To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. …..

Charlie Chaplin – Final speech from The Great Dictator 

Which brings me nicely to Golf Clubs.

I love Golf, always have. Me and my mate Pete (yes the same one that ate my pies in Shouldn’t We all be Northerners), used to spend entire days on our local Golf course, a gorgeous little nine-holer in Rishton Lancs. We would set off in the morning, and just keep going around and around until we were hitting the ball into the dusk. You wouldn’t so much see your ball land as intuit the flight of the ball from the feeling on the clubhead, and then you’d walk the resulting line of the shot to hopefully find your ball somewhere out there in the dark.

We played enough, that we were both members. Pete’s dad Joe, a Spaniard, was a full member and was a regular player. You could generally tell his whereabouts on the course from the clouds of pipe-smoke that he left in his wake like some 19th-century steam train forging its way through the Northern countryside. That man had the slowest backswing I have ever seen though. By the time he had completed his backswing, you could have polished off two bacon-buts and a brew. His shot was generally followed immediately by the words

“Ach ach ah Caramaba, ach, ach, Madre mia vaya con Dios”

or

“Ach, ach, ach…bluddy bal…ach ach, Sevé would, ach ach, never have hit a bluddy shot like that”

or he might break into song…

“Ach, ach….like a breedge under troubled waters….ach, ach…”

“Ach” was Joe’s all-purpose filler. It was used in the same way as a rest is used in music or a half-halt in riding. It slowed things down whilst he picked the exactly correct phrase to convey his meaning. It appeared many times in every sentence. You got used to it. It made you a better person. More patient.

When I was a very young man I worked for a period as an apprentice mechanic at Joe’s garage (he owned a garage in Great Harwood). Joe took apprenticeship and learning seriously. You couldn’t just come in and do your hours and then go home. Joe would give out homework. On one occasion the homework was to learn by heart how the internal combustion engine worked and what the major components were in this process.

About a week after he gave out this homework, I had a question for Joe about this process. When I got into work, myself and Mario (the oldest young man I ever met), went in to the office to ask Joe this question.

“What’s the torque you should apply when tightening spark plugs Joe?”

…and then we waited. While we waited, this happened.

Ach, ach, ach….ach, ach”

Joe reached into his pocket and pulled out his leather tobacco pouch, his old metallic “mechanichy” looking pipe with a knobbled wooden bowl, and a set of keys.

Ach, ach….ach,ach”

Using one of the keys, he painstakingly and precisely scraped inside the bowl of the pipe to loosen the charcoal from his last smoke. It was a practised unthinking motion, and it filled another minute while we waited for the answer.

“Ach, ach, ach….”

He stretched the arm holding the pipe away from him and squinted so he could examine the pipe, and then scraped one more time to clear out the last remnants of the scorched tobacco before depositing the keys back whence they came.

“Ach, ach, ach”

A good 5 minutes had passed by now and unconsciously, we had all leant in toward Joe like bamboo in the wind, hardly breathing, waiting for the answer. Between work-hardened thumb and forefinger, Joe extracted a knob of tobacco big enough to fill the bowl of the pipe and pushed it in. He then reached into his oil-shiny, blue overall pocket again, producing a yellow box of Swan Vesta matches, and removed one match. He pulled his chin tightly into his chest and looked down at the pipe. Gently, he packed the tobacco deeper into the bowl using the square end of the match and part of his middle finger.

This was surely the moment we had been waiting for. His eyes turned up toward the office ceiling as if the answer to our question was somehow invisibly inscribed there. He struck the match against the coarse side of the match-box. His pipe and the box of Swan Vestas in his left hand and the lit match in his right, Joe brought the pipe up to his lips and the burning match above the bowl of the pipe where, for what seemed an eternity, he inexplicably hovered.

The air was still. Nobody was breathing now. Every eye in the room was focused intently on the flame as it crept down the length of the match toward Joe’s fingers. If the flame touched Joe’s fingers, the moment would be over and the question would be lost in time. It must be burning his fingers now. So close. So, so close. As the flame began to burn his fingers, Joe shook the match, extinguishing the flame and said…

“Ach, ach…ach”

…before taking out and lighting another match. Our incredulous eyes followed the minutiae of every movement but this time, he hesitated for only a second before dipping the lit head of the match close to the tobacco whereupon he commenced a deep sucking on the pipe. He drew the combustible mixture of heat and oxygen down into the tobacco time and time again; each inward bellow-like breath encouraging the tobacco to take. He wasn’t lighting a pipe, he was performing a ceremony and we were hypnotised by it.

