Day 141 - The Grove

Every year, I have a golf game arranged with three former Shell Trading colleagues. We each take turns to arrange and host the fixture and this year it was Mike's turn. He is the only one still working at Shell (and is very important nowadays!) and he took us today to The Grove, just near Watford.  This is a corporate golf location par excellence.

Not really a members' Club (at least from my impression) it is very slickly run and has a lot to offer the business golfer: great course, with tees to suit everyone, a bit of history (2006 WGC with Tiger Woods), lots of hotel rooms and restaurants, and today at least, an incident-free route via the M25 and some grand weather as well!

This date is always one of my favourite ones in the diary: the golf is played in good spirits, the banter flows and its great to catch up with what everyone else is up to.  The format is pretty much fixed: 6-6-6, where we play better ball with a different partner for six holes, Putting Olympics, Skins and the Zoo game. 

The latter can be particularly expensive (see my experience in 2007 at Wentworth...) and involves a 25p "fine" for each animal collected (Snake=3 putt, Camel=Bunker, Frog=Water, Monkey=Tree, Gorilla=Out of Bounds and Armadillo=Cart Path) - and the player who holds the animal at the end of the 9th and 18th holes gets to pay everybody else for his sins...

This year, everything pretty much balanced itself out: especially after the net winner, Duncan, had used his winnings to pay for the final round of drinks... 

Roll on 2016: Hankley Common here we come!