gibberish

The first at Lamlash? Might as fucking well have been.

If the concept of watching an octopus club a puppy to death with a cricket bat in a telephone box is your idea of entertainment then you’d have had a great weekend following me around the rain sodden fairways of Arran’s finest golf courses.

We started out at Brodick on Friday where Scotland’s most lugubrious golf pro, Peter Macalla, welcomes visitors to his club with wide open arms, a winning smile, jokes and anecdotes and a penchant for giving freely of his local knowledge and expertise.  [Every single one of those descriptors is a fucking lie. Ed.]

It rained a bit.

I played like a fucking dick.

Nevertheless, I came a distant third despite my best efforts to charicaturise Scotland’s version of a cross between Stevie Wonder and Steven Hawkins.

On Saturday we visited our beloved Whiting Bay – beloved for its scenery and the fabulous welcome from the lovely starter, Mary, who’s been giving freely of her time “because she likes it” for over a decade.  (Mary could give Mr Macalla a lesson or two in being a golf pro.)

That said, it is not beloved by me for my ability to tame the course.

In something like thirty rounds I’ve manged three second places and no wins. Until Saturday morning when I won on a countback.

Yes, you read that correctly, I won.  Cue fanfares and general disbelief.

I was so excited that I resumed my ‘Buster Keaton goes golfing’ approach in the afternoon and finished so far behind the rest of the field that Mary was strongly considering putting me down.

My bump and runs were so pitiful that my 8 iron was ceremoniously smashed to fucking bits on the tenth before I realised that it is probably the club I use most often.

It joins my pitching wedge somewhere between golf’s equivalent of purgatory and intensive care.  Fucking pieces of shit.

On Sunday it rained like a bastard all morning.

But it completely dried up and the sun came out while we broke for lunch then, after weather’s version of a come hither smile, slammed the door shut in our faces and pissed it down again just as we stepped onto the killing fields for round 2.

Actually, I exaggerate, it relented somewhat and reverted instead to creating conditions (wrapped up in five layers of waterproof plastic) that made you feel like you were tramping the jungles of fucking Borneo, but up a mountainside; as indeed Lamlash Golf Club’s aspect is.

By the second hole we were sweating like a polythene bag of mushrooms left on the parcel shelf of a Ford Mondeo parked in the car park of a downtown Karachi mall in late July.

Needless to say this sick combination of relentless physical torture (did I say we were hauling our bags through two inches of fucking marshland for 8 hours?) and my aforementioned blind puppy clubbing resulted in a scorecard that would have made Brian Lara happy; but no other fucker.

Truly my game reeked of piss and ham.

Last.  In the morning. But, remarkably, third in the afternoon; only because Derek played like he’d had the will to live sucked out of him by God.

Which indeed he had.

And so to the final day and the chance to resurrect my self esteem.

The scene that met us was a sky that was absolutely fucking pissing down, blowing a gale and Blackwaterfoot Golf course looking like the fucking Somme in 1917.

The outcome?

“Fuck this.  Let’s go home.”

And so, for me, the comfort of a wooden spoon and the aptly named Jobby trophy.

For Ian and Graham, untold joy and respect as they jointly shoulder the 12 month burden of champion status.

Golf?

You can stick it up your arse.