“I was brought up on torrential downpours”

The cold icy winds of East Kilbride, Siberian in texture, ye wondered at a young age if that was all there was to weather. The Fenwick Moors were our Steppes and the rain arrived marked ‘Ayrshire and fucking cauld’. One day the sun came out and I ran indoors in a panic telling my mammy that space aliens were arriving.

“That’s the sun, son” she said. The sun-sun? Were they another species and if so, why was my honest-to-god mother so unperturbed? What did the sun-sun want?

Doon at the shops, there was a place my da had coined ‘Cochrane’s Corner’. Ye turned round that corner where the wee self-service grocer ‘supermarket’ wis and you were stopped in your tracks: you had maybe entered a wind-tunnel? If you opened up your bomber-jacket (‘windcheater’ in East Kilbride was a misnomer) like wings you could fly off as far as Hamilton and save on bus fares. Citizens of EK had been found as far-afield as Eaglesham crumpled in heaps in fields (The truth about Rudolf Hess was that he’d landed in a field near Eaglesham in 1941 took a step out of his plane and was soaked in a second said “Fuck this for a game of soldiers” then buggered off back to Germany).

Any days of weather clemency were immediately declared Bank Holidays by local employers who then populated the local private golf courses while the plebs played on the scrubby old ‘corpy courses’. These ‘courses’ were littered with lager tins and empty Lanliq bottles and the odd corpse would be discovered in the rough (which could actually be a fairway). Words like ‘sclaff’ and ‘howked-it’ were invented in these places to describe erroneous contact with wee white orb occasioning it to ‘skite’ into terrain well short and sideways to the target.

My father invented new swear-words on the Corpy course him and I played on where greenkeepers fees could be avoided if one turned up early enough in the morning as the dew was merely settling on the grass. Caught in a bunker filled with compact, industrial sand as yielding as tarmacadam, he would go all Tasmanian Devil, arms flailing and flinging golf clubs far and wide and mouthing oaths that rent through the morning air and insulting elderly couples as far away as Carmunnock.

“Whiiiiit isssss the fuuuuuuuuuuuuckiiiiiiiiiiing point?” he would roar as his ball skittered off into the trees to be mistaken for food by gangs of squirrels who would secrete it high amid leafy branches.

My dad didn’t learn to ‘treat himself’ until later on in life. Brought up by parsimonious, acquisitive parents it was ‘make do and mend’ and washing the dishes in cold water to save the pennies. Golf clubs should have whip in the shaft meaning there had to be some bend involved. My fathers half-set were bone-brittle and as unyielding as a bad-tempered woman on her dabs. They were to the game of golf what Margaret Thatcher was to Anarcho-Syndicalism.

If you didn’t connect with the ball ‘just right’ – maybe and god-forbid you connected with the ground first – a shudder of seismic proportions seized your whole body in a jarring effect that left you sore and trembling. This wasn’t golf, it was sado-masochism!

But, for some reason, one looked forward to these days. You could find yourself trudging on muddy ground up the par-5 sixth having already played five but not yet half-way to the hole, the wind would be whistling around your chill-blained ears and the rain soaking your sannies but you’d still be hoping for that one sweet shot that seemed to make it all worthwhile.

I’m not sure it ever came!