The golfing week started off in a very entertaining fashion.

I was looking forward to the opening tournament of the season on the Ladies’ European tour and with the PIF Saudi Ladies’ International being hosted at Riyadh Golf Club that meant a Wednesday start and a Saturday finish.

One of the pre-tournament press conferences featured Solheim Cup teammates Charley Hull and newly married Carlota Ciganda of Spain.  There’s not much seems to phase Charley, on or off the course but Carlota’s admission that she had just gone 42 days without touching a club or playing golf was enough to leave the Englishwoman open-mouthed in disbelief.  Admittedly the Spaniard’s wedding fell in the middle of that time frame.

“Did you miss it?” Charley demanded, hijacking the press conference.  “Not one bit,” came the response.  Charley then revealed she once hadn’t played for two days and her family shooed her back to the course because she was so miserable and difficult to live with.  She didn’t need telling twice.

There’s no doubt the golf course is Charley’s happy place and, despite not yet having reached her 30th birthday, last week saw her begin her fourteenth season on tour.  She just loves competing and her swashbuckling style is very well suited to chasing down the leaders, which is exactly what was required of her last weekend.  She put the afterburners on late in the round, covering the last eight holes in six under par to come home in 31 blows and finish on 19 under.  One by one her rivals failed to match her and the title and rather large trophy were Charley’s without the need for a play-off.

Never dull, or one to miss an opportunity, Hull whipped out her phone and sent a picture of her most recent prize to the carpenter charged with building her trophy cabinet for her newly renovated home.  She explained that she’d seen a picture on social media of Justin Rose’s trophy cabinet and had decided to copy it – but that this latest prize would definitely need a little more elbow room.  She had already relayed all the measurements she thought necessary but realised before the trophy presentation that amendments had to be sent back to England.

With the large trophy came a very large cheque ($750,000) – the largest outside a major in the women’s game.  Pretty timely after an expensive building project.

It’s all a far cry from my first season on tour in 1986 when our twenty tournament schedule yielded a total prize fund of £665,000.  In today’s money that’s roughly equivalent to £2.5 million.  The tour’s 2026 schedule features 30 tournaments and a projected total prize fund of (gulp) more than 39 million euros – that’s roughly £34 million.  For those of us of a certain age, most of whom can be found on a certain “founders plus others” WhatsApp group, that’s an extraordinary sum to get your head round.

Of course, expenses and costs rise exponentially but even so.  It’s amazing to think that nowadays two young women like Charley and Carlota, at ages 29 and 35 respectively, can have amassed, worldwide, roughly £12 million and £10 million apiece, not taking anything other than prize money into consideration.  You can certainly afford a decent house renovation with that.

Even in our heyday very few of us would have held a candle to Charley – except in one respect.  Most of us had that same deep, deep love for the game running through our core.  You certainly can’t say we were seduced by the vast riches on offer.  That love was nurtured, of course, in our amateur days and recently one member of the aforementioned WhatsApp group (and a founder member of the LET) posted a newspaper cutting for us all to see.

It detailed the 1974 Scottish Girls’ Open Strokeplay Championship at Stranraer and it was very special to the teenage Madill girls as it was the first time we travelled alone together to an event.  No parents!

We caught the ferry from Ireland to Scotland and dragged our clubs and suitcases from the ferry port down into Stranraer town in order to locate our accommodation.  We had no car or transport to make life easy but, even then, I was unwilling to make things more difficult than they needed to be.  We needed somewhere to dump our stuff while we found exactly where we were going so we hit on the notion of going to the police station and asking them to look after our bags and clubs.

In hindsight I think they were rather bemused but I seem to recall that a few of them were members of the golf club and they duly looked after everything for us.  Those were the days….!  We did find our digs in the end and the club sorted transport to and from the course for us each day.  The hospitality was unforgettable and I don’t suppose we realised that many of us were just beginning a wonderful, magical journey through the world of golf.

That love of the game, which we share with Charley Hull, has given us all so much – perhaps not the riches she enjoys but for many, a very good living and what price those fabulous, precious, enduring friendships?

