(… with apologies to Sebastian Faulks).
One day in November 2011. Two views of the City of London.
1) St Paul’s Cathedral, from the top floor of a major European bank;
2) The Occupy London protest. Down to Earth, in St Paul’s Churchyard.
Truly, we live in interesting, fascinating times. When distance and detail each yields its own perspective.
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A major tournament – contested on the best links I’ve played, and won by the gutsiest golfer I know. There could scarcely have been a better result to this year’s Open Championship.
Amongst the courses on the British Open rota, Royal St George’s is the toughest and biggest one out there. And those are qualifications which could apply perfectly to Darren Clarke, as well.
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Golf is a sport which can make you humble.
Yet the new US Open champion had already learnt humility the hard way.
In April, Rory McIlroy led a major championship for the third time in a row, starting the last day of the US Masters with a four-stroke lead. That was before a spectacular Amen Corner collapse raised doubts if Rory could ever win a major.
After all, his final round at Augusta only matched the score he had made in a gale at St Andrews last July, after opening up with a 63.
Scoring 80 twice when leading majors seemed to ask serious questions about Rory’s appetite for the fight.
Yet really, his fortitude should never have been in doubt.
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Posted in 2011, golf, heroes, summer, united in a future
No rock so hard but that a little wave
May beat admission in a thousand years
Alfred, Lord Tennyson — The Princess (1847)
* * * * *
The fog is hanging low across the Chalk Downs as ahead of me the village of Freshwater huddles deep between the trees. The first streetlights of a November evening flicker weakly above the street.
As inspiring landscapes go, perhaps this drizzly valley wouldn’t rate that high. But five miles run before the autumn daylight fades is precious, shrunken time, expanded on the trail.
The village street is empty. A fine mist of rain would keep most folk inside, but in truth it’s almost perfect running weather.
I loop around to find the path, cut into steps above the road through dense gorse and bramble. It climbs relentlessly between the trees, emerging breathlessly onto a chalky, flinty track under a darkening canopy of woods — branches of yew holding up grey clouds just a metre or so above.
At last the path emerges from the underworld and in just a second my feet burst out into a longer stride across wide and grey-lit grassland, rising evenly towards a lurking hill unseen beyond.
The evening silence is different here — wider, more expansive and with a distant, threatening edge. I skulk onwards more cautiously now — for all the firm, smooth ground beneath my feet, there’s a clifftop not all that far away.
Open, yawning space fills the sky, as the empty horizon closes out direction and up or down. It’s unsettling, nauseating — yet an elemental elation fills my throat.
This is fear.
A minute further through the void, I’m a mile or more from anyone who would hear me scream when a dark grey mass rears itself tall and high from unlikely, empty fog.
Atop this wild, forsaken hill there stands a cross.
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Clear skies may have been in short supply in Wales this week, but at least by Saturday night the Ryder Cup scoreboard was showing its first hint of blue.
As I left home on Sunday morning to find a TV showing the Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor, news came through on the radio. The start of play had been delayed until noon, and then 1.30 pm. I’ve watched the last day of the Ryder Cup many times, but this year the weather and the schedule were both out of kilter.
Instead of a full Sunday programme, play would be restricted to the last nine holes of six fourballs and foursomes which had begun the day before. The singles matches to conclude the event would be delayed until Monday.
For just a very few moments, I pondered turning around. But, meagre as it was, this was all the live golf I would see in this Ryder Cup.
For me, and for many others, the Ryder Cup is the highlight of my sporting calendar. The reasons that the event is so special?
In truth, there are many. It’s all about pride, about fear, and about the vagaries and unique demands of match play in golf.
The Ryder Cup is about individual performance in the heat of the battle, and about bringing a team together to outdo even its own expectations.
On this side of the pond, it’s about proving the worth of the European Tour against the PGA Tour in the US. It’s about showing who are the best golfers in the world — for many years it really was the Americans, which is why we tried so hard to foster the illusion that maybe they weren’t.
That’s the Ryder Cup. It encapsulates so many glories in this game of golf, and it celebrates all that divides us and unites us across the Atlantic Ocean as well.
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Posted in 2010, divided by an ocean, golf, heroes, united in a future, Wales
As evening falls beneath the deepest black of a December northern sky, a thin veil of dark blue hangs streaked with vivid orange just above the pine trees.
The homeward rush hour in Inverness is a muted, half-hearted affair, and in minutes we’re sailing past the bright lights of the bridge towards the darkness of the Black Isle.
Half an hour ahead, the lights of Cromarty barely touch the depths of nightfall. The white houses of the Royal Burgh are hiding low against the shoreline.
There’s a menace to the silence now, faintly interrupted as it is by the bleak moanful sounds of grinding metal and hammering. Across the water, just half a mile offshore, the leviathans of the deep are waiting.
Here in the Cromarty Firth, oil rigs from around the world are waiting for the calmer seas of spring, wintering inshore through maintenance and upgrade programmes to equip them for ever deeper, more challenging drilling as our quest for oil expands.
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roads of stone 