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Friday 20 July 2012

A Good Walk Spoiled

Golf is a funny game.  Though perhaps not in the classical sense of the word.  There’s not a lot of humour to be found in strolling around on grass with sticks, unless you have a dog.  And yet there is something inherently amusing about watching people chase a ball around.  Which is why I imagine there were people chuckling the whole time my wife, N and I were playing pitch and putt on holiday.

I want to set the scene a little first.  It was raining.  Lightly at first, but by the time we were half way round it was raining the sort of rain that is reserved  for British summer time by the sea.  Cold, very wet, rain that soaks into your clothes, and doesn’t dry for hours.  And there we were, knocking two little white balls around a course.  You won’t be surprised to know that we were the only ones there, in fact, considering how this summer has gone we’re probably the only people who have been on that course for about 3 months.
We had been on holiday for a few days, down in the town where I grew up, and had gone across to Sheringham on our final day for a walk by the sea.  The golf was my wife’s idea, it turned out when she used to come to Sheringham when she was younger and they played golf most holidays.  This was her chance to walk down the memory lane that I had been strolling on for most of the weekend. 

It was pretty grey

It’s a strange feeling, reliving a former life.  I had not been back for 15 years.  Everything was the same, but it was like you were trying to remember something, all these things were reminding you, but they weren’t quite right, as though you were looking at pictures someone had drawn of something you remembered.  They were really really good pictures, but it wasn’t quite right.  Except that it was.  It was all there, all just as it had been.  It’s funny about memory isn’t it.  How the pictures in our head are coloured by all sorts of things.  Happy memories are tinged with red, sad memories are blue or black.  Some buildings are bigger than real life, some smaller.  Some a totally different shape, although that might be something to do with my terrible sense of direction.

It got me wondering.  What my little girl would remember.  What are her memories going to be?  Will they be red or blue?  Big or little?  I suppose we won’t know until she’s grown up.

Perhaps one of the red memories will be a hazy recollection of running around a large grassy area, terrorizing her parents with a plastic golf club whilst chasing after a couple of little balls with mummy and daddy.  Perhaps she’ll remember how we seemed to think that the little balls were best left where they were, rather than carried around.  Perhaps the rain will stay with her, lashing down, soaking everything.  Maybe it will be the fact that mummy and daddy couldn’t stop laughing.  Neither of us will ever crack the PGA Tour, not even ten thousand hours could do that, which led to a number of occasions when one or other of us would have to charge off after an errant ball, or an errant child or sometimes both.

Mare Ditat

All in all it was a fantastic holiday.  We had a wonderful time, the memories were mostly red, the sea was just as powerful as it always is, and the golf was wet and funny.

Oh, and I lost, but I don’t want to talk about that.

 

4 comments:

  1. I hope it didn't drive a wedge between you. The losing that is.

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  2. I think I stayed quite chipper about it.

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  3. You're not feeling too teed off then? Hopefully you all had a nice drive back.

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