Players? There have been many famous ones, and still remembered (and still alive at a pleasant age of 60) is Bobbie Jones, an amateur who had his first sensational win in 1916 and who in 1930 made a clean sweep of the world's most difficult targets the British Amateur and Open and the US Amateur and Open.

How his skill would compare with today's magicians' is another question. The top professional in the US in 1921 was Walter Hagen. In the two following years he was succeeded by Gene Sarazen but Hagen was again top in the four years 19247.

I noticed that the US took the Great War so seriously that there was no compet.i.tion in 191718.

But here is the ultimate statistic that will make many golfers angrily shout 'Liar!' The diameter of the hole on the green is FOUR AND A HALF INCHES.

Man in the street Today in Britain and to a somewhat lesser extent here, much attention is being showered on that eternal wayfarer, the Man in the Street.

For years there has been an Inst.i.tute of British Standards which lays down the specification, size, weight and function of various articles.

Other bodies prescribe the content of sundry manufactured items of food and drink, and even the strength to which some of them must conform, as e.g. whiskey.

From the Cow Milk is minutely supervised from the point when it leaves the cow till it arrives in a sterilised bottle on the citizen's doorstep, and frequently prosecutions for deficiency or adulteration are proof that those in authority do not lack vigilance.

Despite occasional and alarming breakdowns such as the recent scare about the drug thalidomide, there is strict surveillance of the production of drugs, narcotics and pharmaceutical products.

Most proprietary products must bear on the label a statement of the chemicals and the amount of them contained in a particular product, and the law insists that many things which doctors enjoin us to take for our various ailments must be labelled Poison.

Yet this complicated and intricate apparatus for making sure that the customer is not only right but all right is indeed far from perfect; there are cracks and fissures and even chasms, and many an operator who is not only able but also unscrupulous can w.a.n.gle many a questionable substance through the net.

Under our own last Health Act elaborate regulations apply to the storage, handling and exposure for sale of foodstuffs but it is common knowledge that in many shops little or no attention is paid to them.

Indeed, enforcement, inspection and sampling is in itself a formidable task. Recently in Britain a new body has been set up to attend to misleading, exaggerated or downright fraudulent advertising, but many members of the public are by no means convinced that the move will achieve any spectacular improvement.

Every particular make of 16 different makes of motor car is still easily the best of the lot. There is only one decent holiday resort in all Ireland, one newspaper, one golf course, one hotel, one make of shirt.

I have an old cutting (alas, undated) from the London Daily Telegraph dealing with some observations made by the Public a.n.a.lyst for the City of London at a meeting of the Royal Society of Health. Here were some of his disclosures: The meringue, formerly composed of white of egg and sugar, was now made from an 'artificial cellulose gum in place of the egg'.

Among products debased in one way or another were beer, cordials, custards, jam, demerara sugar, mustard, French coffee, shortbread, lemon curd and some of the more expensive teas.

What is presented as 'whipped' or 'Jersey' cream often is of a grade of cream containing less fat than was usual in plain cream before the last war. What is often put forward as pte de foie has nothing to do with the livers of geese.

'Meat pies' were an amalgam of meat and potato. Cider was sweetened with saccharin, fish paste contained as little as 25 per cent of the fish specified.

Apart from the unannounced use of subst.i.tutes and adulteration in general, there had been many prosecutions for the finding of foreign bodies in food and the sale of food that was mouldy, maggoty, unfit or rancid.

The wonder is that some of us are alive at all.

The problem is so big and wide that it is very difficult and in some respects intractable. What can one do if one finds bugs in one's hotel bed?

Write to Bord Filte, certainly, but will that cure the bites? A good safeguard against thirst is to have a syphon of lemonade in the house; it is a good refreshing drink but it has nothing whatever to do with lemons.

It is merely tap-water charged with carbonic acid gas and flavoured with some chemical. A great number of other 'fruit' drinks and even confectionery have absolutely no fruit content.

