WALKING CRAZY

 I don’t say golf is ‘a good walk spoiled.’ I say it’s much, much worse than that, but I 

know that other views are possible. 

The earliest appearance of that ‘spoiled walk’ quip, according to Quote Investigator was in a newspaper article in Enniscorthy, Ireland in April 1901. The author was only identified as ‘a northern Gael.’ 

 

In 1905, they say, Henry Leon Wilson tweaked the expression and used it in his novel The Boss of Little Arcady.  No, of course I haven’t read it.  The line there apparently runs ‘This new game of golf that the summer folks play seems to have too much walking for a good game and just enough game to spoil a good walk.’  It’s a much better line.

 

However since golf dates back at least to the 15^th century, and the first18 hole golf course was laid out in St Andrews in the 18^th century it’s hard to understand how golf is ‘this new game,’ but perhaps it’s poetic license.

 

I’ve never play ‘proper’ golf and I know I’d be no good at it, but there was a short phase of my life when I had a taste for crazy golf.

 

Obviously the great thing about crazy golf is that it doesn’t spoil a walk because there’s really no walking in it to speak of, and there’s no real golf either, which is a real plus.

 

My idea, not one of my best, was that I’d turn my crazy golf interest into a TV format ‘Playing A Round With Geoff.’  We’d get Ian Botham or Helen Mirren or Salman Rushdie, and we’d putter around together and they’d be relaxed enough to lower their guard and say something wonderful.

 

Well, you can imagine how well that went down.  But as ‘research’ I did play a certain amount of crazy golf, mostly in East Anglia, with anybody I could get interested. And I did take some photos – above and below.

 

And then a couple of weekends ago I went for a more or less proper walk in Felixstow, not at all in search of crazy golf, and if you’d asked me if I’d ever played crazy golf there I’d have said no, but it seems I did.  See below, Then and Now: the obelisk doesn’t lie.  Unless it’s been moved.

 

Which brings us to Bing Crosby who died on October 14^th1977.  He’d finished a round of golf at the La Moraleja course in Spain, with three other golfers, and he said to his partners ‘That was a great game of golf, fellas, let’s go have a Coca Cola’ which sounds a little unlikely to me.  The picture below is obviously from a different time.

 

But anyway, he was walking back to the clubhouse, full of the joys of the links, had a heart attack, fell over and died.

 

It must really have really spoiled his walk.  It probably didn’t enhance the walk for the other guys he was playing with either.

 

 

ALL OVER IN DOVERCOURT

Back in the day, and it was a long day, I had an idea for a sort of travel book to be titled The Seaside in Winter.  The pitch was that I’d buy a camper van, a Volkswagen no doubt, and in the course of a long winter I’d travel around the coast of mainline Britain.  By day I’d walk and look and feel the wind and rain and icy chill, and in the evening I’d return to the camper, park up, and spend the evening writing up my notes from the day, which would involve reflecting on and savouring the bleak melancholy of deserted seaside spaces.  

I can still see how it might have worked but I never turned it into a proposal, because I also thought it might be recipe for doom.  ‘Promising melancholic young writer found dead by his own hand in VW Camper.’  That might have boosted sales a little, but it wasn’t enough.  Yet that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped enjoying the seaside in winter.

And so at the weekend I went to Dovercourt: north east Essex coast, next to Harwich, and the casual flâneur might be hard pressed to say where one town ended and the other one started.

Dovercourt is where Hi Di Hi was filmed, in Warner’s Holiday Camp, renamed Maplins for the show.  I wasn’t a regular viewer, but I don’t remember many scenes being shot outdoors, though evidently some were.

Dovercourt in late November had many of the things I thought would be components of my long lost book, even though I’m well aware that late November isn’t truly winter. There was the empty seaside shelter – with pro-Jesus and anti-Satan graffiti.

They’ve got two  19^th century steampunk(ish) lighthouses (no longer in use):

There was crazy golf – I would have played if the kiosk had been open:

And you know I love signs, not least this one, 

I think, and again I may be wrong, it’s warning you that you could be attacked by a blob of black ectoplasm rising from the beach and attacking you in the trouser region.  In general I think life requires a few risks, but I’m all in favour of being warned against that particular danger.

As well as being proper seaside, with groins, lighthouses and (rather small) stretches of beach, Dovercourt also has some serious suburbia, which of course I’m deeply attracted to.

Note how the two bungalows above are apparently mirror images of each other, but they have a different kind of pvc front door and a different kind of lamp adjacent to it.  That’ll make a house stand out from all the others, not that everybody in suburbia wants their house to stand out.

Anchors are another option:

So is a horse: