Spontaneous Combustion

It was still dark when I woke, face down, on something hard. It only happens once a term, but it happens (in time) to us all; the dean pays a visit in the night, and under our tired torsos, slips a golf ball. There’s always a trace of lipstick on the ball, from where the Dean’s kissed it goodnight. But the kiss on the ball, it’s not just a sign of affection; it’s a call. It signals a day in the field. Obscured by the rouge kiss (rouge being the Dean’s preferred colour) is the name and location of a well established golf course (written in felt-tip, not lipstick). On receipt of one of these 'early morning balls', the procedure is always the same. You have to disguise yourself as a green-keeper and get to the said golf course without delay.

Upon arrival, I rendezvous with a specially assigned lip-reader (who’s also disguised as a green-keeper). Armed with a notebook, binoculars and some grass seed (purely cosmetic), we head off into the course. The aim of our mission is to spy on teams of golfers - observe, from a safe distance, the golfing animal  'at home' in his natural habitat. The lip-reader, with the aid of binoculars reports, word for word what the golfers are saying about the state of the golf course. Stuff like; is the rough, rough enough? Are the greens green enough? Is the sand in the bunkers the right consistency? And we are always on the lookout for useful suggestions concerning the toilet (or total lack of) debate. I take notes.

It’s late in the day, the course is all but deserted and we are hidden in the bracken, shadowing a couple, a man and woman - and you didn’t need to be able to lip-read to see they are in love. Both are playing with a poetic fluidity (both playing as if one), driving ball after ball, as straight as a die, towards the rising moon, in the Klein-blue sky. At this point I should say that the lip-readers are trained to stay silent if the golfers aren’t talking golf (business speak etc).

Now, we’ve been stalking this pair of lovers for the best part of an hour (over five holes) and the lip-reader hasn’t uttered a single word.  “Do you think we’ll get to see them mate?” I whispered. “Doubt it, there's more chance of us witnessing a spontaneous combustion,"said the lip-reader. "Go on, tell me what they are on about," I pleaded "They develop these fabulous plans, talk something fantastic into existence, only to let the idea spontaneously combust as they go off on another tangent of absurdity. There's some kind of neo-logic underpinning the topsy-turvy associations they are making though, but but don't ask me translate it." “You’ve lost me, what are they talking about right now for instance?” I demanded. “Well, a minute ago he asked her what she’s going to do with a tiny pink foot she found in the road. She said it might come in useful for her one-armed swimmer. Now they’ve jumped to discussing a ‘Memory Club’ in Switzerland. Hold on, he’s becoming obsessed about a roll of wallpaper on which he’d traced thousands of oars. He keeps coming back to the oars, accusing her of not keeping both oars together - of giving one away even. Now she’s suggesting they take all the clothes they own to Calais for a day. I can't keep up with their lips, they can't be married”

At this point the man plays his first bad shot of the afternoon. He slices the ball way off to the right of the fairway into some trees, he sets out alone to search for it. We take this opportunity to have a last scan for anything else that might be happening on the golf course. By the time we refocus on the tee where we’d last seen the couple, there’s only the man, on his own. In the time it took him to find his ball the woman has disappeared – just vanished. “What do you think happened, where has she gone,” I said. “It’s very strange, the man’s still talking, he’s talking to himself!” the lip-reader said. “What’s he saying, and why’s he alone all of a sudden?” I demanded. The lip-reader remained silent, binoculars held tightly to his eyes, so I looked to him for an explanation. But all I saw was a tear leaking down his face, smudging the green paint. “I can’t tell you, it’s too sad for words,” he said.  

