Terry Bishop reporting

The day finally arrived with the winner of the JCB Raffle round of golf, Gordon Hiscock inviting Andy Platt and Alex Fogwill

We started out 07-00 with a 3.5-hour journey ahead of us which mainly went without too many traffic hold ups, arriving at JCB @11-00 for a coffee and some biscuits

Once badged up with VIP visitor passes, we managed to hook on the back of and mingle into an agricultural dealer day of some 200 delegates and went into the theatre for a 15 min JCB presentation

Having now had the full yellow injection as we refer to it, we went into the story of JCB where yours truly ran through a whistle stop tour dodging in between the other visitors then off up the hill to the JCB golf course

Clubs were then collected from us in the car park and sent to the driving range for cleaning, after a bacon bap and a coffee we got ready and went to the range to be met by our 4 caddie for the day and to knock a few balls from a neatly arranged pyramid

Then off down to the first tee for the standard photo, over coffee 3 of us had stupidly decided to put a card in thereby increasing the pressure to play well on what is already a very difficult course, this turned out to be a bad move in terms of our handicaps going up but at least we recorded the day within our England golf app at the JCB course

I won’t go into the scores or mistakes as I would be here until midnight, I am sure most of you will be taking great delight in looking on England golf and taking the mick

The weather stayed kind apart from being quite windy and each hole had some magical golf from all of us but never all of us on one hole, and nobody being very consistent which I suppose consistency is the name of the game if you want to be good at the game

There appeared to be a four ball about an hour in front of us and another about an hour behind, so we basically had the course to ourselves

I have created a what’s app group called JCB 17^th which consists of Tom Roberton, Rod Bird, ken Robinson and me. We were the first group of players to experience the JCB course from kingsdown some 3-4 years ago and we had 3 x Pars and 1 x Bogey in a magical moment. Sadly, we didn’t manage to break or even match that record, indeed in all the rounds I have hosted since no group has ever been close 

We retired to the clubhouse and had some fabulous food and soaked in the atmosphere of a wonderful course and venue

I do have a plan for something next year which I will discuss in more detail with Andy Platt for his captain’s year, fingers crossed I am still doing my same role

Good day, good company, good food, and just wish I could have signed off with great Golf but there is always next time