Yes that’s a fact. Ok you have to hop across to the West Coast to buy your fish and chips and bread and butter in the Eglinton Cafe. But it’s £6.50! And that’s the sit-in price!

You see living in St Andrews the price of your eat-in fish and chips is £16.95 (without bread and butter). Now I appreciate Saltcoats is not St Andrews but that is a whack of a difference in price. And I would expect the wholesale cost is the same.

Yes the in-places have got somewhat above themselves and things are getting a bit silly all said. Now, I do food tours and I always use the Rusacks for my first stop. I am in the habit of telling my groups to just order their drinks from the bartender. However this went rather awry last week as one chap asked for an 18 year old Macallan to which the barmaid asked ‘single or double’ and the chap answered of course ‘double please’ Now that is a cool sales ploy nonetheless but please not on my shift dear. It was £100 a glass and then one of the other chaps ordered one too! Ouch.

I was in Edinburgh yesterday and thought I’d try the new Singh Street restaurant in Bruntsfield for breakfast. I had a mango lassi, which was delicious and it did have a rather tasty raspberry therein, alongside a Punjabi omelette which was adorned with a couple of chopped bits of spring onion, a touch of chilli and by the looks of its dismal size, had only 2 eggs. It was definitely on the smallish side.

They did me for £17 which ok did include the discretionary 10 per cent service charge. it’s just that it wasn’t discretionary as they just added it in. That’s illegal by the way.

So what is going on here guys? It just seems that the buzzy cool places are really extracting the total Michael. But people are paying it and big time. You can’t get into a lot of these establishment that easily too.

So God get me a train and get me to Saltcoats again.

Also the Links Trust are seemingly no longer letting in tour guides for free at the British Golf Museum! Why ?

Well the girl yesterday muttered something about cost cutting. Cost cutting! The charity that is the Links Trust made £11 million surplus last year and most of their employees are on the minimum wage. And besides I am no longer that incentivized to take a group to see the museum now that it is going to cost me £17 bucks every time. I mean I could buy a fish supper up town for that.

And I may just add that they sting you £3.75 for a hot chocolate in their Niblick Cafe and if you want a few marshmallows they add 50p, just to sweeten it for you.

Hmm. Bother.

Now don’t let me get started on the Links Trust directors salaries and perks please. I mean even the kilted caddie could run the gowf in St Andrews. That is far from rocket science, let’s face it. However he wouldn’t be dishing out the minimum wage, nor taking a fiver off a caddie every day, nor ostracizing a friendly tour guide, nor charging for marshmallows after ripping you £3.75 for a cup of hot chocolate.

God get me a train.

There is a chap attempting to interview a cross section of caddies in order to give a bit of an insight into their world and hear some of their stories from the links. And he seems a very nice chap as far as I could tell when I had a quick word with him on the first tee of the Old at the Royal and Ancient Autumn Meeting last week.

However it seems he has a tall order in getting to speak to some of these guys. I overheard a caddie yesterday,

‘some clown was trying to interview some of the caddies’ was what I initially overheard him exclaim and then I basically got the gist that there was as much chance of him getting an interview as there was of seeing pigs fly down Market Street.

I remonstrated that the guy was just doing some research to which I got the blunt answer that he should maybe try doing some research elsewhere.

What a shame to have this attitude. However I must say it’s not across the board at all. There are some very decent and open minded Old Course caddies, some very impressive people indeed. But this guy sucked.

I mean Oliver Horowitz did a great job with his book ‘An American Caddie in St Andrews’ and gave a very interesting insight into life on the links. People like reading this sort of stuff and well done on the chap in trying to give us more of it.

Otherwise all is well in St Andrews. I met two old friends from my days back in the university who were on the golf team in 1979. I hadn’t seen Alistair Russel since my student days actually. I walked up and said hello and he really had no idea who I was. Which is totally understandable given that my dark locks have long since gone. In fact all my locks have gone.

Donald Galbraith certainly knew who I was as we have had some contact over the years and indeed set up Highlander Golf back in our forties. Donald is still very much the ball of energy that he was and as entertaining as ever.

My tours are fading off now but I have had a great season, made some good contacts and I am still plugging away at the gowf.

Today I am up to Fairmont for a caddie job and then it’s an Old Course tour tomorrow morning and then a rush down to Edinburgh for the Autumn Meeting at Mortonhall in the afternoon.

Fare forward passengers.

As I have said before I think the greatest sporting compliment I ever got in my time on mother earth was something I didn’t actually get.

And that was a slap on the bottom with a cricket bat by the ex-England double-centurion legend Gilbert Parkhouse, our sports master.

Now I must admit that I was quite a canny cricketer back in the days of my early schooling at Daniel Stewart’s and Melville College and could bowl a fine swinger and had a pretty straight bat. Our entire gym class had been awfully naughty one lesson and Gilbert made us all bend over in a line and proceeded to stroll down the line giving each boy a slap on the bottom with a cricket bat. He came to me and stopped, looked up to the skies and declared with some trace of poetic timbre, for a man not habitually renowned for his traces of poetic timbre, ‘This boy can play cricket’ and refrained from delivering the said punishment to my back side and moved on to the next boy in the line-up.

This made a big impression upon me and I still look back nostalgically to that day and indeed all the dreamy days of my youth when the sun shone endlessly and we strode out joyfully in the halcyon fields of our childhoods.

Now I am that Gilbert Parkhouse of course. Not that I am going around lining up young boys to dish out corporal punishment on their back sides, but the fact is that I am now in the late afternoon, early evening stage and maybe just post tea-time of the cricket game of my life.

I suppose it’s witnessing the eager young bejants arriving for term again here in St Andrews that made me reflect so or perhaps the beginning of the fall with these clear beautiful St Andrean skies and brisk sea breezes.

I’m still bowling though and batting as straight as ever. But there is more joy in hitting that firmly struck boundary and much more laughter when we all stop for tea.