There's not much you can do when you're riddled with the cold and associated fevers is there?

Slumped on the couch, in a prison of your own self pity, you sweat like a punctured dinghy and shiver, quiver and quake like Shakin' Stevens operating a pneumatic jackhammer while your aching limbs feel as if they have been slowly loosened with a rusty Allan Key.

Of course, this feeling of overwhelming woe is not confined to golf correspondents nursing a bad dose of snorks and sniffles. About a fortnight ago, these weekly bletherations focused on the prospect of the Open Championship moving from BBC to Sky and, in the days that have passed since those scribblings, the doom and gloom of that anticipated move has reached fever pitch among certain moral-crusaders who have branded the potential deal a "disgrace".

By all accounts, an announcement on what has been reported as a £10-million-a-year deal between the Royal & Ancient and Sky to begin covering the game's oldest major as of 2017 will be made in the next week or so (and if it's not and the Open remains on the Beeb then the golfing media will choke itself into oblivion on vast mouthfuls of humble pie).

Already, the R&A are being portrayed in many quarters as the bad boys in all of this; a greedy, shameless bunch of money grabbers who are happy to take the bags of cash from Sky and go against their ethos of protecting and growing the game by taking it off free-to-air tele.

The BBC, meanwhile, has been depicted as something of a victim in this big brash world of commercialism when the reality, as most folk are aware, is that they have been moving away from golf coverage for some time now.

Yes, there is the grand tradition of covering the Open for the best part of 60 years but when you only pay the game lip service, it would be almost ridiculous to expect the rights to be safeguarded on the basis of history alone. A flick through the sports round-ups on terrestrial TV in general at the weekend simply re-affirmed the belief that golf is treated shoddily and shamefully.

Fresh from victory in the Dubai Desert Classic, Rory McIlroy continues to dominate the global game and is in the midst of a quite astonishing run of form having won four times in his last 11 events, a sequence which also includes a quartet of second-place finishes. In fact, since winning the Open in July, he's only finished out of the top-10 once. Yet, was there any mention of his latest triumph on the terrestrial channels on Sunday? Not that I could see. Football, tennis, cricket, possibly even cribbage and ludo, were all covered but no word of the world's No 1 golfer from the United Kingdom conquering once again. It really was pitiful but, sadly, something we have become accustomed to down the seasons.

The current bandwagon to jump on now concerns the widespread opinion that participation in golf at a grassroots level will be savagely affected by the switch of the Open to satellite TV. A variety of players and pundits have come over all dewy-eyed and nostalgic about the inspiring impact the Open on the BBC has had while insisting a nation of kids can be spared a life of abject misery in some kind of Dickensian workhouse by the soothing pearls of hoary, homespun whimsy from Peter Alliss.

It is a stance that holds some justification and is one that is also easy to adopt. A national newspaper recently started a campaign to 'Keep the Open on the BBC', by inviting readers to fill in a voucher, cut it out and send it to the top brass at the R&A. It is wonderfully old school but, like the heartfelt spoutings from the likes of Lee Westwood and others over the weekend, it is almost bordering on emotional blackmail.

The R&A has been plonked between a rock and a hard place; they'd dearly like to maintain the uninterrupted, come-all-ye coverage the BBC provides but, equally, crave the will, the enthusiasm, the manpower and the money that Sky provides.

Encouraging participation among the young in golf - and in sport in general - is of paramount importance to its future well being but the challenges of doing that are complicated, varied and abundant. Access to facilities, the position of sport in the school curriculum, cost, competition for leisure time in these non-stop times of myriad distractions; it is a multi-faceted list and we would surely be naive to think that free-to-air coverage of, in golf's case the Open, is a remedy to such a broad and complex social issue.

In this ever-expanding age of multi-channel and internet TV, the notion of the BBC's so-called televised sporting 'Crown Jewels', the contracts of which are housed in the Tower of London and guarded by Beefeaters, is almost something of a quaint relic. It was surely inevitable that the Open would become Sky's jewel in its golfing crown one of these days.