Between myself and Philip Barlow and Lisa Gilotty, we had a bit of a funny incident as they first came in to give me something broken to repair. It turned out that the laptop they had brought in to get transformed wasn’t the broken one they had intended to bring at all, but another one that was functioning fine. Of course we just laughed about it and agreed that they should return with something really useless, but this posed a bit of a conundrum for them: they really weren’t sure they had anything broken at home at all. They just don’t keep broken things, they said. Well, after some thinking and looking they managed to fish something out that needed repair, because two weeks later they made another attempt. This time I had to admit that they had a good catch. The golf driver that Philip had been using for a while was turning dangerous, as the leather grip was coming loose and tended to slip off when you swung it. This could of course have all sorts of dangerous implications, if one lost grip of the club in mid swing and sent it scampering away instead of the ball.

I happen to have my own less than fond memories of how golf clubs can do damage from my own childhood, and for a long time I used to also have a small scar right between my eyes to testify to it. The lesson learned was that minigolf is never played swinging the clubs widely like in normal golf, especially when you are getting frustrated for not managing your putt, and that if the person you are playing with are starting to display such a behaviour, it is advisable to stand back a bit even if this might mean you don’t get a good look at his next miss. But so much about my own early experiences of golf, just mentioned to hint at why a firm grip seems like one of the more essential points of golf.

In the process of trying to shape the club itself into a much safer and sturdier grip, I learned that metal with a very good and firm spring snaps before it bends. This is a lesson to be remembered by up-cyclists around the world: if a piece of metal can be used for smashing something repeatedly and hard without loosing its original shape, it will probably react badly to being forced into a new shape. And if the metal is pliable enough, even if it is thick and sturdy, to be bent and adjusted, it will do just that when it is used to repeatedly smash something with a lot of force. Anyway, the shortened rod just ended up providing a much more secure swing, at least after I had added a very safe and firm grip that I cast directly onto the club with 2-component plastic. Probably the driver wasn’t very useful for golf any more, but I do think it emphasizes the dangerous aspects of that sport much more clearly now.