A SLICE OF LIFE

I was visiting my mother in her flat recently, which is something that I still do despite the fact that I’m not the most thrilling or useful of guests. Whilst I was there she found one of those various little tasks that she asks me to do, which was to take the old plastic milk bottles out across the car park and off down the slope to beyond the wall where the recycling bins lurk. This was not the most difficult of tasks and was felt to be one that even I might be capable of handling with a certain amount of efficiency and so I gathered together the bottles, made sure I had my keys in my pocket, added my own water bottle to the collection in the carrier bag and headed down the communal corridor and outside.

As I reached the bins, I noticed on the ground what looked like a golf ball just sitting there all on its own just at the bottom of the slope in the middle of the tarmac. I stared at it for a while pondering upon the fact that there really isn’t a golf course within a mile of the place as I placed the various bottles into the various slots of the bins and shoved the carrier bag into my pocket.

I looked around me. Behind me, beyond the parking spaces, was a barrier of tall conifers that protected the boundary of the whole site. To my left was a wall and to my right was a church. Directly ahead was the apartment block itself, so I wondered quite where this ball had come from, so I went to pick it up.

It was lighter than I remembered. Many, many years ago I used to have a pet mongrel called “Whiskey” for no better reason that I’d once decided that if I ever got a dog, that’s what I was going to call it, and for many teenage years I would take him out for his morning walk across the golf course relatively near to where I lived back then. Quite often I would find stray abandoned golf  balls which, with my usual habit for accumulating useless tat, I would pick up and take home and keep, despite the fact that I was not really emotionally destined to see anything appealing about the game of golf. Strangely, and I’ve only just remembered this as I’m writing this now, I remember my grandmother seeming to be quite eager that I should take up the sport at one point, which is probably what conclusively put me off it for life.

Anyway, because it seemed to be relatively light in weight, I wasn’t totally convinced that it was a proper golf ball at all, thinking instead that it was perhaps one of those practice balls that managing directors used to putt with in their offices in old seventies sitcoms, or maybe it was one of those hollow plastic replicas from a child’s golf set, although what on earth you might be telling a child about his future life and aspirations by buying them such a thing at such an age is quite beyond me.

Naturally, I now know that times have moved on and technology has done many thing to improve the humble golf ball, so that they can be made lighter and sleeker and so very aerodynamic that they could no doubt pretty much do the job of jumping into that little hole without any outside human intervention whatsoever, however, at the moment I picked that particular ball up, I knew very little of such things and instead I gave it the only tried and tested, time honoured test that I knew, and I bounced it.

Rather satisfyingly it did exactly what Newton said it should and, with a surprising amount of conservation of energy and internal elasticity, it pretty much bounced back to the height that I’d dropped it from. Rather pleased that this was indeed the ‘real deal’, I started to wonder about what to do with it.

I mean, I think I’ve got beyond the accumulation of tat stage (at least the sort of tat you pick up from the street anyway), but I decided that there was a pretty good chance that, as the car park was attached to a block of retirement apartments, there was a pretty fair chance that there was a golfer residing somewhere within and, rather logically I thought, that golfer might very well have been removing his bag of golfing sticks from the boot of their car and the ball might well have made a run for it, a dash for freedom and rolled off down that slope without them having noticed its cunning escape. So, I thought, the best thing to do would be to put it inside the post room of the apartment building, and the golfist would be happy to find it when they went to retrieve their Daily Telegraph and their tax rebate the following morning.

Then one of the conifer trees spoke to me.

“Hey is that a golf ball?” it said.

I turned around. Plainly a tree that played golf was an unlikely thing, but I felt somehow that from somewhere around me, eyes had been watching and burning into my soul. Someone, somewhere knew of my history of accumulating a pocket full of such things and had seen me pick up this small object of desire and thought that I was about to have away on my toes with it. What was it that had given me away? Was it the soft yet distinctive tap of the ball as it hit the ground during my unscientific appraisal of its genuine golfing attributes?

“Yeah, I sliced my shot” said the voice, sounding more and more like a teenager with sporting ambitions. So, I went over to the row of conifers and thrust my hand through it and the golf ball was retrieved from it by the faceless possible future green jacket wearing champion of the golfing world who I never saw, and I returned with my empty carrier bag to my mother, my mission accomplished, wondering about the nonexistent Telegraph reader and what they would have thought about me giving their golf ball away to the first passing teenager that asked for it, and whether they might believe me if I told them that I’d been mugged by a conifer.