Theakston’s Old Peculier (sic)

July Job Offer by Charles Wilkinson

I have read much Charles Wilkinson in the past, one of my favourite writers; in fact I first encountered him in THEAKER’S where they serve good beer with a polite smile. Or am I thinking of Theakston’s Old Peculier? Well, this one takes the reading head right off, as if the rest of my body were a tee. It is ostensibly a satire on a Golf Club and its type of members and their dislike of anything alien, even to the extent of frowning upon buttoned-down collars on woke pink shirts — a Golf Club on the same coast as the Allen Ashley monsters, but here they are versions of Hell’s Angels as created from the well-aged mulch in Wilkinson’s brain, paid for by mounds of loose change to the Club’s surly barman, a bar open to the public as part of local planning demands, and there is an old fogey called Vaunce, not Vance, who ends up [SPOILER] like a Chinese potentate of yore. I’d finish this review if I hadn’t got to go off and see a man about a dog. Whatever, with its headless massacre of meaning and message, this story is couched in a prose style to die for.
PS: Wisdom trickles down or up? — maybe what this story’s message is asking as a coda to Coverley?

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Context of above review: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/04/28/theakers-quarterly-fiction-70/#comment-24664

Above image: Clacton Crazy Golf 2012