Sally-Part 71. BILLY-NO-MATES PLAYING GOLF ON HIS OWN !

REAL GOLF ON COLONSAY WITH MY SONS. MY LEGS ARE NOT REALLY THIS SHAPE !

The Open Golf Championship is on at my feet in the caravan !

When I was a boy and the sun shone all summer and cricket Test Matches were the only live sport on the television and not the 'TV' and we learned the times it was on from The Radio Times and not 'TV Quick' and policemen were 'Officers' and not 'cops' and doctors were addressed as 'doctor' and not 'doc' we watched the BBC's coverage on a nine inch black and white screen with the thick curtains drawn to reduce the ambient room light to darkness.... and life was normal !

My father sat in 'his' chair and didn't talk to any of his five sons and my mother stayed in the kitchen where she was best placed to respond to my father's regular demand for all-milk coffee which she made in 'the milk pan', an old bent thing, and always irritatingly allowed to boil and form a skin which she would then blow to one side before spooning it out and bringing it into the lounge where she would stand to my father's side testing the drink until it was at the correct temperature for him to consume!

And this WAS 'normal' !

Such a regime has not continued in my house !

Now, with technology so advanced that companies can offer more than one hundred channels which no-one but the poor inmates of prison or old people's homes or me would want to watch, flat-screen televisions are just as useless as the very early sets for watching anything in any light conditions above very dim!

And that's why the golf is on at my feet!

Of course, if I copied many of today's television watchers I would have mounted a monster forty two inch behemoth five feet up above my fireplace which I wouldn't have been able to watch because of the pain in my neck whilst watching it and wouldn't have been able to understand anything said as the wonderful surround-sound speakers require a level of concentration impossible for anyone over five to maintain!

Shirley, who has just tapped the pile of placemats in a rather authoritative manner by way of a silent instruction to 'place' one in front of me, has kindly if somewhat reluctantly cooked and brought me a sausage sandwich in untoasted bread served with Tartare sauce which is delicious!

She hates all sport and sportsmen except the tennis players Bjorn Borg and Kevin Curan both of whom stopped playing twenty years ago!

 She loves the view and won't countenance any blocking of it by curtains and watches her programmes with the set on the floor in front of a cupboard which is where it now is, completely out of my immediate view below my table!

THIS REALLY IS THE VIEW FROM OUR CARAVAN VERANDA ON AUCHENLARIE OUTSIDE GATEHOUSE OF FLEET IN DUMFRIES AND GALLOWAY ! FACING DUE SOUTH AND SUN ALL DAY ! ANYONE WANT TO BE MY FRIEND NOW ?

Actually I hate almost all sport myself and haven't got a clue why I've got the golf on in the first place unless it's to try to garner a few last minutes hints before I set out this afternoon for a game for which I won a' voucher for two' almost a year ago at my golf club party night raffle which I didn't attend, to play at the area's most prestigious course at 'The Cally Palace Hotel' in Gatehouse of Fleet where you can't actually buy a round of golf because it is open to hotel guests only!

ON THE FIRST ON MY OWN !

This summer has been awful and I'm sitting here freezing, writing on the 20th of July with the skin on my hands stretched so tightly it looks like a five thousand year old Egyptian mummy's!

 I'm even about to go down to the sport's centre to have a warming sauna before setting out for far too much exercise which is why my round will end up with me exhausted and very fed up!

I will be dressed as smartly as I can which means a variety of second-hand clothes, mostly long past their best before they were donated to the town's charity shop and worn several layers thick in an attempt to keep my bones above freezing point.

This will be in marked contrast to everyone else's immaculate and very expensive golf outfits which, to me, makes them look stupidly uniformed!

I possibly also look like I might smell rather badly!

I will be playing on my own because neither of my sons could get the day off to come over and I daren't really invite any of the men from the club I used to belong to here because frankly, I don't want to be rejected by anyone I couldn't stand playing with when I belonged!

When I wrote to my club informing them that I wouldn't be renewing my membership because of other commitments, I didn't reveal the truth behind my decision which was I loathed playing with men who didn't have as much interest in me as I did in myself and never asked me a single question in three years of playing with them.

And as I find it quite within the bounds of reasonable social interaction to ask people about their own lives, I found it deeply perplexing to be constantly stonewalled by their unwillingness to tell me anything in response to fairly innocuous questions like " How are you ? " and " What did ( do ) you do for a living ? "

They were mainly retired and mostly wealthy English incomers who, like every other person I've ever tried to befriend, seemed not to like me!

Even my endless and unremittingly hilarious tales of a small leathergoods manufacturer failed to crack their concrete exteriors and I was never privy to any of their whispered conversations which I wasn't unaware were held in such a way that one of them could keep an eye on me to make sure I wasn't about to approach them !

I am now frozen and must start my preparations for another day in my own company!

And finally a WARNING !

Don't buy and eat the pre-cooked 'Durham Meatballs' mentioned in the preceding Blog, unless you want your abdomen to swell painfully and force you to politely leave the room in a rush to avoid poisoning your family in a manner I am too embarrassed to write about !

 I actually took the decision to make up the spare bed to spare Shirley from death, though I'm not sure she would have done the same for me !