Day 225 - XL Club

A couple of months ago, I received a charming invitation from Burhill member Geoff to be his guest at the Autumn Meeting of the XL Club: he wanted to thank me for my efforts as Captain this year.  A few questions followed: 1) what exactly is this society, 2) where was the golf to be played and 3) in what format?  In reverse order, this turned out to be 36 holes of Foursomes on the Red and Blue Courses at the Berkshire and the XL Club has nothing to do with Extra Large clothes sizes, but rather was set up for former cricketers aged over 40 (XL in Roman numerals).

I arrived in plenty of time (the M25/M3 were behaving) to have a classic English breakfast to start the day and the we were out on the Blue Course at 09:15.  Our playing partners for both the morning and afternoon rounds were Richard, a member at St George's Hill, and Tony, from Tyrells Wood.  I very much enjoyed hearing from Tony about the wine tours company he and his son have set up (and as soon as I got home, I looked them up at http://www.smoothred.co.uk/ - what a fun business!).

Geoff and I played very steadily in the morning: off a combined handicap of 11, we scored 35 points with only one "blob". The course was in great condition and, once we had survived the daunting opening 210+ yard par 3 first hole, seemed to suit our game well.  Yes, of course, we left some points out there but were still well satisfied.

A classic Berkshire carvery lunch followed: a tasty starter, followed by a succulent roast beef with all the trimmings and finished off with treacle tart and ice cream, washed down with a fine red Rioja.  All of this meant that we were perhaps a little slower to our afternoon tee time than had been intended... but we weren't the only ones!

Despite the extra ballast we were carrying in the afternoon (and maybe because of the Spanish red we had ingested?) we started off very fast out of the blocks and by the end of the first nine had already racked up 21 points.  We couldn't maintain this pace though and rather faded towards the end: the wine had worn off.... but still racked up a creditable 33 points to give us 68 for the day.

Somewhat to our surprise, this proved to be easily the best score of the day and we ended up the proud winners of the Rolles-Stollery salver and a pair of splendid XL crystal glasses each. What a great ending to a wonderful day!