It’s the October holidays, so what do you do to kick back and re-energise on a family jaunt with a five-year-old and a one-year-old?
Yes, that’s right, you head off to the tranquil, soothing, backwater retreat of, er, New York.
As decision-making goes, this choice of destination has displayed about the same kind of shrewd judgement that races through a pheasant’s head when it decides to cross a busy A-road just as a convoy of articulated wagons are thundering into view.
This week’s column, then, is coming to you from the city that never sleeps. Saying that, our host in NYC had a curious squint at the opening few paragraphs of today’s offering and just about conked oot.
Anyway, they do like things big in the good old US of A, don’t they? I ordered a burger the other day, for instance, and it was so outrageously vast, I may as well have sat back in my seat, opened my mouth and let an entire herd of cattle stampede down my throat.
Gazing around my fellow diners, all I could see were great piles of mighty, sizzling ribs and monstrous, seared carcasses. It looked a bit like the scorched, smouldering aftermath of the mega-meteor strike that obliterated the ruddy dinosaurs.
My trip to the Big Apple arrived just a week too late to take in the Year to Go festivities for next year’s Ryder Cup at Bethpage State Park in Long Island. The countdown is on.
In a frantic modern world of pushy marketing and unrelenting build-up, which is fanned by industrial-sized excitement generating turbines operated by us hysterical lot in the media, the Ryder Cup fever gets forced down our thrapples like one of those bloomin’ burgers in that diner.
Another 12 months of previews, posturings and ponderings will give us all chronic abdominal bloat.
When you’re off on a jolly, it can be easy to lose track of what’s going on back home. It was impossible, though, to miss the sad news of the passing of former First Minister, Alex Salmond.
I have to confess, I’ve never been very politically charged. In fact, I’ve sat on the fence for so long now, I have to give my backside the occasional coating of creosote.
Keeping all manner of well-documented bits of this, that and the other out of this piece – and I'll not bring up Donald Trump either - there was no denying that Salmond was a passionate supporter of the pursuit that Scotland gave to the world.
“I enjoy speaking to you gentleman as I get to talk about golf,” he once said to a small gathering of us gowf scribblers as the political commentators harrumphed and spluttered in the background.
Salmond’s influence on the game here was significant. Back in 2011, when Barclays ended its sponsorship deal with the Scottish Open, there was a genuine fear that the domestic showpiece would not survive.
Its prized the slot in the schedule, the week before The Open, was always a much-sought after date and Salmond’s Scottish Government, together with the financial clout of Aberdeen Asset Management, gave it security and a platform upon which it could thrive. And look at it now?
"He (Salmond) was the one who got us into the Scottish Open," said Martin Gilbert, the former chief executive of the Aberdeen group during a chinwag with this correspondent and his colleagues many years ago. "Without his financial support there is no doubt that the Scottish Open would have gone.”
Salmond, a dab hand with the sticks himself, was also a strong advocate of the Government-backed Clubgolf programme, an initiative devised in the build-up to the 2014 Ryder Cup at Gleneagles to encourage schoolchildren to give it a go.
“Investment in golf is not an indulgence,” he once told us. “It's not a personal fascination about me liking golf. The investment side is really important. It's not a frippery, it's something central to the Government's objectives."
In the years that passed, many critics questioned the value of the scheme, but it certainly had admirable intentions.
Here in the cradle of the game, there is an argument to say we should have golf as part of the school curriculum. But that’s an on-going, yet probably fanciful, debate for another day.
The Ryder Cup of 2014 – the campaign to host it was started by Henry McLeish way back in the year 2000 - was another major occasion which showcased Scotland to the world.
In the same year, the Royal & Ancient Golf Club voted to allow women members to join for the first time. Oh, and there was also another Yes/No vote in the shape of the Scottish referendum. That one didn’t go Salmond’s way, though.
"Peter Dawson (the R&A chief executive at the time) is now an idol of mine," said Salmond. "He's the man who actually delivered a Yes vote. I thought we did quite well to get 45 per cent but that Dawson guy gets 85 per cent.
“Seriously, though, I've always believed golf has to be a game for everyone. We have to embrace that."
Salmond loved golf and appreciated and understood its wider value to his homeland. You can’t say that about various other politicians who will often treat golf, and indeed sport, with shrugging indifference.
Sorry, I’m getting political now. I’d better hop back on the fence.
