Unlike the day before where a 7:30 tee time had us scrambling to get there in time, today Alex, Billy, Homer and myself wouldn’t be due off until 10:30. That gave us a few hours to kill before going out on the championship course for the last time on this, our first golf trip abroad, at Penina in southern Portugal.

After breakfasting at a slightly more reasonable time than the day before and more importantly not feeling quite so hungover after going out in the local town for dinner rather than propping up the hotel bar – with 6 bars in the hotel it was difficult to choose which one we liked the most so we kept going from one to the other – we decided that some practise would do us some good.

Down at the practise range, we discovered that Billy had committed the most heinous crime of a group of golfers on a trip – he had booked a lesson from the pro. While it was obviously in our interest for someone to sort out Billy’s infamous hook-slice as it would mean less time spent in the trees looking for lost balls, there was money at stake for who had the most improved score from the day before. This was not on. Therefore, as close and supportive friends, we felt duty bound to stand behind him the entire time and jeer at him.

Unfortunately for us, the pro giving Billy his lesson could have taught a Zen master calmness. While all this baiting was carrying on, he patiently ran Billy through the basics to check that he wasn’t doing anything wildly stupid. After watching a couple of good shots followed by a couple of the legendary hook-slices, he walked up to Billy and told him to put more weight on his toes. Now, Billy’s normal golf stance only requires a newspaper to complete the impression of a man about to find some lower intestinal relief. It’s possibly only his experience as a college gymnast that allows him to keep in this position through his entire swing. So he then leaned all the way forward to vertical and took a swing.

Billy has a fairly good swing but it’s always produced odd shots. Who would have thought that this one tiny change would have produced such outstanding results? With a pumping fist, Billy was smashing ball after ball down the range and actually in the direction he meant them to go. Nary a hook, slice or hook-slice in sight.

Robbed of our show, and quite possibly of our money, we then moved onto other traditional areas of amusement when at the range – namely trying each others clubs.

Everyone has at least one club that deserves some flak. Either that 10 year old money club that just does the job or that one you picked up from the used bin at the range and hardly use. The club that came in for the most grief was Homer’s driver. Bought in a 2-for-1 deal with his apparently-from-a-cereal-packet hybrid, it resembled nothing so much as a baked bean can on a stick of liquorice and sounded much the same. Manufactured by a very well known maker of woods, his version is curiously absent from their current website. None of us were able to produce anything better than low screamers that would often veer off alarmingly after about 200 yards. Even Billy with his new and enhanced swing could not get this thing to work. But Homer, true to his tools, refused all suggestion that he would be better off using it as a cattle prod and kept it in his bag.

As both Alex and I use Mizuno irons, we were soon boring the others to tears about the benefits of forging versus the other two and their Pings. Homer showed why he has extended shafts by whiffing the ball repeatedly when using Billy’s standard length irons and Alex found out why you don’t swing irons made for someone 6 inches taller than you when he swung Homer’s 4 iron and nearly broke his wrists when the club impacted on the ground a good foot behind the ball.

Remember kids, get custom fit and don’t swing other people clubs unless you can a) afford to replace them, and b) afford replacement wrists.

Eventually we got bored of hitting each others clubs and started hitting our own. This also reminded us that we were playing for money in this next round so some short game practise was in order.

I have never been one of nature’s putters. My version of a gently stroked putt resembles a man poking a snake and only my choice of putter allows me to get near the hole (well that’s how I justify extravagant putter purchases to the wife). Thankfully, the others are similarly afflicted with putting woes. However, what we lack in ability we more than make up in competitiveness as our individual putting routines soon degenerated into a putting competition. Fairly soon we had to apologise to the other people on the green (average age 108) for hitting more than one ball at a time at the same hole as apparently synchronised putting is not yet an Olympic sport.

