To my knowledge, Old Boy himself had no particular passion for golf, but it was well known that the clubs Mark used had come directly from Old Boy’s loft: an assorted collection of irons and woods dating from the 1960s, the 1950s and, in the case of one tiny, hickory-shafted nine iron Mark was particularly fond of, 1912. My clubs were considered out of date by many, being second-hand and all at least four years old, but when I played alongside Mark they made me feel decadent and spoilt. ‘You want to bin those sticks and get yourself some golf equipment, son,’ Mike, the car salesman Mark played against in the 1988 club matchplay semi-final, had sneeringly told Mark, prior to Mark casually dispatching him by the handsome total of seven and eight, less than two hours later. New juniors at the club came and went, invariably carrying hi-tech weapons that glinted in the moorland sun. It didn’t bother Mark a bit. A lanky bespectacled boy called Roger Glaister arrived, carrying a gold-shafted driver, hopping casually over the fence from a big house on the lane which his parents had recently purchased, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He spat a lot, in a very idiosyncratic way where the spit forked out into the air through his front teeth. Soon, several other kids at the club were spitting this way too, but not Mark. In their one and only match against each other, the score was quite close for the first nine holes, Glaister taunting Mark all the way with under-the-breath remarks about charity shop clothes, but on the final nine – always his favourite – Mark turned up the heat. By the sixteenth tee, that gold shaft had become two smaller crooked gold shafts, languishing in a wooden dustbin 500 yards distant, Glaister’s £50 Pringle shirt was damp from where his saliva had rebelled on him in a gust of wind, and his ankles were caked in cow dung. Mark beat him by eleven shots in the end. ‘I enjoyed that,’ he told Glaister, shaking his hand and taking a grudgingly proffered £20 note. ‘We must do it again some time.’