My golfing friend let me know that he was planning to play at the Pitch & Putt par 3 course today, with another friend of ours, and asked if I wanted to join in. I didn’t have any other plans for the day so I decided to accept.
The plan was to meet at 1:30, so I decided to go via my favourite pie shop and get lunch on the way. I left with plenty of time, fully expecting to have lunch and get to the golf course early so I could practice some putting before we started. But as I approached the pie shop, the traffic got really heavy and I heard on the radio that there was a serious accident a few suburbs ahead, which had backed traffic up all the way to where I was.
I stopped and got pies: a Singapore curry beef pie and a chicken, avocado, and brie pie. The first I got really because I decided to try something that I normally wouldn’t get. I don’t know if I’d had the Singapore curry before, but I probably won’t get it again (unless I forget some time in the future and decide I want to try something I don’t normally get again). The chicken pie was just what I wanted though, so that was fine.
Back on the road, the traffic continued to be slow, and I arrived at the golf course ten minutes late. But that was okay, and we started playing straight away. Our friend, the new player, claimed not to have played golf much and to be very bad. Indeed, his hitting off the tee was not very skilful, usually hitting the ball low along the grass instead of properly flighted into the air… but somehow he managed to whack the ball hard enough to reach close to the green most of the time. And his putting was pretty good (he said he’s played a lot of mini golf). He ended up beating my total by 4 strokes, scoring 2 better than even my best score on this course! It was clearly a hustle of some sort, spoiled only by the fact that we didn’t agree to play for money beforehand.
Before golf this morning, my wife and I took Scully on a long walk. We passed our favourite bakery and I got a loaf of potato and rosemary bread, and a challah.
Challah is very rare here in Sydney – we don’t have much of a Jewish population. I’ve never seen it for sale anywhere else that I can recall. I also had no idea how to pronounce it, again because we have virtually zero exposure to Hebrew speakers in Sydney. I guessed it might have a similar guttural “ch” sound like “chutzpah” but wasn’t really sure. So I looked it up, and yes, it looks like it does. The problem is I don’t know if the bakery staff know how to pronounce it either! It’s weird asking for something when you’re not sure if either yourself or the person you’re asking knows how to pronounce it!
New content today:
As a Jewish Israeli, I can confirm that it’s pronounced with the same guttural “ch” as “chutzpah”.
I got “corrected” when buying Davidstow cheddar at a local supermarket deli counter. The woman at the counter had obviously never been to the town (which admittedly is about 500 miles away) as she got it totally wrong – the town has a much shorter ‘a’ sound than the name David