“Where is she?” I
demanded with a pianissimo petulant
note tiptoeing itself into my voice.
“She’s not playing today”
Gill answered back with a mezzo-piano
smattering of petulance in her reply.
“Shenanigans at Snape?” I
postulated, allowing a slight sforzando on
the last word to slide into our exchanges.
“Handel, Alexander’s Feast”
came the ringing rinforzando reply. “How did we get to be so orchestrated?”
Gill added.
Our exchanges on the
first tee would have been no ‘surprise symphony’ to Haydn but, as neither he
nor Sally was around to witness any of this concerted wit and we had a game of
golf to play, it made sense to stop our symposium now and get on with the job
in hand.
The triumvirate of Gill,
Sally and I was depleted today, for Sally had become erstwhile and abandoned us
and golf for the allure of the cathedral concert hall at Snape. Sally had gone culture vulture, leaving
us - dare I say the dreaded “plebs” word that Sir Bob Geldof’s friend Andrew
Mitchell categorically denies was ever on his lips? – behind as a mere two-pony
trick on the starting grid of our local golf course to carry on as best we
could. And carry on we did.
If we three queens of
golfing are asunder, those who remain are obliged to carry on regardless. There was a point in our career when we
tried to augment our numbers but when we put it out there, not a single
suitable soul, shockproof enough to withstand our witty wisdom and whimsical
wittering, was to be found - nor could we finger anybody capable enough of mixing
it large with our magnificent sense of the sublime and ridiculous and, most
importantly, of matching our standard of play. We expound the golfing aphorism #GoLow every time we play but
I’m very sure our result is more like #HowDidWeEndUp WithThatScore.
Sally, having sallied
forth to Snape, left me gyrating on the starting grid with Gill. Gill and giggling go hand in hand. I knew that from the off – not today’s
off but from the first time we met.
There I was, deep into the course on the sixteenth fairway, lodged in a
greenside bunker and busy testing the mettle of the handicap secretary who had
switched from a traditional scoring card and was now using a ream of paper and
the five-bar-gate tally system. At
last, she was getting a handle on my scoring.
The handicap secretary
had long abandoned the first requirement of any self-respecting golfer (see “What
a load of balls”) while I was committed to the execution of the second and
third requirement of any self-respecting golfer (see a load more of “What a
load of balls”). I was also busy
working on the fourth requirement of any self-respecting, which is encompassed
in the golfer’s immortal mantra “Keep your head down”.
Non-golfer, you need to
know: the importance of this mantra is biblical in its statement and application. Should the four horsemen of the
Apocalypse happenchance by in their fiercely primary colours or Richard III
rise from his Leicestershire car park burial ground and cartwheel down the
fairway with his courtiers in thrall or the lissome Victor Dubuisson glide by
with his beau visage et son derriére
soignée and proffer a “Bon jour, ca
va”, do not lift your head till you are almost tilted round full circle
from the force of your swing.
There is a technical term for all of this follow-through stuff but, being
the inept golfer that I am, it bypasses my solitary brain cell.
So picture the
scene. I’m head down in the sand,
Gill’s on the bank, the Handicap secretary is busy counting, and suddenly I see
a pair of eyes looking up at me.
Gill, by some sleight of body morphing known only to those who have
undertaken this position to kiss the Blarney Stone (Go on, google it. You’ll be amazed), was looking up into
my eyes. But I remained unswerving
in my application of the fourth requirement of any self-respecting golfer and
made a mental note that, if she ever chose to pack in her current career, she’d
make a great limbo dancer.
“I sent you a message”,
she said.
“That’s nice”, I replied
politely, swallowing sand, “but I never got it”.
“Must have sent it to…” Hang on a minute. Wwwwwwwhoa! Did I mention Victor Dubuisson? Did I mention the gorgeous Victor Dubuisson? Let me tell you if he swishes by, I
will be breaking all requirements of any self-respecting golfer – and that is
the naked truth.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, we were busy ascertaining that
Gill had sent that message to a wrong number.
“I never got that
message”, I said, ingesting another mouthful of flailed sand.
“I know that”, she
rallied, “because you didn’t reply”.
Fighting the urge to
state that I had a choice in not replying to unsolicited texts from randoms,
emptied of energy by the effort of increased peristalsis required to digest
builder’s sand, and secure in the knowledge that my mother had banged some
great manners into me which I could access under the most extreme of
circumstances, I said the only thing possible.
“Perhaps I should give
you my number” I grated between sand-gritted teeth.
And with that, she
pulled a blank sheet of paper and a glue pen out of her golf bag. As I dictated, she scrawled my number in glue across
the sheet.
“Keep playing”, she
cajoled as sand splattered in miscellaneous fashion across the page. Five minutes later, Gill shook the
loose sand off the sheet and my personal number appeared in all its sandblasted
glory. Never one to waste time on
dark clouds when you can find the silver lining, I knew that girl had got my
number in more ways than one. As
she walked away laughing, I knew she was on the friends list.
“Let’s just checked it’s
right”, I called after her.
“0751…….”, she called
back.
I’m not giving out this
number in public but, V-Dub, if you cartwheel by as a naked exception or a
knight in shining primaries, well, who knows?
http://www.aldeburgh.co.uk/
http://www.blarneycastle.ie/
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/11/27/andrew-mitchell-plebgate-judgement_n_6231956.html
@Vdubush
@BunkersParadise
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