I've always admired fellow journalists who write books. A book endures. Newspapers, once read, go in the bin. Television and radio programmes are watched and forgotten. For most of the past 25 years I've made documentaries for radio and television in the UK. But I never made an effort to keep copies of them. I thought of them as done and gone. A book is different.
From time to time I have considered turning the raw material of reports and researches on Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia or some other troubled region, into a book. So why, in the end, have I written a book about. . .golf?
The answer is simple. I fell in love with the game three-and-a-half years ago and life hasn't been the same since.
Occasional golfer
Before then, I'd been an occasional golfer. I took an ancient half-set of clubs on holidays and cheerfully hacked my way around a variety of courses to keep my husband company. I knew that golf courses, especially in Ireland, are almost always in lovely scenery and the hunt for lost balls could turn up a rabbit, a hare or a nesting lark. I knew the taste of salt on the wind off the sea, the warmth of a hot whiskey after 18 holes in the rain, and not to park my trolley on the tee. But I didn't know golf could get you by the throat and not let go.
It got me on March 1st, 1997 at Mottram Hall golf course near Manchester. We were the guests of Jim S. - a successful entrepreneur and a terrific motivator. It is the secret of his success. Every half-decent strike was greeted with "Good shot!" When I foozled, duffed and shanked the ball, he contrived to be looking the other way. My confidence grew.
Mottram Hall is a long course: meadowland on the front nine, undulating woodland on the back. The 10th is a par 5. Amazingly, I had a chance of getting on the green with my fourth shot. This was pretty good for a hacker more used to picking up the ball after too many shots, than making par. My ball landed on the green, a few feet from the flag. Now in those days I couldn't really play golf, but I could putt. So I knew I would par the hole. My heart swelled with pride. A voice in my head whispered, "You could be good at this game" - a happy delusion that persists to this day.
(Many lessons later, I found I could hit the ball well but had mysteriously lost the ability to putt. That's the infuriating thing about golf. No sooner do you get one part of the game right than another goes wrong.)
Golf magazines accumulated in the lavatory and on the bedside table. I practised chipping a 10p piece off the carpet into the waste-paper basket and spent a fortune on lessons. I even bought checked trousers. I also bought a new set of clubs and took them everywhere I went. In Sicily, I drove the ball over streams of lava hardened into natural hazards at Il Picciolo, on the slopes of Mount Etna. High above Monte Carlo I teed off into a cloud advancing up Mont Agel. I saw wild boar in the forest beyond the rough at Les Bordes in the Loire Valley. I played with the Wild Geese (golfing ex-pats) near Brussels. If golf wasn't going to bankrupt me, I had to find a way of combining my reporting skills with my new-found passion.
Non-golfing partners
By fortunate coincidence, John Murphy of Appletree Press was interested in publishing a guide to holiday golf in Ireland. Writing it was just the job for me. I wrote it with non-golfing partners of golfers in mind. While golfers played the courses detailed in the book, the non-golfers (and golfers who could tear themselves away) could explore the attractions described beyond the 18th green.
I researched the history of the game, golf-course architecture and greenkeeping. I discovered the meaning of Irish placenames and their associations with Celtic saints and chieftains, Vikings, Normans and Cromwellians. ("Destroyed by Cromwell in 1649" cropped up a lot.) I read about the corncrake and the natterjack toad - species for which golf courses provide a safe habitat. I learned that Irish women dominated the game at the turn of the last century and won more prizes than their male counterparts.
Fellow golfers, club secretaries, professionals and greenkeepers were generous with their knowledge and advice. I had heroic companions (all better golfers than I am) who played the courses with me in fair and foul weather and shared their observations. I had great fun. Reassuringly, I saw other golfers duff the ball, miss putts, shank drives and take more than one shot to get out of a bunker.
New trousers
For four months I golfed nearly every day. By the time I had played my way around the Irish coast to Cork, I could barely stand up, much less swing a club. Did I improve? Well, I lost nearly a stone and had to buy a new pair of checked trousers. But my handicap refused to budge - until three weeks ago on Professional's Day at our local club when I played nine shots below my handicap, won the competition, and went home with a whizzy new Ogio golf bag and a broad smile. I dream on.
A copy of the book sits on my desk. I can pick it up and leaf through it. I will see it in bookshops. I will notice if nobody buys it. Most strangely, despite months of taking careful notes and writing detailed descriptions, I have to read it to remember what I've written. Yet I can visualise now, and could describe again, all the golf courses I played and walked for Emerald Greens. At night, I play my way round them instead of counting sheep.
Emerald Greens is published by Appletree Press at £9.99.