I’ve done well.. but not shaking hands on golf course is rough

A slight footnote to handling the pandemic. I’m being pretty good. I go to the shops as little as possible. I wear a mask and maintain social distancing while I’m in there. I won’t be going to pubs and restaurants for a while, even if they are open. And we haven’t had family or friends to stay at all. Or visited them.

But there’s one place where my ingrained behaviour has been very hard to change. The golf course. I’ve been enjoying (if “enjoy” is quite the word we want for what I do on the course) a few rounds in the last few weeks (socially distanced, of course) and I don’t know how often I’ve had to stop myself before shaking my partners’ hands.

The need to do this was pounded into me so fiercely by my dad when I was a child that it is very difficult to stop. We bump elbows instead. And I often wonder what my dad would make of the sight of all these golfers touching their elbows together.

Well, he’d probably find it less astonishing than the state of my swing these days.