The fairways look like Friday afternoon on the M25. There are three and fourballs wherever you look and the traffic is at a crawl.
I’m a bit more of a sports car than a truck when it comes to golf – and waiting to hit every time you arrive at the junction of tee or fairway isn’t ideal.
But what else am I’m I going to do? It’s not like I’ve got anything pressing. After the past year, I’m still just happy to get out of the house.
Then I see it. The teapot. Or worse still, the double teapot. You know what I’m talking about.
You’re lining up a tricky five-footer, or the putting surface has just cleared and you’re about to launch a piercing iron into its heart (all right, all right, you’re going to hook, slice, shank, fat, thin it) and you see them out of the corner of your eye.
The twoball with hands on hips. They look like something out of a Denby catalogue.
It’s a pose that screams passive aggression – ’You’re in my way and you should remove yourselves from it as quickly as possible’ – and it’s usually followed by a range of utterly infuriating mannerisms.
So if you’ve got a particularly irritating set of teapots you’ll almost certainly also see the following:
– The folded arms: A timeless move, which must be executed with legs placed as wide apart as possible.
– The arm wave: Don’t mistake this for a greeting. These people are not saying ‘hello’.
– The whistle: Do I look like a dog to you?
– The trolley ram: Like the BMW driver nudging you out of the fast lane, they’ll park their trolley next to the tee as they’re heading to the green you’ve cleared. Just as you’re about to tee off, they’ll accidentally on purpose touch wheels.
‘Are you going to let us through?’ they squeal, completely ambivalent to the fact the group in front have barely started walking ahead of you and there’s two further sets of players streaked down that par 5. And they’re just the ones you can see.
But yes, you should just part like the Red Sea, waste another quarter of an hour watching them hack it about, and then spend the rest of the round staring at their backsides.
No one else is going to yield. Perhaps don’t run after every ball like Usain Bolt and it might be a bit less frustrating. Relax. Chill. Or whatever else it is people say on, what is it, Tok-Tik?
Sometimes, it’s just busy.
Has the Angry Club Golfer got it right? Have your say in the comments or why not tweet him?
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Steve Carroll
