So the government has given the green light for a golf course to be built at Ix-Xaghra l-Hamra and the tree huggers and the Ramblers' Association are up in arms because a "virgin area" consisting of garigue is going to be turned into a golf course.

I've never been one to ramble and I'd rather hug something soft that hugs me back than hug a tree, so I shall not even venture to express an opinion upon whether or not it is worth forfeiting the said garigue in order to bring over an additional 30,000 high spending tourists per annum.

I asked an old friend who is a keen golfer to explain to me the basics of golf so that I could at least understand why golfers would be induced to come to Malta when there are hundreds of more exotic locations that offer better facilities.

Golf is a game in which players hit a small, hard ball, with specially designed clubs over an outdoor course, which is called links. Now links is what practitioners in food preparation call the things that they stuff sausage meat into, so in order to avoid confusion, for the scope of this exercise we'll call links a golf course.

The object of the game is to deposit the ball in a cup, or hole, using as few strokes as possible. Winston Churchill described playing golf like chasing a quinine pill around a cow pasture but that was sour grapes because he never managed to get the hang of it. The standard course is divided into 18 holes, each consisting of a tee from which the ball is initially driven along the fairway, which is bounded by tall grass (the rough) and containing natural or artificial obstacles (hazards), such as water and sand traps and the green which is a smooth surface on which the cup is located.

Are you still with me?

The ball is driven by a set of 14 clubs, which traditionally includes three or four woods, eight to 10 irons, one or two wedges and a putter. Don't ask me what is the difference between a wood, an iron or a putter because at this particular point, when my friend was explaining it to me, my eyes glazed over and I started thinking of Anna Falchi. Normally people lug the bag with the clubs all over the course themselves; however there are people who are employed purposely to do this and also to give advice to golfers. For some odd reason, this person is always called Caddy or Caddie even if his name is Jesmar or Clint.

Okay. Let's get back to the game. A game of golf normally takes about two hours to play unless you have a handicap in which case it takes longer because somebody has to push your wheelchair. That was gross.

Keeping score is complicated until you get the hang of it. Par is the number of strokes a good player should (magic word) need to play a hole. This is derived by taking the number of strokes it should (magic word again) take to get to the green, plus two putts. A birdie is a score of one under par on a given hole. A tweety bird is a birdie that keeps seeing a puddy tat. A bogie is a score of one over par on a given hole. A double bogie is Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. An eagle is a score of two under par and an albatross is a score of two on a par five. A hole in one, which apparently is every golfer's dream, is when you get the ball into the hole with one stroke. Getting the ball into the hole is called holing out. Easy hah?

Oh I nearly forgot. If your ball is about to hit another player you shout "Fore" at the top of your voice. This, according to TV commercials, is where Halls Mentholyptus comes in handy. I still don't understand why fore comes after play. In another very popular sport, play comes after fore, which comes before... aaah forget it.

Anyway, according to my friend, the real fun is the après golf, where you meet other golfers at the bar and compare lies and strokes over a beer.

And 30,000 people per annum are going to come to Malta and its potholed roads for this when they can go to Hammamet in Tunisia where one of the 10 golf courses available is designed not around garigue but around six lakes, and 430 acres of olive groves and forest. I wonder what the Tunisian tree huggers and ramblers had to say about this!