Trick or Treat. How scary! The Masters of the European Universe have given us until Hallowe’en to decide whether we want to be members of their Club or not. Whether to be In or Out, or half in or partly out. For a nation that loves cricket how can we be so indecisive! I have quite a lot of German blood flowing through my veins and a small amount of French blood, but today I am feeling distinctly Anglo Saxon. I woke up this morning trying to remember how many times in my life I had made a complete fool of myself. I lost count after one hundred, but I’m disappointed that at my age I continue to make rookie errors. Still, life goes on and it’s time to embrace the future. I’m talking at both a personal and national level. As a country, the future is bleak if we’re still talking about Brexit in six months or a year’s time. I hate to say it, but I do now think that the only solution is a second referendum and may it happen quickly.

M is an important letter this morning. Merkel, Macron and May. Masters, McIlroy and Magnolia Lane. The politicians can take a back seat for now. For the next four days it’s all about Augusta National and who will don the revered and much treasured Green Jacket on Sunday Evening. There are two ways you can gain one of these particular sartorial items and neither is easy. The first is by being someone so important or unbelievably wealthy, or both, that the select few who are already members of one of the world’s most exclusive clubs invite you to join them behind the high walls and locked gates of Bobby Jones’s creation just off the dismally ugly Washington Road in Augusta. That’s the easier way. Much harder is to play in The Masters (pronounced like a bleating sheep, not like a teacher in a British Public School) and emerge triumphant after four days of mind-bending torture and unimaginable pressure. Only four Britons in history have achieved this remarkable feat, albeit Sir Nick Faldo did it three times. It’s a fair bet that Rory McIlroy will be on his knee in front of HM before Hallowe’en if he sinks the winning putt this week to complete a career Grand Slam of the Majors and that will very definitely be a treat without any trickery. Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods; the five men who have won all four of golf’s major championships at least once. In Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods’ case they have done it three times. But there is a long list of extremely talented champions who don’t own a green jacket. Names such as Lee Trevino, Johnny Miller, Nick Price, Ernie Els and Greg Norman all spring immediately to mind, to name but a few. Great champions all, who nonetheless aren’t permitted into that Locker Room on the first floor of the beautifully understated Augusta National Clubhouse that is reserved exclusively for Masters’ Champions. I have been lucky enough to stick my head around the door, but I never dared put a foot over the threshold. Even had I been invited in, it just wouldn’t have been right. It’s a privilege you have to earn. The question on every golf fan’s lips this morning is who will be entitled to hang his shiny new jacket in there. Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson played together in the fun par 3 competition yesterday. Interviewed on Sky TV all three thought that McIlroy would banish his Augusta demons and reign supreme. Of course it might not be a new boy. It could be a repeat winner like Jordan Spieth or Bubba Watson or the defending champion Patrick Reed. So often the Masters has thrown up a surprise winner. When Jose Maria Olazabal won for the second time he went there in hopeless form apparently without a chance. Ben Crenshaw won having just attended the funeral of his long time coach and mentor Harvey Penick. He hadn’t even been on his mother’s lips. There’s just something about that unique place that encourages extraordinary deeds, both positive and negative. The list of men who have been scarred for life after stumbling and falling with victory in sight is legion. Greg Norman’s capitulation to Nick Faldo in 1996 is perhaps the most famous of all.  With a six shot lead, Norman shot a final round 76 to Faldo’s 67. I interviewed him in the immediate aftermath for BBC Radio and he was the most gracious and gentlemanly loser it’s possible to imagine, but inside he was churning like the fires of hell. For a man who has achieved so much in the game and in life it must be an arrow that pierces his heart almost daily and certainly in early April every year.

Rory McIlroy is in great form and has the game, but he’s blown a four shot lead in the final round before and he has an enormous mental hurdle to overcome. Jack Nicklaus said in a post Masters press conference just after Tiger Woods had won his first Green Jacket way back in 1997 that he expected the American prodigy to win more times than Arnold Palmer and himself combined. They won ten and Woods only has four, (only!) so that’s one prediction that won’t come true, but what a story it would be if Tiger did it again. He’s made a fool of himself plenty of times in his fabled career, but there’d be no jester’s hat to go with the jacket if he makes it five and his first since 2005.

Whoever it is won’t be the Master of the Universe, but they’ll probably feel like it!

2FE

 

 

 

Where has the last week gone? Apologies for my silence. I claim school holidays and the Fifth Amendment.

