So the plotting and planning was eventually revealed to be a grand gathering on Saturday at the Addlestone TopGolf range, and a grand gathering it was indeed. In a feat somewhat akin to the herding of cats, T’Other Half managed to assemble all the Maidment Brothers and a selection of good friends all in one place without triggering either a rogue meteor strike or any long-term damage to the space-time continuum.
Stay well away from the back-swing…
TopGolf is a bit of an odd beast, but one that works surprisingly well. A traditional driving range has colour-coded targets dotted around the range, each studded with RFID readers. Each golf ball is chipped and encoded with a player’s name, so that each successful strike of a target allocated a player a number of points. The highest score after twenty balls wins the game.
With refreshments served at each bay, it’s a game I used to play regularly while doing project management work a few years back – finding it a great way to reduce stress after fraught days. With T’Other Half’s back injury and associated health issues alongside a shaky financial, we’ve not really been back much in the last couple of years. This weekend served as a good reminder that this is actually something I really enjoy – so it’s going back on the list of things to start doing again.
The day itself kind of blew me away a bit, eliciting a whole slew of emotions that I’m still picking through. The overwhelming memory is one of shocked ‘wow’ that so many people came along – both for the games and for the pub drinks afterwards. It didn’t quite turn into the mass meal that we’d sort of envisioned afterwards, but that was more due to people needing to get smaller relatives back home at a reasonable time than any lack of interest.
I’ve been thinking around where this sense of bemusement comes from – and I suspect it will continue to nag at me for a while. At it’s heart I think it comes from not feeling as if I deserve the friendships that this has shown. For all my bluster and stubbornness I still have a huge difficulty in believing my own self-worth, much to T’Other Half’s amusement – and that’s something I cherish her for greatly.
It was also our first Anniversary this weekend – so we made sure to make some time just for ourselves. Being the Paper Anniversary, my present to her was all the DLC for Skyrim on the PS3 – said game being in the Elder Scrolls series, and one of her all-time favourite games. Her present to me was a subscription to a writer’s magazine that we’ve been picking up the last few months.
We also managed to get a booking with our local GP for talking about vaccinations required for our Honeymoon, which we’ll be finally getting to later this year…
Wow… it’s really all starting to accelerate isn’t it?
