According to reports, it seems that every woman on the planet - with, perhaps, the exception of Ann Widdecombe - will be frogmarching their nearest and dearest to the cinema this coming Valentine's weekend to ooh, aah, gasp and gawp at 'Fifty Shades of Grey', an eye-popping extravaganza which, by all accounts, will do for intimacy what the Haynes Manual did for a bloke's knowledge of the intricate workings of a Talbot Sunbeam.

Blindfolds, whips, cables, shackles? These are merely run of the mill, sundry items that the sports editor employs on a regular basis to aid the winkling out process of the Tuesday column. And I believe most readers approach this page with a blindfold anyway.

While everybody charges off to the pictures to immerse themselves in fevered escapism, here in the world of golf we've been dealing with a lot of fairly down beat news of late although, given that the game lost two pioneering figures in Charlie Sifford and Billy Casper over the last few days, the negative press that the Royal & Ancient sport has been getting is rather trivial in the grand scheme of things.

We've had tales of woe concerning membership figures while the closure of the Castle Park club in East Lothian, the third such demise in the Edinburgh area in the past couple of years, had cynics drooling at the prospect of a domino effect. The other week, Sajid Javid, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, felt an urge to tell the masses that he wouldn't want to join an all-male golf club while Tavish Scott, the Liberal Democrat MSP, joined in the political points scoring by jumping on the hysterical bandwagon that got rumbling in the wake of the R&A's decision to take live coverage of the Open off the BBC and award the rights to Sky.

That decision, which appears to have created one of the biggest divisions since Ernest Rutherford split the atom, has led to some astonishingly pious bleatings and Scott's sweeping assertion that the R&A will haul down their St Andrews HQ, abandon Scotland and rebuild it elsewhere on the basis that they've taken the live gowf away from the Beeb was one of the most scaremongering, knee-jerk haverings of the season.

But, of course, golf is an easy target and, at the moment, it seems almost fashionable to knock the game. If Scottish football - yes, the same Scottish football that sees a 10-year-old get smacked in the face by a bottle on his way to the Old Firm game - agreed a £75 million TV deal with Sky, pundits, politicians and high heid yins would be joyously hailing the move from the rooftops of Hampden.

In certain media outlets, who work to their own agendas, you can almost sense a feeling of delight when figures dribble in that male membership is down by some 14 % since 2004 while female membership has fallen by around 19%. Bad news is good news, after all. They trot out all the negative stereotypes - golf is as stuffy as a taxidermist's spare room, women are not allowed within 100 yards of the front door, juniors get treated like Victorian chimney sweeps etc, etc - while championing the latest fads like cycling and pouncing on radical plans to completely alter the game by making the hole bigger, combining football and golf or performing some other hare-brained facelift. When figures appeared on the BBC showing that participation in swimming had dropped by 245,000 (in England that is, but they often lazily assume this will do for the whole of the UK) I didn't hear an outcry to make it more sexy and appealing by flinging some sharks into the pool to increase the adrenaline rush. No, they keep their nonsensical do-gooding for golf.

Of course, the game can't afford to stand still but you don't want to change the game. Its biggest strength is, quite simply, what it is and we shouldn't make it something that it isn't. We know that time is a huge factor working against golf, particularly among a younger clientele. Being thirled to 18 holes and sticking rigidly to the fourball format may be ok for a more senior section of the golfing society but there is a move towards the availability of nine or even six hole options. People are still playing this game for all the ages in their thousands (one survey suggested the number of rounds in the UK was up by 3.5% in 2014) and it's never been more accessible but how they want to play, and how they want to pay, is evolving and many clubs are adapting and thinking with a bit of vision, flexibility and invention across a whole variety of issues. "Our early indications of our membership subscriptions for this year is that the decline is not as significant as in previous years," revealed Karin Sharp, the chief operating officer of the Scottish Ladies' Golfing Association who was speaking at the organisation's AGM on Saturday where the vote on a merger with the Scottish Golf Union achieved a 'yes' result of 204-0. "It is down less than one per cent at the moment. It does feel like the decline is slowing. Obviously we would like to completely turn that around."

It's not all doom and gloom after all.