Joe’s head had disappeared. For every inward breath, there was a breath out and with each outward breath, a cloud of tobacco smoke would pour out of the side of his mouth until his head was literally invisible. The pipe was finally lit. The complex smell of pipe tobacco filled the little office and to this day, if I ever catch a whiff, I am back in that office again.

Joe took a pull on his pipe and inhaled the smoke. That doesn’t do justice to it; not at all. Joe sucked on his pipe as if it was the last breath of oxygen in a scuba tank, and he was one hundred and fifty meters down with an anchor chained to his ankle. Having pulled on the pipe, his inhale of its product was like a blue whale getting ready to dive. Then he held it. FOREVER!

If Joe had emerged from the smoke sporting horns, a pitchfork and a pointy tail, NONE of us would have been surprised! When the smoke finally did begin to clear, Joe blinked twice, and with tears streaming down his face, said…

“Ach, ach, ach……I dunno”

EH?

WASSAT?

Anyhoo, that’s by the by and a tiny tad off topic.

Rishton Golf Club was years ahead of the times. Even as a small child I can still remember that we had women members. Not only were they members, but they were allowed out on the course every now and then too! To play golf! They even had their own little room at the end of the Club House with a portable heater. Here, they would gather for a glass of sherry and a good gossip about Perry Como, while knitting golf pullovers for their enlightened husbands who at that moment were sinking pints and talking serious business in the cosy glow of the men’s bar next door.

If you think about it, it was a stroke of genius to let women be members. This way, the menfolk could retire to the 19th green (that’s what we golfers call the bar….hehe), and not have to worry about trying to get behind the steering wheel when he was drunk later in the evening. The little woman would be soberly waiting for her man to wobble out of the clubhouse so she could prop-him up and help him to the car. Once there she would pour him into the driver’s seat before climbing into the seatbelt-less passenger seat.

“Why didn’t the women just drive home Creasy? Surely that would have been safer?

Lol! hehe….hahahahahahah…

Oh God, I can’t breathe….hehe…hehe. That’s good, oh dear…hehe. You’ll be suggesting they should all go out and vote, or go to work next….hehe

hehe…hehe….ahem

No seriously, because it’s obviously a very serious matter. You can’t just go about letting women operate dangerous machinery. Why do you think there are no women drivers in F1? Well, for one thing, there is no central mirror in an F1 car so how would they do their makeup? Also, could you imagine trying to drive with a drunken lech in the passenger seat? No, much better, safer and prettier in the ole passenger seat.

Thank goodness all that has changed now! Only last year (2019) Muirfield’s (male) members all voted to allow women to become members. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that the R&A banned them from hosting the Open and them losing the hefty revenues therefrom, when the membership turned down women members in 2016. I’m telling you, the world’s a changed place.

I love golf. I do. It’s actually the best game on the planet. It is challenging (try a round at Southerness in winter if you don’t believe me), precise, rewarding and yet the most frustrating and heart attack inducing pastime of all time. It’s a game you can play on your own, or with a group of people, in amazing natural settings and is usually the prologue to a great day. I would recommend golf to everyone.

It’s the “members” who play the game I can’t stand. A more egotistical, mealy-mouthed, misogynistic, snobby-incompetent-middle-managerish, little Hitler group of Jaguar driving, bureaucratic, committee-sitting no-hopers you will never find.

And this brings me to the throbbing little nub of this story.

Remember the lockdown back in the Summer? Course you do. When everything closed down and everything went quiet? I think many of us will remember that time as a time of renewal, not just as a time when a killer pandemic raged across the world. It felt like the world was taking a break from us.

Well, during that time, one of my favourite things to do was to go out with my Wife, my Daughter and our dog Bob. Bob is the wee black smudge in the picture opposite darting off toward that little flat patch of grass below that amazing sunset. That’s the 12th green of our local golf course. I think I mentioned in Shouldn’t We Listen, that this golf course is just across the fields opposite our house and through a narrow, but beautiful strip of woods beyond the fields.