You know how things are ticking along nicely enough and you think everything is more or less under control and then, oops, in the time it takes to open a cupboard, all the plans go out the window and domestic chaos ensues?

Admittedly, in the general global scheme of things, finding a few alien beings resting in amongst the spare pillows and duvet and the Liberty quilt that was a wedding present 43 long years ago is not going to attract the attention of Lyse Doucet or cause the BBC to interrupt their Winter Olympics coverage with a news flash – that was for the arrest of the Andrew formerly known as prince.

Anyway, I put an SOS out on the WHGC Ladies Social WhatsApp and found out that speed was of the essence because if they spread, they ruin carpets as well as clothes and not just jumpers – anything with wool in it; they made a mess of one person’s woolly carpet; and another had to have the hall, stairs and landing carpet replaced.  A strong spray of some sort was recommended or a kit from Lakeland and a previous sufferer immediately offered to come round and offer advice.

She’s on hold until I sort out the bedding and do the initial spraying, with something that I wouldn’t normally have in the house – I’m trying to be eco-friendly but am ashamed to say I have my limits.  A friend recommended stuff that could be bought from the vet’s and another friend discovered that it was in stock at Pets at Home, so off I went.  As well as being asked if I had an account, they wanted to know if I had a cat because there’s something in the spray that is particularly bad for cats.  Let’s just hope it’s equally inimical to carpet moths – or whatever their proper name is.

My chosen product got ok reviews on the website but a personal recommendation rates highest of all in my book and I’m still hopeful that an infestation can be prevented, that this is just a recce by a tiny advance party that is still asleep on the job….This cold weather and keeping the radiator off should buy me a smidgeon of time, if that’s possible.  Can you count time in smidgeons?

Just in case you’re alarmed by the featured pic (which appears at the top of the piece unless there’s a technical glitch, which is not unheard of), don’t worry:  there was no spraying anywhere near any foodstuffs, let alone a glass of red, Lidl’s best, Stellenbosch, a cabernet sauvignon merlot mix from South Africa.  Very palatable when you’re stressed, though I would stress that alcohol is no substitute for meditative deep breathing and a good night’s sleep….

I don’t suppose Lyse Doucet has too much time to watch the Olympic Winter Games but as a Canadian she’ll know that her countrymen have been making a lot of noise in Italy, the curlers especially.  There have been a few spats and accusations of cheating and at one stage one of the Canadians told one of the Swedes to “Fuck off”, an expletive that needs no translating.  As luck would have it GB’s men, the world champions, aka Scotland, meet Canada in the final.

Curling, with its granite stones that come from Ailsa Craig, that lump of rock off the coast of Ayrshire in the Firth of Clyde, near Turnberry, is baffling in its complexity to those of us who have been channel hopping rather than concentrating.  Even so, we’re now practising our floor sweeping with renewed energy, with frantic brush work that negates any need for the gym.  Never mind the fact that most of us wouldn’t be able to stand up on the ice let alone control a stone that weighs nearly 20 kilos.  The precision is astonishing.

The other night, at bridge, we were discussing the Games and marvelling at, well, everything:  the speed and skill and artistry of the skaters and skiers; the bonkers bounce of the snowboarders with their stratospheric somersaults and twists; the lunatic speeds of the lugers, skeletoners and bobsleighers – of almost everybody, really; they’re all amazing and completely mad.

So, there we were, four supposed grown-ups, a few decades in, sporty people once but hampered now by knees, hips, wrists, feet that creak more than they once did, working out whether we were regular or goofy.  You may remember, that’s the basic snowboarding stance.  So, how do you decide?

Turns out you stand with your feet together and get somebody to give you a little push – not too hard and definitely not down a slope – and whichever foot you put forward tells you your stance.  We all gave it a go and turns out I’m regular, if that experiment really was the thing to go by.  There’s a wee skateboarding park a few hundred yards from the house where I could test it out but think that would be unwise.

Although I do have a duvet or two that are on their way out and would help soften the landings…