I’ll bet that you have often thought of something clever or witty to say to someone, seconds, minutes or even days too late for it to have any relevance or impact. How many times a week do you come up with a pithy or witty comment but long after the moment has passed?
It happens to me all the time. I am regularly thinking of the suitable rejoinder I could or should have used but never in time for it to make the required impact.
The French have a name for this. They call it “L’esprit de l’escalier” which translates as “staircase wit”. In other words, it is something that you only think of on the way up the stairs to bed.
Of course, when I get home and enthral Caroline with the story of an interesting episode from my day, I alter the facts a little so that instead of the anecdote ending, “… so I nodded and walked away,” which is what really happened, I tell her that what I actually said was, “… yeah, and I’ve got a Morris Minor!”
Oh, how she laughs and I’m sure that she thinks to herself, “How lucky I am to have such a clever, sharp and quick-witted husband.”
Yesterday, something happened that enabled me to get in my retort at exactly the right time. It wasn’t exactly quick-witted or spontaneous as I had been brooding and planning for more than two hours before the opportunity arose to say what I did.
I warn you now that you may think that I don’t come out of this in a very good light. If you have never met me, you may have formed the impression that I might be a nice person. I am afraid that you will see now that I'm not.
My liver doctor told me some months ago that I should take more exercise and he suggested that I join a gym. I did and I hated it. Unhappily, I am contractually locked into membership for a year and I have to continue paying the monthly subscription until next May but I’ve stopped going.
Instead, I have started having golf lessons. Tiger Woods and Rory Mcllroy both started their coaching at the age of 18 months. I am 64!
I was aware of the warning given by PG Wodehouse:
Golf, like the measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious.
I will continue for the foreseeable future though, because of something that was said by A.A. Milne:
Golf is the best game in the world at which to be bad.
I am not quite hopeless at golf but I’m certainly bad. When I began and before I realised quite how bad I would be, I fantasised that I would be going round with respectable scores after a month or two and then would rapidly rise through the listings of a club to become a leading player within a couple of years.
After all, how difficult could it be? I had spent over forty-five years whacking a cricket ball around and occasionally hitting it in the middle of the bat too.
The cricket ball, weighing 5½ ounces, travelled towards me at speeds of between 50 and 90 miles an hour, was often swinging or swerving through the air. Sometimes it was deceptively flighted. When the ball hits the pitch, its onward path is not always entirely predictable either. It can spin, veer either way, rear up or even keep unexpectedly low.
Sometimes on a bad wicket (and I played on plenty of those) there was a real risk of injury. 12 players have died playing cricket since 1932.
No one has ever died from a golf injury but there nearly was a fatality in the spring of 1964. The first time I ever hit a golf ball in anger was at Lowestoft golf club. My friend, Richard Savage, was a member there and having been playing for a few years he was already a good golfer. He suggested that I gave it a try and took me along to give it a go.
I teed up and whacked it as hard as I could but caught the ball with the toe of the club.
Twenty feet away and at an angle of about 50° from us was a metal flagpole with the Club’s pennant fluttering proudly from it. The ball hit the pole and rebounded back, head high and right between us. It came to rest some seventy yards behind the tee. One of us could have been killed and so I nearly made history.
Unlike a cricket ball, a golf ball just sits there, motionless, looking up at you smirking and asking to be walloped. How difficult could it be? The short answer is, “Very.”
As Caroline said to me two years ago after a disastrous attempt to cut my hair , “Cutting hair is a lot like golf – they’re both a lot more difficult than they look.”
My fantasies may not come to fruition for a reason other than my golfing ineptitude, however.
I don’t think I like golf club members.
Hang on, that’s not entirely true. I have several friends who play golf and obviously as they are friends, I like them all – but they are men. It’s the Lady Members with whom I think I would have a problem. The ladies at this golf club all seem to be clones of the same prototype.
The first time I walked through the clubhouse on my way to the Pro’s shop for my first lesson, a woman stopped me.
“Are you a member?” she demanded abruptly.
“No, I’m not,” I said and walked on.
Yesterday, on the same journey, I was intercepted twice and by two different women.
“Do you want something?” said the first one who was leaving the building by the door through which I was about to go in.
“No,” I said coldly and walked on past her. Ten seconds later, as I left the building through the sliding glass door on the other side, yet another “lady” stopped me.
“Anything I can do for you?” she enquired. I grunted negatively and walked on.
My golf lesson went worse than usual. I was inwardly fuming and instead of paying full attention to the advice I was being given by the Pro, I kept thinking of responses I could have come up with.
We played a few holes and afterwards my legs were aching, my ankles were hurting and I was tired. I sat on a chair on the terrace overlooking the first tee to rest before hobbling to my car.
“Can I help you?”
Not again! There she was. Another stern-faced, middle-aged, sun-bronzed, grey-haired, heavily made-up, overweight, scowling harridan. She was standing over me with that look that, after years of practice on her husband, was meant to intimidate.
I looked up at her and smiled amiably. This was the moment I had been waiting for. I couldn’t believe my luck. Just when I had honed the perfect response, here she was – yet another interfering, officious busybody and she had walked right into my trap.
“No thank you my dear but perhaps I could help you. Shall we see if we can find your Carer?”
That is what I had planned to say, gently and with a look of genuine concern. Except that’s not what happened and it’s not what I said.
I really intended to. It wasn’t that I chickened out. She deserved it. In fact, she probably deserved a lot more than that but maybe I felt sorry for her. She obviously had nothing more interesting or fulfilling to do with her empty life than to wander about the terrace on a sunny afternoon searching for strangers to accost and harass.
“No thank you,” I said, “I’m just resting after a lesson.”
What a wimp I am.
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