During the lockdown, the golf courses closed. A little at a time, some of us started poking our noses out beyond the woods and looking cautiously up and down the fairways of this golf course like the apes in 2001 approaching the monolith for the first time.

Gradually, as we realised the there was no threat present, we became more confident and stepped out from the woods into the rough (You have to imagine the theme music from 2001 about now “dah, dah…daaaahh……Tadahh! Dum, dum, dum, dum……dah, dah….daaaaaaah……….TADAAAAGH!”)

Before you know it we are striding up the middle of the fairways, laughing children scurrying about as if they have just landed in a strange new paradise, and yapping dogs with smiley faces chasing balls! It was a happy time! A time without worry or stress! A time of FREEDOM!

“Is that a golf club in your hand or are you just pleased to see me?”

My son TJ, made light paintings with my daughter Lu for his End of Year Show at Lancaster University. The one below was made on the rear side of a pretty nasty little sand trap.

It was never a crowd of people. Just a few people in the know who had found their way across the forbidden zone and happened across the natural, albeit perfectly mown wilderness, that lay beyond. There were a few plonkers, there always are. A few kids riding around on their bikes. A few teenagers down on the 9th having a few beers and a bit of a fumble on a summer evening, but nothing outrageous and no damage being done. No vandalism. I walked the length and breadth of that course during the Lockdown, and it was as pristine on the day the course opened again, as it had been on the day it closed.

The lockdown ended.

Soon, ageing tartan-clad hackers were once again hobbling up and down causing more damage in a single round of golf than any of the lockdown ramblers, dog walkers and glue sniffers had in four months. We all recognised that the good times were over and that we could no longer just wander around the golf course freely anymore. We confined ourselves to the edge of the treeline like trolls in the shadows.

One morning a couple of months later, I came to the field to walk Bob like normal and found myself confused, horrified and outraged all at the same time. Bob was nonplussed too!

The opening to our field was barred! The field we had been walking in for the last 12 years! Mine and Bobby’s field! Well he’s only two and a half but I had been walking there for 12 years. A silver gate had been erected with chains and padlocks. It was almost as if whoever put this gate up didn’t want people entering the field!

“Not a problem”

…says I. I’ll just walk down the path to the next gate and go in there.

“WTF?”

I exclaim at the next gate, which had now been adorned with a brand new heavy-duty padlock which is also clearly locked! No flies on me, I determine to follow this thread of clues to its ultimate end, because something was definitely going on here that was different to the day before.

Other equally confused ramblers from the community were stumbling about bumping into the gates wondering how to gain entrance to the field to walk their querulous hounds, who were now hopping about, yawning stressfully because they needed to take a dump in the farmer’s field.

“I know, I’ll bypass the gates by walking up the path through the woods that border the Golf Course, and I will be able to get into the field at the top”

Like the Fox.

I head down and walk into the woods, and find the path that runs the length of the wood alongside the golf course and the field. After about 100 yards the path cuts in toward the golf course. Bob is leaping and bounding through the undergrowth ahead of me. The squirrels are out. I smile. I love to see him gambling through the undergrowth like this.

Suddenly Bob stops. Like a statue, he is looking straight ahead with one paw curled under him, hanging in the air. A low growl is rumbling in his chest

“What is it Bobzu?”

I whisper. Sinking to one knee next to Bob, I lay a calming hand on his back and through squinted eyes I peer through the trees, silently trying to spot what he has seen. Maybe a deer? I’ve seen them down here before. A Rabbit? millions of ’em around here. It can’t be though. If it was a bunny or a deer Bob would have been off after them in a flash. He’s a lethal hunter after all.

As my breathing settles, I think I spy something in amongst the trees.

“What is that Bob?”

“Grrrrrr”

Whatever it is, he hasn’t seen before. Rising to a low crouch, I creep forward slowly with Bob at my side, low to the ground like he is stalking prey. Step by step we move together, like sha-A-dows amongst the trees until…

“YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKIN’ KIDDIN’ ME!”

It can’t be. Really? REALLY? It has to be a joke of some kind. Who would do such a thing? But there it is. It’s as real as the nose on Bob’s face and as permanent as the pyramids.