Soon we were back on the first tee. Somehow it didn’t appear nearly so threatening as the day before. Possibly because we were teeing off in brilliant sunshine rather than in the cold light of dawn, but more probably because we were neither being rushed nor were still drunk from the night before. Teeing off in the same order as yesterday, all of us managed to get on the fairway – even if my effort was a lucky rebound from the massive tree on the left – and we were off again.

With Billy’s new swing, Alex still without feeling in his fingers and me and Homer both playing rubbish it started off close. Billy surged into the lead with a stunning 5 iron from a fairway bunker from about 180 yards to about 10 feet  (he hadn’t hit one as sweetly before or since) but then had some issues when he forgot everything he learnt in his morning lesson and started spraying it around. Alex was playing safe but got into water troubles, Homer seemed to have spent too much time hitting our standard length clubs at the range and was hitting fats all over the place and my putting went from bad to worse.

Nevertheless, by the turn all of us were a couple of strokes better than the previous day’s effort and feeling pretty chirpy. Penina’s back nine is unusual in that it starts with two par 5’s and finishes with 2 par 5’s so if you have any length, this is where you can score. This knowledge was tempered by the fact that apart from the wide 11^th, all the rest of the back nine were going to be long, narrow and have large amounts either water, bunkers or both along with Penina’s ever present trees.

While none of use were exactly threatening to go round in par, the knowledge of the course from the day before and the warm-up and practice in the morning meant that we kept making respectable scores on what was a demanding course. Playing a championship course is completely different from a club course, even a good club course. You are suddenly aware of how many ways there are to play each hole: either play safe and minimise mistakes or be aggressive and score low. Sometimes being aggressive is actually the safe option when you realise that being too short off the tee only leaves you in more trouble and that the landing area that appears so tight from the tee only appears to be so due to the designers clever use of bunkering and other hazards and it is in fact much larger than it appears.

Hacking, slashing and occasionally playing a real golf shot, we made our way around the back 9 in reasonable order until we came to the 18^th. A dead straight 500 yard par 5, this should be a chance to score providing one could avoid the inviting ditch running across the fairway. This ditch is cunningly placed to catch any drives not quite long enough to carry or shorter driver that get too much roll. A following wind meant that this time, unlike the day before when we had all wimped out, we could take it on. I had kept the driver in the bag for most of the day, not trusting in my ability to keep it on the fairway. With the 17^th fairway running on the left hand side of the 18^th and this being the last tee shot of the trip and thinking ‘no guts no glory’, I decided to let the big dog out. One huge swing later (and what could only have been a fortuitous bounce off a sprinkler head, another one off a cart path followed by a lengthy roll on a rock hard fairway) I was over the ditch and within short iron distance. A powered 9 iron (even when I knew I would be better off with an 8 – some things never change) left me an uphill putt of about 30 feet. Somehow leaving my putting yips behind me, the ball raced up the slope, broke left, broke right and then curled towards the hole, finally stopping a bare 6 inches away. No eagle but a great tap in birdie to end the day, and the trip.

Everyone had improved on their score but on count back it was Billy with his new and improved swing who took the prize money, narrowly pipping Alex. Noticing that he was about to be thrown in the pool for his unfair use of a teaching aid, he promptly (and wisely) spent all his winnings on beer and all was well.

Other great highlights-

Homer’s swearing when he realised that he’d been reading all the distance markers in yards rather than correctly in metres after insisting that ‘the air must be thicker here, I’m losing a lot of distance’, some time on day 2.

Alex shrieking like a girl when he dived in the (unheated) pool in front of the one attractive lady guest in the entire hotel.

Me, who can barely speak English, trying to talk to all and sundry in what my friends described as ‘an interesting mix of Spanish, French, Italian, Urdu and what sounded like Croatian’. Curiously this only ever happened during a night of ‘refreshment’.

Billy’s look of haunted despair when his Blackberry ran out of battery. I’ve seen junkies look less upset.

Three days of golf, played with your friends on a wonderful course in the warm sunshine. Trust me, it doesn’t get any better than this. And if you never do this at least once in your life, you’re cheating yourself out of a great experience.