Friendship. Ten letters that make up perhaps one of the most important words in the English language. I suppose water qualifies as quite important too and food is reasonably essential, but without friends most of us are barren. The true friendless loner is a rare animal and generally either somebody to be hugely pitied or someone to be concerned about and quite possibly frightened of.

Without plumbing the depths of philosophy and psychiatry, hopefully that brief paragraph won’t create too many opponents to the basic principle that we all need friends. The question then is how do we find them and perhaps more importantly having found them, how do we keep them. A correspondent reminded me the other day of the fact that friendship is very definitely a two way street and something that requires effort and interest from both sides. Even the oldest friendships can wither and die on the vine if not tended and watered on a fairly regular basis. I sometimes wonder whether modern communications have made this easier or harder? Our Victorian forebears had to rely either on the postal service or a visiting card and afternoon tea with crust-free cucumber sandwiches and a delicious slice of home-made sponge. I don’t know about you, but I love afternoon tea! The Telegram sped things up somewhat but was by definition limited. It was the landline telephone that transformed the ease with which we could check up on compatriots and indeed many housebound folk in particular would spend ages on Alexander Graham Bell’s invention, never mind the teenage daughters who could somehow find something new and interesting to say for interminable hours. (As a historical note there are apparently at least three others who can claim to be the original inventor of the telephone, notably an Italian, Antonio Meucci, who does appear to have invented a working phone before Bell but couldn’t afford to patent it and died penniless. As they say in South Africa, “shame”).

But it was the arrival of the mobile phone and then the internet that have totally transformed the way that we interact and stay in touch. I remember working for a small division of BT in 1986 that required me to carry something the size of a household brick to stay in touch as I travelled around Britain. It was basically designed for the car but could be carried around, provided you had been doing sufficient reps in the gym. It was staggering, though, how quickly that morphed into a small, pocket-sized handset with a national cellular network that permitted instant verbal communication 24/7…..unless you were in the Scottish Highlands…..or on Dartmoor….or my peaceful little village in Wiltshire, all of five miles from the bustling metropolis of Bath. Anyway I digress. Before we knew it, it was possible to write via email, sms, What’s App, Twitter and interminable other methods that would appear instantly in your “friend’s” inbox and elicit an equally instant response, assuming said friend could be bothered to reply. I love the fact that I can ring up and talk to a friend anytime I like. Talking, (i.e. using one’s voice) is a time -honoured means of passing on one’s thoughts in a way that is easily understood by the recipient. Generally, when doing it face to face there is little room for confusion, although even then we sometimes get things hopelessly wrong. On the phone, I suppose there is greater room for misinterpretation, although personally it’s a medium I love and I reckon you normally get a pretty good idea from someone’s tone as to whether they’re with you or heartily pissed off and about to slam the phone down, metaphorically speaking. But when you remove the audio bit and rely on the written word, all those subtle nuances that have been an essential part of human life for thousands of years are suddenly missing. Now we have to try and interpret what the sender really means. Are they being cryptic, or cynical, or funny, sarcastic, ironic or genuine. Is that snide comment an attempt at harmless humour or really intended to puncture our delicate hide. Emojis and XXX can help but even they can mislead. Isn’t it extraordinary how the person with whom one is totally at home in person and perhaps even in love with, can almost become a stranger on the other side of a screen? It would be intriguing to know how many friendships and romances, have stumbled on the cobblestones of misunderstood rhetoric. I know from personal experience that these supposedly innocuous and even loving scribblings can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences. It’s so hard to transmit an emotion in writing and it can be so easily misinterpreted. I fear this is often exaggerated by the instantaneous nature of modern communication. Generally, I like to write at length, if I’m going to write at all, but too often the recipient doesn’t have the time, or privacy, or perhaps even the inclination, to write anything meaningful in response. To be fair, it’s so easy to become infatuated with the phone that one pings off a steady stream of trivia, when one should be concentrating on the housework, or completing the VAT return, or playing cards with the children, or…….you get the point. I’d love to make a resolution to abandon email, sms, What’s App etc and revert to just phoning people or indeed putting quill to parchment in the old-fashioned way. A colleague of mine, the golf commentator Ken Brown, has done this very successfully for many years and whilst it can be annoying at times, I think it’s also hugely admirable.

