The golf writers do enjoy a regular, morale-boosting nibble to help keep the cogs of industry birling and twirling away during those long, seemingly endless days at a tournament.

Stick your head into a well-stocked media centre, for instance, and you’d think you were gatecrashing Richard III’s Coronation banquet. 

There are insatiable scribblers who could probably shoehorn in a five-bird roast between breakfast and brunch.

Last week’s AIG Women’s Open at the Old Course was given added lustre by the eagerly anticipated daily delivery at 3pm of a vast array of eclairs, yum yums, pastries and fudge doughnuts from a well-kent St Andrews bakery of long standing.

By about 3:03pm they were just about gone amid a quite ferocious feeding frenzy that looked a bit like a hysterical pack of shrieking hyenas savaging the carcass of a wildebeest on the Maasai Mara. To be fair to the hyenas, they probably acted with more decorum.

Anyway, it’s safe to say that your correspondent is all caked out. In fact, this column itself now has a worryingly high level of cholesterol. Even reading it will send yours soaring.

For Lydia Ko, her St Andrews success was, well, the icing on the cake. It was a corker of a conclusion and the cast of characters vying for supremacy down the stretch provided a fitting finale to golf’s major season.

You had Ko, fresh from her Olympic victory aiming to end a major drought stretching back over eight years. There was world No 1 Nelly Korda going for a seventh victory of the season, Lilia Vu striving to become the first back-to-back champion since Yani Tseng in 2011 and the resurgent veteran Jiya Shin trying to land the Women’s Open for the third time. It was compelling stuff.

Yes, I know the pace of play at times during the championship was utterly desperate. Thursday’s first round, for instance, creaked to over six hours. Imagine the startling number of cakes the yawning golf writers got through in that time? On second thoughts don’t. You’ll give yourself terrible abdominal bloat.

But a terrific championship got a terrific winner in Ko. Warm, wonderfully down to earth and always gracious, the New Zealander remains a tremendous standard bearer for the women’s game. 

In the continual quest to encourage more young girls to pick up a stick and ba’, golf couldn’t ask for a more inspiring figure.

The look of delight, meanwhile, on the faces of young ‘uns in the crowd grabbing autographs with Ko and other marquee players during the week showed the appeal of star names. Inspiration can be the greatest driver of all. Golf is lucky to have Ko and the rest of the global gang.

The AIG Women’s Open is now a properly presented and promoted event. There’s a lovely vibe about the whole affair and the various, come-all-ye activities in the Festival Village underline the progressive thinking behind its staging.

Compared to The Open Championship, which in my humble opinion is simply too big nowadays and a playground for a growing battalion of hark-at-me, lairy oafs in the crowd, the women’s event provides a gust of welcoming air that could just about register on the Beaufort Scale.

We all know that girls, women and families remain a massive and largely untapped market. The more they are encouraged to engage with golf, the better the game as whole will be. You don’t need to be a genius to work that one out.

It’s easy to say all this, of course. The challenge, particularly in the game’s cradle, to get girls golfing remains an on-going one. 

“If people knew what more could be done, I think it would be being done,” said the great Scot, Catriona Matthew, when asked if enough had been done to build on her sparkling legacy.

Matthew has been one of Scotland’s greatest sportspersons, even though her achievements down the years have been woefully under-appreciated in many quarters. The 55-year-old tends to be so modest, she’ll probably not even mention her name in her own autobiography.

Matthew made her final appearance in the AIG Women’s Open last week and waved ta-ta on the Swilcan Bridge on Friday night. 

The only other Scot in the field, Gemma Dryburgh, missed the cut too.

The 31-year-old Aberdonian, who became the first Scot after Matthew to win on the LPGA Tour in 2022, will be back but there’s not a great deal coming up behind her.

There are only three Scottish players holding cards for the Ladies European Tour and Kylie Henry, at 37, is the highest on the current order of merit at No 122.

This week, Matthew will have two of her young compatriots in her midst when she captains GB&I for the first time in the Curtis Cup at Sunningdale.

Hannah Darling and Lorna McClymont are exceptional amateur talents but it’s unfair to burden them with the tag of ‘the next Catriona Matthew’ just yet.

The professional scene is a tiny part of the golfing ecosystem. As long as there are people coming into the game at the grassroots, then there is always hope of a flourishing future. 

Maybe a few have been inspired to give it a go after a trip to the AIG Women’s Open too?

And on that note, it must be time for a fudge doughnut…