My husband asks me if I might be persuaded to get into golf. He is not a golfing fanatic himself but he has caught me at a good moment. After an hour and a half of hacking a ball across the glistening sands of St Andrews beach, as we play a new game we invented ourselves - combining some of the concepts of golf with others that belong to boules - I am on a high. Golf, if it has any relationship to this game - which involves one person hitting a ball and the other, curving herself into a strange contorted position around her now burgeoning baby bump in order to swing a club at the second ball, guiding it roughly in the direction of the first - is a heady and good thing. "Maybe," I say, eyeing up the Old Course and seeing myself posing like Jack Nicklaus on the bridge over the Swilcan Burn. "Just don't expect me to get into the golfing clothes."
"I could buy you a session in a driving range as a late Mother's Day present."
"Yes, that's a good idea," I say. He pauses to square himself up at the ball, then looks back at me. "You don't think you could get too into it? I wouldn't want to become a golf widower."
As I peer down the sand towards the water, I get the feeling this golf thing, which I had always just thought was really a dodgy networking club for bankers, belongs to me. I have had a similar feeling on a number of recent occasions. When trying out archery on my hen weekend - wow, I managed to hit the target. And when attempting fishing on an Irish lough: although I didn't catch anything, I was able to cast a lure out into the water. It's not that I was astoundingly promising at these skills, but I was not as shockingly bad as I had expected.
Suddenly, I was redefining myself as ever so slightly sporty. That whole school history of being among the last to be picked for a team, of not being able to throw a ball, fades into distant memory. I am championship material. My husband checks his watch. It's time to get back to the pub to catch the Six Nations. I groan. Did he imagine that because I seemed to be enjoying the idea of participating in a sport, I might also enjoy watching one?
At the pub, I glaze over, doing mental reruns of my swing. As everyone cheers another penalty, I do that thing of smiling and laughing though I haven't followed any of the abstract colour flashes on screen. "I think," I whisper to him, "you're far more likely to get me into playing golf than you are to get me into watching rugby."
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