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!