I don't like golf and golf certainly doesn't like me

I like sport. Football is a high speed thrill; tennis a showcase of skill and mental aptitude and rugby a mélange of physical strength and speed. Then we get to golf. Golf is a sport full of unwritten etiquette with point number one generally being: you must earn over £50,000 and own a pair of terrible trousers.

The cause of my disgruntlement comes from my attempts to play the sport. I confess I am pretty poor at all sports (other than ironically crazy golf, which should be entitled to its own channel on Sky Sports it's so amazing) however golf really did go one step beyond poor with me. Firstly, I had to get dressed up for the occasion. Out of the window go jeans and polo shirts without a collar and in come ludicrous trousers and very plain collared t-shirts. For some strange reason fashion has run away from golf like a gazelle runs away from a lion. This was not the only problem. I didn't have any golf shoes, I didn't have seven thousand clubs with a minute difference between each one, and I didn't have a lifetime supply of golf balls each with a life expectancy of five minutes. Enter stage left: my Dad. Unfortunately my Dad likes golf like a heroin addict likes heroin. He has everything from a strange ball retrieving contraption to a multitude of strange golf jumpers. Anyway we set off to the pitch and putt course to start me off nice and simple.

We arrived at the golf club where clearly they had banned any cars below the value of £30,000 and trundled off with enough equipment to last us a fortnight at the top of Everest. Even as we walked to the first tee I was puzzled as to why on earth we would need a towel when I certainly wasn't planning to go swimming. That was when something happened that was frankly ridiculous. As we passed (at a very safe and long distance) an old codger on the left who was lining up to hit the ball my Dad stopped me as though I was about to enter Chernobyl. We waited for him in deathly silence to perform some practice strokes before he hit the ball wildly to the left. It turns out that in golf you have to keep absolute silence whenever you are within a kilometre of someone taking a shot. If we'd have moved past him he probably wouldn't have even heard us and for crying out loud it's an amateur Sunday morning activity not the US Open.

Over the next nine painstaking holes I realised I could not hit a ball more than 50 yards, which was problematic when I had to hit the ball 100 yards on the first shot to have a realistic chance of par even on the pitch and putt. I then proceeded to walk here, there and everywhere searching for my ball whilst reflecting we probably should have taken the sun cream rather than the towel. At every step I was forced to analyse a selection of criteria to choose a suitable club, take ten practice swings and then make a complete fool of myself in the execution. Thankfully, my crazy golf skills helped me in the putting respect but the driving part of the game was particularly ropey.

By the seventh hole I'd had it. Stress levels had hit the heights as I was thrashed hole by hole. Tees had been snapped, balls had been lost and a joke that was cracked referring to handicaps and my ability at golf being handicapped was not appreciated. Upon my return to the car I certainly was not in the mood for a drink with Timothy Fairborne-Snob in the Clubhouse and was glad for a quick escape.

I have not since returned to golf. I do not ever intend to return to golf in fact. Instead I laugh politely at my family's golf anecdotes, which are tedious affairs that always involve a quite bad shot or a quite good shot with unexceptional consequences. Snore. Personally, I found golf slow, snobbish and like a dodgy curry it certainly "disagreed" with me.