I don’t know about you but when I collect my monthly bag of pills at the chemist, I am always amazed at how many bags of pills there are waiting collection while the production line of pill packing is going full tilt in the background. I have attempted to find out how many prescriptions they dispense per day but the closest to an answer that I have got is several hundred. From what I know of the pill consumption of the Ballbashers, I am guessing where 16 bags of multi-coloured and excitingly flavoured pills per month are headed – the lads in the lab at GSK must be really pleased that we are out there presenting them with yet more exciting challenges in keeping aging golfers out on the course.
But whatever the number we consume, it is clearly not currently sufficient. Today only 3 BBs made it to the starting line for the first summer league game of 2024 and, out of those, only 2 made it to the finish – MikeW and myself – and I have to report that I was so knackered after the game, I allowed myself to doubt the common sense of playing in the conditions we faced today.
On the practice green at the start, the 3 of us, the 3rd being Mike S, remarked on how pleasant it was and what a nice change to have no rain. The practice green was running so fast and true that it felt just like the start of summer. On the practice green I managed to fine tune my putting to take account of the high speed and was leaving all distances of putts stone-dead. I would dearly love to know what happens between that point and the first tee or more correctly the first green – I started to whack the putts miles past the holes. MikeW very helpfully pointed out on the 18th green when I at last left a putt short of the hole that I seemed to have finally sorted out the pace.
Perhaps the real cause of my post-game exhaustion was the mental stress that I was putting myself through on every green trying to sink recovery putts from anywhere between 4 and 10 feet. MikeS was having a different problem – he could n’t sink anything from 6 inches outside the gimme distance so even though his approach putts were far better than mine, his conversion rate was far worse. Perhaps it was not just the very wet rain which caught us later but the mental anguish he was being put through that caused Mike to abandon play after 13 holes – there’s only so much that a chap can take!
We all hit splendid drives on the 1st and buoyed by this start determined that we could play the game after all. However I had no idea where my drive had gone on the 2nd and we fanned out across the countryside in search-party mode and Mike found my ball halfway to Maidenhead from where I failed to achieve a single point and realised that the positive thoughts on the first hole were no more than a foolish pipe-dream.
I don’t think that we had ever seen Temple quite so wet in the places where it gets wet – landing from a great height onto the downhill 8th green, my ball dug a hole about 6 inches deep and stopped dead. There was no run at all to speak of which obviously contributed to the feeling of hard work. As soon as they come up with a tee position 50 yards shorter than the red tees and thereby not having the connotations of being the Ladies Tee whatever English Golf say, then I think we should switch to them specially in the winter. They could be called the Septuagenarian Tees – perhaps Old Fogeys Tees would roll of the tongue easier.
A run of some good play got MikeW and myself to the halfway point on 19 points each with MikeS unusually back on 13. MikeW, who monitors these things, reckoned that the number of “Oh S**ts” was running at a rate approaching once per hole. At this point the fine drizzle set in and gradually increased in volume until the 13th saw the 2 Mikes hopping around in a demented rain dance trying to get their waterproof trousers on. I had taken the more pessimistic decision to put them on before we started – I have a fear of over-balancing while hopping around and being unable to raise myself out of the mud with 2 legs in the same trouser leg. MikeS decided that enough was enough and set off home while MikeW and I continued to the end.
We were joined in the clubhouse for lunch by PeterR and Bill. After some of the usual medical chat, this time about Lynne’s cataract operation which seems to have gone well so far, the talk moved to Boeing’s quality control problems in which Peter produced so many personally experienced anecdotes about safety issues with Boeing planes, that we all instantly became committed Airbus flyers – the piece de resistance being the discovery during a thorough maintenance check, that the controls to fire the fire extinguishers into the engines had been attached the wrong round on a 757 – if the warning light warned the pilot that the left engine was on fire and he operated the left engine fire extinguisher control, then the result would have been that the right engine would have been incapacitated much to the pilot’s confusion. We went home much encouraged in our travel plans.
The league results were:
MikeW 19 + 15 = 34
Richard 19 + 13 = 32
MikeS 13 + 6 =19 (2/3rds of a round)
