As we gathered at Temple on Wednesday to play the final Eclectic League game which also happened to be the final game of the 2024/25 season, a small sub-group of the 3 aurally disadvantaged members were having a conversation about the daily living problems they faced. Amongst the several “pardons” and “sorry could you repeat that please” it appeared that the principal gist of their issues was that the general managers back home was inclined not to talk face-to-face to them but rather as they disappeared into the distance facing away, thereby ensuring that nothing that they said could be captured by the complex electronic devices substituting for their men’s ears. My personal take on this is that this problem applies to all men in that the general managers work on the principal that we never listen to what they say and have no powers of recall if we did happen to catch a snatch. This enables them to make frequent use of “I told you …………..” regardless of whether that was true or not.
Anyway that’s a bit of a digression and probably best kept to myself. By the time we reach the last Eclectic League game anybody with a reasonable chance of winning Marilyn is hoping against all of the odds to score a birdie or two or even convert a couple of 2-pointers into 3. Some of our number work on the basis that ignorance is bliss where this is concerned and just hope that during their round some happy co-incidences have occurred which result in an improvement to their overall score. Others, such as Alan and myself, come prepared with printouts showing their target holes. This has obviously worked well for Alan because he is a multiple winner of the Eclectic and even holds the record score at 59.
For my part, knowing that I needed to score 3 points on the 2nd, 8th and 9th led to my unbridled joy when I managed that on the 2nd but equally to unbridled dismay when I put my downhill tee-shot into the bunker on the right of the 8th hole, thereby destroying any chance of the 3 points, which was then followed by leaving my par putt on the 9th about 3 inches short of the hole. Up to that point I had been contributing heavily to the team score with a string of pars but after the 10th that all deserted me in the disappointment of failure.
My 2 team-mates, Nick and MikeW, were blissfully unaware of their target score-improvement holes and this should have led to happy stress-free high scoring. But this didn’t seem to work out either as, with the exception of the 7th where they both scored great 3-pointers, they produced a series of blobs with an amazing range of slices, tops and pulls mixed in with multiple shots in bunkers. Mike in particular seemed to seek out every bunker on the course – this may have been to practise his bunker shots because he certainly seemed to need some.
But of course even if golfing genius proved elusive we were able to adequately amuse ourselves with questions really only of interest to Ballbashers such as “In today’s money, how much did an LP cost in 1970?”. This was raised by Nick and the answer was apparently £32. Since that now buys a couple of packs of cigarettes, I suppose it means it was a bargain. That of course led onto obscure memories about the first vinyl records we had bought – in my case Connie Francis with Carolina Moon in about 1897.
Back in the clubhouse, as always medical matters were given an airing including the experiences of vertigo and labyrinthitis – the latter of which Alan fell prey to while trying to avoid a cocktail stirrer up his nose on a Virgin Atlantic flight. This is more serious than it sounds since the ability to resemble a whirling dervish while stripping the willow in Family gatherings was key to career progression. Nick tried to re-route the conversation with more LP talk but that left most members a tad baffled.
Before the scores were announced, we had talked about MikeS’s huge dominance of the BashCoin market with probably more than 3 times as many as his nearest rival – we can only attribute this to his early cot-based training by Owen Green. The team results added an other huge whack to his existing mountain – I will need to buy a new calculator to work out next year’s membership fees.
The team scores are calculated as the sum of the team’s 3 and 4-pointers divided by the numbers of players in the team.
Alan & MikeS 9.5 + 6 = 15.5 (clean sweep of the BashCoins)
MikeW, Nick & Richard 6 + 2 = 8
Bill, RobA & Roger 4 + 4 = 8
At the time of going to press the final Eclectic League scores were yet to be calculated – they will follow.
