Doing her duty to the subject of...death

FOR this month’s offering, I thought I’d pick a cheerful little topic – death! It started when I was settling down to my cornflakes, and had the misfortune to read about Keith Richards snorting his father’s ashes. The Rolling Stone reportedly achieved this feat as part of a drugs binge.

During an interview with NME magazine, the rock singer said, “I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow…It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”

Why would anyone want to stick the remains of their father up their nose? Without knowing what the rest of the concoction going up his nose at the same time as his father was, I think it is probably safe to say he was out of his mind. However, it does bring into focus all the other weird and wonderful things people now choose to do with the ashes of their loved ones. Certainly, it seems to be quite a popular idea for golfers to be strewn across their course.

While it’s a fairly quaint idea to be scattered over the 18th green at the beloved golf club where you have spent many happy years, I can’t help being plagued by the vision of being stuck to the soles of all the golf shoes trampling over it, and then being shot blasted into the waste tray of the shoe cleaner afterwards, which isn’t quite so romantic somehow.

If you had a more perverted sense of humour – like me – you might want to have the last laugh by being added to a bunker and be part of the frustration of all the people who failed to get out first time. Then there seems to be a roaring trade in sending ashes up into the heavens via firework rockets.

There’s something to be said for going out with a bang, I suppose, but once the rocket explodes, you could land in all sorts of unsavoury places, that you would never willingly have chosen. I only mention it because there is a sewage works in close proximity to one end of the course at Trentham. Enough said!

I have to admit, I was both appalled and intrigued by a letter to The Daily Telegraph from a vicar who had read about the Richards story. It reminded him of his younger days, as a curate, when he went to visit one of his parishioners, and was told the lady’s late husband was in the kitchen.

Expecting to find an urn, he was somewhat surprised to discover that he was actually in an egg timer – well, three minutes worth of him was to be precise – where he could still be of some use!

Now that really does open up a whole new avenue of ideas of what to do with someone! The starter at Open Days would no longer struggle to send people off at six minute intervals if he had a past captain to keep turning over, would he?

On a slightly lighter note, Harry Vardon (as of the Vardon grip fame) had a very lucky golfing escape. He was due to attend the 1912 US Open, but fortunately for him, illness prevented him from sailing on the Titanic. The US Open also came to the fore in 1977, when Hubert Green had the biggest win of his career, despite playing out the last four holes under a death threat. A woman phoned the FBI to warn them that a contract had been taken out on his life, and that he would die at the Southern Hills club in Tulsa.

That adds a whole new meaning to standing over a four-foot putt with your knees knocking, but to the man’s credit, he finished with two pars, a birdie and a bogey, before joking that the assassin was probably an ex-girlfriend!

Never let it be said that I don’t spend an inordinate amount of time researching my articles for your edification. In 1940, the temporary rules at Richmond Golf Club stated, “In competition, during gunfire or while bombs are falling, players may take cover without penalty for ceasing play. The positions of known delayed-action bombs are marked by red flags at a reasonably, but not guaranteed, safe distance therefrom…. A ball moved by enemy action may be replaced, or if lost or ‘destroyed’ a ball may be dropped not nearer the hole without penalty.

A player whose stroke is affected by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb may play another ball from the same place. Penalty, one stroke.”

Now, I like my golf, but I’m not sure I’d be tempted to skip down the fairways dodging bombs. Even worse, I’ve long said how unfair many of the rules are, but giving someone a one shot penalty if they have been put off their stroke by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb is just plain mean.

Still, at least they wouldn’t have had to worry about going up point one in those days, just to add insult to injury!

I would like to end with a story my father always uses to illustrate the rules of what you can and cannot remove from a bunker. Should you be unfortunate enough to land in a bunker and then find the dead body of your secretary holding his beloved pipe, you could remove the pipe before playing your shot, but you must not move the secretary.

With my long association of encounters with the secretary, that analogy is just a little too close to home for me!