As fun as it can be, golf is also a painful exercise when I am involved.

Painful for anybody who has to watch my unnatural swing and painful in the physical sense, when the erratic motions of trying to smack a small white ball around the countryside take their toll on my body.

A piercing, knife-like annoyance occurring between my shoulder blades reminds me of the recent game I had with my brother.

And I can only guess the extent of the psychological injuries inflicted on my playing partner for having to witness, over 18 arduous holes, the brutish biomechanics that left me in this aching heap.

It had been three years since – for humanitarian reasons – I retired the Brosnan Imperials to the dusty abyss beneath the stairs.

Their return was, for the most part, vastly enjoyable, except for the legacy whereby it is now difficult to move without crying.

If I want to turn my head, the whole upper half of my body has to come along for the journey.

The simple act of communicating a non-verbal “no” to my children, for example, means having to rotate my entire torso back and forward to facilitate a lateral head movement free from the sensation of having a Wiltshire Staysharp plunged into my back.

They have to learn that if, after golf, they see me gesticulating like an amateur mime artist pretending to be a washing machine, it means they can’t have a biscuit.

I have seen professionals. Firstly, a golf one, and when that made things worse, a sports-injury one.

Sensing he had a special project on his hands, the golf pro attempted to break down the basics of the swing into simple steps to make it easier for me to understand.

He used scenarios from everyday life to illustrate what he wanted me to do. First he had me “sitting on the edge of a stool”.

Then I had to balance like I was “diving into a pool”.

Finally I had to rotate my body like I was “starting a mower”.

It was the same technique you might employ when teaching a four-year-old to tie their shoelaces by making bunny ears.

The results were just as tangled.

It was in keeping with this theme that when I eventually consulted a deep-tissue massage expert, he discovered some “serious knots” that needed to be worked out.

For those who haven’t experienced it, having knots untied in your back is not as fun as it sounds.

I needed to conjure in my mind the cutest picture of bunny ears in order to get through the ordeal.

I survived, although the same can’t be said for the bench I was lying on. It may have been irreparably damaged by my strenuous finger clenching and fist thumping.

Oh, how those hurtful times have come sailing back – like the ball from a shanked four iron ricocheting off a gum tree and landing at your feet.

It was, however, far from all bad out there with my brother.

On the positive side, I lost only one ball over the entire four-hour journey at Headland, which to me is a victory akin to winning the US Masters.

Also – and I’m not making this up – I scored a birdie, which is even bigger still.

This is like winning the Masters and the seafood tray in the raffles at Montville’s Penefathing’s pub in the same weekend.

We’re still trying to work out how it happened, but for one brief moment the stool, the pool and the mower were all in the same backyard – and I managed to hit the ball close enough to the flag on a par three to sink it in one go.

There’s an adage in golf that Tony and I came up with a couple of days ago, that something amazing and something hilarious happens in every game.

The hilarious thing was when I got swooped by a magpie and nearly fell over.

The amazing thing, apart from what happened at the par three, is that my brother wants to play with me again.

I’d be delighted, because every now and then you make a good shot that stays with you forever, and when you hit 109 in an afternoon, there’s got to be at least one or two to take the pain away.