I know where I wish to visit next and which golf course I’d like to play.  Yes, it’s time to think of hitting the M6 and going north again to Scotland, this time to the Kingdom of Fife and Dumbarnie Links.

Dumbarnie Links, a handful of miles from St Andrews, near Leven, has been open for a whole 14 months so must surely qualify as the UK’s newest links course.  It looks like it’s been there for years and last week it played host to the Trust Golf Women’s Scottish Open. The television pictures really did paint a thousand words and it was certainly to the liking of 34-year old American Ryann O’Toole, who won for the first time in her professional career.  A co-sanctioned Ladies’ European Tour (LET) and Ladies’ Professional Golf Association (LPGA) event, it was O’Toole’s 228th start as an LPGA Tour player but the first time she had led after 54 holes and only the second time time she’d played in the final group in the final round.

We get accustomed to seeing a smiling face and tears of joy on a Sunday at the end of a tournament but very nearly all of these players have an interesting backstory.  Ryann’s first year on tour was 2011 when she was plucked from relative obscurity by Rosie Jones, the US Solheim Cup team captain, who awarded her one of her captain’s picks.  Even the Americans didn’t know this rookie.  It looked like they’d found a potential regular in the side when she played in four out of the five matches, recording two wins and two halves.  Her half in the singles cut deep however.  When bad weather led to a suspension of play the American was two up and two to go on Europe’s Caroline Hedwall.  When play resumed Europe won the closing two holes and halved that match, ultimately winning the trophy by the slenderest of margins.  It was a long time before we heard of Ryann O’Toole again.

The intervening years saw her lose her card, fight back and change coaches and it was when she started to work with the uber-talented Jorge Parada in 2014 that she felt she could turn things around.  Her final round of 64 on Sunday was as close to flawless as it is possible to be and despite admitting she’d been very nervous on the Saturday evening there was no trace of that the next day.  She even stopped to pat a spectating dog on her way to the 72nd tee.

A closing par and a cosy three-shot victory was achieved and then followed a winner’s speech as eloquent as her golf had been elegant.  The last decade, the hours spent practising, the grind, the constant travel were all worth it, she said, “for this moment”.

The instant she finished she FaceTimed her Mum, who had been nervously watching at home back in California.  I’m not sure Mother O’Toole was awfully impressed with a Scottish links, declaring that Ryann looked like she’d “been playing on the moon!”  Just wait, Mum, until you see Carnoustie!

Ah, Carnoustie – often considered the most ferocious, the most unforgiving of all major championship venues.  This week it’s the test that faces the women in the AIG Women’s Open, the last of the five majors in the annual female golf calendar.  Someone will have gone to bed two nights ago little realising they are about to follow in the footsteps of the greats.

Fair to say, it’s a pretty exclusive club, including Ben Hogan, who won in 1953, his only appearance in the Open, Gary Player who won in 1968 and in 1975 it was Tom Watson winning on his Open debut, beating Jack Newton in the 18-hole play-off. Almost a quarter of a century later, in 1999, Paul Lawrie realised every little Scottish boy’s dream, winning the greatest prize of all on home turf.  Padraig Harrington opened the floodgates to Irish major championship success with his extra holes win over Sergio Garcia in 2007 and in 2011 it was the incomparable Yani Tseng who stormed to victory, successfully defending her Women’s Open title procured the previous year at Royal Birkdale.  Finally, 2018 saw Francesco Molinari hold off Tiger Woods, amongst others, to etch his name on the oldest trophy in the world, the first Italian to do so.

Carnoustie is not for the faint-hearted and it is more than fitting that the best women players in the world get to tee it up at one of the most exacting venues.  It gives credibility to the women’s game and it gives a fitting stage to these athletes.  Cool, drizzly weather with a bit of a breeze is the forecast – foreign conditions indeed for many of the LPGA players accustomed to following the sun.

And for anxious Mums watching on from California it might just look exactly like the players are on the moon.

It’s a very weary blogger who sits before her keyboard, aware that there’s unlikely to be enough golf in this piece to satisfy the sister.  Golf usually requires a bit of research and because I was playing in a club match I’ve only caught a few glimpses of the first day of the AIG Women’s Open (even had to check the title after years of inserting a British somewhere along the line) at what looked like quite a benign Carnoustie, if chilly, judging from the bobble hats and waterproofs on show.

