Rainbow Over The 11th

Rainbow Over The 11th

I wouldn't say that golf has become more important to me than sex or money, but there are times when it comes very close. Look, Hemingway managed to make bullfighting interesting to the uninitiated so, as the saying goes, suspend your disbelief.

Golf at its best is a duel with the elements, whilst at the same time the player is at one with the elements. Today, for example, I was simultaneously caught in a howling gale on the 9th, pissed all over on the 10th, and sweating in a heatwave on the 11th. That's what caused the rainbow, of which more in a moment. I saw a family of coots cross the 11th, parents like a school crossing patrol, ushering the fledglings from one side of the fairway to the safety of the stream on the other side. I saw a falcon hang in the air and then silently dive to take its prey as I putted home for par on the 13th. Then on the 16th, I was surrounded by a swarm of around 100 swallows, hugging the contours of the fairway in low-slung swoops; gliding in search of flies, like water boatmen across a clear lake.

Oh, and I also got round the back 9 in a more-than respectable-but-not-exactly-Tiger-Woods score of 44, against a par of 37. I'm not shabby.

That's because I've put in the hard yards - hours and hours of socking it down the driving range in the wintertime; then tentative knocks from the ladies' tee to build my confidence in the spring. Then finally, when I got my new clubs (Ping G10s, natch), hammering it off the pro-tee with the best of them. It's a metaphor for my personal and intellectual development. I feel that at this stage of my life and career, I've done the work I need to do to get here - personally and professionally I'm on the pro-tee.

I almost always play alone - normally because I hate most of the white-van-men whose outsize egos are only matched by their outsize waistlines; not by their limited talent or technique. And judging by the lack of women on the course, that lack of technique is not limited to the golf course. I wonder what happens behind the bedroom doors of a thousand north-east golf widows. I really hope they're getting some from the milkman or the neighbour's teenage son.

So it's against this background that I stepped out today. It had been a hard day - in so much as I'd broken my holiday to dutifully go into work and collect latest performance results - which were an abberation. As I popped my head round the Director's door the senior managers sat in a disgruntled huddle - like grizzly bears, awoken from their winter slumber to find something has shat in their cave. I knew that next week I would pay.

I left as soon as I humanly could, and tried to reason why I still worked there at all. I couldn't find a reason - not even a lukewarm one.

I'm in the middle of a mid-life crisis. I don't even want to work. I want to write, take photographs, walk the earth, speak other languages, feel the sun on my back. I don't give a flying fuck about performance data or the corporate bottom line. I'm working in a metaphorical McDonalds. All that experience and training, and I'm serving people metaphorical burgers, so in turn they will be able to go forth into society and serve other people burgers.

So when I got to the 11th, away from all that, and looked back over the fairway from the green, I looked at that rainbow with renewed hope. Things do - and will - have a way of working out. I don't know how yet, but that rainbow reminded me that it just might be possible.