It’s a nice feeling to be enjoying my 25th birthday this week looking back on a season that couldn’t have finished any better.
To win the end-of-year Players’ Championship for a second time would have been good enough, but to add the European equivalent the week after has made a pretty good season a very good one.
The only disappointment was missing out on a medal in the Worlds, but our strong finish has made up for that.
The Worlds and the Olympics are the championships that get the most media attention over here by a mile, but for curlers themselves, the Players’ is looked upon as the hardest to win.
The 12 best teams in the world compete, and you can’t say that about any other competition.
If you knock a Canadian team out of the Worlds or Olympics there isn’t another one to beat in the next round, as there was in Toronto.
We beat Rachel Homan and Jennifer Jones in that one, and then in St Gallen at the European Masters last week we won that competition by defeating the reigning European and World champions.
We won’t just brush aside the reasons that we didn’t have a great Worlds, but for the first year of a new team we have to be really happy with where we are.
If we can do this well in year one of a four-year cycle, we’re really excited about what is still to come.
* We think we’re pretty competitive as a team, but the dads who are at the World Seniors just now will take it to another level.
They’re going well and will hopefully fight it out for the title at the weekend but, with a Muirhead and Mike and Dave Hay in their side, I don’t think there will be many brushes coming home in one piece!
* With the good weather we’re having I’m going to have to get the golf clubs out soon.
I’ve been invited to play in the pro-am at the BMW PGA again in a couple of weeks.
I’m really looking forward to it, and dad’s caddying for me this year, which will be fun.
My handicap certificate from Pitlochry has just come through. It’s 2.6 so if I’m going to get anywhere near that at Wentworth I’ll have to start practicing asap!
* I read that Gullane have given some more details about the course lay-out for the Scottish Open.
I played there a few years ago in the Scottish Schools and I really enjoyed it, but I’m not sure the mixture of No.1 and No.2 will capture the public’s imagination.
Because there’s no recent history of championship or TV golf there, it will be hard to identify with the one-off course.
The pros will get the preparation they want for The Open the week after, but it might not be a big hit with armchair viewers.