It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. And given that it’s still November, that is an appalling vision. Everywhere you turn, the festive frenzy is rammed home with all the hard-nosed, profit-seeking gusto of a Victorian chimney sweep pushing his downtrodden apprentice into a narrow, sooty flue. If you’re not being ordered by television adverts to buy an inedible array of oven-ready vol-au-vents and party foods then you’re being frogmarched into hastily knocked up ‘German Markets’ and ‘Christmas on Ice’ extravaganzas that tend to be as eye-wateringly gaudy as a Siegfried & Roy photoshoot with soft furnishings provided by Liberace.

It’s a mind-mangling time of year and one made even more bamboozling by the golf schedule. The 2015 Race to Dubai finished on Sunday but the 2016 Race to Dubai starts again this week in South Africa with three events of the new schedule shoehorned into the calendar before 2015 has even finished.

It’s a new start but, from a Scottish perspective, there won’t be any new faces. Last week’s European Tour Qualifying School in Spain ensured that and, for the second successive year, not one single Scot finished among the card-winning places of the top-25 and ties.

As it stands, Scott Jamieson remains the youngest male golfer on the main European circuit from this country at the age of 31 (he’ll be 32 next week). There is a huge missing link, a sizeable generation gap and a vast void and it remains somewhat concerning.

Prior to the Q-School final, Bradley Neil, the talented 19-year-old from Blairgowrie who turned professional in June, expressed his determination to succeed and get a solid foothold on the ladder. “The game is getting younger and younger, and I want to be part of it,” he said of a global game dominated by ready-to-win 20-somethings. “I don’t want to miss out.” Neil did miss out, for the time being at least, and his failure to make the 72-hole cut in the qualifying scramble means he will have to fight it out on the third-tier of the professional game. Of course, he may find his feet there and get battle hardened at a cut-throat level where you have to win to make progress but, like many Scots before him, Neil has not hit the professional ground running.

Why this is the case, for so many Scottish golfers, remains one of life’s great mysteries and has provoked so much teeth gnashing down the years, most folk involved with the domestic game now require falsers.

A few years ago, the Scottish Golf Union – now the amalgamated Scottish Golf body – unveiled its performance strategy and ambitiously claimed that ‘by 2020 Scotland will be the world leading golfing nation’ and ‘will have the most comprehensive player pathway to develop golfers from entry level to elite levels in the world’. The clock is ticking.

Of course, in a global game, where every federation and governing body is spending increasing amounts of money on developing new talent, Scotland still holds its own on the amateur front and our golfers still win major amateur events, both individually and collectively. You can argue that it’s not an amateur governing body’s responsibility for what happens at a professional level when players depart on their own merry way. It is a tricky position to be in, a kind of damned if you do and damned if you don’t quandary, but this is the nurturing role the powers-that-be have adopted.

Here in Scotland we have academies, pathways, development centres and performance managers, with coaching here, there and everywhere and hand holding at various stages for those in the squads. It’s a system but then golf is very much an individual pursuit and those who tend to succeed in individual pursuits have the strong will and the single-mindedness to thrive out with a system, to exist in their own environment and question what will not be right for them. Are our home-based players too reliant on this system? And is it the right system anyway?

One notion that is often trotted out about the amateur-to-pro switch is the fact that players in this country play too much links golf on the unpaid circuit when the professional tours rarely visit that type of terrain. But then you could say that about all the players in Britain and Ireland. Look at the upper echelons of the 2015 Race to Dubai (forget Rory McIlroy, as he is one of those God-given talents) and you’ll see players like Danny Willett, Andy Sullivan, Shane Lowry, Matt Fitzpatrick, Tommy Fleetwood and Tyrell Hatton. Most of them went toe-to-toe in the amateur game at some point or another with Scottish talents like Lloyd Saltman, James Byrne, Michael Stewart and Wallace Booth to name but a few but they are now light years ahead of our lads.

Talent is one thing, but mental resolve, determination, drive, belief and a general toughness are attributes that are harder to foster. Marry those ingredients together and you have a successful formula, but it’s a combination that still remains somewhat elusive for our next generation of tour players.