Both golf and shooting can be deeply frustrating. One day, everything seems to be going splendidly and you find yourself shrugging off the compliments of your companions while secretly beaming with pride; the next day, just when you feel that you've cracked the sport, it all falls to pieces and the ground refuses to open up and swallow you and your embarrassment. Worse, your same friends struggle with increasingly meeker words of encouragement to improve your spirits.
* Subscribe to Country Life; Country Life on Ipad
I was having a bad day. My golf shots bore no resemblance to what I could see in my mind's eye. Balls were lost in bushes, the lake acted like a magnet and when I eventually reached the green, I might as well have been using a shillelagh as a putter.
My tee shot off the eighth behaved as if the ball had spotted the flag and decided to swerve off course like a man spotting his ex-wife. I trudged towards the clump of trees where it had come to rest, utterly despondent and threatening my clubs with eBay. But something caught my eye while
I was looking for the ball. It was a cep, the most prized of all wild mushrooms and it wasn't alone-I've never found so many. Supper was beyond delicious. That's got to rank as the best golf shot of my life.
* Follow Country Life magazine on Twitter
-
‘Anyone who has once known this land can never be quite free from the nostalgia for it’: The Country Life guide to SicilyEverything you need to know about Sicily, from where to stay, to what to do (according to locals in the know).
-
'Other people would have given up and turfed half of it over': The couple who turned 'the ugliest house with the nicest view' into a Somerset treasureWith many viewpoints and changes of level, Grove Ley in Somerton, Somerset — home of Dr and Mrs Michael Horder — was not an easy site on which to make a garden. But key to its success, writes Caroline Donald, has been enlarging the pond and creating long beds full of robust perennials and grasses. Photographs by Britt Willoughby Dyer.
