Not Charles of course but Bernard, the celebrated and esteemed turn of the century golf writer. Now he is wrong in his famous statement about us, claiming that ‘caddies as a race possess not a genius for witticism but for brusque and penetrating home truths’.
Now in my experience, caddies are some of the wittiest characters I have ever stumbled across. They are keen eyed and notoriously good fun. They are as homogeneous as a molecule of DNA, as unpredictable as Network Rail and mostly have irascible and biting wit. Well mostly. A few are definitely more subtle and weathered than others. Ok it can be coorse but that’s kind of par for the … I won’t even go there. Sorry.
Take yesterday as a typical example hanging oot in the busy caddie shack. Larger than life Gary is jesting with Cal over his e-cigarette vapour business and teasing about the interesting flavours. ‘Ok what am I out with today then? peanut butter and cinammon with a hint of tutti frutti?’ Many laughs all round. Then Gary, not noticing that our sole female caddie has just arrived, explodes with a ‘fuck me’ to which Meroee, with award winning timing, quickly retorts an impassive and abrupt ‘no thanks’ behind his back.
All credit to Cal, by the way, for the class act of naming one of his vapour flavours ‘peanut butter and friends’. That is just superb. Brilliant marketing, great wit and certainly one to put in your pipe and ruminate over. You can’t buy that.
Well you can actually as Cal is just getting a web site running.
Anyway I went out to have a fun round with Tom, Derek and Ralph. I was being slightly teased over some pretty bad reads on the greens and Derek brought up my wee faux pas last week, when I kind of got in the way of this chaps pitch shot. I asked Ralph if he heard about it to which he said ‘I saw it. I was standing on the 12th tee!’ You just can’t do a thing round here.
Anyway we had a wee jest down the last as Ralph’s man hit a good shot which Derek and I considered was going perilously towards a bunker, but at which Ralph said ‘get up’ to. We teased Ralph and there was obviously some misunderstanding etc. I then said to Ralph ‘where is it?’ which on reflection was a pretty poor question as the ball had gone over a hill. And Ralph retorted with immediate and wonderful timing ‘do you think I’m a fucking drone’
Caddies humour. Made in Scotland, from girders.