It’s raining balls

The players arrived with brollies at the ready for breakfast wearing the loud shorts and shirts and befitting of a golf course, though probably not the apparel you might expect to see on a fashionable Paris catwalk. Crimes against good taste aside, the breakfast lasted an extra 40 minutes, after which the monsoons abated and the brave could start thwacking balls into the middle distance. The ground may have been sodden, but the state of the driveways and the greens remained immaculate. Even though the skies remained grey, the drizzle did not constitute an excuse to call off play and the local swans remained unruffled and strangely unconcerned by the oncoming barrage of spherical projectiles. There may have been no Tiger Woods or Seve Ballesteros present, but what the players lacked in professionalism they made up for in enthusiasm with some gleefully digging themselves into bunkers faster than the soldiers of the first world war. Teams of three to four players were each assigned a star