How lucky we all are to be able to turn down the driveway to our golf clubs, recognise many of our friends there, spend time exercising and sharing great experiences in beautiful surroundings and be somewhat cocooned from work, Brexit and shoplifting grannies!

I’ve always said that there’s ‘a lot of nice people in golf’ and I wonder whether the people find the good in the game, or whether the game finds the good in people? Whichever way it is, I doubt you would ever find a nicer person than Jill Sly, who sadly passed away suddenly last week.

She was one of the longest standing members but still a sprightly chicken, playing regularly and had joined the club as a teenager along with her brother, Ian Burnside. Jill was an accomplished golfer and along with her husband, David, joined us in Turkey for many of our mixed trips over the past few years and both were brilliant company too. We even have the carpet from their dining room furnishing the floor of our office after they donated it to us.

We’re all shocked and saddened to lose Jill and I know she would have two schools of thought about this week. Firstly she would have totally disagreed with our female assassin’s summary of life and secondly she would have been delighted to see Ian Burnside out competing in the Turkey Trot at the weekend - another benefit of golf that we can easily take for granted, that we’ve automatically got 500 friends to rely on. These are the things I like to think of at Christmas time, instead of Black Friday sales and Boxing Day sales and sometimes a bad event makes us realise how lucky we are, and I think we were all lucky to know Jill.