To see oorsels as ithers see us: part 136. There has always been some sense of sneering, narrow-eyed suspicion from the general public about media folk. ‘Oooh, hark at them with their lanyards and their armbands and their inside the ropes access’ they hiss through clenched teeth after forking out a fortune to attend the Open and gaze at the back of somebody’s balding bonce. Even for the humble golf scribbler, the inside the ropes access often means you just get a closer look at a variety of cameramen instead of actual gowfers hitting shots as the Open continues to become more like a tour around the Sky Sports production equipment museum. The Diarist and his fellow golf writers have been called many things down the seasons – “you’re not a golf writer” being one of them – but, as we filed down the side of the fairway the other day, we took umbrage to one muttering spectator who mumbled “aye, here come the hangers on”. Good grief.
My body is a temple, is a phrase you don’t often hear in the circus tent otherwise known as the media centre. Unless we’re comparing said body to those shoogling, crumbling bits of the Acropolis, of course. The golf writers have never been the healthiest of specimens. There are seasoned campaigners who smoke between mouthfuls during meals while a blood sample at the doctors comes with a head on it. In the media café, meanwhile, there were some significant developments. At the start of week a bowl of mixed fruit cost £7.50. As the Open progressed it went down to £1.50. On Sunday it was 90 pence. Cue a wave of healthy eating? Not quite. The counters still echoed to drooling, fevered cries of “can you shoehorn another bit of black pudding into that roll, love?”
In another life, the Diarist has decided to come back as a meteorologist. I mean, what other job do you get handsomely rewarded for getting things wrong on a daily basis? Mmmm, now let me think? It seems our friends at the Met Office spend days gazing at low pressure systems, tightly packed isobars and occluded fronts before making a considered, educated forecast which is consistently wide of the mark. A keek at the daily weather bullet-in, which this week has been about as uplifting as reading the death notices, said ‘rainfall on Sunday: 0mm’. At least I think it did. It was hard to read it clearly with the morning rain battering down on the spectacles.
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