East Neuk Notes

It's Monday morning in Pittenweem, and the times they are a changin'.... at least, the weather most certainly is.  I started drafting a bit on the new world handicap system. which I'll leave at the bottom of this post, and get to the more recent bits first.

Stormy Weather - Anyone coming to Scotland for the weather would have been, like Rick Blaine, misinformed.  That acknowledged, you won't hear too many complaints from us on that subject, as we've been unbelievably lucky over the years.  In fact, my bride refers to it as Scott Simpson weather, yanno, the stuff we enjoyed for the last ten days or so.

While they get more than their share of the wet stuff here, the one thing you don't see much is thunderstorms and electricity.  I've heard of it, of course, but last night was the first lightning I've ever seen in Scotland, a bit freaky if I may say.  Theresa had parked herself here to enjoy the view:

I actual thought I had taken a shot of her gazing out to the sea, but she was sitting on the wall and it began to rumble, then drizzle....then over this hill came a bolt of lightning:

That's our typical route for after-dinner walks, as just over that hill is the Pittenweem Tidal Pool, or at least it used to be.  Kidding, I'll explain in a sec.

Elsie and John are up in Northwest Fife with Ross, Dace and Sebastian, and they dodged the weather for their barbeque, but it got there later.  A funny bit from John in an e-mail:

Dace and I thought we heard thunder. But Ross said it was the neighbors putting out their wheelie bins..which it was...😱

So true!  It is exactly the same sound....

Elsie told us later that they had seven hours of thunder and lighting, which seems a decade worth to me.

The forecast?  Let's not go there just yet....

Ch-Ch-Changes - I know, at least at a conceptual level, that tides come in and out, and that the moon is somehow implicated in it all.  Beyond that, it's all a blur, but I would have assumed that changes in the tide would be incremental from day to day.  Yet, while our late afternoon and early evening strolls have featured an endless succession of low-tide imagery, yesterday afternoon featured a high tide:

With the tide in and it being a Sunday, everyone was taking advantage of it:

Visually more pleasing for sure, although those rock formations on the floor of the Firth are oddly entrancing.  I took a walk over to the St. Monans windmill in the afternoon:

As I made my way back to Pittenweem I encountered Theresa, wineglass in hand, about to park herself on our usual bench for her first nip of the day.

A Blogger's Obsessions Collide - If you've made it this far on our journey, you're familiar with the dark recesses of my mind, specifically my obsession with bales of hay, red BT phone boxes and the  localized meteorological phenomenon known as the haar.  I'm sure that someday I'll capture an image of the characteristically cylindrical bales of hay with a red phone box in the frame, or not, but as we made our way to the Bowhouse yesterday morning, I pulled over to capture this image, and I hope you'll agree that two out of three ain't bad:

Hay in a haar.... Amusingly, the image I really wanted was this, but with the St. Monans windmill in the background, and that entailed driving through a caravan park, though that image for some reason didn't come off quite as clearly:

As with Tessie's shot of the Sturgeon Moon, it's got a certain impressionistic charm to it all the same.

On my afternoon walk, I did capture some better images in far better light, but this was from the base of the lighthouse, so necessarily facing inland:

On the drive home from St. Andrews we stopped where the road was reduced to a single-lane due to construction, and did see one of these in the middle of nowhere:

No disrespect intended to the fine folks of Dunino.....

Tidal Being The Key Word - While the signage there just calls it an outdoor pool, on the map it's referred to as the Pittenweem Tidal Pool, not that there's ever been any doubt as to how it all works.  Nonetheless, as I ascended that hill and looked down, there was something that had changed:

There was a pool there yesterday!  

The Auld Grey Toon - As noted previously, we played Saturday instead of Sunday for a combination of reasons, including the weather forecast.  But, also, because of this charming idiosyncrasy:

Why is the old course closed on Sundays?

Slumber Sundays at the Old Course date back to the 16th century, with historians tracing the tradition to religious reasons. It is said that residents at St Andrews faithfully reserved the religious rule which forbid such activities on the day of rest.

Fast forward two centuries, and locals then lobbied for Old Tom Morris to reverse the rule in the late 1800s. Unfortunately for them, the legendary figure upheld the Sunday closure, maintaining that his iconic course needed the rest.

“If the golfer doesn’t need a rest, surely the course does,” he said.

Actually, these two golfers did certainly did require a rest....

We've thrown snake eyes thus far on the Daily Ballot and, though there's one more throw of the dice, it's pretty clear that it's not going to happen for us this trip.  But on a Sunday we're guranteed to be able to get on the Old Course, se we went for a little walk:

As you walk down Golf Place, having passed the Dunvegan and Auchterlonie's Golf  Shop, the reveal is always quite dramatic:

Care to revisit my favorite rant?

That "Where it all began"  signage is a bit rich, because that storefront began as Old Tom's shop, and if we're the kind of folks that honor our actual history.... Oh, but wait, there's a branding opportunity to vertically integrate our actualization strategy, so some MBA is sure it makes sense.  Anyone care to guess the name of the golf hole it abuts?  That would be Tom Morris, although I'm sure by the time The Open returns the hole will be renamed after Tenants lager or some such nonsense.

