There is a ballot every afternoon, which roughly speaking offers a one in three chance of success. So, if you are staying up there for a week, the chances of your achieving your ambition of hitting a ball into the Swilken Burn are considerably better than they are of either the Americans winning the Ryder Cup in 2006 or the celebrations in Ireland being subdued if they don’t. In other words, you would be very unlucky to miss out six days in a row (the Old Course is closed on Sundays.) More constructively, let’s look at the alternatives in the event that your name stays in the hat. For a start, the St Andrews Links Trust – the charitable body responsible for looking after the Old Course – has five other courses within its care, two of which at least are long enough and tough enough to be regarded as tolerably acceptable alternatives to the Old Lady herself. Notwithstanding Messers Blair and Mandelson’s successful re-branding of the Labour Party, naming anything “new” suggests a lack of both imagination and foresight.

The New Course at St Andrews was opened in 1895 and the name was clearly chosen to distinguish it from the only other course that was around then, which was the Old. Laid out by Old Tom Morris and his assistant, David Honeyman, it is a classic links course with the traditional nine out and nine back configuration, the odd shared fairway and even a double green at 3/15. Shaped rather like a spoon – that’s the one that goes with a knife and fork not a mashee and niblick – the course takes you out along the left-hand side of the handle, let’s you wander around a bit up the bowl end next to the Eden Estuary and then brings you back home along the right-hand side of the handle. Sandwiched between the Old and Jubilee Courses on the same stretch of links land, it has precisely the same feel to it with similar bumps, hollows, springy turf, grisly gorse and fearsome bunkers as its venerable neighbour. So similar, in fact, that it has been removed as one of the