The tee was kind of tucked away in the side of a wood that slopeddown and the hillside fell away to the squarish green below. Quite a drop. A Par 4 but you can drive the green, or I could once long ago. After teeing off you took a steepish path down the side of the hill.

Looking at Brueghel triggered the thought, that trick he does of making the space slide away diagonally. I'm thinking of his paintings Hunters in the Snow and Fall
of Icarus and especially The Conversion of St. Paul, where an army winds its way
up a mountain pass. Something about the path in the painting, its angles and spatial dynamics, brought the 16th hole back into view. I see from a distance a man swinging his club and a second or two later the 'cnck' sound of the strike.

In the school summer holidays me and my pals were never of the golf course in Hawick. Spaces in the landscape | once spent so much time in. Absorbed, dormant somewhere in my memory, wrong probably or distorted. This recalled space is what I paint and I discipline myself not to peek online. It is my version. The Vertish Hill golf course in Hawick. How green was my valley? Very green. Too green maybe? It was a complaint Anne Redpath had when she painted in the Scottish borders, that there weren't enough other colours to explore pictorial harmonies and tensions.

The 16th was a hole where there was often a convergence of groups of golfers, especially in the fading light where players could cut in. I see - as clear as day- moments in the dusk where we boys would often meet our old PE teacher Bill McLaren and his wife Bette, and we'd play the last three holes with him. As the visibility went we were guided in the dark by his famous voice. McLaren had an unusual swing, with a big loop at the top of his backswing, like someone swinging a polo mallet.

It is an absurd game, trying to get that wee ball in that wee hole. The futility of it, however, doesn't make it any less compelling when involved in the activity of it, and much of my teenage years were engaged in that absurd repetitive pursuit, like Sisyphus rolling his boulder. Apparently, Samuel Beckett was a really keen golfer which makes some sort of sense.

What I like about golf is that although you might be competing against others, you are also playing against the landscape and more crucially against yourself. Painting is the same. In the studio you want to be the best version of yourself
you can be, and comparisons, or competition with others is pointless, unhelpful, irrelevant. Playing golf was where I felt the first deep engagement with landscape, an appreciation of natural terrain and where I first practised a kind of inner conversation with myself, or sometimes even with an imaginary interviewer.
Back then it was Peter Alliss, later it was Melvyn Bragg.