This reel is book-ended by me tottering about like a very young drunk, initially in a blue romper suit (‘you look like a Smurf,’ says my daughter, not unreasonably), but chiefly I’m posting this one for its golfing action.

My father was a golf professional, as was his younger brother. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they ran a driving range where the fringes of London meet Surrey.  In summer, Dad would teach six days a week.  He also played tournaments, with varying degrees of success, once getting written up in the Daily Mirror as ‘003 and a half’, owing to a passing resemblance to the James Bond of the time, Sean Connery – that,  and possibly some knowledge on the part of the reporter of other Bond-like behaviour, but let’s gloss over that here. I now live not a million miles from where I grew up, and if I pass a golf course round these parts, it’s a sure-fire bet that he has played it at least once, if not many times.

The film shows 003 and a half (and briefly his brother) resplendent in golfing browns hitting balls at the driving range, first with an iron, and then a wood. I hope he won’t mind me saying that rather like footage of football from the same era, the pace of his swing looks slower than that displayed on television by today’s top pros – less physically and technologically primed. But technically, I imagine you can tell a lot about his game from these recorded shots. He certainly keeps his head nice and still. No doubt he would have watched the film back, to assess his own technique, to see what could be worked on and improved. I recall him telling me that while he could hit the ball a long way, relative to his slender physique, his short game wasn’t sufficiently good to raise him higher up the professional ranks.

Again for reasons I won’t labour, it wasn’t until I was pushing forty and Dad was retired that I took my first golf lesson from him. He has always had the gift of the gab, and now here he was finally putting it to use to correct my many faults as a golfer, which he was quick to point out I couldn’t yet call myself. At prolonged times in my own professional life, I have myself acted as a teacher, so I know a little about what it takes to win people over, to get them to trust your word, and then to follow it. Enthusiasm, authority, patience, humour, demonstrable results. It’s not easy, especially if you are not naturally possessed of the gift of the gab. But as I also remember witnessing occasionally when I was a boy, Dad made it look effortless, couching his rudeness about my recalcitrant swing in a fostering bed of humour, optimism, and reconstructive surgery. Judging by the end result – a vast improvement in the course of just a couple of lessons – he still knew exactly what he was doing. I don’t imagine he was any different with me than with the thousands of people (including such light entertainment luminaries as Dick Emery and Leslie Crowther) that he taught in his working life. I couldn’t help comparing his style of teaching with that of the contemporary professional who gave me a series of lessons at around the same time; his demeanour was weary, his methods lacked conviction, and psychologically he never made me feel anywhere close to a million dollars over such progress as I was making.

Golf was never my sport, very possibly because I am a contrary type and it was my father’s, and so closed to me. But at a time in middle life when there weren’t many other sporting options open to me, I felt a compulsion to give it a go. And though I doubt I’ll ever make my way round all or even some of the courses he played on hereabouts, I’ll always be glad that I belatedly got to have a couple of lessons from an undeniably great teacher.