There is so much in the press these days about the evils of social media and particularly in education circles it’s very apparent that it can be extremely malevolent and a thoroughly undesirable aspect of a teenager’s life. I suppose its impossible to turn the clock back but I noticed the other day that even the inventor of the internet was postulating as to whether he had uncaged a monster that was now too big to be harnessed and controlled.

Hopefully, beloved reader, you will have understood my words and mood and not strike me off your Christmas card list…..assuming you still send cards.

2DtC

It’s time, if you can stand it, for part two of Blog 43 and the Loves of Julian. A correspondent has told me that she thinks I fall in love far too readily. She might be right, but thankfully those days are behind me. I now have my one true love and there will never be another. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Although I think it’s worth posing the question, is it more important for a successful and long-lasting marriage to be great friends or great lovers? I actually think real, intimate, trusting friendship is the most important thing in a relationship, but that’s just me.

My first marriage ground to a slow end in a depressingly familiar fashion. We’d been married for 7 years, I was approaching fifty and I was away so much at work (which involved huge amounts of international travel) that it was almost inevitable that we should grow apart. It was sad because we really were the best of friends, but to my shame, I had a fling with a US Olympic skier, which my wife eventually found out about. We went for counselling and for a year tried to make it work, but the damage was done. We parted without wrangle on amazingly good terms and with much heartache and sadness, but no bitterness. She returned to Canada with our two labradors and I remained in the house in Wiltshire, which felt very empty for many months afterwards. Thinking about it, my correspondent might have a point, because I then met a beautiful blonde (they always are!) who was the most bubbly, extrovert, party-loving woman I have ever met. She was divorced with two youngish boys and had handfuls of potential suitors. She had been involved in a very nasty speedboat accident which had left her in quite a bad way internally, but you would never have known it. She was probably the gutsiest, most determined and stubborn woman I know. Sadly, she had been the victim of a strict Victorian upbringing which rendered her almost frigid. My love was largely unrequited until it was too late. By the time she felt the way I did, other issues got in the way and we started to drift apart. At that point I met the future Mrs Tutt. (Future at that point, now the present Mrs Tutt!). It was at our local golf club. As I walked into the Pro Shop a vision of Amazonian loveliness was walking out of the other door, with blonde locks flowing over a very skimpy halter top, and legs up to her armpits, encased only in the tightest and briefest of shorts. It was unusual attire for a lady at a fancy golf club, but she was a scratch golfer and the men, including the Committee, spent most of their time trying to get her into bed. Luckily for me, despite my relative senility, I succeeded where others had failed. We had our honeymoon in Mauritius sometime before getting married and the resulting son attended our wedding fifteen months or so later.

As old friends celebrate forty years together and more, it makes our twelve years of marriage seem rather pitiful, but nothing about my life has been conventional and regrets I have none. I’m writing this sitting in the garden with love in my heart and the recipient not far away, on the most stunning early Spring day, that could easily be mid-summer were it not for the lack of foliage. Long may it last.

2DtC

I’m afraid a combination of jet lag and family duties has kept me from my typewriter; and that after making it home in a world record time, after a lengthy flight from Kuala Lumpur. Airlines are not allowed to overflow India or Pakistan at the moment for fear of an errant nuke or ground to air missile inadvertently causing unnecessary civilian casualties. It therefore took the best part of fourteen hours to go from the 111 degrees (f) of sweaty heat to a beautiful but cool 6 degs C at London Heathrow. We touched down at 05.35 and I was home in Eastbourne at 07.40. Apart from a five minute delay going past Gatwick, I can’t imagine it could be done any quicker. I was first off the plane, first through immigration, and my bag was almost first on the carousel. I was in the car and travelling, thirty minutes after the rubber hit the tarmac; astonishing. We made it home without exceeding 80 mph on the motorway and staying within all other speed limits. Now, as you may have seen, the European Fun Police (EFP) are at it again. In two or three years time all new cars will be fitted with a multitude of clever gadgets that prevent you from exceeding the speed limit and automatically slowing you down if you’re going too fast, entering a lower limit. I’m not sure what happens if you’re in the middle of overtaking with oncoming traffic rapidly approaching, but presumably there must be some sort of override. Maybe that’s where the Law of Unintended Consequences comes in? Either way, whilst being highly meritorious and no doubt a huge contributory factor to safer motoring, it’s yet another nail in the coffin of freedom of expression; in fact just freedom of any sort. The Nanny State is slowly and inexorably guiding us towards a Brave New World. It may not be the one Aldous Huxley predicted exactly but it will happen. The advent of Artificial Intelligence and an international refusal to control the use and impact of robotics means all those Sci-Fi films could easily be more accurate than most of us care to imagine.

