The ball bashing I slogged away at over the winter has not so far brought the enormous improvement in my game that I had hoped for, but I am slightly encouraged. Two shots in particular in yesterday's round gave me heart though I don't think that either was the result of winter work.

I sank an extremely long putt, at least as long as any fish that ever got away and had a brilliant wedge shot out of a greenside bunker to within six inches of the hole. That was in the annual Chateau de Poinsouze competition where their merry campers, mostly Dutch, join us for golf and we go off to the campsite (where there actually is a chateau) for an excellent dinner afterwards. They serve some jolly nice wine with it but one of the penalties of country living is that you can't risk more than a glass for fear of repercussions on the road home.

One of the penalties of having too much to do in my last week in Edinburgh was that I didn't manage to squeeze in seeing Senna. It looked super from the trailer and all the press reports I had read raved about it. My friends here didn't seem aware of it and I'm not surprised. It came out in France in late May but even had I been here I'd have had to travel to see it because it was only screened in four cinemas.

Could that conceivably have been a post mortem incidence of the old rivalry with Alain Prost?