AN ODE TO PITCH & PUTT

Dan Davies tells us about his love of this short form of the game and how it's inspired him to create his own back-garden course

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Over the last year, it feels like I have ceased being a golfer. This is not to say the game has left me; on the contrary, it has become more all-consuming than ever. Every morning, lunchtime, and evening when I'm at home, I head outside, through a gate, and into a small, one-acre plot of land where all I can think about is people hitting pitch and chip shots to tiny, sloping greens, laughing and joking even as a bad bounce sends their ball into knee-high rough. In many ways, this curious dream state is the result of having come full circle.

I can still remember the first time I picked up a golf club, somewhere in the region of 40 years ago. I was around ten years old and we were at the home of old family friends having Sunday lunch. Outside, in the middle of their perfectly striped lawn, was a hole supporting a black-and-white-striped flagstick topped with a limp red flag. As the adults chatted, I was given a putter and a couple of golf balls. In the space of a single afternoon, my life changed forever.

Soon afterwards, my dad took me to our local pitch and putt course, situated in a scruffy corner of a park close to where we lived in London. A litterstrewn brook split the nine-hole course down the middle. The flag poles were painted bamboo canes, the tees were larger versions of the rubber-link mats some kept outside their back doors. Managing the operation was a bearded curmudgeon who reeked of tobacco, two-stroke, and grass cuttings.