Every individual has his or her own pet complaint adulteration and deficiency in a particular thing. My own, I am sure, will be echoed by many males.

Yellow Pockets When I was much younger the pockets in the trousers of even the cheapest suit were made of yellow, indestructible canvas. They were the pockets of the greatest stress, containing not only weighty metal things like coins and keys but also too often a heavy pair of hands.

Nowadays the pockets of even an expensive suit are made apparently of cotton, sure to be riddled with holes after a month's wear.

I suppose it's one argument for going back to the kilt and sporran.

Knowall on the weather Well, there you are and where are you? The first time I read that phrase I thought it was profoundly wise, subtle and terribly true. But after some weeks reflecting on it, I decided it was quite meaningless and just d.a.m.n silly.

But now I'm not so sure. It does seem to have a queer psychic import. It bears nothing so simple as an actual meaning but a sinister suggestion, a warning, a threat of the necessity of taking care.

There is almost a hint of nuclear disaster just around the corner, germ warfare perhaps, or generalised rheumatism of the brain. After all, this is 1963 and the world is bound to get worse before it's better.

Ireland has had at least four days of snow and frost. A nationwide epidemic of leprosy could not have shaken the country more. Thunderous news reports on the radio gave ever more fearful details of the momentous crisis.

Two men were starving to death in a cottage at Ticknock, County Dublin, and the question of requisitioning a Constellation of Irish Airline was under consideration; the dropping of four loaves of bread was planned but n.o.body could be sure whether it was brown bread or white bread they liked.

A banshee had fainted from the cold on the border of county Carlow. A hop-off-my-thumb from Strabane had savagely a.s.saulted a B. Special with an icicle which contained plaster of Paris. In Ballymore Eustace an old man demented with chilblains mistook a bag of coal for tobacco and had smoked three pipefuls of it before he could be stopped.

n.o.body doubts that the heart of Ireland is sound but if everybody in the country was to be frozen to death, what then?

In the middle of all this terrible consternation a Dublin paper made editorially and very casually a revelation which startled the few people who had retained the use of cold reason.

That Government committee, the paper said, had been sitting for four months and had not yet reported. That was not good enough. If it could not bring its deliberations to an early close and make a recommendation, the Government should ignore it and go ahead within the confines of its own judgement.

The time for action had come; mere talk had rarely solved any problem of grave national importance. There was indeed far too much talk in this country.

Know what this committee was pondering for so long?

That the State here should buy one helicopter!

At the present time there is absolutely no helicopter anywhere in the 26 counties.

True, disasters at sea threatening along our very extended coastline call for rescue intervention by helicopter and with no shyness at all our respectable Government alerts the British Navy at Derry, who usually have already despatched a machine on its errand of mercy and hope.

It seems that in Ireland the British are now accepted as the haven of last resort. We would be lost without them.

What does a helicopter cost?

Personally I have no idea but a knowledgeable friend tells me that the standard machine can be got for about 50,000, and that maintenance costs are nominal.

This sum of 50,000 is, of course, enormous but one should remember that our prodigiously numerous collection of Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries are fluthering about the place in brand-new cars of the Mercedes Benz make; those cars are good but they are not cheap.

Some people feel (and I am one of them) that a second-hand Post Office bike would be the very man for this job, and more in keeping with the ancestry of our betters. For that reason one may take it as the general feeling that one helicopter for the whole country would be preferable to having innocent people drowned or frozen to death.

From another point of view, 50,000 is not really so much if one finds oneself in this new dimension we call air travel, for there costs tend to take on a fictional quality and the tendency is to ignore them.

What does money matter if the question is one of prestige and national pride, to say nothing of convenience and safeguarding life? Aer Lingus (Irish Air Lines) have three Constellation aircraft.

Know what they cost? One million pounds each, with goodness knows what maintenance burden. I suppose it's all right, since those giant birds stimulate emigration and also bring American tourists here to be skinned alive.

