The Art of the Mulligan

Apart from becoming president, George Bush and Bill Clinton, as each would be eager to emphasise, don't have a lot in common. They do, though, have one shared weakness. They cannot resist the mulligan. A mulligan, for those who do not follow golf, is a dispensation that allows a player who has botched a shot to have a second go, as Bush did the other day after interrupting a holiday game to comment on events in Israel and then mis-hitting his shot. George Bush Sr, too, had a weakness for mulligans, though his mother - who came from the Walker family, which instituted the Walker Cup - was famous for her stern rejection of such practices. The younger George, it is claimed, is nowhere near as bad in this context as Clinton, who helped himself to mulligans all over the course. Or so Republicans like to assert. They want people to think it epitomises his presidency.

You can see why the concept appeals to politicians. How often golfing presidents - which seems to be most of them - must have wished that this humble device could be used to get them out of some political fix. Al Gore, who is not a golfer, seems to be a mulligan fan: he's been moaning about how, if allowed a replay, he'd have handled his doomed campaign altogether differently.

George Bush Sr, having uttered the fatal words about watching his lips, no new taxes, could with the help of a mulligan have called them back and buried them. Bill Clinton, having lied that he'd never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky, could have asked for a mulligan and, second time round, told the people the straight, unfortunate truth. Indeed, he may even have dreamed of a sort of super-mulligan where instead of disastrously trysting with Monica in the Oval Office he'd have had her swiftly dispatched to a four-year semiotics course at the University of Otago.

There are, of course, serious areas of life where the principle already applies. One is marriage. The ancient procedures for the solemnisation of matrimony ought really to be reworded. "I, X", they might be altered to say, "take thee, Y, to be my wedded husband/ wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death do us part, except if it doesn't work out, in which case I'll go for a mulligan."

And then there are those who make a sudden spectacular amendment of life. The repentant sinner. The stripper who becomes a nun; or the nun, perhaps, who becomes a stripper. A story about a guy from a dry cleaners' in Woking who becomes a pop star has a certain romance, but a story about a one-time star who now runs a dry cleaners' in Woking has an even more potent allure. Not long ago the press discovered a brilliant Oxford academic who had thrown it all up to become a plumber: a very sensible step, you might think, if you've recently sought a plumber who won't charge you the cost of your house to deal with some damp emergency. But it is a step that makes people think: suppose I'd abandoned my whole way of life for another? Or even: suppose I yet might.

As they grow older, people have cause to reflect on what their lives might have been had they handled things differently, had they had the chance of a replay. There's a book by George Gissing called The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft that is usually assigned to a territory somewhere between novel and autobiography. In fact it's a kind of would-be mulligan: it describes a life that might have been Gissing's but for the terrible botches he made, most of all in his dealings with women - though even then, this alternative life would have required the legacy that alone allows Ryecroft to live as he likes, where he chooses.

The book was published in the year of the author's death and is full of a sense of his impending end. In a preface, Gissing writes of the death of Ryecoft: "It had always been his wish to die suddenly; he dreaded the thought of illness. On a summer evening, after a long walk in very hot weather, he lay down upon the sofa in his study, and there - as his calm face declared - passed from slumber into the great silence." Here too, Gissing was to be disappointed. His own death, at 46, was terrible.

I once read an account by a bestselling novelist of her early days as a nurse. What she'd found hardest to bear was the sense she found in some of the dying that they'd lived all their lives as if taking part in a dress rehearsal; now they discovered, too late, it had been the real thing. They longed, I think she was saying, for some kind of mulligan that would let them start again and get it right second time round. I meant to cut the piece out and file it, but characteristically forgot. If only some form of mulligan could recover it for me now.