Golf Etiquette

Etiquette is an important part of golf, more important than the balls, the clubs, the players and the actual course itself. Without etiquette golf is just a bunch of rogues hitting a 2 inch white ball across a field aiming at a hole twice the size. However it seems that this is becoming apparent as etiquette works its way out of the golfing scene.

Golfing is a proper sport. When you begin to regularly play golf and gain a handicap, your local course becomes extremely important, every shot in the round is vital, and the frustration that is generated when you duff a shot is soul destroying. So you can begin to understand the anger when hooligans play on the course you know and love.

Pushing in the line for tee-off is a good place to start. Tee-offs are given at very specific times, 7.06am for example. I have witnessed four grown men throw punches on a golf course because a group of two started before their tee-off time. Now I’m not advocating violence but NEVER, ever start before your designated time, it is given for a reason. If you’re late and miss your time you are going to get some serious bad looks because it messes up the whole choreography of that day’s golfing.

When you hit a duff shot and your club decides to carve the ground open like it has no other cares in the world, the divots that are made, especially when the ball plummets onto the green, need to be repaired. A sneaky golfer may try to avoid doing this because the chunk of grass he’s ripped out has landed 30 feet away and he doesn’t want to waste time, but the bunker that is created from their mistake can ruin other peoples game and make the course look a state.

It appears that the old fashioned tradition of shouting FOUR! when hitting a wayward shot has been eliminated from the grand old sport. It may not seem like etiquette but when someone gets hit with a 40 gram dot travelling at 150mph you’re going to hear something about it.... when they regain consciousness.

It may seem particularly funny to make loud noises on a golf course; because it’s a quiet, tranquil area where people have to keep their concentration for a long period of time. It isn’t. If any of you have seen Jackass you’ll know what kind of “air horn banter” and you’ll know what kind of rotten, golf club related death that came to the man that pressed it while golfers took their swing.

The moral of this story may seem pointless to you but is important for golf players to know that any future players of their beloved sport (if this very positive blog has enticed you to play) do not break the rules!

Olympics

Here's an interesting fact, that may or may not be true, depending on my sources. Did you know that an Olympic torch used by the runners cost £500 to make. Now this is all well and good if we didn't have to have a new torch for every single runner. There were 8000 runners so the Olympic torches alone cost this country's tax payers £4 million pounds. What's wrong with having one torch? or maybe two if the first one conks out? Not only that, people who have carried the torch and wanted a souvenir have to buy the torch from the Olympic committee for £250. Now strictly speaking do we not already own these torches considering we payed for them? It was estimated that we spent £8 billion on the Olympics, which makes £4 million one two thousandth of what was actually spent. If we hadn't spent that money every person in the U.K. would have an extra 20p. Fuck you Olympic committee I want my 20p back.

I don't know the words but I'm going to mumble them anyway so it sounds like I do

Stop pretending! We can all hear you doing it. Just because the music is loud doesn't mean we are suddenly impervious to the fact you are just making sound and not actually singing lyrics. In the car, in the shower, in a club, it's all the same and it doesn't help your cause because if anything you just sound a bit special. Not only that, it also ruins the song for the people who do know the words because they are practically correcting your idiotic screams. If you don't know the words, just miss them out and sing the rest it's still as fun and saves you some dignity.

Meaningless words

My account of a brief history of words

If you actually study words, it's hard to believe that there is any logic behind them at all. Whoever first constructed a word, I assume will have just made it up from the sound they made when they saw it. For example upon invention of the wheel I imagine someone making this sound out of curiosity "WOOOOOOOOO" (a rough guess). Onomatopoeia was formed. Then, humanity being the greedy race that it is, wrote the letters down on paper as some form of ownership so no other cave man could steal it. However letters didn't exist yet so they formed their own interpretations of shapes they thought the word looked like. Then, billions of years later the more intellectual minds on earth thought, these meaningless markings should be more bold and more distinct to make them easier to learn and understand. Hence letters were formed. Hence words were formed. This is the reason that when you say a word too many times in a sentence you start to question the word's meaning and how it actually got called it in the first place. Take for example the old tongue twister, "Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry". Say the word Lorry more than five times and you began to wonder why it's called a Lorry? What is a Lorry? Look at the word and try to make sense of it because I can't. Is it a cross breed between Large and Worry? Someone probably has some pretend logic behind it but I really don't know what to believe anymore. Its all a Falsity.

Time

I have a very strange relationship with time. It seems to be something we can control, you know time flies when your having fun and all. It sounds strange but whenever I look at a clock it has an unintentionally coincidental time on it, and when I say whenever I mean every time. For instance, I may see a well known date, or a consecutive row of numbers.  I haven't got a clue what it means, if, of course it does mean anything at all but I am starting to have reason to believe that it does. Three days consecutively  I have woken up at 9:11, on the dot. You may think habit? When making lunch twice out of these three days I've looked at the clock when it hits 12:34. The other day it was 11.11, an early brunch. Even now whilst writing this blog I looked at the clock displaying the current year 20:12. Still coincidental I can only assume. I would like to think at some point though I'd be able to develop and manipulate these time powers in order to do cool things like predict the lottery. At that point, I'll make this blog into a book.

9,11,12, 20,24,34

Crying children

This is probably a touchy subject, that I can't really comment on as I'm thankfully not a parent yet, but I'm going to anyway. Crying children, understandable. Crying children in public places, horrific. I am fully aware that parents have no control of their child's vocal chords but it seems that they choose to do it in all the wrong places. Shops, cinemas, churches, you name it, they've screamed their heart out there, leaving the rest of society with a headache and a ringing sound in their ears. I realised, on a cold winter day whilst innocently stocking shelves at work listening to a child about to scream that the worst part of the scream, that children produce, is not the scream itself. It's the intake of breath between cries in order for the child to prepare for the next mortifying howl. In that moment, time seems to stop as the world prepares for what will be the most soul destroying noise anyone has ever heard, anyone within a 3 foot radius gets sucked into the black hole that is their mouth and I've seen people cover their ears with headphones to drown the sound out. But nothing can prepare you for it. I'm not trying to say that you should drown out the sound by strangling your child, just parents please avoid bringing them into enclosed places with other people inside them. Thanks.

Food

I never used to enjoy food. Before now I've spent a considerable time in the kitchen preparing a meal which then takes me 30 seconds to eat (Literally). I used to think eating food was more of a chore than a luxury but I've learnt to enjoy it. However I now hate wasting food.. to the point where I'm eating other peoples food because it seems a "shame" to throw it away. I had an incident recently which was something that had never happened before. (It's not as bad as it sounds). I was making a very lovely dish of spaghetti bolognese for the first time, nicely seasoned and of which I had a little taste before I served it up. After I had dished it up I was quite proud, so I actually took a picture for the memories. It looked perfect, like the pictures on the cardboard sleeve of a microwave meal (that actually turned out to look like a lump of vomit). It had an essence of "That's not just any spaghetti bolognese... that's my..hand cooked... took me an hour to make... Spaghetti Bolognese."

Needless to say, somehow  during the time it took to get from the kitchen to the dining room, I dropped the plate. The plate smashed. The food landed on the white carpet. My spaghetti dreams were shattered.   I haven't made it since.

What a nightmare.

R.I.P. =>