Day 256 - Foggy Bottom

One of the many great holes at Buenos Aires Golf club

Between 2003 and 2005, when I was in charge of Shell's Downstream business in Central and Latin America, we lived in Argentina.  For three years, we were members of a great club: the Buenos Aires Golf Club.  This was a cracking course, consisting of 3 nines, which opened in 1994 in time to host the 2000 World Golf Cup.  We used to spend most weekends there but there were certain times of year that we would turn up to play and would instead have to spend a couple of hours in the bar, waiting for the heavy fog to clear.

All of this came springing back to mind when I turned up at Burhill this morning: we had our last friendly match of the season against the Old Bradfieldians (former pupils of Bradfield College) .  We were due to play the New Course but once the teams headed down to the tee, they were greeted by dense fog... what to do?  In the end, we decided to play anyway...carefully... in the hope that the mist would burn off as the sun came out later.  It didn't.

We played all 18 holes unable to see much beyond 150-200 yards.  Nevertheless, nobody in our group lost a ball and the quality of the play was pretty good: my partner Andrew S and I went down 2 holes quickly at the beginning, which a birdie to within a foot on the 4th (mine!) helped mitigate. After that things went up and down until, by the time we got to the last, we were one down with one to play.  Opponents Hugh and Andrew W looked very likely to get down for par, as did I, but Andrew S stepped up to the plate and put his tee shot to within 6 foot, and then sunk the putt for his own birdie and a halved match was the result!  Great stuff.

Unfortunately, for Burhill, many of the other matches did not go our way and we ended up losing by 1 1/2 to 5 1/2.  But at least we got to play, which had looked far from certain at the start of the day!