Since I was fourteen, and became politically awakened, my mates have all been ridiculous leftists. Together, we have called for mandatory omniequality, the stripping of all titles, the immediate restoration of the golden toad to its natural habitat, and the ushering in of the new anarcho-syndicalist era.
I’m therefore going to turn right away from them in this blog post, and gesture towards a different audience: reasonable golfers. Yes, if you’re a card-carrying leftist of any stripe or hue, this post is not for you. For, in my couple-of-years residence of St. Andrews, I have benefitted economically and personally from the golf industry. Despite this, the golf industry’s whoops and skirls certainly had me running from the hills at Fairmont Hotel, a five star hotel designed for such a demographic, where I encountered some of the most unreasonable members of the golfer subsection. These are the kind of guys who seemingly play golf so they can belittle, treating whacking on a ball on a cup as some improbable admission to an elite cadre of professional shirkers. The fact that golf was for half a millenium a deeply violent sport, involving frequent club-inflicted deaths, (I might have just made that up), definitely applies in this case. These guys will throw their clubs at you, demanding you behold their Titleist-emblazoned objects with the same avaricious glee that they themselves behold them. I have suffered, Reader, at their hands. I have been subjected to the most impolite behaviour, from someone DEMANDING a taxi to ‘Old Course Church’ (and refusing to believe that they meant ‘Old Course Hotel’), to hearing colleagues subjected to over-sprinkles of racist abuse and violence. I attribute some difficulties that were going on with me, emotionally, last year, to working in the Concierge department of the Fairmont Hotel, though I definitely interacted with some lovely people as well.
Working there, indeed, I could be angry at golf, with its cult of ecological destruction (golf courses, as they currently exist within this world, involve clearing vast tracts of precious forest, and have resulted in the destruction of many pristine ecosystems.) But working as a tour guide (and having a father and grandfather who are both reasonable, tolerant people, and have been involved in this unnamable sport) has given me a probably fatal belief that golfers can be good people. In Eat Walk Tours, I have met the cream of the crop: golfers who want to know about the history of St. Andrews before golf (the Reformation mafia drama being the reason that there is enough space for golf, for one,), to golfers who are interested, God forbid, in sustainability, respect, decency, equality, and fairness. I have become aware that such golfers exist, complicating any stereotype of golfers.
I am therefore addressing such golfers, when I am asking you to oppose the plans for this sports bar. There are enough spaces for golfers here – there is an entire 5* hotel, and an entire district of town taken up with their interests. What we have so precious little of the town in, however, is affordable business and housing. Soaring rents have displaced locals from the town, while there are simply not enough community spaces or affordable businesses, while they are plenty of businesses both in North Street and The Scores for golfers to cavort.
Well, I am saying, let all this continue. Provided they are inquisitive, and responsible, they are doing no strict harm. But this town is more than just golfers cavorting: it is an ordinary town in the beautiful Kingdom of Fife, with people with the ordinary needs of locals in any town. Efficient, functional hospitals, shops in which bread and milk can be purchased at a reasonable price.
And, so this cinema represented, entire spaces that are designed for the budgets of ordinary families and citizens. Places for people to bring their children, without having resort to Dundee etc. Community spaces where the non-mega-rich folk of the town can feel safe.
And that is why, all jokes aside, this Sports Bar is just not what this town needs right now. Golf money, so I have observed from direct experience, is not trickling to the ordinary people of this town. Wealth inequality is soaring on these Isles.
Please continue to play golf here. For your doing so has helped the town. But do so reliably and engagingly, being aware you inhabit a real town. And interest yourself in this town’s complexity and diversity, and its need for passionate social projects to relieve its cataclysmic wealth inequality. We are not – and, I repeat, repeat not, just the home of Golf. And we do not – and I repeat, not – need yet another business to venerate its post-reformation cult.
Please – please – do everything in your power to oppose the Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods Sports Bar. The town needs you. Call instead for a community space, where the elite will let us live in this town. For once.
Squidditas 