The Golf Blog Club tees off

He's called it The Golf Blog Club, because we welcome the views of anybody who reads it. Whether it is to express an opinion on a topic raised, to go off at a tangent, to come right out of left field . . . or to get the ball rolling on a totally new subject altogether..

My priority, as the man hired to write about golf for The Journal, the Sunday Sun and the Evening Chronicle, is to get to hear about as much fun as possible on and off the course and do everything in my power to let everybody know about it.

I am no great shakes at golf myself. I play off 19 at Chester-le-Street but it would be more if the miserable so-in-so's on the handicap committee would let me play much nearer my true standard. I hate those men for sending me out to get a hiding every time I have a scorecard in my hand. Thank goodness for Dr Stableford.

My coach, Matfen Hall's guru extraordinary John Harrison, Kenneth Ferrie's mentor, who writes a well read Dr John golf clinic for The Journal every Thursday morning, says I am the one member of his stable who keeps his "feet on the ground." The swine.

Of course all three papers I write for, cater for the good golfers at professional, amateur and club level and do our best to make sure excellence is regularly recorded.

But as I should know, there is more to golf than winning. My all time career best prize was won on an outing organised by the Bull's Head Golfing Society around 20 years ago when I lived in Poynton, Cheshire in the days when I used to drink pints, rather than halves.

These days, my local pub in Chester-le-Street won't have me in their golf society because I don't show my face there often enough.

When I made my debut among the Cheshire society's motley collection of travelling old lags and nondescripts, I played my usual military golf (left-right, left-right) around some sumptuous, sun-kissed course somewhere around the Yorkshire-Derbyshire border.

Then the dinner-cum-let's-get-mortal started and I won first prize in the raffle, a splendid cut glass brandy decanter mounted alongside two glasses on a mahogany stand.

When we got back to Cheshire, the publican, who was a member of his own golf society, organised a lock-in. Driving home was out of the question and when son number one Nick arrived to pick me up, he got involved in the session.

Nick ended up having to carry home my splendid prize on the grounds I was barely able to carry myself. I forewarned him we would probably wake up his mother and that she would be doubly annoyed because she likes a night out herself.

If that happens, Nick, I said. Calm your mother down, treat the truth the way Richard Nixon used to, and say: "Come on mum, don't be too hard on poor old dad. Just look what he won for us at the golf."

At first all went as expected. My wife Ann, torn from her beauty sleep, came crashing furiously down the stairs.

Nick went a tadge overboard, pointing out dad must be a brilliant golfer now and, tottering on his own feet, held my star prize dangerously close to her nose. "Mum, just look what dad won at the golf," he said dutifully, if with a slight slur.

At which my wife's lips curled in a venomous sneer as she replied without any hesitation whatsoever: "Yeah, right. It must have been in the raffle."