According the behavior and health research unit at the University of Cambridge, the British pint in the pub is officially too big.
“By the time you reach the bottom, you’re inevitably left feeling bloated and sluggish,” suggested one commentator.
On the Scottish golf scene, meanwhile, the news of a couple of club closures recently has been hard to digest too. The Hirsel in Coldstream and Torrance Park near Motherwell both announced that the shutters would be coming down.
It appears that the harsh natural cull, delayed in many quarters by the unlikely boost golf clubs were given by the spike in participation during the Covid pandemic, has resumed.
It was probably always going to happen. In those locked-down days, when various activities and pursuits were placed under house arrest, golf became the pastime of the pandemic as all and sundry raced to their nearest course in the same stampede of enthusiasm you now get when Labour ministers hear that there’s a freebie going.
The clouds of Covid had a silver lining for many clubs, particularly for those ones that had been eking out the kind of hand-to-mouth existence that would’ve even had Oliver Twist saying, “there you go, take some of mine.”
This is so sad. My Dad and Grandad played golf at The Hirsel.
It’s where I was taught. Until I picked up the ball and threw it 🤣 Was never taken back lol. I was about 8 I think. https://t.co/l00GjS4UFF
— Karen M Renton (@karen_renton) September 13, 2024
Tee sheets were overflowing and memberships ballooned amid the stifling restrictions of the time.
Normality, of course, would eventually return, accompanied by the cheery onset of a cost-of-living crisis. In a saturated market, something has to give.
One of the industry experts this correspondent has occasional chinwags with is the estimable Kevin Fish, who regularly conducts surveys, gathers data, crunches numbers and logs feedback from a vast cross-section of golf club managers and secretaries.
At the start of last season, his findings suggested that the average resignation rate of members at clubs in Scotland was running at six percent.
“Back to the level golf was experiencing before the pandemic struck,” he said of this return to a “familiar slippery slope golf has been on since the turn of the century.”
Where will that slope take us all? Hopefully not off the edge of a cliff. Given the way the cost of just about everything is going, as well as the weather patterns which now make the…
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