The Golfographer is Born

Spreadsheets, like sleeping bags, don’t lie (but it’s a romantic thought – them lying together, one on top of the other). There’s no getting around it, our degree course in Golf Course Management is turning out photographers. Fact. If it were wedding photographers it would be understandable, as a terrible amount of wedding receptions take place on golf courses every weekend. Or if it were Landscape photographers, one could see some connection – the modern concept of golf courses being the last real countryside and so on. No, it’s a very specific kind of idea-led, directorially minded photographer that degrees in golf appear to be producing. The Golfographer is born. How about some marketing blurb? The Golfographer hovers somewhere above the accepted perspective; Art is the food of golf; golf greens are the new painters palates (you put your thumb through the hole); bunkers are really giant potato crisps (bunkers eat your balls so bite the bunker back). To land in a bunker you have to slice the ball (slice, meaning miss-hit the ball). To make a chip (crisp) you have to slice the potato. And to get out of the bunker/crisp you have to play a chip-shot.

Golf clubs (irons and woods) perform exactly the same function as camera lenses – focus the aim over different distances. Armed with the golf bag as camera bag, swapping balls for pixels the Golfographer is equipped to negotiate the most abstract of principles; Familiar with the Psychogeographer? Meet the Golfographer. None of this however, is new.

Consider Allphonse Allais (1854-1905), a French writer (who specialised in ‘speculative journalism’). Allais (even though he wasn’t a painter) was the first man in history to paint an abstract picture. In the 1890’s it was an accepted criticism of modern painters that they could not draw or paint; so Allais decided to hold an exhibition of writers who genuinely could not draw or paint. The show was called the Salon des Incoherents, and Allais exhibited a large, totally white rectangular canvas. It was entitled ‘Anaemic Young Girls Going to their First Communion through a Blizzard’. He was so pleased with it he painted six more, one of which is a red rectangle entitled ‘Apoplectic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes by the Red Sea’. Theses strange abstract paintings (the only paintings Allais ever made) pre-date Yves Klein’s monochromes and Rothko’s black, green, orange and magenta canvases by half a century. But was the British abstractionist Victor Pasmore, the first artist to interpret golf courses from a modernist perspective, without intending to do so?

More golf and back pain

I was in the rough with the girl I’d concussed (see"Don't let sleeping bags lie"8/10/09) when the golf ball in my trouser pocket started vibrating. All undergraduates have to carry a remote controlled golf ball during term-time - can be radio-balled back to the Club House at a moments notice.

The Dean was already over the ironing board. “You took your time, come and look at this,” he hissed. I was confronted by a freshly pressed spreadsheet. Sophisticated tables and figures charted the career paths of Golf Course Management graduates (the course has been running since 1971, the year the first and last golf ball was driven off the moon by Alan Sheppard, an astronaut with a handicap of 15). Several golf graduates had gone on to manage pubs; one (who’d attained a PHD) had become a chimney sweep; an alarming number had joined either the police or armed forces; another ran a chain of massage parlours; dry-cleaning shops seemed to be popular career choice; two had gone into partnership (a two-ball, in golfing lingo) and ran a vast tobacco plantation in Nicaragua; several were in prison; an alarming number had either lost a limb or died young. None (unless you count the transvestite who graduated with a tutu and now runs a crazy golf franchise by the sea in Essex), not even one Golf Course Management graduate, in thirty eight years, had gone on to successfully manage a golf course. The spreadsheets did however reveal another clear career trend; the majority of Golf Course Management graduates (over two thirds, in fact) had gone into photography, had become successful (exhibiting, regularly published) photographers.

“How do you explain that,” ejaculated the Dean, who was wielding an imaginary six iron (safer than the steam iron, but still worrying). I reasoned, “a university education is about the cultivation and development of an enquiring mind, not just training for one specific job. English Literature students don’t all become writers, History graduates don’t wear old fashioned clothes and live in the past, if you study German you don’t have to go and live in Germany, and everybody accepts that the vast majority of Fine Art graduates never make any art again after the experience of studying it.”

