And no, it isn't smoking, per se. Smoke all you like. Draw in the fumes from a Marlboro Light, suck the nut from a Winfield Blue, deeply inhale the pure, if smoky, freshness of Scandinavia. 

Hmmmm. Menthol Kools. So fresh. So Scandinavian...

You could wrap your laughing gear around a Paul’s Billabong, to mangle the meaning of a catch-phrase of ‘80s Aussie kitsch, and I would say, no judgement here.

Indeed knock yourself out, champion, which is ironically what cigarettes will do to you, after long enough drawing upon their carcinogens.

Bottom line, in the dear, sweet, freedom-loving Commonwealth of Australia, smoking cigarettes remains entirely your call.

But, please, don't, in the name of sweet Ian Baker-Finch and all that is holy don’t leave the remnants of the filthy godforsaken bastard things in the sand bucket hanging off your golf cart.

Do not do this. You are better than this. PHOTO: Matt Cleary

Now, you’ll note I asked that you not leave your butts in the bucket.

Even if there are cheap, modular, enclosed ash-trays-of-sorts for storage and later disposal of cigarette butts, I actually don’t mind (well, I mind, but y’know) that you use a sand bucket for your cigarette butts.

Better in a bucket than blithely cast aside to later end up inside a rare waterfowl or black flying fox or pouch of eastern grey kangaroo, right?

Better, even, than in the den of a feral fox which doesn’t deserve pollution by gasper, am I right?

I am right.

Better, too, in a sand bucket than discarded out onto one's Santa Ana couch or TifEagle superdwarf Bermudagrass where it might be left to decompose while eking toxins which leech into the water table for the next 500 years.

Putting the butt in a sandbucket remains better than those things, and many other things.

But! Don’t! Then! After you've stuffed the dead ciggie out in the sand, don’t, please, leave the godforsaken things in your sand bucket when you’ve finished your round.

I mean, come on.

I. Mean. Come. On.

Long John Daly loves a gasper. If he disposed of his butts in a sandbucket and left them there for the cart kids to clean up, it would harm his reputation, a lot. PHOTO: Getty Images

Look, sure - to golf is to whinge. There’s something can bug you every round. Unraked bunkers. Unfilled divots. Sand-filled divots. Divots filled with sand from which poke old cigarette butts left there by perhaps the most selfish godforsaken individuals upon old Mother Earth.

I mean, who do you think is going to pick the damn things out of the sand? Magic cigarette disposal pixies?

No, it’s left to junior staff at the pro shop, cart boys and girls on $13.76 an hour, to empty the buckets into the bin, where someone with a single ounce of empathy or manners or etiquette would have done it before they’d left the course proper.

In fact, you want to know if a potential partner, who happens to be a smoker, is a keeper? Take them on a date around a golf course, and perform something like the door test in that movie with Robert De Niro and Chazz Palminteri and introducing Lillo Brancato Jr. as Calogero “C” Anello. You know the one. Bronx Tale. Good flick.

But instead of seeing if your date will reach over to unlock the driver's side door after you've ushered them into the passenger side, and thus proving if he or she may be one of your three allotted Great Ones, see if, after their round of golf, your playing partner and potential partner-partner, empties their sand bucket of cigarette butts.

And if not, well ... your call, buckaroo. But you'll know they're a selfish turkey without a shred of empathy for the wellbeing of kids who wash golf carts.

Fact. 

Charley Hull, smoking. PHOTO: Getty Images

Because if they don’t take that sand bucket to the nearest garbage bin after their round, then you should kick them, metaphorically of course, to the curb, because what sort of selfish brain-eating parasite would do such a thing, someone think of the children, and so on. 

I mean... Sweet flaming Lucifer! But that’s a bad habit. And not the smoking, though it is quite bad. But it is your lookout, of course, your business, nicotine is legal, even if it will eventually kill you and very badly. And as an example to said children, it’s up there with every day tapping yourself on the head with a hammer with ever firmer resolve.

No, the smoking itself is bearable. But the habit of leaving the damned cigarettes in the sand bucket and then going to the bar, and then driving away from the golf course, safe in the knowledge that some poor, probably young cart boy or girl, will be cleaning out those buckets.

That, friends, is … and I choose these words carefully … bad.

It is very bad. Perhaps very bad.

And as the late, great Yul Brynner would tell you: don't do that, you selfish prick.