It’s a busy old spell coming up for Catriona Matthew. This week it’s the Aberdeen Asset Management Ladies Scottish Open at Dundonald Links before she hops in the car and drives down to Woburn for the Women’s British Open. Not long after that, she’ll be on the plane to Rio to represent Great Britain in the Olympic golf competition. The build-up to that is gathering pace and parcels. The other day she took delivery of five colossal box loads of Games-related odds, sods, bits and bobs which possibly earned the postman a gold medal for actually heaving and humping the pile to her front door without keeling over. “The kids had quite a bit of fun going through it all,” she said with a smile.

There’s plenty to look forward to on the immediate horizon but in this game you’re often peering further ahead and Matthew can already scribble the 2017 Solheim Cup into her diary after she was unveiled yesterday as a vice-captain by European skipper Annika Sorenstam.

As a veteran of eight Solheim Cup campaigns down the seasons, it was hardly surprising that Sorenstam has called on the experience of the 46-year-old Scot. This backroom role does not necessarily mean she will retreat from the frontline of competitive action. Far from it. Matthew is still keen to be an on course leader too but, as ever, the former Women’s British Open champion will approach everything with calm, matter-of-fact reason. “I’d love to play and be a vice-captain at the same time but I’ll see how I’m playing,” said Matthew, who will partner Cheyenne Woods in today’s first round of the spectators-enter-free Ladies Scottish Open.

With the Solheim Cup set to return to Scotland in 2019, when Gleneagles stages the transatlantic tussle, the choice of Matthew as a vice-captain for the next edition of the event on US soil has only strengthened the widely held assumption that she will move into the main role in her homeland in three years’ time. By that stage she’ll be climbing the brae to 50 and, despite her sturdy, competitive longevity, she appreciates she can’t go on forever.

“Being a playing captain might be a step too far,” she said. “You couldn’t possibly be a playing captain now. There’s far too much involved. If I do put my name forward for the captaincy then I’d accept that I wouldn’t be playing in it.”

Matthew and the Solheim Cup go back a long way, to that wet weekend in 1992 when she watched Europe’s golfers beat the Americans as a flag-waving fan on the other side of the ropes. Since then, she has been on three winning sides and has racked up a hefty plunder of individual titles on the global stage. “I would never have imagined back then when I was walking round Dalmahoy in the rain that I’d play in eight and now be a vice captain,” said Matthew, whose only loss in Solheim Cup singles encounters came on her debut back in 1998. “You dream of doing these things but you never quite imagine it will happen.”

She probably never imagined she’d get a crack at the Olympics either but, despite all the downbeat deliberations and withdrawals on the men’s side, Matthew is relishing the chance to go for golfing gold. “Ladies golf will certainly benefit a lot more than men’s golf,” she said. “They get so much more exposure already. I just hope the men not going won’t lead to golf coming out of the Games. The ladies are supporting it so hopefully we can stay in it.”