LOCKERROOM: Well Doctor, it's Sunday in California and I've been feeling odd for about a week. The motel says I'm welcome to a free continental breakfast. This means free coffee and the choice of red apples or green apples. On what continent or planet does this count as breakfast, doctor? Outside the window, the shuttle bus to the World Matchplay is waiting. I'm the only journalist in this hotel covering the golf, so for whom does the shuttle bus wait? It waits for me alone.

Me and Bill, the shuttle bus driver, get along fine, but there is a crunch coming in our relationship this evening. A watershed moment. Last Wednesday, when we discovered that we were to be a couple, we could both see this coming, I think, but just in case Bill took the precaution of providing me with visual reminders. By Thursday morning there were several stickers adhered to parts of his bus telling me that Gratuities Are Graciously Accepted.

Anyway, this evening will be the last time Bill drops me back to the motel. We are both glad, I think. We have reached the limits of our small talk reserves. He's not interested in golf. I said to him on Thursday that this was the first time I'd ever been involved in a golf tournament longer than Tiger Woods, and Bill just said, "Yeah, I guess", as if he'd been thinking the very same thing but didn't think it worth saying.

For my part, I have discovered that in southern California commenting that the weather is lovely today gets to be redundant quite quickly. Every morning I say, "Hey, Bill, that's a beautiful day", and Bill says, "Yeah you bet" and starts his bus.

In the evenings, when he drops me back to the Coffee 'n' Apple Motel, he says, "There you go buddy, home sweet home".

I wish that Bill and I had become a little closer. Then this evening I could give him a big hug and just say, "Thanks, big guy". Instead I've got to fumble in my pocket and fish out a big tip. No way will Bill provide me with a receipt for the office. He may be gracious but he's not thoughtful. Not in that way.

Even apart from that pending awkwardness, it seems a little strange to be heading off to the final day of this particular golf tournament. There's just two guys left, Scott McCarron and Kevin Sutherland, and if they were sitting across the tiny lobby from me right now tucking into red apples and black coffee I wouldn't know them. Yet one of them is going to win a million bucks in a few hours from now.

That there are only two guys left in the golf tournament makes it unique, but it's been a weird week anyway, what with this feeling and all. On Tuesday, as planned , I left Salt Lake City after a week or so of covering the Winter Olympics. Leaving was a gamble, and with gambling Doc, I've found that you win some and you lose some.

Last Monday had gone something like this. I awoke in my Spartan lodging house somewhere on the Utah-Nevada border at about five am. Being an experienced Olympian, I weighed up the possibilities. Plan A: I could go the skeleton event at Utah Olympic Park. Plan B: I could write up all the stuff I had done for the weekend and then hope that the skating scandal would take another twist. That would be two pieces.

Plan A had very little going for it. There was an Irish competitor, for sure, but he'd be slipping and sliding for less than a minute. Skeleton isn't a great spectator sport. He'd go flying past in last place. I wouldn't know what to ask him.

I wouldn't be around for the finals anyway. It would take three hours to get into town and back out to the skeleton venue. I went for Plan B. That particular plan came with a built-in bonus: I turned the light back off and graciously accepted my four hours of that fine bonus, sleep. Experience, Doc. Experience.

The day came out sweet as a nut. Wrote up my considered thoughts on ice hockey. Went to a highly entertaining press conference on the skating business at which the French journalists, bang up against deadlines at home, began objecting to the English translations to their questions. They had a point in that we could all get earphones to listen to translations concerning the Mme Le Gougne scandal, but it was more fun to let the marvellous Octavio Cinquanta translate his answers. E.g.: "The question is: Was Mme Le Gougne upset when I questioned her? Of course she was upset. My friends, I was not at that time the champion of sweetness."

CHUFFED, I went back to the main press area, only to meet Ian Chadband of the London Evening Standard. Ian was in a state of high excitement.

"You've got to tell me all about this Irish skeleton guy."

"Why?"

"He came fourth in the heats!"

"No."

"Yeah, he's a lord and he owns a vineyard or something. What a story!"

"Shit."

"Whatshisname? Lord Clifton Lancelot Wrottesley or something?"

"Oh Jesus."

It's almost midnight at home now. I know nothing of his slippery lordship. I find an old LA Times story on the web and lift a quote from Lord Wrottesley about the run at Cresta in St Moritz being a cruel kind of mistress. " 'She's a cruel mistress,' he said recently." The piece makes him sound as though he were dead. Who cares. It doesn't make the editions anyway.

And that's how the week has gone. Off to California last Tuesday. Writing obits for Clarke and Harrington by lunchtime Wednesday. Call home. The Lord came fourth again. He's been on the radio and everything. What a story! Write obit for Paul McGinley on Thursday. Every other golfer I've heard of is gone by Friday evening.

So Doc, it's this persistent, chronic feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time all week long. Today there's this historic ice hockey match between Canada and the US back in Salt Lake City, but for me there's this awkward parting with Bill still to come. I can see him out at the shuttle now, his fishing hat pushed down over his eyes. He's dozing softly, waiting for me and me alone. Bless him, but lemme tell you, Doc, it's no consolation.