My foursomes partner, Azzie Paton, ingratiated himself massively with me on Saturday as we almost pulled off a win in the Hamada Trophy. Coming off the seventh tee I told him that I was down to play in the Alex Fairlie Trophy the next day, which is an over 50’s event. He seemed surprised that I was over the half century and indeed much more surprised when I revealed I was a full six over. He had me down as late 40’s.

Alex Paton is a very fine man.

But this has nothing to do with the cost of haircuts. A woman now pays about forty five quid a pop. And a blow dry comes in at about thirty. My goodness! Why didn’t my career’s advisor mention this to me and prevent my rather hasty and tortuous route down the road that is chartered accountancy?

I could have opened a nice wee salon somewhere, called myself the creative director and copped a good few hundred a day breezing around with a pair of scissors in hand while blowing a bit of hot air. In my opinion that’s quite serious money for not very much. I mean it doesn’t look that arduous or complicated.

Not that I hang out in hair salons over-frequently.

Now over to politics….

Well, that’s enough of politics.

Here are my current forecasts for the year; Kemboy to win the Gold Cup, a stock market crash in May, Roger Stone and Sarah Saunders jailed, Oxford win the boat race, I get put up for the R&A, my hair grows back, Andy Murray is pictured smiling, Nigel Farage is pictured not smiling, JK Rowling becomes PM, Donald Trump scores a new course record at a golf club in Texas and I pass my grade 4 violin exam with distinction.

Yes, I do miss my violin. Unfortunately it got rather warped as I left it in the coal cellar over the winter. Not the brightest thing to do.  It’s now going to cost about 1.5k to fix and the judge is out as to the merit in this. Besides, I would think that my second string seat in The Really Terrible Orchestra is no doubt now filled.

Anyway I have no real time to give to it. The bistrot is coming on swimmingly and it’s all meetings with people and stuff to do. We have a wonderful interior designer in Paula who runs Supertonic, so it’s at least going to look good. Yes, it’s all going in the right direction at last. It’s going to be called Left Bank. Well because we are on the left bank of the river and it’s got fairly cool overtones, I think?

It’s taken an awful lot of pain to get to this. Choosing a reasonable name is hard. I mean The Ubiquitous Chip, Babbity Bowsers, The Canny Mans, La Folie Douce, La Grande Ourse, Quagliano’s and The Fat Duck have all gone, gone , gone.

I quite liked The Crazy Duck mind?! But I’m a bit crazy.

Talking of ducks I have had a great run on the gee gees and am now in profit this year.

That’s nay bad.

 

 

What a load of baloney from the BBC pundits reporting on the Six Nations match between Scotland and Ireland at the weekend.

Shame on John Barclay for not answering the question as to whether he thought the no-arms tackle by Paul O’Mahony, that took out Scottish captain Stuart Hogg, was late.

Of course it was late, My blind grannie could have seen that. Which match were you watching sir?

This was poor and weak stuff by Mr Barclay. Why wouldn’t he call it as it was? And he is Scottish! Annoying what? He even declared that he didn’t think that this caused the crucial injury which saw the Scotland captain walk off five minutes later. ‘He held his head at first and only held his shoulder when he stood up’ What nonsense?

Give me strength.

Anyway, I’ve got a bet on England at 8 to 15 to win the championship. It seems they are pretty unbeatable. Unfortunately, I think Scotland’s rather slim chances were ended with that phoney by O’Mahony.

I was up at my old golf club, Mortonhall in Edinburgh, last week and was glad to see that the professional course record still stands at 68. A score which I actually and miraculously achieved in a mid-week medal, one fine summer’s day back in 1979.

Now if you saw me duff and scrape my way round the Eden course last Saturday you would not believe this and indeed probably suspect some foul play. But no.

There are certainly cheats in the game of golf though. My favorite anecdote relates to an Edinburgh businessman playing in a medal with my brother, who was marking his card.

They came off the par five 15th and were standing on the next tee. The conversation miraculously went like this:

My brother  ‘What did you have?’

Edinburgh businessman ‘5’

My brother  ‘I thought you had a 6?’

Edinburgh businessman ‘a net 5’

 

Lordy me! For the love of Christ! Cripees. blimey O’Reilly and many other expletives.

But unfortunately, this is God’s honest truth.

Anyway, we should maybe relay this wee anecdote to Mr O’Mahony and let him reflect upon his behaviour. For it’s nice and right to be a good sport.

And you Mr Barclay should get hastily down to Specsavers, I would think.

The bistrot is getting there and we have now got to the design phase which involves choosing flooring, lights etc. We are getting a designer to have a wee look today so it will  be interesting to see what she comes up with, apart from a handsome bill. We have chosen a wonderful new coffee from our supplier Mr Eion to compliment Alessandro’s and have got Paolozzi beer on tap, as well as some unusual and interesting wines on board. We will be having real loose leaf tea (Rosevear) and of course hot chocolate from The Cocoa Tree, Pittenweem.

Oops I’d better be off. It’s Monday 7.30am and I’m teeing off the Old in 40 mins.

Life sucks.