It reminds me of perhaps the most effective speed limit I’ve come across. When the Iron Curtain was still in place and Berlin was a divided City in Soviet controlled East Germany, there was a corridor from the West German border to get into the British Sector in Berlin. As you entered the corridor you had to present your passport to a Red Army soldier who looked as though he’d come straight from pulling a plough in some far distant field. He would disappear into a mysterious, windowless booth, where, for all we knew, he’d have a quick brew before returning some time later with the necessary authorisation for us to proceed. You then had to go through a similar checkpoint at the other end of the corridor and if you were more than a few minutes either side of two hours you were liable to be handed over to the Stasi and shot…..or castrated….or brainwashed….or whatever it was they did then. The point is it was a very effective constraint because we really didn’t know what would happen, but we had this irrational fear of the “Communist State” and its all-encompassing power. There’s a theory that the world was a much safer place then; just East v West with no realistic threat of conflict so long as both sides had roughly the same number of Nukes. It was called MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction and most people thought that wasn’t a very good thing; destruction, I mean. Nowadays there are so many more threats, often involving unknown and potentially maniacal madmen, that there is much greater reason to be concerned for our future.

One of the reasons I voted to leave the European Union was to be rid of their arcane and often ridiculously pedantic regulations. It still looks likely that we will exit the European Union, but apparently we’ve already accepted the “law-abiding car”. Plus ça change.

2DtC

 

We all know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To many, the Eiffel Tower is an architectural and engineering masterpiece, whilst to others it is a blot on the Parisian skyline. For some, Picasso’s daubings are works to be treasured and worshipped. Others find his cubism remote and unattractive. Mozart was an undoubted genius, but apparently there are those who would rather listen to a Bohemian Rhapsody than his Rhapsody in Blue.

Obviously the human form can also attract and repel in equal measure, although there is the magnificent minority who appear beautiful to all. I guess most of those who feature on the silver screen fit that category. So what’s a good way to define beauty in people? Those that are as attractive naked as clothed is probably quite a good measure. I also like the concept of front-on compared with in profile. How often do you see a man or woman for the first time from the side and think “wow they’re rather lovely”, only to see them full frontal and be deeply disappointed? In women, it often has to do with a fine bone structure, beautifully coiffed hair, unsullied skin, sparkling (probably blue!) eyes and voluptuous lips. I don’t feel entirely qualified to define male beauty but the likes of George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Roger Federer seem to have it, judging from my wife’s sudden interest in Wimbledon whenever the Swiss star is on court.

You might wonder why I’m musing on the subject. I’m not really sure myself, other than perhaps because I have just returned from a week in Kenya and a week in Kuala Lumpur, where we were surrounded by an extraordinary number of beautiful people. You must forgive me if I wax lyrical about the women, but I am a heterosexual and I tend to notice them rather more. As I mentioned in a previous blog there are forty two different tribes in Kenya but there is a lot of cross-pollination now and they really are a very beautiful people. Likewise the Malay women who have a totally different appearance and skin texture, but many of them are eye-wateringly beautiful too. I would say in both cases, the percentage of stunning women is much higher than is to be found on the high streets of Britain.

We are subjected to beauty and ugliness in every walk of life, not least language. It’s quite scary how rapidly and significantly our mother tongue is being bastardised and “developed”, with the dreaded social media having a significant impact. But America has a lot to answer for too. I remember the first time I went there thirty years or so ago, I was appalled at how people would respond to the greeting “how are you” with “good thanks”. For years I wanted to reply, “I don’t think you’re qualified to judge that, leave it to the Almighty. I think you mean ‘well’ “. Now I find I say it all the time and hate myself for the linguistic idleness. Going out with my first (actually only) American girlfriend she’d go into a shop and say “could I GET a coffee please”, (At least she said please!) when she meant could she HAVE a coffee. Now I do it all the time too. Yuk! I found it quite easy to forgive her though as she was very beautiful…..in fact doubly so; she had an identical twin and they really were hard to tell apart, even after I’d been sleeping with one for some time! (At least I think it was one…?)

