By all accounts, the procedure you have to go through to become a member at Muirfield would make a thoracic aortic dissection repair look like a fairly straightforward guddle about.

“It is quite a complicated admissions process,” conceded the club captain, Henry Fairweather, last month after announcing that female members would finally be ushered in for the first time in 273 years.

Of course, there remains one obvious female choice to get the ball rolling on that particular front. If it’s the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, then they don’t come much more honourable than Catriona Matthew. East Lothian native, major winner, Solheim Cup stalwart, multiple tour champion and, as of yesterday, a global ambassador for VisitScotland? Any club would be proud to have her.

“Living down there, I’d love to be a member,” admitted Matthew yesterday at a breakfast briefing in the Gleneagles Hotel to promote the 2019 Solheim Cup, which will be held at the Perthshire resort in September 2019.

At the moment, no professional golfer is a Muirfield member and Matthew may have to enter through some form of honorary status. “I’m not sure if professionals can be members, but we are exploring the possibilities,” she added. “Things are in motion, from what I hear locally. In the end, they are going to do things the right way. There won’t be just a few token members. They are going to have a decent amount of women. And after that, women will be treated the same as men on the waiting list. Their normal process normally takes about five years. I’m going to Muirfield to play in a few weeks so we’ll explore it there.”

Before that, Matthew has her own on course business to attend to. By her own admission, the 47-year-old, who has recently switched back to her old coach, Kevin Craggs, has made a slow start to the 2017 campaign, with a tie for 30th her best result in five LPGA Tour events. “There haven’t been a whole lot of events these past six weeks, which in a way, has been quite good for me as I could work on the little changes Kevin and I have been making,” she noted. “I’m quite excited about the real start to the season, which is probably in about a month. We have three majors in six weeks so that’s a time to start peaking.”

As a European vice-captain for this season’s Solheim Cup, Matthew is guaranteed a seat on the plane to Des Moines. Those competitive instincts don’t diminish with the passing years, though, and Matthew is still eager to play in the event itself and notch up a ninth appearance in the biennial bout with the USA.

“The goal is still to try to make the team and I think it’s definitely possible to be a playing vice-captain,” added Matthew. “Juli Inkster performed both roles for the US in 2011 so it can be done. I’ll know myself if I’m playing good enough. If I can play well probably from mid-May onwards, I’ll have a good chance.”

Matthew has seen it, done it and acquired a garret-full of t-shirts during a professional career spanning over two decades. She remains the standard to which the next generation of Scots aspire to but Matthew knows that making your way on the Ladies European Tour is not easy. The migration of the top players across the Atlantic to the alluring bounty on offer on the LPGA Tour continues but for those lesser lights, opportunities on this side of the ocean can be harder to come by.

There are only two European Tour events this month, none in May and only two again in both June and July before the season gets going in the second half of the campaign. “If you are an emerging player playing in Europe you just about need to have a part-time job, I’d say, to keep you going,” said Matthew in an eye-opening admission. “It does get better as the season goes on but it’s just a tough sell to get tournaments. A lot of the top players go to America. It’s a shame, but it’s difficult.

“I’ll play the Scottish Open, the British Open and the Evian Championship on the European Tour. It’s difficult to play both tours when I have two children. I don’t want to play more than around 23 events in the year and I feel I have to play most of them in America to keep my position out there.”