Well, at least that’s another of life’s grisly rituals over with for another year. The United States of America have given the world some appalling things – squeezy cheese, for instance, is marginally worse than Trump and boasts a terrifyingly similar colour – but nothing is more preposterous than Black Friday, a shopping tradition over there that’s now a shopping tradition over here.
Do you want to watch a so-called sophisticated society gouge, elbow and kick its way towards the gutter? Yes? Then shove a “50 per cent off” label on a Kenwood blender, retreat to a safe distance and enjoy the chaos as boggle-eyed hordes embark on the kind of shelf-stripping frenzy that resembles a frothing shoal of piranha fish ripping a stricken wildebeest down to its bare bones. The fish, of course, are far more civilised in their pursuit.
It’s a fevered old world where speed and convenience are demanded, often at the expense of quality – well, that’s what the sports editor said to me – and instant gratification is almost viewed as a basic human right. Funnily enough, the same head of sport didn’t display any sense of instant gratification when he read the Tuesday column.
Society has become as fraught as a rabid gaggle in the jostling queue for a discounted household appliance and we all just have to strap ourselves in and cling on as best we can. In this birling centrifuge sits golf.
This weekend in Edinburgh, the second national conference staged by Scottish Golf on the state of the game and how we can make things better takes place. All and sundry with a passion for this pursuit have been invited along to the open forum to share their views, listen to other views, hear more opinions, form some opinions, agree, disagree, nod their heads, shake their heads, maybe even their fists, and generally let their feelings be known. And then there will be a cup of tea and a finger buffet.
Having earned enough votes to raise the annual affiliation fee members pay to Scottish Golf – an issue which remains contentious – the high-heid yins of the governing body will get the chance to explain just what they will do with this extra revenue, while a variety of topics, including plans to benefit financially from nomadic golfers with no club membership, will be discussed.
It should be a wide-ranging, eye-opening day and one which, at least, keeps the dialogue and the communication between golfers and those involved with the game’s governance open. Too often in the past, there was a significant disconnect. What the future holds, though, would have Mystic Meg throwing her crystal ball into the bin in a mind-mangled fankle.
We are constantly told that golf needs to change to attract a new audience. Last week’s KPMG annual report on participation in Europe claimed that Scotland had lost 5000 registered golfers in 2017. Doom and gloom is never far away.
The irony is that in this crash, bang, wallop age of ours, golf should actually fit in perfectly as a delightful, galvanising sanctuary from the fast lane of everyday life; a soothing retreat for body and mind at a time when bodies and minds are being ravaged by rises in obesity, dependency and depression.
The increasingly indolent online culture, meanwhile, sees us constantly drawn to the light of a touch-pad screen which at least proves, once and for all, that we are actually descended from moths.
Golf, they wail, is too slow and it takes too long so we now find ourselves falling over one another to find ways to make it less time-consuming. The result is that some of this “innovation” can be crass, dumbed down and unfulfilling.
It’s not golf’s fault that society has become so clamorous but now, it seems, it must conform even if one of the best things about sport in general is the different, abundant challenges it poses and the varying qualities it demands and fosters.
Somebody more erudite than this correspondent once said that, “to be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
Golf remains the greatest of games. At least there will be an agreement on that front among those gathering in Edinburgh on Saturday.
As for the future? Who knows?
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