Sports commentators have destroyed another really good and specific word. Decent used to describe an honest, hard-working, straightforward, principled person. What a useful word. But there were many ex-professional commentators like the England cricketer Geoff Boycott who had a very high opinion of themselves and were reluctant to heap too much praise on the modern player, so rather than it being a “good shot” or even a “great shot” it became a rather condescending “decent shot”, meaning it was OK but not in the same class as something I might have done.

I am writing this sitting in our potentially very attractive garden (the destructive work is complete, creativity now required!) as the sun heads for the horizon encased in a cloudless blue sky, a chorus of frisky birds filling the otherwise silent air with an extraordinary cacophony of serenades as they seek their springtime mates. Now that really is beautiful.

I am conscious that while I am on the job (I mean at work!), my writing about golf incessantly is probably mind-bogglingly tedious to those who prefer music and drama or the cafe culture, so today I shall journey down a different road.

I’ve been trying to remember what it felt like to be a teenager; but I can’t! I do remember being seriously annoyed by my father on a regular basis, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when my thirteen year old son behaves in the same way towards me. From there my thoughts drifted onto relationships and how many times Cupid has unleashed his arrow in my direction. I know some people have gone through life with only one or two partners, which to me is extraordinary and admirable. I confess I’ve had more than a few, but what about love? I was nineteen before I had my first real experience with a woman, such were the restrictions of a boys’ boarding school back then. It came about in an unfortunate way. I was taking my final exams to get my commission into the Royal Air Force when I had a call from home to tell me that my fifty two year old Mother was dead. It was a bit of a shock. I didn’t even know what had happened, but she’d been admitted to hospital complaining of stomach pains (she never complained about anything) and when they opened her up her insides were riddled with  gangrene. They could do no more than sow her up again and she died a few hours later. My sister had moved to Canada, but she came rushing home and brought her best friend with her. We hit it off immediately and I was quickly besotted. She was my date at the Graduation Ball and things progressed from there. I do remember being utterly hopeless at knowing how to cope with a girlfriend in public. I took her to the Station Sports Day on my first base at RAF Brize Norton after which we were heading off to Scotland and I was so embarrassed that I hardly talked to her all day and failed to introduce her to any of my fellow officers. I eventually found her later in the day, having fun with a bunch of airmen. Being in each other’s pockets for a week north of the border sowed the seeds of dissent and it didn’t last long after that.

I went through my twenties having a wonderful time and never even contemplating marriage. Most relationships were short and sweet although I did manage nine months with a lovely WRAF officer who was almost as good as me at tennis (and I was quite good) and dramatically better than me at squash, which was quite a challenge! I had probably the best five months of my life as a twenty nine year old, spending five months flying helicopters in Hong Kong, playing lots of sport, singing, acting and partying most nights. I fell head over heels in love with someone I shouldn’t have done and it was always going to end in tears, but it was great fun while it lasted. I was thirty two before the prospect of marriage loomed. I was based in Germany but was home for a weekend when I met the most ravishing twenty one year old blonde. She was very intelligent, sporty, had a great job and was extremely sexy. We kissed on the first night and then I had to return to Germany. She came out a few weeks later and I quickly discovered to my surprise that despite having survived three years at University with the same boy, she was still “intact”. I was even more surprised when it didn’t take her long to get over that inhibition. We were unofficially engaged and driving back into London after a day avec les parents, when she pointed out her favourite wedding dress shop. Apparently my complete lack of interest (I was concentrating on driving) gave her second thoughts and it wasn’t long before her love melted like a butter pat in the sun; thank heavens I didn’t fall for someone so shallow! I was still bonkers about her and even bought her a stunning three layered pearl choker with a ruby clasp to try to change her mind. She didn’t, but kept the choker anyway. To be fair I did insist, as I had bought it for her.

So that makes three proper love affairs and the next didn’t happen till I was thirty eight and heli-skiing in the Cariboos in the Canadian Rockies. The girl running the shop at the Lodge was a top skier and great fun and we had a wonderful holiday romance that was only ‘conjugated’ on the final night. I thought that would be that, but to my amazement she came over to England for three months in the Summer. I wanted her to stay, but without a job she couldn’t and she returned to the mountains where the only communication was by radio telephone. By Christmas I realised I really was in love with her and wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, so on Christmas Eve, when I was working a late shift at BBC Radio Sport in Broadcasting House I rang her to ask her to marry me. The radio telephone was on a speaker to the entire Lodge staff, which I didn’t realise so you can imagine how she blushed. Remarkably she said “yes” and I didn’t see her again until two days before we got married on 17th March 1990 in Banff. It was the most romantic of weddings in a stunning setting, followed the next day by a wedding breakfast in a friend’s house in Canmore. As well as being a brilliant downhill skier, she was a very accomplished cross country skier and she thought it would be fun to ski the 18 kilometres back to Banff. My experience of langlaufing had consisted of a 12 kilometre race once a year to keep the Army happy eight years earlier. The conditions were hot and slushy and my skis weren’t waxed. It was one step forward and two back for a gruelling few hours that seriously tested my sense of humour. Luckily I really was in love so it didn’t matter and it was the start of a very happy eight years together.

