The summer season, out with a whimper, not a banger

Well, that's the summer season over. I've played virtually every weeekend competition, won the Challenge Cup and come down by 10 from 24 to 14; Julie has played all year, got her handicap, reduced it from 36 to 31 and we have a fine silver plated candelabrum on the sideboard to prove it. Peter has played for the junior team, representing them at two of the finest courses in the midlands. I've played with some extremely nice blokes, had some good arguments, learnt a huge amount about the game and how it is played, thoroughly immersed myself in golf. That was the summer that was.

Saturday was the traditional season closer, the Turkey Medal. The prizes were not of money or pro shop vouchers but of meat vouchers for the local butcher, including the top prize of a Christmas turkey. Well, didn't really get close. Actually really a long, long way away from close. If you must know, I shot 95 for 95th place... Peter played too and had a nightmare of 107 for 99th. We were both just above the N/R's. Conditions were foul, but that's no excuse. Rubbish.

Needless to say, played again on Sunday, just nine holes and was under par. That's golf, I suppose. Julie had another birdie. That's three in the last couple of weeks, after not having had one before.

Before that, I was in the team for the Alliance match at Wollaton Park. That was interesting - Wollaton is a Nottinghamshire stately home, and the course runs through the deer park. I'd never played there before, but Peter had and told me that you get quite close to the deer. He wasn't kidding! The deer are rutting, and several times we had to wait for the stags to stop bellowing at each other and get off the fairway. It's the only course I've played where there is a local rule that you can ment hoofprints on the greens. Tee to green I played single figure golf. Hit every fairway apart from one and was great. On the greens I was rubbish. 33 points anyway, should have been 36 or 37, but there are lots of should haves in golf.

Bring on the winter. I probably won't post as often through the winter, as the competitions are more casual and none are 'qualifiers'. Hope you have enjoyed reading it so far.

Madness at 4am

Next Saturday sees the last competition of the summer, the Turkey Medal. That means that the following week, October 31st, is the start of the winter comps. Now, the way it works at our club is that a member may put his name down along with four others in a time slot, which becomes that team's slot all the way through the winter. There are, therefore, only about 40 slots available and up to 200 people wanting a game...and booking opened at 5am last Saturday

Our designated 'slotter', Eddie, was down there at 4.15am, and got ticket number 15. People had been there since 2.30! By 6am the feeding frenzy was over and all the good slots had gone. And our start time? All the way through the winter? 7.56! In the bleedin' morning! I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Had a bit of a weird weekend of meeting people and making connections. When I was a teenager we were all bikers, and we all went to the same parties, listened to the same sort of music, had long hair and all that. Last Tuesday I went to a seminar on internet marketing given by Absolute Design in Nottingham, and very good it was too. With an hour to kill beforehand I dropped into a local pub and happened to meet a couple of old friends from that time. All a bit sad really - one had clearly had long term alcohol problems and was frankly a bit of a mess, and the other, despite being the one among us who was most likely to succeed, being a self-employed electrician by the time he was 19, had had a breakdown 20 years ago and hadn't worked since. Shame. Anyway, not to dwell.

Saturday, I played with the Anderson brothers Colin and Gareth. Really enjoyed the round, and it turned out that Colin had been in the year below me at school, and not only that but he lived next door to the house where we had the best parties and had been to a few, so we must have met many times without realising it. The golf was out of the window a bit while we er, expressed our opinions about our schoolmates. Hope nobody was listening. Shows me up for a pompous ass for my previous comments about swearing. Colin also knew the characters I'd met in the pub. Not only that, but Julie and I played in the mixed comp Sunday, and John, last year's captain and in the pair we were playing with, turned out to know another of the lads from that time, Gino, who now is also a golfer and plays for Cotgrave. Small world.

And we were second in the mixed comp! TWO big tins of Quality St and two bottles of wine! Hoorah!

Another 'almost' round, wanton vadalism, and a milestone

Saturday was the final round in the club Millennium Medal, where you take the best three of five medal rounds. After four rounds I was lying sixth with 238, so I wanted a solid round, ideally a couple under, just to cement that position and hold off any challengers. I would have needed a great round to move up the leaderboard, so just wanted level or a couple under so someone else would have to have a great round to knock me off. And it oh so nearly was. TWO over GROSS for the front nine......................apart from the 7th, where I had an 8! In the hedge and lost, followed by in the hedge and unplayable. Although I parred the 8th and 9th, my mojo had gone at that point - 45 on the back nine wasn't too bad - two pars and two double bogeys, but 86 for a net 72 not as good as it should have been.