Meantime, I have chilblains on my corns. Any reader who knows of a remedy will be sent a book token value three shillings.

The power of darkness The observant wayfarer in this vale of tears will have noticed that misfortunes do not come singly. They more usually descend in a shower.

Since about Thursday night, the 10th January practically everybody I know (including myself) has been in a bad temper. Although Cuba is far away, perhaps this countrywide depression dates from that very narrow shave the whole human race had.

As I write these lines, news has come over the electric radio of the death of Hugh Gaitskell, one of the brilliant and academically distinguished lights of the Labour Party in Britain. Western Europe can ill afford such a loss at this stage of tumult and threat. The Congo situation, though apparently nearing a stage of finality, due mostly to exhaustion of the militant natives of Katanga, was never a very pleasing operation and one feels that if there is to be a truce, it will be an armed truce.

But most of the continent of Africa is unsettled and unhappy, not the least part of it being South Africa, where the minority whites have indulged in the most cynical exacerbation of relations with the natives.

Then there is universal puzzlement about the entry of ourselves (with Britain) into the Common Market. Such comment as has been forthcoming from official sources is vague in the extreme but generally admits that native industries long sheltered by a tariff wall will be wiped out. It is also admitted that the price of food here will go up, and that there will be a general rise in the cost of living.

Unemployment and dearer food are not enticements, and could result in steeper emigration figures. Some people have a.s.sured us that membership of the Common Market will automatically make the existence of the Six Counties as part of the United Kingdom a meaningless anachronism. In other words there is a fearful amount of guesswork and prophecy going on. I am personally too cunning to contribute my share here.

But n.o.body writing on the subject of contemporary hardship, local and international, can dodge comment on the main excruciation: I mean the awful descent of snow and frost. It has meant, sometimes absolutely literally, just paralysis. If this country, with its natural wealth of food and fuel, collapses at the onset of a week of stern weather, what would happen if there came from the skies not snow but several thousand armed invaders, aimed by aircraft at strategic points such as big towns, rail centres, water reservoirs and installations for the production of electricity?

It is a sobering subject for meditation, for the truth is that there is no pre-arranged apparatus in the country to deal with a short period of very severe weather. Those who have listened to radio news from Britain console themselves with the thought that what the British are getting is something far worse, with the situation made more bitter in the eastern district, including London, by the coinciding go-slow of workers in the power stations.

Tough phrases like 'national sabotage' have been used to describe this semi-strike activity, condemned as roundly by the unions as by the Government and the newspapers. It certainly imparts one lesson that should be learnt everywhere, and that is the utter dependence of modern human living on the supply of current artificially generated.

Theatres, cinemas, streets, phones and electric razors can all be reduced within a few hours to chaos and nullity.

Reports seem agreed that Dublin, Wicklow and Waterford got the worst dose of snow and ice but to show there was no purely geographical rancour, Donegal was also refrigerated. In Wicklow there were situations reported which for exaggeration seemed to border on the comic.

In one remote cottage one old man who lived alone survived, fireless, for ten days on turnips, presumably eaten raw. Another man who died could not be buried or even taken out of his house. A Dublin evening newspaper, never reluctant to adopt the heroic role, hired an aeroplane to drop parcels on Wicklow farmsteads.

Unfortunately it printed a picture of the plane in flight, and it was a biplane. Like many people, I did not think there was any such machine now in existence and wondered who had been so carefully hiding a fighter of World War I? Many people also wondered exactly what was in those parcels? Eight sods of turf, two loaves of bread, a quarter lb of b.u.t.ter, two ounces of tea and 20 cigarettes but no matches?

Mystery abounds. Surely an isolated cottier in wild mountain country has a rick of turf outside his door? He must also (one thinks) have a supply of at least a month of tea, flour to bake bread, a pound of rashers, maybe a bit of gur cake, and a big bit of plug tobacco for his pipe. Indeed, nowadays it is nearly certain that he also has a television set, and his wife and sons are probably there to make possible a hand of cards.