Sadly things went pear-shaped after that for reasons that I will explain next time as I’ve already wittered on for too long. As someone once said “Love is a many-splendoured thing”, but there are times when it can be a pain in the arse too, as I’m sure you know!

2DtC

P.S. If anyone’s interested I’m working for Sky this week, which means that unusually my wit and wisdom (or total lack of it) can be heard in the UK.

At the end of another blisteringly hot and sticky day at Saujana Golf and Country Club, I’ve just been sitting down with Miguel Angel Jimenez, the fifty five year old Spaniard, who was dubbed by an American journalist as the Greatest Showman in Golf. Slightly hyperbolic perhaps but he is very good value. He’s the oldest winner on the European Tour and also has more wins over the age of forty than anyone else. Married to a charming Austrian lady they have homes in Vienna (Susan’s home), Malaga (from whence he comes) and the Dominican Republic, where he bases himself for his frequent highly successful assaults on the Champions Tour in America…..that’s the one for the Over 50s. He’s playing his 699th tournament on the European Tour this week and will play his 700th at The Open at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland in July, for which he qualifies as the reigning British Senior Open Champion. The record number of tournaments played is held by Sam Torrance at 706. Jimenez has it very carefully mapped out how he will pass that number next year. Once he has the record, he says he will happily retire to the Old Farts tour where he will no doubt continue to win millions of dollars more. Miguel plays for fun and it shows. He invariably has a large Havana on the go, and a bottle of Rioja won’t be far away. He says so many of the young professionals of today have got it all wrong. They’re playing, not for the love of the game, but to make money. As he says, if he didn’t play golf what would he do? He loves to drive his Ferrari (no doubt very fast), but having started life as a caddie in Spain, golf is the only thing he really knows. He is the living embodiment of someone who just loves what he does and is therefore highly successful at it, almost without trying.

The first time I met Miguel was at the, much lamented, Benson and Hedges International at St Mellion in Cornwall in the mid ’90s. His English then was almost incomprehensible (it’s not an easy listen now!) but he was doing well in the tournament and my BBC Radio producer had detailed me to get an interview with him after his round. Standing behind the 18th green watching him finish, I saw him dump his second shot into the water in front of the green. He went to the drop zone leaving himself a pitch of 60 or 70 yards over the water to a tight pin. He then proceeded to put three more balls in the water before eventually playing the perfect shot. After that I still had to interview him. He was full of humour and just said “it’s my frog shot!”. Being an incredible shotmaker and a highly talented, but stubborn player, he was determined to play the right shot.

I’m conscious that this is becoming a bit golf specific for a general audience. So let me regurgitate a couple of relevant quotes that I read recently. Amelia Earhart, the incredibly brave aviation pioneer who was the first woman (and second person) to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932, said “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward”. How very true.

The other one I like (having recently watched Dirty Dancing again), which is also relevant to my earlier golfing comments, is from someone called Satchel Paige; “Work like you don’t need the money, Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching”. Good advice but quite hard to follow on all counts, I’d say.

2DtC

Having spent enough time out in the sweatbox of Saujana Golf and Country Club in KL, I’ve retreated to the air-conditioned luxury of my hotel room to muse on a cornucopia of unrelated topics. I’ve just been watching a bit of that brilliant film about the Enigma machine, The Imitation Game, and it made me think about codes and how much of life is coded. Almost every minute of every day we have to read what people’s bodies tell us; not so much what they’re saying as what they’re meaning. I guess the older you get the better you get at it, although it sometimes surprises me how prescient my two young teenagers can be. I’ve decided to re-title my daily meanderings, based on the famous old Churchill quote about “Jaw jaw not war war”. I’ve just dropped the “w’s” for aesthetic appeal. In future I’ll also be signing each blog with my new online signature. Incidentally, Churchill’s official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, tells us that what Churchill actually said was “meeting jaw to jaw is better than war” which makes a lot more sense. I wonder how history might have been different if social media had existed when Hitler was trying to rule the World? Can you imagine Adolf tweeting…”Hey Winnie, your boys took a helluva beating today”! I suppose it’s not that different to the very effective propaganda machine they had then anyway.