“Undress and lie on the ironing board. I can’t massage the figures so I’m going to massage you,” the Dean said. Then just as I was about to take my bra off, he ejaculated, “stop I’ll undo you.” I was allowed to keep my bra on (with the straps undone at the back of course), for this I was grateful, as my Eccles cakes cushioned the force of the Deans powerful touch. When he’d finished my arms and shoulders the Dean lit a long thick Juan Lopez cigar and moved onto my back. The massage itself was very sensitively performed, however every so often I felt a sharp prick followed by an excruciating burning sensation. I thought, perhaps our Dean's also an acupuncturist (on the side) and was just inserting a few needles. When the massage was over he said, “stand up and face the wall, I want to photograph your back.” By the time I got home I was in considerable pain. I took my shirt off and examined myself in the mirror.

 Around familiar moles the Dean had added eighteen new holes. He'd burned (with just the tip of his cigar, and from memory) a map of the ‘Old Course" at St Andrews, on my back. That our Dean is a golf course designer, through to the bone - now that much is known. But is he any good at photography?

What did the Dean mean?

"Cigar?", said the kindly Dean. "And take those golf tees out of your nose before you light up, or the scent of this Cuban beauty will be wasted on you." My punishment ( a regular form of punishment in golf course management) was to 'sneeze tees.' I'd spent the last twenty four hours with a golf tee inserted up each nostril (sharp end first), and for the next twenty four I had to be seen (by the Dean and my peers) to be using the very same golf tees as tooth picks. "I'll come straight to the point," the Dean continued as we blew smoke at one another."If you didn't hold a certificate in Ladder Awareness (the Dean had one on his office wall too, in a gold frame) you really would be in the bunker. You really did score a hole in one, that exchange student from Portugal is still in a coma. Atomizing students and staff is all very well but I'm going to have to get you to fill out a Molecule Evaluation form. Once you've done so screw it up and deposit it in the ninth hole at Sandwich, nobody will read it there, and remember to claim travel expenses." The Dean got up, went over to his ironing board and pulled a slip of paper from under the iron. "What do you make of this?" he hissed.

I put on my special Visiball glasses and tried to decipher the text. "I think it says Test Tube Baby, where did you find it?" "Screwed up in the sixteenth hole here on the university's own golf course, it was mistaken for a golf ball at first." But what does it mean? I asked the Dean. "It can only mean one thing, somebody, possibly even one of our own Pro's, is mating with our holes, the university's very own eighteen flag-flying orifices. I'm going to get every hole DNA tested asap." I left the Dean with a mixed emotions; is it illegal to mate with a golf hole when it's under sixteen? (but regulations state that there can't be more than eighteen holes on a course, leaving only two you could legally do it with - some courses have only nine holes! Worse still, golf course management degree could be trying to manufacture its own students (surely an activity the Dean would be all for) thus rendering recruitment a thing of the past. I feel awful, I feel as bad as I did, the day I found out Bob Dylan played golf.

Don't Let Sleeping Bags Lie

Back at Uni. We had to present all the golf balls we'd found over the summer to the our tutors and peers. It was a poor show. The majority of my contemporaries, I hesitate to call them students (the University refers to them as customers) on this golf course management degree had barely collected enough balls to fill a bra - and a back-to-school bra at that. I on the other hand decanted a whole sleeping bag full. And I'd made quite an entrance into that darkened seminar room. The group were already at their desks with their balls on the table, as I entered backwards, dragging a sleeping bag full of golf balls noisily through the double doors. My sleeping bag's bright red and being as loaded as it was, it looked like a massive swollen tongue or a mermaid with crabs (but how would she catch them?). I'd got the sack dragging idea from a Bunuel film ("That Obscure Object Of Desire"), where Fernando Rey, a smart middle class, middle aged, well dressed man, is seen dragging an old sack (contents unknown) through Paris. This sack dragging scene is never explained and seems to have nothing to do with the plot/story of the film.
The group formed in a circle around my boil-ridden tongue. You could have heard a golf ball drop, they were all tongue-tied. I started to redden up. Having spent all summer camping alone on golf courses hunting for balls, I felt hemmed in, on the spot (or as we refer to it here, 'put on the tee'). I had to fill the void (left by the lack of words) - I had to do something visual. So I employed a step-ladder from the back of the room (it was safe to do so, we'd all been on a ladder awareness training course last term). I climbed the ladder holding the neck of my sleeping bag. Once at the top,  I hauled the bag onto my back, hoisted it over my head (as best I could) and showered more than four hundred golf balls onto my peers and professors. The golf ball fall was from a height of about twelve feet. Balls ricocheted off the walls and bounced back like bullets off the ceiling. The entire tutor group were atomized. By the time my tongue was flaccid again all the golf course managers (and the professors, or as we have to call them, the professionals - the pros) were either under the tables or face down on the floor. The sleeping bag didn't quite have to double as a body-bag, but two students were still out cold as I was being taken away. But I saw a lovely scene as I was being led to the Dean - I just got a glance. One of the students who'd been hit on the head was taking aspirin, but instead of popping the pill in her mouth she'd  balanced the painkiller on the tip of her tongue (which was green). What a scene - just like a golf ball ready to be teed off.. If I'd have had a hairdryer I'd have blown it down the hatch there and then. When I'm done with the Dean (or he's done with me) I'm going to find that girl with the lump on her head and and ask her out for a walk in the rough (the rough is a technical term for the long grass that borders the fairways). I hope she'll accept -  I'm not going to take a headache as an excuse.