If any general conclusion is possible, it must be that we Irish are getting soft. How could we be getting soft, a famished farmer may roar, when me boots is frozen solid and the well where I get me water is frizen? I won't attempt to answer. Engendering heat in print won't make my own yield water. I pray tonight for a thaw, when all my pipes will burst, damaging carpets and ruining wallpaper.

No work past fifty What are your Best Years, capital letters and all? I will try to explain. Recently I came across a paperback with the challenging t.i.tle How to Enjoy Retirement, by Walter B. Pitkin (Cedar Books, 2/6) and, though evidently intended as a serious treatise however brightly written, I found parts of it amusing and other parts of it replete with what seemed plain ignorance.

An initial shock was the discovery that the a.s.sumed age for retirement is 50, which is sometimes in Ireland the age at which an earnest worker gets his first promotion or rise. Some probing about revealed that Mr Pitkin is an American, that his admonitions are primarily addressed to other Americans and that he is also the author of another book named Life Begins at Forty.

In the Retirement he deduces enormous possibilities from what he calls the arrival of the 'Atomic Age' but never mentions the chance that nuclear science could lead to the extermination of the human race. The form of uranium known as U235 could produce rays so powerful as practically to abolish disease.

If you are now thirty or so, he says, 'women will finish with child-bearing in their mid-twenties, children will learn how to shift for themselves around sixteen. Parents will be on their own soon after forty, with the wide, wide world ahead of them and everywhere to go.' One can only reflect that people of that kind must have been mighty precocious.

If the mother had 4 children she must have been married at perhaps 17. If those children were considered to be on their own at 16, they could have had little more than an elementary education, and the father (just like those children) must have collared a fat job with no qualifications for it, to support such a household, having married at 18.

How did he save the money to travel the wide, wide world with his wife when both were just over forty? He solves this simply by saying that twelve shillings out of every pound are in the pockets or the banks of people over fifty.

In regard to health, he mentions countless revolutionary discoveries of the Atomic Age, many still top-secret. Fourteen years ago, he asks, who had heard of penicillin ... or curare?

I would reply that the curative principle of penicillin has been known for centuries in rural Ireland, usually a.s.sociated with cow-dung which has been some time lying in the field. Curare? It was in use by the Indians of Southern America even in primitive times.

But don't worry. He says that the Russians have completely cured tens of thousands of people with a new serum they have developed. What's more, influenza is no trouble, for doctors everywhere are using a vaccine which abolishes it. Can peptic ulcers be cured without drugs or an operation? Of course. The correct treatment is now routine.

Of cancer (the top killing disease in Ireland for a long, long time) he says that now most cases can be wholly cured or alleviated if caught early. Arthritis is a fairly common affliction which can be so deadly as to amount to paralysis.

It would be tedious to pursue Mr Pitkin further in his role of therapist but perhaps it is worth mentioning his view concerning the ice-cap of Greenland.

This ice-cap could be easily melted by atom bombs, and geophysicists have testified that the ice would never return there. The result of this operation would be startling, according to our author.

'England would bask under the sun of Seville, while the Scots would give up oatmeal and go in for homemade orange juice.' But he is wary here and counsels against atom-bombing the ice-fields of Antarctica.

Such a move would release so much new water that great London and Calcutta would be submerged to a depth of 150 feet of blue water.

But what are his positive recommendations for attaining and spending the Best Years? After pa.s.sing forty, he should start a tapering-off process to get mind and body gradually attuned to the condition of doing no work.

Naturally there is any amount of money laid by in the bank but an abrupt stoppage of work at 50 would be a very serious mistake, possibly fatal.

He should start 'vacating' from his office several times a year. (For most of us people here, that would be just not going to work and would mean the sack.) But for the retiring American, this procedure would make other members of the firm get used to the idea that he was not indispensable.

