Well, have you been sticking to those resolutions you made when the new year birled in? C’mon, tell the truth.

You’re probably hiding a packet of Bourbon Creams under this sports supplement and hastily flinging a couple down your thrapple when your other half goes out of the room. Look at the state of you. There are crumbs all over your jumper. Brush them off, for goodness’ sake.

Don’t worry, though. I’m not here to judge. A disciplined, dieting, dry January, during which you lock yourself in a joyless prison of abstinence and basically eat twigs and steam for a month, is not my thing either despite the hectoring insistences of others that I should cut back on this, reduce my levels of that and ca’ canny on gulps of the other.

At this time of the year, when tut-tutting, handwringing, healthy-living zealots are out in force, I’m always reminded of the fellow who was advised by his doctor to do something a couple of times a day that got him out of breath. So, he decided to start smoking.

Alternatively, he could’ve have started covering golf because it’s been a pretty breathless spell of late. There seems to have been so many bombshells recently, I wouldn’t be surprised if press releases start getting delivered by a squadron of droning B-52s.

Amid the tumult in the upper echelons of the men’s scene, an on-going pantomime that will probably get a run at the King’s Theatre before long, the news last week that Martin Slumbers, the chief executive of the R&A, and Keith Pelley, the top man at the DP World Tour, were both leaving their posts – Slumbers at the end of the year, Pelley at the start of April - made for an eye-opening turn of events.

As for events on the golf course? Well, given all the capers, frolics and palavers that continue to consume the game off the fairways and greens, it’s nice to take a step back and actually appreciate the heartening human tales of triumph and resilience in the face of adversity that have illuminated the early part of the 2024 campaign.

Let’s face it, golf could do with a few feelgood stories to revel in, couldn’t it? Grayson Murray’s victory at the Sony Open in Hawaii on Sunday was another uplifting chapter in his rehabilitation. Three years ago – in Hawaii of all places – his career had reached rock bottom.

“Why was I drunk?,” he posted on social media at the time following a drink-fuelled incident which led to a disciplinary hearing and the unravelling of his life. “Because I’m a f***ing alcoholic that hates everything to do with the PGA Tour life and that’s my scapegoat.”

Here in 2024, Murray is a golfer reborn. "I wanted to give up a lot of times,” he said of his well-documented trials and tribulations. “Give up on myself, give up on the game of golf, give up on life."

A week earlier, Chris Kirk, another player who had plumbed the dark depths of despair, won the season-opening Sentry tournament. Kirk’s own battles with alcoholism and depression forced him to step away from golf for a spell in 2019. The turnaround in his fortunes, both personally and professionally, is worthy of grand acclaim.

While Kirk and Murray departed Hawaii as winners, there was success of a very different kind for the former US Open champion, Gary Woodland. In many ways, though, he was probably the biggest winner of them all.

Woodland may have missed the cut at the Sony Open but simply playing again was a mighty achievement having undergone surgery to remove a lesion from his brain last September.

The struggle he endured over the last year or so was frighteningly intense. "A lot of fear,” he said in a frank press conference as he reflected on the harrowing days and nights during which he wrestled with intimations of mortality.

“I was very fear-driven every day, mostly around death. As it got worse, (there was) loss of appetite, chills, no energy. I had four-and-a-half months of every day really thinking I was going to die.”

It was compelling stuff. Unsurprisingly, a new, hard-earned perspective on life is now a 15th club in Woodland’s bag. What’s a missed cut in the grand scheme of it all, eh?

By plenty of accounts, there are a lot of people cheesed off with men’s professional golf at the highest level these days. The arrival of LIV and the seemingly bottomless pit that is the Saudi sovereign wealth fund has disfigured the elite game and has exposed the greed, entitlement and self-interest of some of those in it.

The unseemly stampede to shove the snout in the trough has been about as classy as feeding time at a pig farm. And no disrespect is meant to our old friends, the pigs.

So much of the coverage about golf in recent months has centred around money, avarice and more money. Even the money itself is getting fatigued.

Amid this maelstrom of division, mind-boggling riches, selfishness and hypocrisy, many have questioned the character of certain players. The strength of character, meanwhile, shown by the likes of Woodland, Kirk and Murray is something money can’t buy.

In these turbulent times, they have provided gladdening tales that have been good for the golfing soul.