At one Open there, there was a wonderful aerial photo of the last two or three holes, three of the toughest finishing holes you could ever wish to play with anything more than a few quid or some beers on the line.  I thought, “Great, I’ll study this pic and work out how to play those holes”, factoring in my limitations of course.  I looked and looked and looked – and still had no clue how any vaguely normal being could negotiate them with any certainty.  I think Justin Rose birdied the last, a brutal par 4 as many will attest (pas de noms, pas de drill de pack), all four days the year Francesco Molinari won.

Ben Hogan travelled to Scotland early and spent two weeks absorbing every aspect of the course prior to his comprehensive Open victory in 1953.  He finished four shots ahead of his fellow American Frank Stranahan, an amateur, Dai Rees, Peter Thomson and Antonio Cerda (blimey, some research!) – a Welshman, an Aussie and an Argentine who were no joke when it came to golf.

Harold Riley, the artist who is one of Salford’s most famous sons, then 18, walked every step of the way with Hogan (I think), sketching, awestruck and recording his admiration for posterity.

From the sublime to the faintly ridiculous.  The main reason I’m cream-crackered is that I trekked down to north London (from Lichfield) on Sunday to watch Spurs play Manchester City in the first league match of the season.  They increased the seating capacity at the swanky (see my pic at the top of this piece), state-of-the-art (but far from glitch-free) Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (think that’s the official designation, it’s certainly no longer White Hart Lane), so I bought myself a season ticket.  It was now or never and there are some advantages to being an old codger, such as getting seats half price.

I mulled over the travel options, decided against risking Sunday trains and opted to drive….I chose the M6, M1 (is there a reason why the exclamation mark is above the 1!!!?)  It was a route I used to travel regularly but that was decades ago and nowadays I go to great lengths to avoid the M1.  To begin with, all went well, then there was a delay at junction 11a where there’d been some sort of prang and we crawled along for a bit because of the lane closure.  I don’t know how serious the accident was but on reflection missing a football match would not rank as the worst thing to happen on a Sunday.

By this time, I’m wondering if I’ll make the 1630 kick-off and stop at something called the London Gateway to stretch out my aching bones, go to the loo and ponder the rest of my route.  Mostly I like to do it the old-fashioned way, with a map, only using the phone (my car is too aged and basic – it has wheels and an engine – to have a built-in sat-nav).  Mo once threatened to buy me some sort of directional gizmo for Christmas but I put her off, insisting that was the equivalent of buying me an iron and an ironing board.

Anyway, I decided against the M25 and renewed my acquaintance with the North Circular.  The last time I was on it, heading home from a game at Royal Mid-Surrey, I exulted in the thought that I’d be dead before I had to use it again.  Bits of it ran ok but there was a lot of stop start and I eventually bailed out down to Wood Green (are you getting the impression that this was not the most meticulously planned excursion?)  By the station I saw a load of people in Spurs shirts making their way up the hill so I took a left, another left and another left and found a parking space.  The phone was called upon and lo and behold I was about 150 yards from White Hart Lane.  Miracle of miracles.

Off I trek and am starting to worry that I’ve got my 50-50 chance wrong and turned right when I should have turned left (by Dai’s reckoning I got 90 per cent of my 50-50s wrong), when I spot two people getting out of a car, one in a Spurs shirt.  “Are you going to the match?” sez I, feeling suitably pathetic.  “Yes,” they say.  “Where is it,”  I say, feeling even more pathetic.

They point in the direction I was heading (phew!) and say that it’s quite a long way.  “Fifteen minutes?”  (hoping they’re not great walkers).  “More like thirty.”  And off they stride, having assured me that it was straight all the way.  I thought of John Jacobs when I realised that at least getting back to the car was just like the golf swing:  two turns and a swish.

I got there with half an hour to spare but several queues (nothing seamless about electronic ticketing in my seat’s neck of the woods) and a lot of swearing (not me, there were plenty of others willing to do that and the man next to me had two children with him) later, I found my seat, several minutes after kick-off.  City were battering our goal but we survived somehow and went on to win 1-0.  “Fantastic,” messaged a friend in Ireland, “worth the price of the full season ticket.”

And she was right.

Going home I took the A10, A14, M6 – it rained a lot of the way – and staggered in the door, exhausted but exhilarated at 2300.

Still, alternative travel arrangements are on the agenda and it turns out the young man in the farm shop has a brother who is a Spurs season ticket holder and goes to every home game…..