“You write a piece about scattering the ashes,” Patricia said. “You had so much history here with Dad and playing in the Irish Championships.”

The “here” she was referring to was Rosses Point where our Dad Jimmy Madill grew up, learning his golf, whiling away endless sunny summers with his childhood friend John Monk. As a boy he was unaware of the quality of the links, a stone’s throw from the wild Atlantic waters, that was his playground. Despite leaving the area at the age of 14 his lifelong love for the Point endured and strengthened. Whenever we came back from global travels with tales of faraway, magical places he would listen with great interest, but the phrase that followed was always the same – “not a patch on Rosses Point, though.”

I was 6 down at the turn, it was pouring rain and I was playing tripe.  I wanted to go in.

“You’re not going in,” Dad said.  “You challenged me to a match and we’ll play to the finish.  You can’t just keep going when it suits you.”

I was 10 years old and Dad had promised me a brand new set of clubs the moment I beat him playing level.  He was playing off 7 handicap and I was so keen to win those clubs I badgered him to play a match at every conceivable opportunity.  It took me till I was 13 to get the better of him, winning at the 20th hole of our home club of Portstewart.  My reward was a set of Jean Donalds, bought from the club pro, Johnnie Hunter, a myriad of lessons learned and a lifelong love of golf.

Many years ago, Elspeth Burnside, a fellow journalist and I were at the Dinah Shore tournament (now the ANA Inspiration) in Rancho Mirage, California, when one of the Americans in the press room did that oh-so-easy but very risky thing: he made an assumption.  He was sure we were players manquees, that we would have loved to be professional golfers and that we were writing about golf for a living because we couldn’t play it well enough.

LGU AGM, Leeds. 20th February 2016.

Mo’s advice, when she heard I’d been asked to speak, was “Don’t do it!”  I always listen to my adviser-in-chief and usually take her advice but on this occasion I couldn’t resist temptation.  There was every possibility it would be the last chance to address the Ladies’ Golf Union, a venerable if sometimes maligned institution, in its present form and I couldn’t pass up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.