Tall Pines Big Trees

And so to Tall Pines golf club on the outskirts of south Bristol, just a few yards from Bristol Airport.

So that was it: two hobbies – golf and plane spotting – in one afternoon.

Three fifty-somethings were never likely to set the world alight on the course today and so it proved.

Campbell and Swifty as I shall refer to them in order to preserve their anonymity joined me in a stableford competition which I don’t really understand. It involves getting points for scores – or in my case, no points for crap scores – and I lost money due to my consistent inability to hit the ball long and straight.

The name Tall Pines was certainly appropriate because, as Campbell had warned me, there were a lot of big trees around the course and sadly I became acquainted with a good few of them during the round. My recent rounds on ‘proper’ courses have had wide fairways which served to hide my ability to hook or slice the ball but Tall Pines, whilst hardly a narrow course, certainly exposed by lack of straight hitting.

If I hit a crap shot, I would lose it in the trees on one side or the other. If I hit a quite good one, I would catch the tree that was slightly off the middle of the fairway and the ball would scuttle off in the wrong direction or into the darker reaches of the course where it would never again be seen. It seemed very unfair to me.

But then, golf is 50% mental and 50% mental. All the basic physical components have to be in place, of course, but to actually play the game the head needs to be focussed and uncluttered. Now this is not a good description of my head!

The first two holes, both par 4s were safely navigated for bogey 5s which for a rank amateur like me is actually good. Already I was thinking in terms of a sub 100 round, maybe way below 100? Of course, reality soon set in and the single bogeys soon started to become triple bogeys and worse. Worse in the form of a bleeding 10, a couple of nines, eights and sevens and then, absurdly, a birdie two on a tricky par three which was worth a lot of points to me, though I don’t know quite how or why!.

My usual golf is actually on a much shorter par 3 course which means there is not a lot of smashing the ball with my driver and 3 wood, but on a proper course the big clubs are seldom in my bag so the potential for cock ups is much greater.

It’s also much more tiring and I can feel it tonight. By the 18th, whilst I wasn’t breathing heavily, my legs and arms were starting to ache and my golf got even worse, hitting a hybrid club straight into – yes, a fecking tree!

I enjoyed it a helluva lot. Good company, great laughs, pretty terrible golf followed by ice cold cider in the afternoon sun.

I’m not going to get much better at this great game, having started at it so late in life, but I am going to have a lot of fun trying.