“Did you get a look at any of the houses when you drove in this morning?”

From City AM:

Since the club was sold to its new Chinese owner Reignwood Group a year and a half ago, relations with some locals have gone into decline. In October last year, Reignwood announced that it wants to double the annual membership rate to £16,000, and current members are being asked to pay a one-off £100,000 debenture to keep on playing at the club.

At the end of January Wentworth Residents' Association, made up of Wentworth locals and the club’s current members, partnered with City law firm Quinn Emanuel and sent a 15-page letter to the owner threatening legal action if the changes aren’t abandoned...

When asked if he thought requesting a £100,000 debenture from current members would alienate the locals, Gibson quipped: “Did you get a look at any of the houses when you drove in this morning?”

Wentworth, with an overall average house price of around £1.9m, is better known as Surrey’s stockbroker-belt.

No doubt the Poor Widower In A Mansion Who Likes A Round Of Golf features heavily in their 15-page letter somewhere..

They don't like being beaten at their own game...

From The Telegraph:

Members of one of Britain’s most prestigious golf clubs have threatened legal action against their new foreign owners over plans to introduce a £100,000 fee.

Reignwood, the Chinese conglomerate that bought Wentworth, in Surrey, for £135  million, also wants to reduce the number of members from 4,000 to 800.

Those invited to rejoin the club will be charged a one-off payment of £100,000 while annual fees will rise from £8,000 to £16,000.

Well played Reignwood! If 800 people are dumb enough to rejoin for £116,000 up front, then Reignwood has recovered three quarters of its initial outlay of £135 million.

If this had happened to anybody else, they'd have my full sympathy, but in this case the plaintiffs are all city financiers and people who live in multi-million pound mansions surrounding the course. Serves them right for not buying up the golf club themselves i.e. 4,000 members @ £33,750 each.

"It's a disaster waiting to happen!"

… says Julia M who emailed in this from Newsshopper:

"Hush hush" proposals to put grazing cows in a popular park and golf course are complete and udder madness, users say.

The proposal to turn part of Beckenham Place Park, which lies between Downham and Beckenham, into 'parkland grazing' is one of four options put forward as part of a radical redesign being considered by Lewisham Council, which has responsibility for the space…

I'm not sure quite how hush-hush this public announcement was, but hey…

Controversially, the plan would do away with the park's famous golf course…

David Hansom from the Friends of Beckenham Place Park, who fought those plans, said: "If you look at all the pictures from the 18th century, they show the parkland was used for grazing animals which people could eat in big houses.

"But they can't really seriously consider that. The idea's ridiculous."

Yes, eating grazing animals in big houses. Ridiculous.

Judith Whitton, 63, of Burnt Ash Lane, regularly walks her dog Leah in the park - the borough's largest green space - and said an exhibition of the plans last month was kept under wraps.

She said: "They've kept it all hush hush but all these plans sound like pie in the sky to me. They should be more concerned with looking after it a bit better."

No, not "pie in the sky", this is a case of "pie ingredients in the park".

Even golf courses hate bankers

From The Daily Mail:

A claustrophobic mortgage banker has told the story of how a round of golf ended up with him plunging into a sinkhole that opened as he walked across the 14th hole...

The story has a very sad ending.

He survived to tell the tale with a broken shoulder rather than being sucked down into our planet's molten iron core.

"Extreme sanction for a non-member without a day ticket infringing the club’s dress code?"

Asks ViewFromTheSolent, who spotted this story in The News:

POLICE marksmen shot dead a runaway cow as it hurtled towards a school…

The animal managed to run through a field, on to Crookhorn Lane, up Apollo Drive and on to Crookhorn Golf Course. It was found on the 10th fairway... Between 1pm and 3.30pm the animal ran more than five miles...(1)

Police are responsible when an animal runs out of control in a public space and the RSPCA said shooting an animal as big as a cow or bull is the most humane (2), and the safest for public protection, way of killing it.

1) That's barely more than walking pace, isn't it?

2) As opposed to what? Ramming it with a vehicle? Strangling it?

Of course.

Colin Wiles on top form at Inside Housing:

 

I did some more digging and discovered that there are around 2,000 18-hole golf courses in England as well as hundreds of smaller 9-hole and pitch and putt courses, and at least 600 golf driving ranges.

 

Each 18 hole course requires up to 90 hectares of land (including practice courses, clubhouses, car-parking etc) so my best estimate is that golfing establishments take up around 270,000 hectares in England – that's 2 percent of England's total land area of 13.4 million hectares.

 

Accurate figures are hard to come by, so if anyone can contradict my figures I would be pleased to amend them.

 

But by my reckoning English golf courses use an amount of land that is equivalent to one fifth of England's total built up area (10 percent of England is built upon) and could provide at least 8 million homes...

 

But it's also worth bearing in mind that golf courses drink huge amounts of water, are not particularly brimming with wildlife and are generally closed to public access.

 

Yet many countryside campaigners argue that we should not touch any greenfield land whatsoever, either because of its wildlife and amenity value or because we need every scrap of land to provide for our present and future food needs, or both.

 

Well in the case of horses and golf the food argument is spurious, and in the case of golf the wildlife and amenity argument is tenuous, at best. Some golf courses spoil the landscapes they occupy.

 

At the risk of boring the readers of this blog I repeat: There is no shortage of land in this country.

I'm sure there's an opportunity for a vaguely golf related joke here...

From The NY Daily News:

It was an unexpected sinkhole-in-one for a claustrophobic Missouri man who was swallowed up while walking on the fairway of an Illinois golf course on Friday. Mark Mihal, a 43-year-old mortgage broker from Creve Couer, was at the 14th hole at Annbriar Golf Course in Waterloo, about 25 miles southeast of St. Louis, when he disappeared into the earth.

PHOTOS: SINKHOLES AROUND THE WORLD

"I felt the ground start to collapse and it happened so fast that I couldn't do anything," Mihal said on his website golfmanna.com. "I reached for the ground as I was going down and it gave way, too. It seemed like I was falling for a long time. The real scary part was I didn't know when I would hit bottom and what I would land on."

Mihal, whose wife Lori describes as claustrophobic, suffered a dislocated shoulder as he fell onto the mud floor of a bell-shaped sinkhole that measured 18-feet deep and 10-feet wide.

D'you see what they did there: "sinkhole-in-one"? Absolute genius.

Why is it called a "football"?

We know that you need a ball to play cricket, golf, or tennis, and we refer to the balls used in those sports as "cricket ball", "golf ball" and "tennis ball" respectively: you take the name of the sport and then add the word "ball".

But as "football" is the name of the sport itself, why isn't a football referred to as a "football ball"? The same applies to "netball ball" and "basketball ball" of course.

UPDATE: as BFOD suggested, I posed the question here.

Sorry

Health scare story du jour

From the BBC:

Driving a convertible car can seriously damage your ears, experts have warned. Cruising with the top down at speeds of 50-70mph (80-112km/h) exposes the ears to sound levels sometimes nearing those made by a pneumatic drill, they argue...

SEE ALSO

Smoking link to hearing loss risk

Playing golf can 'damage hearing'

One night out 'damages hearing'