Now that The Masters is underway, you'll no doubt be looking for an activity to occupy the spare minutes between tournament coverage, ESPN highlights, and late-night previews of tomorrow's action. I recommend P.G. Wodehouse's golf stories, which capture both the allure and maddening nature of the sport.

Most tales feature the Oldest Member, a clubhouse curmudgeon whose eyes showed "that peace beyond understanding, which comes at its maximum only to the man who has given up golf." Ensconced in a comfortable chair and holding a drink, he holds forth on the theme of love and golf, or the love of golf. Among his wise words:

"Golf, like measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious."

"The ideal golfer never loses his temper. When I played, I never lost my temper. Sometimes, it is true, I may, after missing a shot, have broken my club across my knees; but I did it in a calm and judicial spirit, because the club was obviously no good and I was going to get another one anyway."

"Few things draw two men together more surely than a mutual inability to master golf, coupled with an intense and ever-increasing love for the game."

"In the days of King Arthur nobody thought the worse of a young knight if he suspended all his social and business engagements in favour of a search for the Holy Grail. In the Middle Ages a man could devote his whole life to the Crusades, and the public fawned upon him. Why, then, blame the man of today for a zealous attention to the modern equivalent, the Quest of Scratch!"