Just a few notes from our little stroll of the course.  The Road Hole has tormented golfers for centuries, featuring every known hazard to golfers, including plague and pestilence though, to the best of my knowledge, there's been no slaying of the first born.  Yet, that is...

This is the tee shot for mere mortals:

Your caddie will tell you to take it over the second "O" in Old Course Hotel, but you'll be bailing left for sure, for reasons I assume are quite obvious.  But this is where the big boys pegged it in the Open:

Which is, being just a wee bit technical, out of bounds.  Just sayin'...

The size of the seven double greens is hard to convey to those that haven't seen them, and pictures only partially capture it.  This is the green for the 2nd and 16th hole:

And for all the talk of how flat the terrain is:

I assure you that it's even more severe in three dimensions....

Perhaps not as severe as The Himalayas:

Again, the lens flattens everything out, but this is the iconic venue maintained by the St. Andrews Ladies Putting Club, which dates back to 1867.

The cathedral and cemetery was strange, as there was metal fencing everywhere to protect visitors from.....well, falling gravestones:

Not exactly sure how a falling gravestone presents a risk to tourists, but I'm new in town.  It gave the cemetery quite the unkempt look:

As we always do, respect was paid:

That's Young Tom, and here's Dad:

This signage is from the New Golf Club, where Old Tom hung out in his later years:

Old Tom's life had this epic arc, encompassing the formative years of professional golf.  Yet, his own life was so epically sad, as he buried each and every member of his family, including his wife and all his children.  His later years must have been so lonely.... The R&A accorded him an honorary membership, but one doesn't need to be scholar of the early twentieth century life in Scotland to know that he would always be a caddie in their eyes.  

And I always find the grave of Allan Robertson, the forgotten man of golf, who gave Old Tom his start:

This is a little bit of inside baseball, but those had better be featheries:

Robertson's ball-making business was put asunder by the introduction of the gutta percha ball, and he fell out with Old Tom when he saw Tom testing out the new technology.  That led to Tom's banishment to Prestwick and his building of their links that hosted the original Opens.  So, that's actually where it all began....

Some random images I caught:

I mentioned Janetta's the other day, and apparently I'm not the only soul familiar with them:

I think Yogi put it best when he said, "no one goes there anymore, it's always too busy."

Morning Update - I am pleased to report that overnight the pool was returned to its prior location:

And the morning has featured the seals flopping about, and I was even able to capture them:

 That's two of the critters on the right, flopping about and making quite the racket.  

This is the bit I mentioned above, which of course doesn't exactly fit with the rest of the post:

Handicaps - Are you digging the new, unified worldwide handicap system?  Yeah, it's likely not even crossed your radar, though it did mine yesterday.

When the new handicap system was unveiled, I was lukewarm at best.  There wasn't (couldn't have been, really) anything objectionable in the concept, it just seemed like a make-work project for golf bureaucrats and gadflies, the Peter Dawsons of the world.  Mostly I thought that the re-rating of every little links to the required course rating and slope protocol was an unnecessary burden on them.

That said, after Saturday's dispiriting match a walk back of sorts is justified, as I have to concede that setting up the card for our match was child's play, just the typical scan of a matrix to convert our indexes to course handicaps, something the MGA or GHIN apps do for us overnight, and we quickly ascertained that the bride would get twelve strokes, whereas merely using our indexes yielded a delta of eleven.  Happily we can conclude that the system has been rendered increasingly progressive, with the patriarchy taking a deserved hit....

Of course, I still think my larger point holds up, to wit, that this is of little import.  Your average tour group of men and women will inevitably end up with the same differentials, it just solves a uniquely Scottish/Irish issue related to the ladies' tees and associated scorecards.  The clubs simply don't have the resources to build separate tee boxes for the ladies, so in most cases they put the gals on the front of the men's tee boxes and deem the appropriate holes to be Par-5's.  All well and good, though I used to give Theresa an additional stroke for each of said Par-5's, and she responded to such generosity of spirit by closing me out on the twelfth hole.... 

So, they've simplified our scorecard preparation, though lost in translation is the more substantive differences in handicap systems.  Under the ancien régime, GB&I used only competition scores for calculating handicaps, a very different thing for sure, about which I had never quite made up my mind.  Of course a competition score is a more accurate measure of how a player might perform with a scorecard and pencil in hand, but the offsetting factor is that handicaps would necessarily be subject to the laws of small sample sizes....

One other note from the Craighead, involving a precariously placed ball washer:

Unless your ball is seriously dirty, perhaps you might give it a miss.  We'd seen evidence that they're cutting back the gorse around the course, but they might want to give this one a trim.  

The Home Stretch - Elsie and John will be down later this afternoon, and our nephew Ryan, amusing himself in Edinburgh for a couple of month, will be joining us for tonight.  We hope to fire up the BBQ for this evenings meal, though the weather outlook will make that a game time decision.  

Nothing is cast in stone, but I wouldn't expect to blogging as regularly or as extensively, though the weather, at least for Tuesday, might prove more suitable to indoor pursuits.  Do check back, but we'll be happily engaged with our friends and family, so you'll understand.