Trends, fashions, zeitgeists?

You name it, this correspondent has never followed them. While friends, colleagues and acquaintances continually hover about at the cutting edge, with pristine haircuts that look like they have been downloaded off the internet, clothes so slick they could be made out of oil and gadgets so technologically advanced they haven't actually been invented yet, I prefer to entrench myself in a bygone era and huff, puff and wheeze away like Fred Dibnah scaling an industrial chimney overlooking Bolton. Only less smartly attired, of course.

This steadfast refusal to embrace all things new fangled probably explains why, over the weekend, I enjoyed the live in concert, musical meanderings of Fairport Convention, a fine body of men who have been strumming and warbling away since the Bayeux Tapestry first got commissioned. "Are you not a bit young to be here?," asked one follower as he shuffled into his seat while carrying a lute and wearing a smock. He seemed pleasantly surprised......a bit like the un-French sounding Frenchman, Gary Stal, in Abu Dhabi on Sunday night. The 22-year-old's maiden victory on the main European Tour was certainly a tale of the unexpected and one that, in many ways, summed up what is wonderful about this unpredictable game of wildly fluctuating fortunes. Of course, all of the focus has been on Martin Kaymer throwing away the title with the kind of collapse that the aforementioned Dibnah used to perform on Lancashire chimneys.

Inevitably, Kaymer has now been branded a 'choker', that wearisome tag that his attached to all manner of sportsmen and women after a bad day at the office. Yes, he was 10 shots ahead with 13 holes to play and eventually finished third. Yes, you would have expected a player of his pedigree to canter over the finishing line instead of stumbling and bumbling like Devon Loch. And yes, the focus in the aftermath is always going to be on the trials and tribulations of the marquee name and not a relative unknown champion, regardless of how unfair that is. But the widespread questioning of the German's mental resolve is yet another hysterical, knee jerk reaction in a sporting world that echoes to the cracking of constant knee jerk reactions. This is the man, after all, who stood firm and showed nerves of galvanised steel to hole the knee-knocking winning putt and complete Europe's Miracle of Medinah at the 2012 Ryder Cup during a topsy-turvy period of his career when he was still not firing on all cylinders. Sunday's scunner will have been a sore one to stomach but this was not an Open, a Masters or a PGA Championship. It was a big European Tour event, right at the start of the campaign where the winter rust is still probably being rubbed off with a wire brush and the competitive edge is still being sharpened. Kaymer is seen as one of the game's great frontrunners, a fact illustrated by his eight-shot romp in last year's US Open, but he had an off-day. It was a closing round strewn with damaging debris but a three-over 75 is hardly the highest round of golf you'll ever see. Stal's seven-under 65, in contrast, should be applauded during the fraught cut-and-thrust of a Sunday.

A regular face in Scotland during his amateur days, when a vast French legion would descend on the UK in the summer for a series of international open events, Stal's emergence is another sign that France's system is bearing fruit. The Federation spends something in the region of pounds 2.5 million on performance and coaching, well over double what the Scottish Golf Union spends annually. The successes of Victor Dubuisson, who made the Ryder Cup team last September, Alexander Levy, a double winner on the tour in 2014, and now Stal continues to bolster the momentum ahead of their nation's turn to host the Ryder Cup in 2018. Kaymer may have wasted it on Sunday but, in this fickle game of boundless opportunities, Stal seized his career-changing chance. Every week on the tour provides an opportunity to start afresh; to wipe the slate clean after a day to forget or to build on a breakthrough triumph. Abu Dhabi is now gone. For both Kaymer and Stal, it's onwards and upwards.

AND ANOTHER THING

Dwindling memberships, falling participation figures, expense, time constraints in the all-go modern world? The challenges facing golf are not new and there are plenty of questions but no easy answers.

In many ways, the 'it's aye been' mentality continues in this ancient game of tradition and history. Next year, golf has the opportunity to showcase itself to a vast audience when it returns to the Olympics for the first time since 1904 but it still grates with many that a chance to break away from the staple diet of 72-hole strokeplay has not been embraced. That will be the format in Rio 2016 but, at a time when clubs are being urged to innovate to survive, golf at the Olympics may have missed a chance to innovate and thrive. It will be more of the same.......and, in a sense, that is part of the game's wider problem.