Steven Wells’ reminds me of a a strip from Andy Riley’s genius Roasted cartoons, where the male character deliberately hates golf in order to slow the ageing process.

“For suburbanite ageing punks like me, foxhunting is a mere abstraction - a distant battlefield where self-righteous vermin-loving vegan hedgemonkeys get the crap kicked out of them by inbred toffs and their ape-like supporters. Golfers, on the other hand, are what people like me become when they stop trying. They’re the pod people from Invasion of The Body Snatchers whispering: ‘Stop trying to stay awake, give in, surrender, wear Pringle.’

“Golf is the quicksand at the end of the existentialist rainbow, sucking the unwary ageing hipster into a half-life of gin-pissed conversations about house prices, airport car parking and immigrants.

“But there are those...who have tried to square the circle. Golf Punk magazine has been injecting the sport with monkey glands for years. Has it made golf any punker? Sadly no. Rather it has acted as a gateway to sporting senility, tempting thousands of unwary groovesters into the first stages of irreversible Alan Partridgedom.”

Steven Wells in The Guardian/ Forget foxhunting - urban golf is the new gateway to culture death

“A while ago, I wrote something that attempted to define what was or wasn’t a sport by a set of rules with which any sane and rational person in the universe would concur. For instance, it’s not a sport if it carries the prefix ‘ultimate’, if you can smoke while you’re doing it, or if the outcome is based upon points from judges. Or if it’s quite obviously a pastime, such as golf. As I say, there was very little controversial in the piece, though one reader did take offence at the description of gymnastics as child abuse with points.”

The Guardian / Ruffle a few feathers, support our pigeons