Mike Edwards on the joys of autumn and Ryder Cup etiquette

But the season that tops them all for me is autumn. I have been known to don the mustard cords and the russet pullover to amble around Helensburgh as a good flâneur should.

The light, the colours, the atmosphere and if you’re lucky, the temperature, autumn has it all. It is the best of the year for me, no question. Keep your heatwave. Keep your snow. Give me the fall.

I had just grabbed fountain pen and Moleskin notebook the other day and was heading off to pen a treatise on Helensburgh’s temporary traffic lights and impossibly slow drivers, when Her Ladyship guided me instead to the toolshed and pointed to some bush between the maglev railway and the observatory in the grounds of the Schloss which, to be fair, had grown exponentially since I last cast my glims on it.

Some charitable soul had given the ground staff time off over the holiday weekend, so it was left to yours truly to engage in hard graft for the first time in far too long.

Four full days it took to whack back this thing, dispose of what seemed like miles of leafy branches, saw the limbs thick enough into lengths which would fit the log burner, then stash them under the nuclear reactor which heats the swimming pool so they will be dry enough to burn a year from now.

As I surveyed the modest pile of resultant wood and did a swift mental calculation of the industry required to create it, I realised that the end didn’t justify the means and while I would never want to waste anything, next year I’ll save my sweat and zip down to Wright’s for a couple of bags of logs.

REGULAR consumers of these bon mots will be aware that I have long since lost love for the beautiful game.

Sadly, the players of my home town team and the Scotland national side could walk past me on Sinclair Street and I doubt I’d recognise any of them.

But football is back in my life with the recent surge mounted by Inverness Caledonian Thistle who, despite a massive punitive points deduction for going into administration, are flying high at the top of Scottish League One.

I never thought I’d say how much I’m looking forward to going to places like Larbert and Forfar, up there with Milan and Madrid in the pantheon of football cities, for big games. But that’s where I’ll be heading shortly as the prospect of watching a match in the flesh looms for the first time in years.

Will I again be addicted to the smell of liniment and the vista of blood and snotters?

Or is it simply that my sap is rising once again because of the prospect of a winning team and I am nothing other than that worst kind of football fan? The glory hunter.

THE opprobrium I have for golf has nothing whatsoever to do with the sport itself.

Why I am not a fan of golf is a dit for another day, but I will admit to raising an occasional eyelid for the Ryder Cup. We have just seen Europe and the United States slug it out in Bethpage, New York for the biennial fest of odd clothes and silly hats.

I covered a couple when I was a jobbing journalist and I was a guest of the sponsors the last time it was at Gleneagles and spent the final day in a miasma of champagne and caviar. Europe won that year, too.

But what irked me most this week is another episode of loutish behaviour by American fans as Rory and the lads were taking their shots.

I can’t believe that a sport that is brim full of rules about behaviour and etiquette allows that to happen.