I have been very quiet lately on the blogging front. Been engrossed in keeping my head down in true golfer’s fashion and getting to grips with course management – whatever that is. I have also been very busy – but not on the golf course. It seems I don’t actually need to have a golf course at my disposal to cause mayhem and madness. Take my recent trip to Waitrose, my favourite food hall, café, and watering hole. I shop there daily. I’m in the checkout queue, lunchtime food needs paying for. Tummy rumbling. Great new leather in-your-face-cerise-pink tote bag in hand. Purse is hiding in the unyielding deepest recesses of this bag and I tip out its contents in my haste not to delay the hungry midday queue. Make-up bag, notebooks, newspaper, dental care bag (I am known to Guy’s and St Thomas’ – go look it up), more notebooks (I am a consummate maker of lists), cardiology mags (serious read), nano i-pod, and… And an item of underwear very dear to one, Bridget Jones, which I would rather not have to mention. I am now more cerise than my giant pink handbag while the queue falls about laughing at my underwear foray in fifty shades of embarrassment.
I visit there daily still but I’m the customer wearing a brown paper bag on my head.
But now I am back and I have something to say about golf. In fact, it’s a bit of a gripe. The Open: it is almost upon us. That’ll be THE Open. It does not need an appendage adjective to describe or prefix it. It is not The British Open or The UK Open or The Great Britain Open.
Like Wimbledon and The Masters, it stands alone.
Naked.
No qualifier needed.
The Open is the first; it is iconic; it is the prototype and stereotype; it is sacrosanct. Since the 17 October, 1860 at Prestwick, Scotland, it has been just that. All else is follow-on, copy, or replica. Most importantly, it is this side of the pond and we love it. And we love its name, undiluted and unadulterated.
Say after me: The Open. Well done. Now go to the top of the class. You can add prefixes and suffixes ad infinitum to anything you like under the sun but leave those two words alone when you refer to what happens with a certain Claret Jug in this part of my back yard but once a year.
Now I take the Fifth Amendment before me and my paper bag head make the next statement. A straw poll vote tells me that Uncle Sam might just be the greatest offender. You stole our football and gave it back to us as soccer. You stole our Open and gave it back to us as The British Open. Lehman Brothers stole our money but, come to think about it, they still haven’t given it back. Will they ever? Will they heck as like!
But we have not complained. The British stiff upper lip has taken the slight on the chin in bulldog style but as I’m neither stiff, upper, British, or gifted with a chiselled chin – but most certainly lippy - I thought I would put it out there for comment. Hit me with it. Am I the new Luddite in golf or do I have a creditable point?
Well, now that I have burnt my boats and bridges, cooked my goose, gone the whole hog and nailed my colours to the mast with a swathe of America, I might as well finish it off with the proverbial and entire nine yards and get the rest off my chest. Dare I mention The Ryder Cup? That’s The Samuel Ryder Cup we have won for a bit of a time and a season over here. I have had the great and good pleasure of watching live coverage of this event with an American audience in Scotland. That’s when I first learnt that Americans are known as Americans but Europeans are Euros. Really!!?
Not
on my watch. For the uninitiated, the I-don't-know brigade and the plain
I-don't give-a-fig band, the euro is the official currency of the Euro-zone. That’s
it. It equals approximately seventy pence of the pound sterling. That’s
all. Certain Europeans don’t even subscribe to that currency and
none of us are any too enamoured with that monetary gem at this moment in time,
given that Greece is on the slippery slope to perdition and leaking euros
quicker than water through a sieve, the IMF is clamouring for fiscal union -
with the UK in full-on resistance mode to an emergency bail-out contribution of
some £850 million – and Angela and Wolfgang are diktat-ing the sale of the
Greek Islands. There we have it: proof that money is the root of all
evil and it comes most predominantly in the shape of a euro. Meanwhile,
we natives of this corner of the world stay in the shape of – say it after me -
Europeans. Well done again.
Now, David Cameron, Alexis Tsipras, Angela Merkel, and Wolfgang Shauble, gather round in a “Grexit” huddle if you please. I know you’ve been in meltdown melodramatic negotiations of late but, sometimes, you have to stand back and look at the bigger picture, the panoramic view. You have all been leaning in (someone wrote a book about that lately; Angela, please note). I need you to lean out - as far as the Duveen Gallery in the British Museum and a certain set of Classical Greek marble sculptures. Stick with me here. I haven’t lost my marbles but Greece has – in the form of the Elgin Marbles. Let’s put aside Thomas Bruce, his controversial permit from the Sublime Porte, and give the people of Greece back their Acropolis sculptures. It’s time to part with those Parthenon pieces for pity’s sake, and the sake of a bankrupt country that has given us the birthplace of Western civilisation, the square on the hypotenuse, half the roots of our English language, a screw to make water flow uphill, a shipping magnate with a penchant for familial Greek tragedy and espoused to a former First Lady, the all singing Nana Mouskouri and kaftan-touting Demis Roussos. What more do you need? Hand them back enterprising Earl Elgin’s loot and let them use those priceless sculptures as debt collateral or sell them to the highest bidder.
That’s my bit done for world peace and entente cordiale but I suspect my American family and friends will be divorcing me.
Aw-shucks!
.