I love being at a golf tournament on Tuesdays. It’s all so relaxed, the players are approachable, there’s no one else around, apart from the workers completing preparations for the corporate hospitality suites and the tented village and there’s always good gossip to be garnered on the practice ground. I learned some interesting facts from the Titleist rep. The Titleist Pro V1 and V1x golf balls are by far the most popular and successful balls in professional golf and the story behind them is interesting. Back in the 1920’s Phillip “Skipper” Young, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was playing with his dentist friend when a putt he felt sure was going in veered off to the left to miss the hole. He asked his friend to X-ray the ball and sure enough the core was off-centre. They took more X-rays and found that most balls had off-centre cores and were prone to erratic flight. He started to produce his own line of balls that would eventually become known as Titleist. (i.e. the most ‘titled’) He hooked up with the Acushnet Process Company, then essentially a rubber company, and it all progressed from there. Nowadays every single Pro V1 and V1x is made either in their factory in Fairhaven outside Boston, or for the Asian market in an identical facility in Thailand. Titleist now have seventy two R&D chemical scientists constantly working to improve the product, which is already extraordinary. The machines that are used to manufacture the balls are made by machines that are made by Titleist. The tolerances are even tighter than those used by Rolls Royce. You may not know that Rolls Royce engines don’t need gaskets, such is the precision of the milling of their cylinder heads etc. Titleist manufacture one million Pro V balls a day, with the factories sometimes working twenty four hours a day. Every single ball is x-rayed to ensure that it is perfect. Have a guess how many are rejected? I said 3%. The answer is 1. Not 1%. 1 ball, and that is because very, very occasionally the painting process causes the tiniest of flaws. It’s no wonder that a dozen balls retail for close to £50 in the UK; not a price that Tour Pro’s face of course. They pretty much get as many as they want, free. But that’s part of the Titleist marketing budget. Success on Tour translates into massive sales in golf clubs and shops.

If you’re a golfer and you find the whole thing is a bit of an enigma, try the latest Pro V1’s. They go further and straighter and more accurately than any ball ever produced. Period. (Well, ok, there are balls that might go a bit further, but without the same feel, accuracy or control).

2DtC.

 

This is my first Air Blog. Hopefully not too much hot air, although it’s warm as we depart Doha and will be even hotter and certainly a lot more humid when we touch down in Kuala Lumpur. My final day in Kenya proved to be an interesting one, as I made a bit of a rookie error. Normally we all leap on the tv crew bus at the end of play to get back to the hotel and thence on to the airport for a midnight departure. However, as we had plenty of time I decided to stay at the Golf Club for a massage at the very excellent spa. I knew that would involve getting a taxi back, but I’d been assured that wouldn’t be a problem. We had reckoned without the presence of El Presidente though. A very popular man he was clearly intent on enjoying himself and stayed on long after the golf had finished. As you might imagine the place was swarming with armed guards, soldiers, police and security guards of every description. The whole area was in complete lockdown, with all roads around the Club closed. Even the mobile phone network and wifi had been shut down so just calling for a taxi was a non-starter. What had seemed like a very simple plan was taking on nightmarish proportions. Julian stuck at the Golf Club, unpacked luggage at the hotel, both due to be at the airport in the not too distant future. Thanks to a very helpful red-bereted captain in the GSU (I never did get round to asking her what that is) and her miraculously working mobile phone an extremely dodgy vehicle that purported to be a taxi somehow made it to the front entrance and we careered back to the hotel with time to spare. Phew!

Now heading out over The Gulf all will be peace and tranquillity for the next seven hours in my fairly luxurious Qatar Airways Business Class seat. Travelling the World for the last thirty years, predominantly turning left upon boarding, has for the most part been simple and pleasurable. No hijackings, bomb scares, bombs, ground to air missiles, air to air missiles, engine failures, lightning strikes, diversions, medical emergencies….am I tempting fate?!

