I just received an email from Temple advising me that geofencing will be enabled for all buggies from now on – this technology, which sounds like something of Star Wars done with light sabres, disables the buggy should it wander too near any area on the golf course which has been geofenced off. The only way out is in reverse to the nearest bit of non-geofenced off land. The problem is that none of the geofenced land is marked in any way other than by invisible radio beams. I envisage a situation in which there will multiple buggies piloted by Ballbashers driving round backwards in circles trying to find their way out of something that they cannot see.
Buggy-riders will have to take emergency rations with them plus a tent and something to boil a kettle on – they may be gone some time. Assuming that, unlike Oates, they eventually find their way home, they will soon be seen driving round the entire course in reverse which hugely increases the likelihood that they will be driving over greens and tees despite the geo-fencing. Each buggy will need to be preceded by a man with a red flag or perhaps the clubs will be strapped to the front of the buggy and the co-pilot will stand on the rack at the back shouting instructions to the pilot, who will be endeavouring to remember to go left-hand down a bit when the co-pilot is talking about going right. It seems like there’s a new challenge for us maturing Ballbashers every week.
Last week the challenge was to keep the rain out and when some members’ raingear proved dismally incapable of living up to their marketing hype, there were some embarrassing sights to be seen which suggested incontinence was becoming another problem for us to grapple with. The result of all this was some heavy investment in new rain gear. Mike S has kitted himself out in a Sunderland jacket matched with Tommy Armour trousers. It got quite a good testing today but I forgot to ask him how dry he was kept – an update will follow next week to help others grappling with the same problem. Climate Change means the rain is here to stay – it might be warmer than before but there will be more of it.
Five out of the eight almost fit Ballbashers turned out to play today and it was Novelty time at Temple. Split into a 3-ball and a 2-ball, the best format to avoid the 3-ball complaining about handicap reductions, was the Choose Your Scores format whereby the 3-ball got to choose 15 scores on each 9 holes and the 2-ball chose 10 scores one each 9 holes with their final total scores being divided by 3 and 2 respectively.
The balls fell so that Alan joined buggy-riders MikeS and Bill to form the 3-ball and MikeW and I formed the 2-ball.
Although this format can be stressful when you are facing the choice of whether or not to include a 1-pointer in your score after it has become apparent that your team is not racking up lots of 3-pointers, if you are playing quite sell, it becomes easy. And that is what happened for MikeW and myself. We decided that our chances of making any kind of decent score on the 9th were slim to zero and therefore we had to have all 10 scores on the front 9 in the bag after we walked off the 8th green.
I went on a run of four 3-pointers in a row from the 5th and with MikeW also scoring one on the 7th we had 26 points in the bag for the front 9.
The back 9 was less of a success apart from the 15th where we scored 7 points between us courtesy of MikeW getting a 4 for 4 points to go with my 4 for 3. This 9 holes proved more difficult than the front 9 and we had to included both scores on the 18th – fortunately we got 5 points on that hole and we totalled 23.
When the 3-ball appeared in the bar, they launched into an argument that instead of dividing the total number of points by the number of players in the team, it would be fairer to multiply the total instead. Now it may some time since I got my GCE in Maths but even I could spot the flaw in this idea and, anyway, I had declared the format at the start and I was not in for changing my mind at this late stage.
Over tea and tea-cakes, the scores were revealed to be:
MikeS, Alan and Bill: 26 divided by 3 = 8.67 + 26 divided by 3 = 8.67 giving an overall total of 17.33
Richard and MikeW 26 divided by 2 = 13 + 23 divided by 2 = 11.5 giving an overall total of 24.5
Thereby all of the BashCoins for this opening game of the 2024/25 season went to MikeW and Richard.
This number 26 seems to be following us around at the moment – we had a whole load of them last week at Saunton and 3 more today.
