There was a time when entertainment did not need charging, updating, downloading or connecting to the Wi-Fi.
It needed a pocket full of change, a bit of sea air, a cousin who was only half-interested, and a crazy golf course with just enough windmills, ramps, tunnels and ridiculous obstacles to make a ten-year-old believe he was entering some kind of sporting destiny.
For me, that place was Arnold Palmer’s crazy golf course on the seafront near Tynemouth.
Shoot-Out at Arnie’s Corral, the second poem in Spanish City Slickers, returns to those long 1970s summer holidays when six weeks felt endless, fifty pence felt like a fortune, and childhood had a way of turning ordinary places into entire worlds.
I would be staying at me Auntie’s in Tynemouth, sent there for a few weeks while my mam and dad worked through the summer. It was a familiar rhythm: suitcase thumping down the stairs, instructions shouted from the hallway, and the promise of sea air, freedom and mild mischief somewhere beyond the front door.
My cousin was five years older than me, which meant he existed on an entirely different plane of coolness. To a ten-year-old, five years is not just an age gap; it is a civilisation. He knew things. He had opinions. He could be bored professionally.
So when he marched me past Longsands towards Arnold Palmer’s crazy golf, I assumed I was being introduced to something significant.
And I was.
He played once, naturally, with all the grim seriousness of someone determined to win and then lose interest immediately. By about hole four, the shine had gone for him. By hole six, he was mentally elsewhere.
But for me, the course had opened like a map.
There were humps and bends, ramps and rockets, windmills and tunnels, a loop-the-loop that seemed to have been designed by someone with a personal grudge against small boys. Every hole was a challenge. Every obstacle was a villain. Every putt was a possible triumph or a public disgrace.
This was not crazy golf.
This was frontier justice with a putter.
That is the spirit of Shoot-Out at Arnie’s Corral. It is a poem about a boy taking something gloriously trivial far too seriously — which, when you think about it, is one of the great gifts of childhood. Children understand intensity. They know how to bring their whole heart to small things. A plastic ball, a battered putter and a concrete lane can become the Masters, the Wild West and the last stand at the Alamo, all before teatime.
The poem is full of that exaggerated seriousness. The putter becomes a knight’s blade. The loop-the-loop becomes a dragon’s grin. The wind becomes an active opponent, hoying the ball back at your feet just when you thought you had mastered the geometry of the thing.
And that, oddly enough, is where the poem finds its little bit of wisdom.
Because crazy golf teaches you things.
Hit the ball too hard and it flies off sideways like it has urgent business elsewhere. Tap it too gently and it gives up halfway up the hill. Aim perfectly and the sea wind intervenes, because the North East coast has never respected human ambition.
So you learn patience. You learn touch. You learn that sometimes a gentle tap achieves what brute force cannot. You learn that hope has angles.
Of course, sometimes you score a miraculous two and walk away as if you have just won a major championship.
Other times, you take thirteen shots and blame a gull.
That is also a useful life lesson.
Like much of Spanish City Slickers, this poem is not just about the place itself. It is about the way places become stored inside us. Arnold Palmer’s crazy golf course no longer stands there in the same way. The seafront has changed. Childhood has moved on, as it insists on doing.
But memory keeps its own scorecard.
I can still see the course in a slant of light: the bright greens, the concrete edges, the smell of salt, the sound of gulls, the ball rolling with absolute disregard for my plans. I can still see a boy standing over a final putt, convinced that one clean shot might win him a free game, a private victory, and perhaps immortality.
That is the strange power of childhood places.
They were often ordinary at the time. A pool. A fairground. An arcade. A shellfish stall. A crazy golf course by the sea.
But looking back, they become landmarks in the geography of who we were.
Shoot-Out at Arnie’s Corral is my tribute to one of those places — and to the boy who kept going back, daft as could be, certain that next time he would beat the course, the wind, the gulls and Arnie himself.
He never quite did.
But he learned to keep putting.
Stephen Watson is the co-founder of Shades4Seasons and manages the day to day operations of the store. As a professional copywriter Stephen manages the store's social media marketing and content creation. Stephen has published long-form articles and blogs extensively on LinkedIn on topics ranging from technology to self-improvement and commercial matters. He is also a published author with his collections of poetry "The Milling Street Tales" and "Spanish City Slickers". You can find out more about Shades4Seasons founders here.