As the years went by he would step up this procedure by going in to work only three or perhaps two days a week. On attaining fifty and on the brink of enjoying the Best Years, he would be practically non-existent as a worker.

After that, his life is generously left to his own personal inclinations. A tour of the wide, wide world and a dumb stare at the Taj Mahal? Certainly. By all means he should read books, though think twice about trying to write them.

Woodworking (but with power tools) is a grand way of spending post-50 days, and so is golf in strict moderation. Home-made movies, membership of useful clubs and philanthropic activities can be absorbing. And so on.

I don't think this book is convincing anywhere. It was written in 1947, when presumably Mr Pitkin had reached the Best Years himself, and that would make him today at least 80. I wonder is the gentleman still alive?

To hang or not to hang There was curiously little public interest or comment when it was recently announced in the Dil that the Government would shortly take steps to abolish capital punishment 'except in certain cases'.

In fact we are one of the few sovereign civilised states west of the Curtain to retain it. Leaving aside time of war and martial law, it has not existed in Austria since 1918, Belgium 1873, Finland 1889, Holland 1870, Norway 1875, Portugal 1886, Spain 1932, Switzerland 1874, New Zealand 1941.

It has been abolished (with certain qualifications) in all the republics of Latin America. Curiously, however, it has been abolished in only six of the United States, the others variously prescribing hanging, the choice of shooting or hanging, and electrocution.

Arguments It is to be hoped that we will not have in Ireland when the matter comes to legislation a re-recital of all the tedious arguments pro and con the decision. We are ent.i.tled to rely on the experience of countries which have been long without this penalty and to decide, its barbarity apart, whether its retention in the statute book acts as a deterrent upon the criminal-minded.

All the figures prove that it does not. The usual explanation for this result is that in practice very few murders are premeditated, and in the temper and pa.s.sion which dominate the committing of the foul deed in other cases, no penalty can overshadow the moment of crisis.

But treason, it may be remarked, is another matter, It can be argued that the culprit who is shown to have menaced not an individual but a whole community must be put condignly to death, if only as the most effective form of warning to others.

Within the longest memory Ireland has never had a native hangman. Many years ago the present writer entered Fanning's public house in Lincoln Place, Dublin (Oliver Gogarty's 'Indignation House'), just to have a quiet, solitary drink.

Present at the counter however was an elderly, low-sized, darkly dressed gentleman complete with bowler hat. A staid family solicitor, perhaps. He was accompanied by a much younger man. After casual salutation we got talking and it was not long until I realised that my new acquaintance was Pierpoint, the public executioner, over here to do 'a job'.

His predecessor Ellis, I recall, had committed suicide. His young companion was a nephew who was learning the trade and, I was told, 'another few necks and 'e'll be ole reight.'

While dealing appreciatively with a pint of stout, Pierpoint without any shyness said that the fee he got for a 'job' in Dublin was ten guineas plus generous travelling and subsistence allowance, the latter expenses also extending to the nephew.

On one occasion our parsimonious and incredibly tactless Department of Finance tried to tell Pierpoint that there had been a reprieve at the last minute and in the circ.u.mstances expenses only would be payable. Apparently the flare-up which followed was momentous.

The hangman pointed out that it was not he who had granted the reprieve, that he would sue the Irish Government for breach of contract, and that he would never come here for another 'job' again. The Department quickly paid up, for a public court hearing on such an issue was unthinkable.

Pierpoint told me that he personally did not accept the widely believed and indeed propagated view that death by hanging was instantaneous through fracture of the spinal column by reason of the 'drop'. Many men he had hanged had shown many signs of life for up to ten minutes after the launch into eternity.

20 Minutes It is scarcely possible for anybody to be sure that such signs are not merely post-mortem reflexes of the physical apparatus but it is a fact that the hanged man is not cut down until at least twenty minutes have elapsed.