One really disappointing thing was the vandalism that again we have had on the course. The course is bounded on two sides by housing, with a school, cricket field and roads on the other two, and we do have trouble from time to time with teenagers coming on the course. They run out and steal balls etc and very occasionally it goes a bit further. Not usually a big deal - kids etc flexing their muscles a bit. The last couple of weeks have been something else though - tee boards have been smashed up, some benches have been smashed, 150 yard posts stolen and a couple stuck into one of the greens. Some of the lady members verbally abused. Friday night, things really went bad, with about 25% of the third green completely dug up and the pieces thrown into one of the bunkers. A right mess. Completely unplayable. We had to play on a temporary green, which we very very rarely have to do. I don't know what the police plan to do, or how they will try and catch the people responsible. A golf course is inevitably very vulnerable, and if people are determined to cause trouble there's not much we can do, short of standing in the undergrowth with a baseball bat ;). If it was youngsters, it just makes you despair. Mischief is one thing, but destruction is another entirely. I blame the parents.

Anyway, played with Julie on Sunday, and she hit a new milestone - her first birdie! Very nearly an eagle, actually, the ball bounced into the hole on her approach to the 5th and out again. We agreed that a birdie is worth more than an eagle, because a birdie is skill, an eagle is usually just a fluke! She was naturally delighted.

Golf, watching golf, women and Society Golf

Saturday was a pairs competition. Betterball Stableford full handicap. We scored 33 points, and I scored on 15 of the 18 holes. That's all I'm saying...

Sunday, went along to watch Peter play at Hollinwell. This is one of the treats of the year for the juniors. He's already played Sherwood Forest, another fabulous course, and now the Nottinghamshire Golf Club, a wonderful heathland track. He played a very pleasant young man called Lewis, 12 year old 19 handicapper, chatty, interested and keen to play good golf. He was telling me that he had been on a Lee Westwood Academy day and ended up winning a new Ping G15 driver, a putter to go with it and a round with Lee himself at Lindrick. What a great prize! He's had the round - I asked him what Lee was like and he said 'oh, he was really nice. If he thought I was doing something wrong he showed me the right way and explained what he would do in the same situation'. I don't know if he saw my jaw drop! You couldn't buy that, could you? Lee apparently is hugely committed to junior development and good for him.

Now, Hollinwell is one of those places that has a er, traditional approach, as far as the women/men thing is concerned. Women are apparently not even allowed on the premises before 2pm on a Saturday, and there are three bars, one for men, one mixed and one for women. There are actually four, there's an extra little one inside the men's visitors changing room! Rumour has it that a path was diverted so that men wouldn't have to see women walking past on their way to the Ladies changing rooms. I had a free and frank discussion on the subject with a chap in the men's bar. He seemed to think that the 'men's bar' was justified, and indeed that juniors shouldn't be allowed into men's competitions, on the basis that after a week at work, men should be allowed to 'express themselves freely'. I suggested that we should do away with the men's bar and replace it with a 'swearing bar' but that didn't go down well. Isn't it odd that the approach is that the men want to swear, so ladies and juniors should be barred? It never seems to cross the mind that it might be more appropriate, if it's an issue at all, that a swearing ban be put in place so that everyone can enjoy their golf together, but let's not get silly, eh? The argument ranged freely around other issues including dress code, but let's not go there.

One other thing. Hollinwell is so posh that the local Porsche dealership leaves examples of the latest models in the car park. All very nice, and the lads were drooling over the cars, but they missed the best car in the place - an immaculate, beautiful 1964 Aston Martin DB5. Mmmmmmm.

Monday was The East Midlands Packaging Society golf day at Kedleston Park. I chair the Society, so I had the usual job of herding cats to get people onto the tee, back into the bar, then getting on my hind legs to make a speech and thank everyone. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the sun shone, but the weather was fantastic for golf, not a breath of wind. The staff at Kedleston looked after us really well and the meal in the evening was excellent.

I hope everyone enjoyed the day. For the record, the winner of the Norcros Trophy and owner of bragging rights for the next year was Mike Young. Outside the main prizes, we also awarded a 'Longest Driver' award to Steve Fletcher of Manor Bakeries, for coming back (from the Wirral!) after last year's disappointment when the host course put us on temporary greens (a horrible thing, as any golfer will tell you) and having enough confidence in us to bring a group of colleagues; a 'Violence to Local Wildlife' award to Polly Wells for hitting a duck on the lake hole, and a 'Mental Focus' prize to Malcolm Clipson for losing not only his glasses but also a hearing aid. His prize was a bottle of wine, which he forgot.