Throughout the ages, the considered construction of a column has caused all manner of hassles and hatterings. Sturdy old Horatio Nelson, for instance, had to perform swashbuckling feats of great valour and vigour on the high seas just to get Nelson’s Column cobbled together. “Can any of you fellas give me an idea for an intro?” was the resigned holler that could often be heard rising from the quarter deck of HMS Victory. It’s a plaintive plea that still echoes around the sports desk of the good ship Herald on a Monday afternoon as this correspondent continues to endure the kind of weekly huffings, puffings, faffings and footerings that resemble that aformentioned Admiral trying to change a duvet cover. There’s always something to write about, of course.

Having emerged from the glitz, glamour, guzzling and gluttony of the Annodata Scottish Golf Awards – a highly polished, professional operation that makes Oscar night look about as glamorous as a queue outside a butcher’s shop on a wet Thursday – there is always a feeling of encouragement and optimism by the end of the evening. Well, that and a touch of heart burn.

Some of you will probably be thinking that us lot in the media wouldn’t know what positivity was if it smacked us over the shin with a 7-iron. It’s all doom and gloom this and the end is nigh that. The problem, of course, is that there tends to be a lack of real balance and considered judgement in these rapid-fire times of rampant hysteria. You only need to look at the quite astonishing levels of build-up that the Rangers versus Celtic Scottish Cup semi-final is generating – a match that is still over 30 days away – to confirm once and for all that we live in a quite bamboozling world. On all manner of subjects, everything is either absolutely fabulous or absolutely appalling and it’s all constantly hanging on tenterhooks, just waiting to get caught up in the tentacles of the next media storm, knee-jerk crisis or internet outrage. There’s no level-headed middle ground. Jordan Spieth, for example, has had one or two average rounds by his quite shimmering standards and the twits and halfwits on Twitter, no doubt slumped on the couch and jabbing at their fancy phones with lazy, podgy fingers, are branding him “garbage”.

The wider game of golf, meanwhile, tends to be an easy target for those looking to give the Royal & Ancient pursuit a right good beating every so often as it gets caught up in a self-perpetuating cycle of negativity. It’s a convenient bandwagon to jump upon and one well-kent London-based newspaper recently published something of a patronising leader comment that said: “The decline of the golf course may cause anguish to devotees of Bertie Wooster but fashions for recreations do shift. Golf was of its time.”

We know these are trying times for clubs and we know there are struggles to retain and attract new members. There are declines here, drop offs there and death knells seemingly everywhere. Of course, if you want a statistic to suit a downbeat agenda you can easily find one. Equally, if you want to look on the bright side, you can trot out the European Tour’s recent data that found that 11 million people in the UK are actively engaged with golf in a variety of ways.

The grand gathering of golfing folk last Friday night were all full of passion and pride – and possibly some Sauvignon Blanc – for what they do as everything that is good about the sport in Scotland was celebrated. Gordon Strachan, the Scotland manager and regular guest at the Golf Awards, could barely contain his enthusiasm for the game while Eleanor Cannon, the new chair of Scottish Golf, took to the stage to deliver a sprightly rallying cry about making golf fun. In this cynical world, something has to be. There are plenty of people at plenty of places doing plenty of fine work for golf, particularly at the grassroots level. At Prestonfield, the Edinburgh club which won the Junior Club of the Year award, the junior membership is now 178, compared to a meagre 10 a few years ago as a progressive thinking culture of change swept through the clubhouse and the fusty old rules and regulations were binned. Innovation can help to inspire while passion can lead to prosperity. Golf and golf clubs have been guilty of standing still in an age of change and challenges but there are plenty of committed, unheralded enthusiasts who have faced up to the sense of defeatism and have refused to be defeated. That’s why they were deserved winners on Friday night as Scottish golf toasted a healthy future.