I am lost in the rough, wading through long reedy grass and gnarly thistles, hunting for a little white ball bearing a black golf logo. Hacking through the undergrowth, wielding my seven iron like a scythe, I can feel the summer heat on my back, the sweat on my brow, and splitting existential headache brewing.
I feel like an alien, lost in time and space, on this Brighton golf course, which hangs curiously above the cityscape that runs all the way down to the Atlantic Ocean. Traipsing round the confusing maze of greens and fairways, it feels familiar yet unfamiliar, harbouring secrets of the past and promises of the future.
I am playing a four-ball, with male family members, for the first time in a blood red supermoon. And, teeing off, swinging the club like a severely handicapped chimp, I am finding this undulating, grass trimmed hill, by no means a fairway to heaven.
Arriving at the base of the Roman hill fort – sunken like a UFO craft crashed in the beating heart of the golf course – I am reminded of the times I would tune in, turn on and drop out with old Uni mates. We would watch the golfer’s gopher about their business, ducking the blazing white strobe like flight of the balls, and roll around belly laughing at the frazzled state of four-play.
Today, the golfing shoe is firmly on the other foot. As I hack another frustrating ball into the rough, I wonder whether the golfing gods have forgotten my game on this day of days. I am all out of rhythm and stealth, facing the grim prospect of the wooden spoon and consolation of the 19th hole.
Approaching the 13th hole, a resident crow lands on the black and white pin. So begins a raucous attack, as I wonder whether the daft bird thinks it’s a magpie.
The sighting of a crow represents a dark omen for some. I remember the crow from the Tarot ‘Death’ card which fell the wrong way up in my life all those years ago. Could the flap of a crow’s wing, here, mean pain and suffering for someone living on the dark side of the moon, there?
Lost in the winking beady eye of the crow, I have a flashback – to a time long buried in memory, yet which still scars to the brittle touch – of a grim desolate day of golf played in the long, looming, shadow of the Grim Reaper.
This was a nine-hole round of hell, on an unforgiving course, played days after I landed in the Intensive Care Unit after a near fatal suicidal overdose in a Worthing bed and breakfast. The golf was played with family gents and was a shocker of a game: soul on skids, heart-broken, and life on life support.
Yet was a therapy of sorts, as I look back today with no anger.
The pedestrian clown-like pace of the golf today feels like last of the summer whine, as I daisy-cut my way round the course. But I am catching up with family members scarcely seen across the ravages of Lockdown. The noon passes into after-noon, the sun follows its downward trajectory, and I feel a renewed zest and lust for life, despite all its handicaps and hiccups.
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