Yes, Doctor, I would like to lie on the couch, and, yes, I would like to talk about it. Yes, Doctor, I have tried golf... Of course I've always watched it. Loved the manicured beauty of the courses and the windpipe-tightening drama of the last nine holes at the big tournaments. I'd also dabbled with pitch and putt as a boy and, as a teenager, had rather cleverly mastered the windmill hole in the crazy golf at Burnham On Crouch. And that was pretty much it until the fateful day my brother Michael and my best friend Dan both took up the game. Worse, through me, they met and started to play – obsessively, all the time – together. I realised that if I didn’t want to completely lose two great mates, I’d better learn to play.
 | | Anyone for golf? |
No problem. Midwinter lessons were booked at a posh golf training centre in the middle of Regents Park. For nine weeks I dutifully trundled onto the practice ground with my bucket of balls, waggled my bottom, lined up the pesky little white orb and, under expensive instruction, learned to make a passable impression of a golf swing. Initially, it was just a swing, the club tracing a gorgeous swish through the clinging London mist. Later on, I started to actually make contact with the ball! Indeed, by the end of nine weeks, I was starting to not only make semi-regular contact with the ball, but was also quite often getting it to go up into the air. Even more occasionally, it would go in the right direction. I was well pleased.
Sadly, on the tenth and final week of my tuition, my coach decided to remodel my swing. He thought I could do better; I thought he was touting for further business. Whatever the motivation, one hour later I was a gibbering wreck. The club in my hand felt like an inflatable croquet mallet, the action of driving the ball felt like trying to hit a pea with a length of pyjama cord. Tears were shed, teeth were gnashed, oaths – some of them blasphemous, all of them deeply unpleasant, were uttered; I have never been able to drive a golf ball since. All of which means that the aforementioned bro, Michael, and myself, now play a very strange variant of the great old game. We go to Ireland together to visit the family homestead, and, early each morning, make our way to the Carriglade, a lovely, if rudimentary, course slumbering in the foothill folds of the Blackstairs mountains. In this beatific setting, Mike drives off two balls. I – still relatively confident in my short game and putting – used to always play the second one (figuring I’d benefit from him having a second go to improve on the initial swing. But then Sierra Madre-style suspicion set in; now I play whichever of the balls lies best. I don’t even trust my own flesh and blood. Yes, Doctor, golf does strange things even to the most balanced mind…
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