There in front of us is the unimaginable; the unthinkable. So new it was still gleaming. British racing green so that it would camouflage with the trees, and because it gave it a military effect. A green, metallic, threatening monstrosity that cut through the forest like an axe. My heart sank and I fell to my knees in front of it and held my head in my hands. I’m not too proud to admit that a single tear made it’s way down my handsome face, getting stuck in the designer stubble on my square chin.

The Golf Club had only gone and erected a fence along the entirety of its western border. Not an ordinary fence either. This fence would not look out of place in Berlin or Palestine. I’d include the border between the US and Mexico but, honestly what a waste of time. That “non-fence” is way less impressive than this thing. If this thing was along the border of the US and Mexico, the Mexicans would take one look and say

“Oooooh….thees senor Trump must be a mighty and eeempressive hombre…I not heven gonna try to cross theees huge eerecshon”

No, Trumps erections are way, way….way, less impressive than this.

The top of the fence was jagged and sharp. Not one spike mind, three spikes per pole, two of which were bent at angles to inflict the greatest injury should a peasant member of the community attempt to climb over. This thing must have emptied the club coffers. I reckon there is a good £50,000 – £75,000 of fencing here.

But here’s the thing. The thing that gets in your craw and just chews away until you ain’t got no craw leyft Peggy-Sue.

Why had they built the fence?

“I dunno Creasy, why?”

It was rhetorical. You don’t have to try and answer every question I pose. I’ll tell you why they didn’t build this fence first though. They didn’t build it to keep us out. If they had, it was an exercise in futility.

Anyway secondly, there is a public pathway that goes through the golf course which means that they had no choice but to make a gate in the fence that is open 24 hours a day so that we, the peasants people, can ignore the fence entirely and walk across, and all over, the course. After 6:00 pm at night and before 7:00 am in the morning, I can tell you for a fact that there is nobody around, so you can have your Bobbies gamble all over the place without leads and without interruption until you see the first pensioner golfer wobbling from rough to rough toward you.

So why go to all the trouble of destroying this unspoiled little woods then?

Because, it’s a long, green, spiky and spiteful message and the message says…

“We spend five thousand quid a year to be able to exclusively walk about on this grass, tearing up the turf with entirely the wrong club for the shot, and if you think we are going to stand by and do nothing while you bloody plebs turn it into a ramblers club or a place for your bloody dogs to take a dump every morning, you’ve got another thing coming”

And the “other thing coming” was the spiteful fence. Designed only to ruin a good walk, ironically what golfers say about a round of golf. Well, Mr Captain, I’m here to tell you that a) the foxes and the badgers use the bathroom way earlier than us and b) Bobby wouldn’t lower himself to take a dump on your fairways (although I am trying to train him to take one on, and through, your fence).

Fences don’t last though. Everyone knows that. No matter how tall or how strong you build them, eventually they come tumbling down. Walking through the woods, I noticed that all the trees along both sides of the fence bend inward toward the fence. This is unusual as the trees would normally bend according to the prevailing wind. It’s as if they have already started their offensive against this gaping wound. Imagine our glee when we came across one large tree that had already fallen and crushed a section of the fence. Right next to it was another tree that was only inches from the top of the fence. One good puff during the winter and I reckon that will come down too, crushing the fence low enough for the combined, and by now rabid, ranks of ramblers and dog walkers to storm the course like the zombies in World War Z only stopping to call…

This fence is a microcosmic metaphor for humanity’s world view. Everything is ours. Nature always comes second. Poorer is lesser. Wealthier always wins. Sharing doesn’t work. It’s time humanity woke up to the fact that we are temporal whilst nature is eternal.

Sharing that Golf Course during the lockdown, was an unwitting act of kindness to the community. Peaceful morning and evening walks through a tranquil green setting, was a source of comfort when everything else in the world was worrying or upsetting. The community gave it back in the same condition it found it and went back to walking in the nearby fields when the lockdown finished. In a single act of spiteful, petty-minded revenge and pride, the Golf club reminded us that actually nothing had changed. We could still expect and rely upon the dribbling colostomy bags who make up the membership of institutions like golf clubs, to convene their horrid little committees to consider how best to dole out their little portions of incivility and misery.

I’m not bitter though; no I’m not.