  Here's a shot from the summer, when I'd been camping out on golf courses and cricket pitches, collecting balls.

Look at this. This tiny image of sleeping bag on a golf ball. I found this golf ball. The red markings on it (made by the ball's original owner - most amateur golfers have bright coloured spots on their balls, usually made by marker pens, for identification) resemble the sleeping bag I slept in the night before, the very night before I found this ball. Spooky! That's one of the reasons I'm studying golf course management - a course that manages chance encounters, facilitates coincidences, is purely Pataphysical.

More, Moore

After what was just a taste, a demi of Moore yesterday, I woke up wanting a bit more, Moore. So here's Roger. Note, there's no Eccles cakes on Roger. Another name for Eccles cakes is dead-fly-cakes (on account of their current filled hearts - black hearts). So you could also say, there's no flies on Sir Roger.

I've got a plan. I'm going to act as a sort of middleman. I aim to fill the world's largest bra with the world's largest Eccles cake - half the cake in each cup.

But in the meantime, I've got a golf course to manage. So it's back to uni and a new term, with bunkers and holes at every turn. But before I go lets consider the formal (rather than edible) relationship between the Eccles cake and the golf bunker.

The funny thing is, in dreams Eccles cakes are more lardy and pallid, more the hue of the golf bunker. Yet, when I dream I'm trapped in a bunker, the sand is sun-kissed, honey coloured, like the world's largest Eccles cake. I hope the Candy Coloured Sandman visits me tonight. I'm going to put it to him.

Now and then

It's Sunday and I'm up early having dreamed of a white breakfast. So I'm having porridge with Oatly milk, mashed banana, plain soya yoghurt and salt. Have to look after myself as I'm a mature student. Well, not that old - semi-mature. No, more demi-mature. Hell, I'm two years younger than Demi Moore. But it's Bruce Willis i woke up thinking about this morning. When he married Demi Moore, at the Golden Nugget Hotel, Las Vegas back in 1987, I remember thinking of them as so much older than me. Sitting alone here with soya  I'm thinking, I'm about the same age as them now, which means  I must have been their age then. I feel ill knowing now what I should have known then. Here, I'm looking at a photo of myself from 1987.

Back in 87 I was bombing about the country in my Mini delivering letters. As other couples (my age) were getting married I'd just started getting my first words out. Sentences came a year or so later. Look, I'm still in my back-to-school bra. I'f I blow this up you can just make it out. I'd pad it out with Eccles cakes (currents gave me confidence, as black fruits did in those days). I suppose my Eccles cakes could be thought of as the first air bags. All those layers of lardy puff-pastry could have saved my life (but prevented me from getting to close to a wife). And I'm glad I didn't have an accident. It's right what they say about underwear and accidents.

Here, you can see them better here