I guess the worst thing was when I was based in Hong Kong and was returning home from London after a four week trip away. Staging through Dubai on Emirates, I fell asleep in the Lounge and was late reporting to the gate. Unbelievably, rather than letting me on, they took my bags off the plane and I was stuck in Dubai for another twenty four hours. When the full reality struck home I was probably more depressed and angry than at any time before or since. I was desperate to see the family. It was the longest twenty four hours of my life. I got to know the Business Lounge and its staff quite well.

Flying on Qatar Airways makes you wonder if the Chief Executive of British Airways ever flies on other airlines and if he does, whether he removes the blindfold! The staff are unfailingly smiley and charming and do everything in their power to make you feel valued, comfortable and well catered for. Contrast that with the frequently superior, unfriendly, intolerant and often uncaring attitude of the BA staff and you find one very good reason why people would rather fly with Emirates, Singapore, Cathay Pacific, Etihad or Qatar. Actually the list is rather longer than that, but you get the idea.

Sadly the peace and tranquillity is coming to an end as we start our descent into Kuala Lumpur to land at 8.30 pm. The captain has just told us that it’s thirty degrees centigrade and the humidity will be up in the nineties. If I was hot before, I will be even hotter in a minute!

2DtC

I’m writing this while watching the final Six Nations matches. Wales have claimed the Grand Slam by thrashing Ireland and now England are making Scotland look like tyros. This Championship epitomises the tribalism that exists within the United Kingdom, with everyone hating the English but plenty of other rivalries as well. Where I am this week, in Kenya, there are an astonishing forty two tribes, with the likes of the Kikuyu, Swahili and Maasai being the best known, although the Warrior Maasais make up only 1.5% of the population. They all have their own dialects and variations, but everyone speaks Swahili and English which is the Country’s official language. Inter-tribal rivalry has been quite a problem over the years in many African countries, causing civil wars in the past, with the potential to do so again, not least in places like South Africa.  But my taxi driver was interesting on the way back from the course today. Plastic bags are banned here, with heavy penalties for those caught using them. The Government is making a concerted effort to clean up the Country, both visually and environmentally. It’s a brilliant initiative and one that every country needs to adopt quickly in my view. Next on the agenda is banning plastic bottles which is a bigger challenge. My driver explained that these sort of plans are helping to bring all the tribes together, with the Government encouraging everyone to think of themselves as Kenyan first and Kikuyu or whatever second. He also said that it’s becoming harder and harder to differentiate between people from the varied tribes since they’ve been allowed to inter-marry, which was strictly forbidden until I think ten or fifteen years ago. Apparently the only time you need to be concerned for your safety here is at election time, when tempers can run a little hot. Otherwise the best way to avoid trouble is to learn the local tribal slang. The villains invariably target outsiders first and a few questions in their tongue will quickly confirm you’re from out of town.

In the time it’s taken me to write that, Scotland are in the process of making the most extraordinary recovery at Twickenham. I don’t know about civil war, there might be a few Englishmen committing hari kari if they lose this one. It would be one of the most extraordinary sporting upsets in many a long year. This is ridiculous, Scotland have just scored twice in quick succession to level it at 31-31.

This is one sporting rivalry that has created all sorts of drama over the years with the historic Calcutta Cup at stake, but it’s thirty six years since Scotland won it at Twickenham. England’s Australian coach Eddie Jones will have some serious explaining to do about this one, whatever the result. An Australian born Scotsman , Sam Johnson, has just scored another try to put Scotland 38-31 ahead.

Meanwhile we’re heading into the final round of the Magical Kenyan Open with two Tour rookies leading the field. When it comes to magic, it would be harder to think of a better description for Scotland’s truly other-worldly comeback that so nearly brought about one of the great wins of all time. From 31-7 down at half time, they’ve come back to lead 38-31, only for England to score a try under the posts two minutes into extra time to tie at 38-38. Inevitably it persuaded one of the commentators to describe it as genuinely a game of two halves, one of the worst sporting cliches, but on this occasion thoroughly justified! Heading into the World Cup, England are going to carry some serious scars after this.

I’ll be heading off to Malaysia via Doha after tomorrow’s final round, so may be a little tardy with my messages, but hopefully No 40 will come from the Saujana Golf and Country Club in Kuala Lumpur, one of the great sweatboxes of the world. If I’m not ten pounds lighter landing at Gatwick in nine days time I shall be disappointed.

Usiku mwema na nakupenda.

Jaja