I enjoyed marching against Donald Trump – but wish I could have borrowed his golf buggy to get around

Thanks to the US president, I did the highest number of steps recorded on my iPhone in months

Ol’ fatty bum Trump recently tweeted that his “primary form of exercise is golf”. What he really means is that he likes hurtling around his own golf course on an electric golf buggy and occasionally jumping out to flail around with a nine iron.

You can imagine his kit can’t you? The monogrammed golf balls, the hand stitched Italian leather golf bags, the Swarovski crystal golf tees, in fact I’m surprised his golf clubs haven’t got solid gold stems.

OK, at this point I’ll admit that my golf knowledge is pretty patchy, the only boring thing my most excellent dad ever did was play golf and the only time I ever tuned out listening to him was when he talked about it.

I have a difficult relationship with golf, for many reasons, but to start with…

My dad’s local course was Royal Lytham. One summer he and my mum went on holiday and rented out our house to Aussie golfer Greg Norman (aka the Great White Shark), who was playing The Open in Lytham that year.

Some of the money raised by this enterprise went to pay off a big chunk of my sister’s first wedding, which was fine for her, but what about me?

At the time, I was a skint student and had to stay in my Manchester garret rather than come home for a few weeks of lolling around in the garden and playing locusts round my parent’s fridge and, well, I think I built up quite a lot of resentment over it.

But apart from that … there is something so Trump about a golf club and something so golf club about Trump. It’s the expensive non-inclusive membership, the archaic reluctance to accept women or take them vaguely seriously, that hideous old boy back slapping crap, the designated parking for The Captain, the personal tankard in the clubhouse, the bragging, all those petty rules and the Pringle sweaters.

Basically it’s the whole Alan Partridge-ness of the game that makes it so utterly Trump and to top it all, he cheats – of course he cheats. He wouldn’t know how to play the game without cheating.

He talks while other people are playing their shots, he moves his ball, he alters his score as he goes along, he claims to have won non-existent championships

Golf is the go-to sport for the unsporting man and by that I mean you can play it without being in the peak of physical fitness.

In my dad’s day, it was where retired blokes gathered to compare bypass ops. My dad insisted that at his club, the blokes with the quadruple bypasses, like him, got served at the bar before the guys that had only had triples, whilst the men with the double bypasses went right to the back of the queue.

The great thing about golf is that it stretches the legs, but involves no running. Imagine Trump running. He couldn’t, he’d go red and sweaty and get all out of puff and I know this, because it’s precisely what happens to me when I run and I’m not quite as fat as Trump.

So whilst I don’t run or golf, my primary form of exercise is rolling around a mat doing pilates, oh and marching.

Marching is great, especially in the West End. For starters you can meet your chosen marching team somewhere nice for lunch beforehand. On Friday for example, when I went marching with my “family members – ladies only” squad, we went for sushi first and then set off, full of raw fish down Regent Street, placards in hand (very good for toning up that flabby bit under the arms).

The great thing about marching, particularly in central London, is that should you see a nice top in a shop window that’s been reduced in the sale, you can march out of the march, march into the shop, buy the top and march back in to the march, before the march has passed Piccadilly.

Marching is very recommendable. For starters, unlike golf, there’s no dress code – we saw people dressed in anything from gold lame and latex to a great deal of linen and converse sneakers. But just like golf, there are the benefits of spending time outdoors, and the camaraderie, for me and my “rellies”, was a bit like Christmas but without all the expense and the wrapping paper.

And it was nice to be surrounded by like-minded people – you know folk, who don’t want to see babies in cages, people who object to dangerous attitudes towards women, gays and brown people, that kind of stuff.

So thanks to Trump, I had a lovely day out and did the highest number of steps recorded on my iPhone in months – cheers mate.

However, I was completely pooped by the end of it and my feet were like mince. In fact, don’t tell anyone but I’ve got a horrible feeling the next time I go marching, I might be tempted to cheat like Trump and do it from the comfort of a golf buggy.