Well we're back
It was a historic time to be back in Blighty, what with the passing of the only monarch most of us have ever known (there was also the passing of the torch from one dipsh!t Prime Minister to an utter dimwit, but that's another story)
While in the homeland, I managed to get a couple of rounds in, one at the fantastic Broadway Club in the Cotswolds, and one at Old Thornes in Hampshire (not so great). In both rounds, I suffered from a lag in my jets and that led me to play to an even lesser standard than is the norm.
Truly, jet-lag is rubbish - it leaves you with a sense of being mildly inebriated without any of the fun plus a side dish of suprise exhaustion
I looked into it a bit further, and the history of time zones etc is fascinating. The idea of time zones was raised by a Canadian Railway Engineer by the name of Sanford Fleming and agreed at a conference in 1884 in Washington DC. It was here that Greenwich Mean Time was accepted as the prime meridien (the French thought this was merde, as they naturally felt that Paris should be the centre of the known universe, but to be fair, they were French)
The original concept was for 24 equal, 15 degree segments each representing an hour, but geography, politics and indeed, geo-politics meant that this was never going to be that simple. In China, for example, one of the first actions of Chairman Mao after WW2 was to standardise the time in China (which would have been 5 time zones) to Beijing time - this means that dawn at Beijing at 6am in China would be about an hour earlier on the East Coast (ie 5am) and at the western most point, dawn occurs several hours later (about 10am)
It gets even more complicated when you throw in daylight savings. This was originally the idea of a New Zealand Postman (George Vernon Hudson in the 1890's) and he was quite rightly ignored as a lunatic. Then the idea came up again from some pompous Pom who thought that people were wasting the day by sleeping too long in the mornings. He was a moralist by the name of, William Willet (& he is a direct ancestor of Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay), and he was also ignored and never lived to see it implemented during the latter stages WW1 when it made more sense to try and reduce energy usage (think light bulbs) in munition factories.
A quarter of the planet's population has been subject to this ever since.
The best bit about this though was in the US, where States, and even towns, were allowed to choose whether or not to adopt this "new" idea - it resulted in one scenario where if you travelled 35 miles (about 55km) between two towns (Moundsville, West Virginia & Stuebenenville Ohio) you would pass through 7 different time zones (this was in 1963, in case you were wondering).
All of this does give me a greater appreciation of just how good the pros we see on tv really are.- they not only produce fantastic golf week in and out, but they do it despite the handicap of not knowing what time it is. Quite remarkable.
Anyway, in case anyone is wondering, I am going to be milking the jet-lag excuse for several weeks (months), unless by some miracle I manage to remember which end of the club to hold.
Stay safe, play well, and I look forward to seeing you out there soon
Steve
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