Fore!

Southampton City Golf Course

Among the many things I do not understand in this life, and which have probably marked me out as rather less than alpha male material, golf figures quite high. It's very striking, when you take the train up to London from Southampton, quite how much acreage has been allocated to this bizarre activity. What seem at first to be tumuli turn out to be bunkers and putting greens; what appears to be interesting parkland, glimpsed through trees, turns out to be stretches of fairway and rough. Every town seems to shade into golf courses at the edges.

Which is not to say that a golf course, as such, doesn't have quite a strong visual appeal. As it happens, two of our regular weekend walks take us through golf courses, which can be a slightly hazardous business: it's quite hard to spot an incoming, badly-sliced golf-ball. But the contrast of velvety greens and tussocky rough can look rather attractive in the right sort of light, only spoiled by the presence of golfers (are those strange clothes an essential part of the game?) and an overpowering sense of futility that hangs about the place like a chill mist. The recent snow has rendered our local municipal course unplayable, however, so it was a chance to wander about freely without fear of concussion.

Living among the semi-detached houses of suburban streets laid out on what were "green field" sites in the 1930s, as so many of us do, it's striking to realise that, at the very same time, eighty-plus years ago, acute observers like T.S. Eliot were already identifying a hollowness in what seemed to be happening to society, a busy purposelessness that the new, efficient network of roads and the game of golf somehow exemplified:

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour
Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore
I have given you the power of choice, and you only alternate
Between futile speculation and unconsidered action.

And the wind shall say: “Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.”
from: Choruses from The Rock, 1934

To be sure, there's a snobbery there, but you don't have to share Eliot's Christian conservatism to appreciate the sentiment. In fact, I suspect that it is precisely at the other end of the political-confessional spectrum that we now look at golf with bafflement and suspicion. Mindless motoring, of course, is widely recognised as having become rather more than a spiritual sickness. But then, eighty years on, things that could once only be detected by the most fastidious antennae are now obvious to anyone. In Choruses from The Rock, Eliot's denunciation of our society's inclination to anaemic distractions and disinclination to make positive choices seems almost to have anticipated the draining of meaning from work by IT:

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

"Systems so perfect that no one will need to be good"... Or need to work, or even to get off the sofa. Never mind golf, I wonder what Eliot would have made of a Prime Minister with an Angry Birds habit? Somehow, I don't think he would have been surprised that a man like David Cameron would make an epically foolish choice, one that ended up sacrificing national for party interest, and then clear off to chillax and write a book about it all. Does Cameron play golf? Of course he does.

Southampton City Golf Course