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slightly different place on the ball, about an eighth of a centimetre below where they’d originally resided.
    Additionally, I noted that they were very slightly bigger than the ones I had made with my pen.
    I called Grant and Michael over from the opposite side of the fairway, showed them the ball, and explained. Their faces turned grave: maybe not ‘someone has died’ grave, but certainly ‘something has died’ grave.
    Is there another game with rules as multifarious and intricate as golf? It’s doubtful. I find it remarkable that professional golfers’ brains don’t short-circuit from trying to keep all those carefully worded provisos and stipulations in there. Every so often on your golfing travels you’ll meet some little bloke, possibly with a moustache and a bit of an issue about the fact that he’s only five foot two, who doesn’t appear to have a hell of a lot going on in the rest of his life, who’ll claim to know it all; but one day, say when his ball lands in a soft drink bottle that also happens to be resting in a rabbit scrape, even his encyclopaedic disciplinary knowledge will fail him. Nobody can possibly know the correct course of action in every situation in a game played in as many different topographical habitats, with as many permutations, as golf. That said, when it comes to playing the wrong ball, most good players are pretty savvy – largely because playing the wrong ball is one of the most senseless and crushing of golfing mistakes. As Michael would generously say to me half an hour later, ‘It happens to nearly all of us once, but it very rarely happens twice.’
    I’ve never been one to hunker cackling under the duvet with a pen torch and a copy of that year’s updated R&A Rules of Golf, but even I knew that playing a ball other than your own means a two-stroke penalty. But here’s the real kicker: if you fail to identify and declare that alien ball on the hole where you first played it, the penalty is outright disqualification. No second serve. No ‘Go back, have another go.’ The end. Goodbye.
    There was no doubt in my mind that the lethal switchover had happened on the second hole, not the third – I’d just been too dopey, or too neglectful, or too inexperienced, to realise it. Now, as Grant recalled that he’d seen another ball a couple of inches off the fairway on the second hole, not far from his ball and the one I’d thought was mine, it became clear that the crucial moment had occurred just before my second shot. Possibly because of nerves, possibly because I’d been yammering, I had neglected to clean my ball and check its identity before playing it, other than noting that it was a Titleist Pro-V1X, marked with a number two. But we’d hit three good shots off the tee into the sun, all of which had seemed to go straight. Then we’d arrived to find three balls in the fairway. Why would we have imagined – particularly when the adjacent holes were both a fair distance away – that any of those balls was not ours? More to the point, what were the odds – even in a Titleist-dominated world – that someone else had been playing a green-dotted Titleist with the exact same specification and number as mine, and left it in this particular fairway? And who was this wasteful, struggling pro who could afford to discard perfectly good £4 missiles in a tournament that cost £325 to enter and – if you ignored Qualifying School Stage Two – only carried a £1000 prize fund? I wanted to meet him. Maybe we could strike a deal: if he apologised nicely and kept me in Titleists for the rest of the season, I’d agree not to steal his driver and throw it into the lake next to the first tee.
    There had, of course, been another option open to me when I’d noticed that I had the wrong ball: I could have kept quiet about it and played on. It is doubtful that Michael or