Today highlighted the differences in the views held by sundry Ballbashers on the delights to be found in Nature’s bounty. Whereas JohnS smacked his ball into a beautiful patch of meadow-sweet, tumbling-jack-in-the-box and wild orchids and decided not to wade into the wild flowers for fear of causing damage to the Temple habitat, enjoying as he does such beauty. Clearly of a different persuasion when it comes to saving the planet, MikeW had a giant whinge at Stuart adjacent to the 6th Fairway for his failure to get the daisies cut to a sub-5mm height. Given that Mike is the tallest Ballbasher, you might have thought that he could have been a bit more sensitive about the problems faced by the shorter members of our group trying to see over the top of the dandelions.
From a personal point of view, I must own up to the fact that when my ball fell into a thick patch of nettles next-door to the 7th green, I had no compunction about laying about me with my best sand wedge whatever long term effect it might have had on the availability of food-stuff for the greater-spotted, orange-tailed, rambler moth.
Whingeing was in the air from the get-go when Alan remarked on/commented on/insinuated that it was strange that the 3-balls seem to have been selected so as to put the 3 golfers with the lowest handicaps into the same group. As the person throwing the 9 balls in the air and then selecting the 3-balls based on the adjacency of the balls on the ground, I would counter this assertion of manipulation with the observation that even the great Enrico Castelli, who could juggle half a dozen kitchen sinks at the same time, would be hard pushed to throw 9 balls into the air so that they landed in a required pattern. Besides which, there has never been a moment in BB golf when lowest handicaps had anything to do with outcomes. To avoid any future concern about the PC nature of the throw-up, we will democratize the resultant selection of teams.
It is fair to say that the grass was very long apart from on the greens. There were many situations in which that famous tribe in the Congo might have given up trying to work out where they were. Stuart was bypassing this problem by smacking his drives miles down the middle of the fairway which lessened the risk of visiting the papaya grass. I took the approach of mis-hitting most of my fairway woods so they never got off the ground and never got too far ahead so as to be out of sight. On the Par 5 4th I found that my strategy had the unbeneficial result of my 4th shot coming to rest in the bunker on the left-hand side and I had still not caught up with Stuart’s drive.
The 3rd member of our team was MikeS and he was hitting his drives the sort of distance that nobody with 2 metal knees has any right to do. Whether or not there is some kind of mechanical connection , I know not, but he was also despatching his wedges a similar distance using the well-known thinning technique. The totally erratic nature of our golf resulted in totally erratic team scores. On a couple of holes we all got 3 points which was a bit stupid when you are choosing the best 2 out of 3 and we counter-balanced this by all scoring 1 point on a couple of other holes. To be fair, we never all scored zero on a hole and that probably contributed to our partial success.
The weather was warm and sunny when we set off but, as is the way of our current Spring, it turned into being warm and very wet from time-to-time. Strange to say, none of the BBs had a post-match whinge about the rain, they were probably so busy looking for their balls in the jungle, that they never noticed that it was raining.
Ashley turned up for lunch and was able to give us the surgical details of his finger knuckle replacement op. He had been offered a local anaesthetic and a ring-side seat but wisely refused on the grounds that he had no desire to see his finger totally dismantled into it’s component parts however skilled the knife-man. Given that it took over 2 hours, one’s interest would have probably wavered despite the self-interest. Anyway he was cheerful about the progress and looking forward to seeing his finger bend again. I just hope that they did n’t fit the new knuckle the wrong way up.
We did of course discuss that event that happened over the weekend and everyone seemed to have enjoyed the local Sunday entertainments but were somewhat unsure that the Saturday event projected the UK as a bang-up-to-date country with a modern democracy with equal rights for everyone, but we are good at fancy-dress for what that’s worth.
Team scores were:
Stuart, MikeS and Richard 35 + 36 = 71
Alan, RobA and JohnS 37 + 26 = 63
MikeW, Nick and JohnT 32 + 32 = 64
Individual league scores were:
Stuart (34), Richard (30), Nick (29), MikeS & JohnS (28), MikeW (27), Rob (26), Alan (21) and JohnT (20)
