Friday 31st August, 2012

Anyway, back to Sweden. Yes, what a great country. We rented a house on one of the islands in the Swedish archipelago together with a boat to get us there. It was not the modest vessel I had hoped for, but a Chris Craft 25ft motoboat with an 8.1 Volvo Penta inboard engine together with brand new set of propellors which meant the boat was capable of a stunning 60mph. Alas it did not come with GPS and I can tell you the Swedish archipelago is one complicated and rocky place. I wasn't actually skippering the boat. The friends we were with had heard about my exploits in the British Virgin Islands no doubt and had pre-qualified their 16 year old son who passed his small boats licence days before. Fair play to him. We rocketed along on our 40 mile journey to Blido, darting artfully around islands and between yachts, flying across the substantial wake thrown up by various enormous ferries that ply their way between Stockholm and St Petersburg or whereever. My mistake was to take the steering wheel on the last ten minutes of the journey, in my defence a particularly precarious section that involved some dangerous rocks. I'll get to the point. I successfully negotiated all of these until we were just about to tie up to the jetty off our house. At that point there was an horrendous scraping noise and we had run aground. The pristine propellor flukes were not looking quite so shiny and smooth anymore. 'Nuff said. Blinking hate boats. To be fair it wasn't really my boat handling that was at fault. I was quite pleased at how I smoothly extricated the boat off the rock and edged gently up to the pier. The problem was the lack of sat nav and map reading, I admit, is not my forte. Believe it or not days later I had another little navigational incident. This time though it was on the Old Course at St Andrews. Now, as you might expect, I know my way around the Old rather well. I won the our family golf competition, The Big Stick, again this year, the eighth time out of the 15 occasions on which we have held the event. As I scribble this I am still considering whether or not to send you the write up which, as the winner, I am obliged to come up with. We'll see. The Old Course starter official manny handed us each a score card together with a sheet containing the day's pin positions and I was rather pleased with myself when, faced with a tricky approach to the third, I remembered to pull the sheet out of my bag and consult it. Armed with the knowledge that the pin was 22yds from the front and 7yds from the left I took an extra club, decided to add a bit of a draw and my 9 iron finished two feet from the hole. I resisted the urge to suggest that my father, brother and nephew would do well to pay such attention to detail, because I felt that would have been a little bit pompous. Just as well. When I next resorted to my pin sheet on what I thought was the 5th, I couldn't reconcile from the sheet whether or not I was on the hole I thought I was so I just hit the damn ball and hoped for the best. On closer inspection as I wandered up to the green I discovered that, from the start of the round, I had been using a map with the pin placements for the New Course on 19th August 2011. What a numptie. Oh what the heck, it's a dull old day...I'll send you my write up. But if you havn't heard of William Macgonagall, Scotlands second greatest poet then you may well think I have finally lost the plot. My write up owes a debt of gratitude to his seminal work, A Descriptive Poem on the Silvery Tay. Just for reference, faither means Dad, J is my brother and Charlie is my 17 year old nephew. The yellow jacket is a hideous corduroy creation once owned by the brother of the editor of Private Eye, which the loser of our golf contest is obliged to wear over lunch in the R&A.