The flags will not be needed again until the spring. The holes will be filled and the greens left to grow. I'll be breaking the news to the staff in the clubhouse: they'll have to find new work until March - there just isn't the demand.
Still, one or two folk will drop by that I know. Mr Jarvis will come in for his lunchtime pint every day, as will Derek Drake and Mrs McBride. There might be the odd game of bridge or Canasta on a weekday afternoon - Phillipa Reynolds will come in and make up a four. They'll sit in the bar and I'll serve them sandwiches and nuts and drinks. Mrs McBride will invite me to play, but I'll politely decline, say I've got to go and change a barrel, trusting them to mind the bar while I go upstairs and lie back and think.
When I come back, Derek will be looking at the photographs on the wall, asking me who this is and that is and if I remember when he went around the Old Course in 64. I'll smile and say yes, and he'll stroke his moustache proudly and return to the table.
They will sit in the bar until it closes, and then Derek and Mrs McBride and Mr Jarvis will be off to their homes, and I'll call a taxi for Phillipa Reynolds because she lives fifteen miles away. And while we're waiting for it to come, and the others have left, Phillipa and I will go and sit by the fire and hold hands and I'll wonder silently about what might have happened if we had met twenty years earlier, and I'll kiss her goodbye on the cheek, and watch from my room as she gets in the cab and goes home.
Yes, it will be just the same as ever this winter - the old routine - they'll be in every day. But they won't be going on the course. Oh no. The course isn't open in the winter. The course is closed.
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