A tribute to P.G. Wodehouse:
The Joys of Indoor Golf
I was once accused, when I was found mixing nitro-glycerine in the potting shed, of having nothing decent to occupy my time. The accusation rankled then, and it rankles now. My hobbies are as diverse as they are numerous: sailing, reading, writing, playing the piano – lock picking is one of my more exotic ones – I readily embrace anything that would prevent me from doing an honest day’s work. But in my mind, nowt rates as highly in the eyes of kings as that of golf. It has the advantage of being a sport that you can greatly enjoy even with very little skill. I myself am a strict eighteen-handicap man, and have great fun.
Outside of the professionals, golfers in general can be clumped into three main classes. Firstly, there is the serious golfer. These men are pale, wan creatures, worn down by the ignominy of decades of bad driving. Their actual ability can change within this class – some are plus eight or above on their home links, while others have never gone round in less than a hundred. Two things untie them all – their passion for the rules of that most holy game (if you commit sacrilege while on the green, they will be the first to cite chapter and verse), and their extreme sensitivity. The said sensitivity usually increases with the ability of the player. I once knew a man who was unbeatable on the fairway when he was on form, but seldom reached that form due to being disturbed by the roaring of butterflies in adjacent meadows.
The second group is to that which I belong – those who play the game not so much out of an all consuming passion, but rather because it is a good way of spending the time. We tend to roam the links in large groups, laughing uproariously and generally breaching the peace. As a result of this I have been forcibly ejected from several clubs. You may or may not be pleased to know that I was not badly injured. After the fifth heavy threw me out on my ear I learnt how to roll.
The third and final group is perhaps the most pitiful. They are generally of a poor standard, but are desperate to improve. In their desperation, they scour the surrounding area for books written by famous golfers, patent clubs with titanium shafts and anything that they feel will improve their stroke. Normally they are accountants or other pallid denizens of the night, and have a deep love for the game, but are normally too embarrassed about it to admit it to their friends and relations. At the club I was at last, I heard a very sad story concerning a man who would come home late from work every night, and refused to tell his wife why. She, naturally, feared the worse, and filed for a divorce. It was only in court that the truth came out – the unfortunate man had been staying out late to practice his driving, returning only when it got too dark to see the ball.
Not seeing the ball, or rather, not finding it, is an all-too-common scenario in the imperfect world in which we live. In the spring or the summer the ball is invariably lost either in the glare of the sun or the long grass (only to be found, the moment your back is turned by a small infant who will go and sell it back to club) and in the autumn the ball will trundle into the piles of leaves, never to be seen again.
And so onto winter. The trees are bare, the grass is in hiding, the ground is hard, and while the sun is out, it is weak and feeble enough not to blind you. Whatever its critics may say, winter is the time to play golf. Picture the scene: a frosty morning some time in February. The links are deserted. The air is still and clear, save for the little clouds of steam given off by your breath. You place the ball on its tee, select a goodish driver from your bag, square your legs, take a deep breath and swing. You have violated maybe only eleven of the twenty-three rules for perfect driving, and the ball shoots off. As it normally does, it veers horribly to the left, but by an amazing stroke of good fortune it bounces off the bare trunk of a tree, and lands an easy putt away from the hole. So you round up in one under par.
Of course, when the snows arrive this becomes impossible. Of course, you may be able to go out with a red ball and play that way, but if you seriously consider such an idea, you are clearly in such an advanced state of brain decay that the arrival of the men in white coats should not be a surprise. No, when the weather sends you off the links, it is time for the Joys of Indoor Golf.
It is my firm-held belief that whatever your house, be it a bungalow, flat or mansion, it is possible to construct an indoor golf course. The only exception to this is if you live in a caravan, but I feel that if a caravan is your home of choice, you don’t deserve to play golf. Depending on the size of your home, and your ingenuity, you will be able to have a different number of holes. At the Cardozo residence, we have managed the full eighteen. A friend of mine claims to have gone one further, and mapped an elusive nineteenth hole, but such claims are best taken with a pinch of salt. Frankly, the idea is ridiculous.
To give you an idea of how to set up your own indoor golf course, I will now proceed to give you a brief overview of the Cardozo indoor golf course. The first hole is carefully designed to be simple and basic, in order to boost morale and increase the player’s confidence. Starting on the doormat by the front door, a well-aimed drive will bounce your ball off the left hand and back walls, placing you in an admirable position to hole you out in a cup under the stairs labelled: “The World’s Biggest Mug”. Par is two, but three is quite acceptable. My grandfather once claimed to have done it in one, but he was drunk at the time.
The second hole starts where the first left off. Starting under the stairs, you must drive the ball along the rest of the hall. All the doors in the house are left open, so care must be taken not to overshoot and propel the ball into the kitchen. Instead, you must turn left at the end of the hall and into the long dining room, where a good niblick shot should loft you nicely onto the table to hole out in an overturned slipper (normally used for storing tobacco).
The third hole starts at the other end of the dining room. The player must re-trace their steps back into the hall, and then left into the kitchen, to finish in an egg-cup under the dresser. This is a nice easy course, with no real hazards except the chair legs and the occasional hazard of Cuthbert the cat, who is normally lounging around on the fairway. That is really all there is too it, though house rules state that you gain a penalty stroke if you hit the maid coming down the back stairs.
I will now skip to the sixth hole, the infamous water course (not having the time or space to explain to you the others in great detail). Starting at the base of the stairs, you must loft the ball up onto the landing (normally taking at least three shots), and then along the landing to the bathroom. The basin and bath are filled, and the loo seat is left up. The hole is the overflow pipe in the bath. Some use a sand wedge for their shot, I prefer a lob wedge, but each to his own. You may remember the scandal back in ’98 when old “Beefy” Belemnite broke all previous records by taking a shovel for his approach shot, and while he was judged “not guilty” by the jury, it is considered injudicious to attempt to repeat his performance.
The seventh to seventeenth holes are played out on the second third floors, with a brief detour down the back stairs into the kitchens in the ninth hole, and the eighteenth hole starts at the top of the front stairs. A well-played shot will get your ball through the banisters and straight down into the hall. From there, it is only a couple of shots to the drawing room. This is generally a difficult course, due to the large amounts of furniture and people cluttering the fairway, and reaching the hole in fewer than eight is a rare achievement. My cousin once took twenty-nine, but he had the misfortune to become bunkered in a photo of my Aunt Taisy on the piano and took fully eleven shots to extricate himself. If you get the ball into the canary’s cage, it is usually best to give up straight away. It is generally considered to be impossible to get out in under fifty, and after about thirty the bird gets visibly annoyed.
Disclaimer:
I do not actually play golf.
