Christmas is coming but the golf is not

The last dispatch in this series closed with the words: "It's coming. I can feel it." Well, as one colleague immediately remarked with an uncomfortably accurate cynicism, so is Christmas.

I don't like to admit it, but I am close to resigning myself to the knowledge that I'm going to be disentangling the tree's fairy lights long before I see the magical figure 10 appear at the top of my scorecard.

No, I'm not giving up, but I am going through a black patch, a nasty mental funk. For I can stand here, hand on heart, and vow that I am unquestionably playing the best golf of my life, striking the ball with a balance and authority I never possessed; and yet I am utterly incapable of compiling a score. The breakthrough I'm waiting for is a mental one; Leonard Owens can teach me many things, but I've come to realise that only I can teach myself to compete. If I can, there's still hope.

I know, I know, I'm being too hard on myself, setting impossibly high standards, cracking under self-imposed pressure. But, my God, we're more than half-way through this exercise of getting my handicap down to something respectable, and I have yet to break standard scratch off 20. If I had been handing in my cards from all competitions to the bosses at Hollystown, I'd probably be off 24 by now.

It is absolutely infuriating. I can't help but think that if someone with even a modicum of natural talent had put in the sort of work I have, then he or she really would be playing to 10, if not better. I read this week that Paul McGinley was off scratch within a year of taking up the game. John Kelly, the professional at The Ward, told me much the same thing.

This is being written on Saturday, and if you think this is downbeat, it's just as well I didn't write last Thursday, my nadir. At that stage I hadn't, for various reasons, been out to Royal Dublin to see Leonard for a couple of weeks, and in the meantime had been hitting fade after fade and - off the tee-box - slice after slice.

On Wednesday I had gone out to Bull Island to hit a few irons. It's not an ideal location, but it's handy. I chose a six-iron, and, after two reasonably struck (slight) fades, realised that it wasn't enough club to clear the dead ground and that I'd be hard pressed to find any of these balls in the high grass. But I was just so disgusted with everything that I nearly enjoyed bashing them into oblivion. I was striking them really well. I found 20 of the 30 balls.

So on Thursday I went to Leonard. I wanted him to work on my driving, but we started with seven-irons. Now, from day one, Leonard has been trying to get me to hook the ball, just so that exaggerated action would help to ease me into developing a natural draw, and thus add a bit of distance to my game. But I could never really get it.

Maybe Thursday he found the answer. I can't recall the sequence of events, but at one stage he took hold of the club, asked me to start the backswing, and thus discovered how stiff my wrists and arms were. There it was: no hand-action in the swing, no snap of the wrists. Thus a tendency to leave the face open for a push or fade, and, because of the missing club-head speed, no real distance.

So Joe, keep your left knee steady (remember I'm a lefty) but loosen up the upper body and get those hands moving. We tried some three-quarter seven-irons and, sure enough, I hit a few lively draws. I felt a whole lot better.

Then I went to the practice green and spent 40 minutes hitting the same, two-and-a-half-foot putt. It paid immediate dividends the next day.

Friday, out to Hollystown with a colleague and an effort to loosen up and snap through the ball. Well, the front nine was the same old story: trouble off the tee into the (arguably unfair) rough on the left. You can't score if you can barely see the ball when you're just two feet off the fairway.

But the back nine started par, double bogey, par, par, and my play of the 12th was typical of where my game stands: three-wood (with a bit more snap), just into the punishing left rough, a sweet, lazy seven-iron recovery back onto the fairway, a nine-iron stitched to the flag (or so we thought - when I got up there it was about 12 feet short) and a single putt for par. That was intelligent and skilful golf. I can do this thing, you know.

And now I face my biggest hurdle: next week I will stand on the first tee for my first pro-am. How I handle that will determine my future as a golfer.