Playing Through A Year of Life and Links Along the Scottish Coast

1 In my mind, the story always begins in my bedroom, in 1987, in a flat at 2 Alfred Place, St Andrews, when I awoke to find my narrow, messy bed had not its usual one occupant, but two. Moving slowly and quietly, I propped myself up on one elbow to have a peek. She wasn't much to look at, really; over-tall, gaunt, cold to the touch, and with a stiff page of mustard-coloured hair. Not that I found her unattractive. Quite the opposite, and to prove my devotion I nuzzled up close, whispered sweetly into her ear, wondering huskily how we'd managed to come together under such unlikely circumstances. I placed my hand on her javelinesque waist, stroked along the racoon-like black and white stripes of her skin. Haughty and distant -- the way she'd been from the start, in truth -- she chose to say nothing. Go ahead, be fickle, I thought, running a hand through my messy, longish hair. You're the same as the other seventeen. I rolled over and away from her, scanned my bedside table for my clock, found it, and discovered I was late for lunch, let alone breakfast. I also found, beside the clock, a small sheaf of paper -- perhaps thirty sheets -- and a handful of envelopes. The notepaper was light blue in colour, highly elegant, of a sophisticated grain. There looked to be an emblem confidently embossed at the top of each sheet of stationery. Picking up a single page, I saw the words Royal and Ancient Golf Club curled above the scalp of a heraldic logo, and St Andrews beneath the chin. It seemed golf had been involved in acquiring this paper (as well as my bedmate). A match, possibly, the day before between the University of St Andrews Varsity Golf Team, on which I played, and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, known to the world as the R&A. I looked down at the paper again. I had no idea how I'd ended up with the stationery, and it seemed a good bet the answer wasn't going to enhance my reputation in the better circles about town. Swinging my feet out of bed, the damp chill of March on the east coast of Scotland -- which being indoors did not parry in the least -- speared at my legs and torso. I reached for a T-shirt, put it on, and glanced back into my bed. My naked, steely companion ignored me. She was as stiff and uncommunicative as a long steel pole; this did not come as a surprise, since she was, in fact, a long steel pole. Flinging back the bedsheets, I removed the pole and leaned it against the wall, at which point its coarse page of plastic yellow hair uncurled to reveal a home address. A large black 1 beside a large black 8. This flagpole had been torn -- presumably by me -- from its home, the green on the final hole of the hallowed Old Course. It's a big field, really, the 18th hole, but a field rumpled with humps and mounds and swales, and the massive weight of its own history, and which concludes at the green fronted by the Valley of Sin. This is perhaps the most recognisable, most consecrated, spot in all golf. I considered the flagstick leaning in such a slatternly way against the wall, and felt my blood thinning, felt the need to sit down. I might as well have snuck into the Galleria dell'Academia in Florence and snapped the privates off Michelangelo's David. Something moved in the dregs of my memory, and I tried to tease out a coherent string of events. Too much alcohol had been involved, it was clear. I thought hard, concentrated even, but in the same way you get tyres and shopping trolleys when you dredge a lake looking for a body, so the night before emerged from the deep in muddy clumps of apparently unrelated imagery, each of which drew a cringe: walking down South Street and seeing my short, curly-haired friend Simon grabbing some poor dog by the testicles, and saying, 'Oy, oy, 'ow's that then?' My taller, spotty, red-headed friend George, who alsGillespie, Curtis is the author of 'Playing Through A Year of Life and Links Along the Scottish Coast', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400052233 and ISBN 1400052238.