Ian Wood: My one-man quest to fight recession

Published on Sunday 12 April 2009 22:44

THE hour is fast approaching when I'm going to have to answer the Prime Minister's call to help fight the recession by spending money at a feverish rate. Recently, I have become acutely aware that most of my possessions are beginning to decompose and require to be replaced with some urgency.

Every item in the house, from socks to washing machine, is showing its age and my failure to keep pace with the technology of the day was brought home recently when someone on the telly told me not to forget to use the red button and it occurred to me I didn't have one.

To be more precise, I have a red button, but nothing happens when it is pushed. The situation grew even darker when I was informed that in order to trigger whatever it is that is supposed to happen when the button is pushed, I need some other piece of equipment. This was depressing news, for I don't really want the place littered with any more bits than are absolutely necessary. There seems to be no end to the number of bits available and once you start collecting them you're liable to wind up living in a sort of warehouse, with scarcely a corner to call your own.

Anyway, my proposed spending spree will not be concerned with trivia such as red buttons. It will be aimed at grim necessities, such as shoes, light bulbs, carpet putting aids and dishcloths. It's amazing how much is needed once some thought is given to the general state of things. On a minor sortie to the shops, a sort of practice spree, I bought a tube of super glue with which to stick together items which are falling apart. They've been falling apart for years, but now, thanks to super glue, they're joined up again. There are probably loads of other useful things to buy and though I can't think of any right now, no doubt they'll spring to mind once I get the hang of sprees and how to go on them.

The subject of putting, albeit of the carpet variety, having risen unbidden from the depths, I might have been tempted to add a new putter to the list of potential purchases and I would if I thought for a moment it would do any good, but I know it won't. I am always amazed when I survey the ranks of gleaming putters in the pro's shop and see the prices being asked for them. It's even more amazing that people buy them. Of course, I can't speak for anyone else, but I know that in my case I'd be as well piling up banknotes to the value of the asking price and setting fire to them.

At present, I'm putting with an ancient hickory-shafted specimen which cost nothing. I can't even remember where it came from. I'd like to report that it works like a charm, but it doesn't. I'm no better with it than I am with any of the others in my dismal collection of total failures and that's the whole point. Whether they're the result of years of painstaking research or have been tested to destruction in laboratories; whether they're built from materials perfected in outer space or from limbs hewn from trees, they're all the same – useless.

I'm using the hickory-shafted putter for purely aesthetic reasons. It looks friendly and it feels good. When, for some obscure reason, I achieve a good strike with it, the ball comes beautifully out of the face and, given that the green has a good surface, the roll is smooth and true. The downside is that the ball rarely goes into the hole. Putts go close sometimes and the whole operation has a certain elegance about it, but, as a general rule, the actual business of holing out does not figure in the equation.

In common with the rest of its miserable kind, the old club staged a brief honeymoon period just to get the poor sap hooked. When first I plucked it from the obscurity of my crypt for fallen putters, the putts started to disappear like ferrets down drainpipes. They went in from all ranges, borrows meant little or nothing and I was a happy lad. My ship had come home and all was right with the world. So convinced was I that this was, indeed, it, I did not take it on a golfing holiday to Portugal lest some insensitive baggage handler reduce it to sawdust.

Far from showing gratitude for my considerate handling of the holiday arrangements, the putter appeared to resent being left at home and by the time I returned and restored it to the bag, it had gone into a deep sulk. Suddenly, many putts were being taken, but few were falling. On one occasion, I took four putts from 15 feet on the eighth green on Gullane No 1 and my playing partner reckoned the last putt fell in out of sheer exhaustion.

When at last this unhappy spell was over, I was as sour as the putter and the club had come close to meeting its end on several occasions. There's a streak of the insensitive baggage handler in all of us.