You don’t need to have a daft name to play golf but it helps. Even a glance at the leaderboard at this weekend’s British Open throws up some odd names: Boo Weekly sounds like a character from To Kill a Mockingbird. Then there’s Stewart Cink who is still plugging away. Over the years, who could forget Corey “crazy” Pavin who was always in the mix. Or the tasty Duffy Waldorf? Then there was Tom Kite, the only Mr.Kite I've heard of apart from the one in that song which was probably inspired by a dose of Lucy in the Sky? The Beatles references didn’t end there. We also had Craig Stadler – he was the “Walrus”. Fred Funk was another with a musical connection.

I hope the engraver at Carnoustie doesn’t make a mess of it like this one did.

My first clear memories of a golf tournament come from Troon 1982, when Bobby Clampett, the young American with curly blond hair and plus fours, blew a huge lead to let Tom Watson win yet another Open title. I was on summer holidays at my grandparents in Inverness. They had a few clubs in their garden shed and my brother and I cracked a few shots around. It was a council house, so the garden was small but it was a lot grassier than the one we had at home. My grandad, forever keen to encourage our interest in sport, used a trowel to cut a couple of deep holes in the grass and placed small flower pots in them, enabling us to retrieve the ball without getting our hands too dirty.

I've followed golf ever since. The British Open in particular inspires me to look a few clubs out. Golf is often seen as an elitist sport. In many ways it is. In some countries, particularly the US, it appears to be a sport for the wealthy and conservative upper middle-classes and predominately for white people - in spite of the Tiger. I remember one tournament, I think in Scotland, where a few of the players stopped to be introduced to the US president and I thought to myself, why the hell am I watching this reactionary rubbish?

But there are few, if any, countries in the world where it is more accessible than Scotland. Granted there are elitist clubs like the St. Andrews Royal and Ancient or Muirfield, but Scots have plenty of local municipal courses to choose from.

In any case, I find it absorbing viewing. During the Open, I can lose track of time and almost everything else, as if I am engrossed in the creation of a poem.

José Saramago once wrote a novel in which the Iberian Peninsula disconnects from the rest of Europe and floats out to sea. Its English title is the Stone Raft. This week the Portuguese Nobel prize winner was in the headlines again with another Iberian concept: he has predicted that one day Portugal will merge with Spain into a new country known, in all probability, as Iberia.

In an interview with the Diário de Noticias, Saramago said that on the whole the Portuguese would accept this if it was explained to them properly: “With ten million inhabitants, Portugal would gain a lot in terms of development and it would not mean the end of the country, it would continue in another way. It would not mean we stop speaking, thinking or feeling Portuguese, (...) and we would not be governed by Spaniards, there would be representatives from the parties of both countries in a single parliament with all of Iberia’s political forces”.

Surprised? I only recently became aware that there is a degree of support there for such a scenario in Portugal. I was listening to an interview with Paul Preston, the English historian and expert on Spain. He pointed out that it is odd that Catalonia appears to be drifting away from Spain at the same time as Portugal wants to grow closer to it.

So what do Spaniards think of the idea? El País carried out a survey to gauge public opinion. Six percent of Spaniards don’t really mind but object to being called Iberians, nineteen percent think the Portuguese find it difficult to be independent and are doing okay as they are, while a whopping 75% though it was a great idea because Spain would have ten million more inhabitants and a better chance of winning the World Cup.

This article also appears in my new blog about life in the north west corner of Spain: http://galidonia.blogspot.com/

Had an outgoing weekend by my standards. On Friday, I went to see a local band called Quaken play a set of Neil Young covers. A few of my old favourites were performed: Heart of Gold, Like a Hurricane, My My, Hey Hey. I'm not that old. I retrospectively listened to most of Young's back catalogue myself. But what struck me as the set progressed was that here was an audience with many 20-somethings who had grown up with another era of Neil Young stuff that I didn't recognise. I realised, quite disturbingly, that the last Young albums I paid any attention to were at least fifteen years old - Harvest Moon (1992) and its predecessor Ragged Glory (1990). I don't know what of the more recent stuff is worth a listen. The impression I get is that Neil Young is unusual in the sense he appears to get louder and heavier with age. I saw that film Year of the Horse a couple of years ago and while the director Jim Jarmusch is one of my favourites, the music didn't particularly inspire me.

On Saturday, I changed my tune and went to visit a bagpipes factory outside A Coruña. More on that somewhere else at a later date.