Pitchmarks #85 - "The Thing to Do"

Addington’s third seems a lot less scary without clubs…

A dear friend, Chip, is in London, so we grab the chance to play a bit of winter golf, and when the temperature plummets, we swap out our carry bags for mittens and walk instead, pacing over the icy corridors of some heathland marvels.

He brings with him a book - a gift - and we both forget it the first day, but he hands it over the next, and I am fascinated. For it - “Big Ideas, Little Pictures”, by Jono Hey - is not the sort of book one normally sees, or receives. It is different, unique, and utterly delightful.

Over the intervening month or so, I have dipped in whenever a tiny window of time presents itself, or when feeling “stuck”. And almost always, I will find something - a concept pondered with Jono’s effortless charm and perpetual curiosity, alongside an equally marvellous sketch or diagram.

I am “stuck” again this morning, but two little dips into this new closest ally are worth the time invested a hundredfold, and the day becomes one of energy and hope. To begin with, it falls open at page 120, and I am reminded of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories of a century ago, so beloved to the children who rest peacefully upstairs, just as they were to me when their age. Where wise old Owl cannot help but use long words and complicate things, Pooh is a simpler soul, so when Owl is asked “What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?”, he resorts to a simpler explanation: “It means the thing to do”, and I wish everything could be tied up this neatly.

Next up Jono writes of “The Moon Illusion” - the optical conundrum that is our satellite appearing to alter in size during the evening. “Great minds from Aristotle to Newton have wondered at its cause”, he notes, and if he is “surprised to learn that it’s still debated”, I’m positively ecstatic. And the points are for me not that we don’t know the answer with any certainty, but that we are - at this stage - unlikely to ever do so, and that we don’t need to. It doesn’t matter.

We strive to place reason behind every little thing, and in doing so smother the universe. But I love that the world still contains magic, and mystery, and confusion, and illusion. And among other delights, such as the friendship of people like Chip, golf seems to bring me a healthy dose of these factors, too.

Who can explain the pitch (should that have been “Chip”?) that announces to the gallery that it will drop fully ten feet short of the hole? Or that we all know what is happening from a space beyond rationality? Or that the finest drive of the day might be followed by a duff, or more ominously, a sh*nk, or that somewhere in the closing stretch we will stop striving for just a moment and that out of that - perhaps because of that - something beautiful happens?

Our belief, shaky as it is, that we can actually play golf is an illusion in itself, at least as it relates to permanence. Ask every single other person who ever played the game. Our form is prone to vanish as swiftly as it arrives, and science or Owl’s fancy language can’t get at the bones of that puzzle, nor social science solve the riddle of why we even bother to try, given the odds.

But maybe that’s why this game and a handful of other, seemingly futile pursuits are so valuable. For they permit us to step outside of a world built by Owls and bathe instead in Pooh’s realm of somewhat deluded simplicity.

When it all seems a bit too much, I can turn to golf and feel a damn sight better for it, for some illusions are worth keeping. That’ll be my “Crustimoney Proseedcake” moving forwards. It means “the thing to do”.