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.

The inevitable and inexorable demise of golf on the BBC has left me a little uncertain as to where my broadcasting may or may not take me this year.  It’s now a full ten years since I started doing some work for Sirius XM radio out on the PGA Tour in America and I had a very happy three years travelling back and forth until ageing parents, and a huge desire to be closer to home at that time, called a halt to my transatlantic travel.