Well, that’s another year successfully negotiated on this birling clump of space rock otherwise known as planet earth. It’s perhaps fitting that my birthday is on May Day given the number of distress calls that are sent out from the sports desk when the chief sub reads the opening haverings in the weekly column.

This time 12 months ago, I overheard someone passing comment on my age and saying that they thought “Nick was pushing 40” only for somebody else to swiftly interject and add, “crikey, he looks like he’s dragging it.”

When you’re hurtling through your twenties you would often spend a lot of time worrying about reaching 30 until you finally hit 40 and wish you’d spent less time fretting about turning 30 in the first place. Now that I’m 41, the brow-furrowing about the march towards 50 can commence.

Mercifully, inspiration can be found from my cherished colleague, Jock MacVicar, who celebrated his 80th birthday at the weekend and is showing no sign of retiring from the golf writing beat. Can I keep the Tuesday column going for 39 more years? It’s going be a hell of a back nine, and probably straight into the wind too.

While birthdays are a commemoration, and often commiseration, of an increased number, it’s reduced figures were are focusing on this week as the European Tour’s Golf Sixes, in which 16, two-man teams battle it out in a series of six hole matchplay ties, gets its first airing.

The marketing slogan excitedly declares that this will be “golf but not as you know it”, which admittedly sounds like something this scribe’s dumbfoonert playing partners would say when asked to give a brief analysis of my swing.

Depending on your tastes and levels of tolerance, the Golf Sixes will either be brilliant or utterly appalling. The players will walk on to the tee to blaring music and there will be eruptions of pyrotechnics while a variety of grinning celebrity hosts, spearheaded by the mystifying Vernon Kay, will no doubt dazzle all and sundry with their vast acreage of gleaming tooth enamel.

Beyond this racket and razzmatazz, however, the actual format of the event should make for a decent, engaging spectacle. Away from the weekly grind of 72-hole strokeplay, the rapid fire, cut-and-thrust of team matchplay over half a dozen holes will keep things ticking over at a sprightly rate. The fact there is a shot clock – players have 40 seconds to ponder and play – will get things moving too.

Following on from the World Super 6 series in Perth earlier in the season, the Golf Sixes is the latest attempt by Keith Pelley, the European Tour’s energetic chief executive, to package and present the game to a different demographic who demand immediate gratification, easily digestible sporting fare and attention-grabbing action that is delivered far more quickly than a succession of five hour rounds over four gruelling days.

Pelley is desperate to cultivate the general public and tap into new, younger markets with fast-food golf instead of preaching to the converted. Golf is a game where one size doesn’t have to fit all and the scalable nature of it is an attribute that should be utilised while always safeguarding the sport’s integrity.

In that sense, you have to give credit to Pelley for his unbridled enthusiasm and let’s give it a go attitude. As with most occasions, of course, the relevance of the event is highly dependent on who is actually playing in it.

You’re not going to get your top stars competing for a purse of £850,000 while a final between, say, the Portuguese duo of Ricardo Gouveia and Jose-Filipe Lima and the Swedish team of Johan Carlsson and Joakim Lagergren would hardly be box office stuff, with all due respect.

You’ve got to start somewhere, though, and if the Golf Sixes can attract an audience and demonstrate a potential for growth then hopefully would be sponsors can have their eyes opened to the possibilities and the concept can be developed.

The PGA Tour’s Zurich Classic at the weekend marked the first time team golf had been played on the circuit since 1981 and the general consensus was that it was “fun.”

Having “fun” is what encourages people into sport in the first instance and if the Golf Sixes can help stir the senses and capture imaginations then it will have served a valuable purpose.

And as for that walk on music? Well, perhaps it’s a good job Colin Montgomerie is not playing.

Clumping off the green at a Spanish Open a few years ago, with his shoulders at half-mast and thumping music booming from a nearby hospitality box, the bold Monty was not particularly enamoured. "Is this a golf tournament or a f****** disco?," he hissed through clenched teeth.