Using Coriolis Effect to Cure a Slice

Monday saw us crawl out of bed at our usual holiday hour, just in time to have breakfast and then set out for our first attempt to get across Melbourne without being seduced inadvertently on to one of the toll roads. The road map that came with the car was a standard single sheet with too small an area on one side and too large a scale on the other. Susan has lent us a book map, which has all the appearance of a 500-page telephone directory, and is absolutely comprehensive in street detail. Trouble is that it is almost too large a scale and there is no overlap between pages. Because of this, poor Mum has great difficulty in keeping up with the plan that the TomTom has, and if I miss a turn then she has finding the right page, before the next recovery junction is manic. Never mind, we’ve kissed and made up again!

Expecting a leisurely afternoon and polite evening conversation, I had not dressed entirely appropriately for the next event. Susan was going to whisk Mum around on the various pre-wedding and weekly errands, whilst Alastair was to take me to play golf! Nil desperandum – I have nearly the same size feet as Alastair, and Susan had already bought me from her charity shop a cotton Aussie-style brim hat, so there was nothing holding us back. Susan’s clubs fitted me OK – she now thinks they must be too long for her – and we enjoyed 18 holes at Yarra Park Public Course; very pretty, lovely birdlife, and only $20 for 18 holes. Who needs to be a member of a club here at those prices? Alastair did say that membership at some clubs was about $3-400….sigh!

Now, in the northern hemisphere a thing called the Coriolis Effect causes winds to veer to the right when blowing from high to low pressure (and for water to go down the plughole clockwise). In the southern hemisphere the opposite happens. If you have a tendency to slice golf shots, then does Coriolis make it worse in the northern hemisphere and better in the southern? Answer: probably…but the evidence of my first 6 drives, with alien clubs, all bisecting the fairway, did not disprove the thesis. Once I had managed to get back to old habits of making too steep a swing and hitting the ball just near passing aircraft Alastair started to forgive me for initially looking too much like a professional, although the birdie at the 14^th and driving the green at the 175 yard 17^th had him looking askance at me again. I hadn’t anticipated playing golf whilst we were away, and it was a welcome event to be able to go home and tell The Boys about.

Of course, we were late back and dinner was being held up because of us. Vicar and wife were irreverent (is that an oxymoron?) and great fun, but with the late start all thoughts of worshipping Bill Gates went out of the window. Just hope that there is time to make another assault before we leave. We have managed to change our flights from Melbourne to Sydney to Wednesday 7^th, and so we shall stay the last night with Susan instead of having to find somewhere in Sydney. Evetually, we left and found our way home…where we collapsed into bed!