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I found the Top Flite golf ball – it bore the initials JSP – at the foot of a steep bank and peeping out from under a gorse bush. There was no point in looking to see if its owner was peering down from above in the hope of spotting his wayward missile. Not when the last balls on Edinburgh’s Torphin Hill Golf Club were struck as long ago as 7 January 2014.
Today, hill walkers have taken the place of the golfers who first started to clamber over the Torphin slopes in 1895. In those early days, golfers were made of sterner stuff than they are now. They loved their course but, little by little, their softer successors decided that the game was entirely tough enough without the simultaneous challenge of a spot of mountaineering. As Ian Hislop, a former club captain, said on a last-day gathering, “people don’t want to play golf on a hill these days and they don’t have to any more.” And certainly not in Edinburgh where there is a chain of flat links (other than Gullane No. 1) stretching all the way to North Berwick.
So how would JSP’s ball have arrived where it did? It was a good guessing game – and as near as you could get to the real thing at a time when, with this coronavirus at its most rampant, the defunct Torphin suddenly has found itself back on a par with courses grand and small all across our golfer-less land.
I climbed the relevant hill and found an old teeing mat – it was glued into a rusty metal tray – lying close to the summit. That had to have been JSP’s starting point. With no-one in the vicinity, I took up my stance and contemplated the glee that must have attached to hitting from so dizzy a height towards a full panorama of Edinburgh. Maybe, when he was standing there, JSP had had a great score in the bag and was visualising that Top Flite of his chasing down the hill towards what I thought could have been a distant green. And maybe the slice that followed had ruined his chance of getting his handicap down to 3 or 4, or winning a rare hat-trick of club championships.
I continued with my on-the-tee musings and even got so far as to think about tracing JSP and giving him back his ball. I was sure it could be done. What memories, I wondered, might correspond with the golfing history I had given him in my mind’s eye?
That was when someone approached out of the blue and felt constrained to point something out.
“I think you’re facing the wrong way,” he said.
The gentleman in question had played the course 40 years before and, though that hardly made him an expert, he seemed to think that the old tee belonged to a par-3 heading still further up the hill.
I lost all interest in JSP and his ball at that point. And switched my musings to the glorious downhill hole that maybe never was.
Lewine Mair