Dad’s Day Job

 Once in a while, Dad does actually get to go and visit some interesting places, and gets to some rather nice events. One such was the ‘One Year To Go’ Ryder Cup preview event at Celtic Manor, on October 12th 2009, when European skipper Colin ‘Monty’ Montgomerie and his USA counterpart Corey ‘Spitting Image of Marie’s Ex’ Pavin came together, along with a fair collection of media types like yours truly, for nine holes on the Twenty Ten Course – venue for the 2010 Ryder Cup matches.

For those family members who don’t get to these behind the scenes type events – which is most of them, with the exception of my brother Robin, who is very much part of the European Tour in his own day job as golf course architect at European Golf Design, and my own Dad, who I try to sneak into as many golf events as possible – what follows is the answer to the frequent question ‘what does Andy do all day?’. In fact, the pictures themselves don’t give many answers, because they don’t show all the talking, the wheeling, the dealing, the running about and the compromise-making that attends these events. They’re great places to meet people who, one day, might help you do what you want to do, and vice versa.

Also there that day were BBC radio DJ Chris Evans and his wife Natasha – you’ll see their picture in there somewhere. Marie and I once spent an evening at a hotel bar in East London putting the world to rights with the future Mrs Evans, a couple of years before she met Chris. She was nice and it’s good to see how well things have worked out for her.

Instead of putting up all the pictures one by one, as normal, I’ve put these into a Gallery format which – so they tell me – should work fine if you click on each picture in turn. So here goes:

By the way, I took these pictures with my Nikon D300 – the D3s was still a twinkle in my eye at this stage.

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