The home of golf remains a comforting haven for Nicolas Colsaerts. “I’ve always had a bit of a connection with Scotland and I always loved coming here to play in my amateur days when I was 15 or 16 and staying in a lot of dodgy B&Bs,” reflected the Belgian with dewy-eyed memories of tiny rooms, shared bathrooms and the kind of quirky welcome that used to be the reserve of Norman Bates. “I think the dodgiest B&Bs were in England though,” added Colsaerts as he staved off a letter of complaint from the Scottish Tourist Board.

As the guest of honour at the glass-clinking, snout-in-the-trough shin-dig that was the PGA in Scotland’s annual luncheon in Glasgow yesterday, the 34-year-old talked warmly of those formative years in the game’s cradle. The saltire was thoroughly embraced by Colsaerts, which is more than can be said of the stars and stripes. With his golfing stock rising, after he played a part in the European Ryder Cup team’s Miracle of Medinah in 2012, the doors of opportunity in the US swung open like the entrance to a saloon in the wild west. The American dream became something of a nightmare, though.

“In the two years I spent in the US I think I had some sort of depression going on for many reasons,” said Colsaerts, who juggled competition on both sides of the Atlantic in 2013 and 2014. “When I was in Europe and I watched golf on the TV from the US I’d start to get the shakes. When I realised it was affecting me physically I decided it was probably not a good idea to go back.

“It wasn’t homesickness. I’ve always been happy enough travelling the world with my golf clubs and my suitcase. It was just being in America all the time. When you play on the tour in Europe you change countries every week, you change food all the time but in the US it’s all the same. Ok, Arizona is not the same as Florida or the North East but it’s the same yellow line on the roads, it’s the same restaurants everywhere and the same chicken caeser salad. For me, that got a bit boring in the end. The day I decided to pack it in I was at Houston and I said to myself ‘I’m getting the f*** out of here, otherwise I’m going to go mad’. I just couldn’t do it.”

During that Ryder Cup year of 2012, the big-hitting Colsaerts – whose 447-yard clatter during the Wales Open in 2014 was a European Tour record - was the biggest golfing name to come out of Belgium since the celebrated Flory Van Donck made his mark on the international scene in the 1950s with a brace of second place finishes in the Open Championship. The career slump that followed the high of the Ryder Cup has seen him overtaken in the popularity stakes by his emerging countryman Thomas Pieters, who was a shining light in the transatlantic tussle this year, but Colsaerts is in the midst of a second coming. Competing in America may have flung something of a star spangled spanner into his career works but the two-time European Tour winner is relishing the home comforts of his own continent again. A quartet of top-four finishes this season, including a third place in the Scottish Open and a fourth in the end-of-year DP World Tour Championship, underlined his resurgence. “I remember the first time I came back to Europe and I said ‘this is refreshing, people talk to one another’. In the lounges in the US there were players there all sitting at eight or nine different tables. In Europe you don’t have that. It’s much more like a fraternity type of thing where people get along. There’s more laughter in Europe too. Here you can make fun of somebody and they will laugh, whereas in America they take it as an offence. I had a few raises of the eyebrows from people when I was just making a joke and they have taken it the wrong way. When you are born and live in a European city when you’re really young you can’t adapt to living in the US that quickly, it’s just not possible.”

If Donald Trump is bawling about making America great again, it’s clear that America simply grated on Colsaerts. Making the European Ryder Cup team against those Americans for the 2018 match in Paris is certainly a goal. “Being Belgian it would be nice to make the team to shove it up the French,” he said with a smile as he stirred up a bit of local rivalry. “For many reasons, the Scots and the Belgians are a bit similar. We don’t take ourselves too seriously, we are the little sister of another country in a way. I’ve always got on well with the Scots. It is pretty tough to get into the Ryder Cup team but I do feel that if I get on a run then it is something that is definitely achievable.”