that those bunkers represent, check out this and this!).
And if, as often happens, some devilish pitch results not in eternal glory but in the blade of my wedge thinning the ball across the target and way beyond, I will take solace in the fact that my earlier description of this horror - the ball “like a stray bullet” - has amused a regular four as far afield as Canada, for whom the phrase is “firmly embedded in our lexicon” (thanks PY). In these moments, we can only laugh or cry, so to know that at least three of those four are chuckling when another bullet is discharged makes me smile…every shot makes someone happy…
Familiar haunts, and come rain or shine, fine play or average, I shall enjoy this communion with natural golf and with my fellow sufferers, and no doubt the talk will be of this course or that, and this bucket list of places to golf will grow even longer. And I will decide, perhaps also for the thousandth time, to put aside how and why for the time being, and let when and where be the key questions to address moving forward.
And when the daylight eventually fails, I shall be found re-Listening to the glorious Episode 4 of “The Duffer’s Literary Companion” (on Tom Morton’s “Hell’s Golfer” and remote honesty box golf courses), and trying to plot a way to get to these pilgrimage links via camping. And when that’s done, I’ll move on to Reading “A Course Called Ireland” by Tom Coyne, for that’s where the next camping trip will be, and who knows, there might be room in the roof-box for a few choice hickory sticks. And everyone should be Reading this on the most extraordinary transformation that is happening at The Addington, from Ryan Noades via Sounder.
Watching will be an easy choice, too, for I was sent this link below last week (thank you, AB; another deposit in the bucket list), and when we’re done with all that, next Sunday will have arrived and I shall see you all again.
One final quote for today, and though I hope my golfing - and camping - days will extend for as long as I walk this earth, I am at the same time reassured that some form of deliverance may one day lie ahead. Though perhaps Wodehouse is still awaiting his own release from the deepest version of limbo I know, as he once gave his correspondence address as: “c/o the sixth bunker, The Addington Golf Club”. Maybe they’ll find him during renovation…
“He enjoys that perfect peace, that peace beyond all understanding, which comes at its maximum only to the man who has given up golf”
P.G. Wodehouse
Given you’re at Woking next week it would be interesting to have your view on the relatively new bunker on the left of the fourth fairway. Feels penal to me rather than strategic
That video on the Lido is just incredible.