My amazing collection of golf courses mixes curiosities with creations of unearthly beauty

He kept walking out so that he could walk back into the R&A clubhouse again

The November issue of Golf World magazine contains conclusive evidence that I am a waterproof – the golfing version of an anorak. Of Golf World's list of the 100 best courses in the British Isles, I have played more than half, including all but four of the top 20. Royal County Down, the highest-ranked course to which I have not yet made a pilgrimage, is now in my sights as surely as Charles de Gaulle was in Edward Fox's sights in The Day of the Jackal, if that's not too melodramatic a comparison.

Non-golfers, and even some golfers, are bewildered by this mission of mine to play as many decent courses as possible. But I would rather collect golf courses than football programmes or baseball pennants, and I have some genuine curiosities in my collection, such as the Moscow Country Club (a better place than most to crack the old joke about a putt which stops on the edge of the hole requiring, Bolshevik-style, one more revolution), and La Salle in Burgundy, where the holes were built in homage to the course designer's lover. Thus are two adjacent fairways shaped like a woman's legs, with a vague triangle of thick rough where they meet and beyond that, two adjoining, buttock-shaped greens. Very French.

Course design inspired by a woman's curves is not the sort of caper that would go down well in the Home of Golf; in the lounges of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St Andrews, and the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers at Muirfield, sex is what the stewards dispense coal from. That said, the Old Course at St Andrews does have Mrs Hutchinson's bunker, christened in the 19th century when said lady, the wife of an R&A member, was discovered there in flagrante delecto with a man other than her husband.

That unfortunate incident was described to me a couple of weeks ago by an Old Course caddie, an excellent chap who was carrying my cousin Stuart's bag. (After three holes, Stuart, an urbane Londoner, said to the caddie, "I'm sorry, did you say your name was Donald or Douglas?" "Gordon," said the caddie.) The occasion was a competition to raise funds for the Bobby Jones Scholarship, an exchange programme now 25 years old between St Andrews University and Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, established in memory of the great man by his friends, and in which I was fortunate enough to participate in 1985-6. I play in the fund-raiser every two years and look forward to it for the next 729 days. It starts with a champagne breakfast in the R&A clubhouse, and concludes with a hugely convivial lunch, either side of 18 holes on the Old Course. Which for my money – if not for Lee Westwood's, who shamefully said it would not even rank in his top 200 courses in Fife – is the greatest course on this or any other planet.

Anyway, it was a pleasure to take Stuart, a man not easily impressed, an MCC member who plays real tennis at Lord's every week, yet who had never been in the R&A clubhouse and kept walking out so that he could walk back in again.

To make matters even better, we shared a room at the Old Course Hotel, probably my favourite structure in the world apart from my house and the Gwladys Street End at Goodison Park, and a fantastic place to stay for numerous reasons, not least of which is that it is the only place on the western edge of the auld grey toun from which you cannot actually see the Old Course Hotel; I love the place but it's no architectural beauty.

Stuart was not able, alas, to enjoy with me the cherry on the icing on the cake, which was a game the day before at Kingsbarns, just down the coast from St Andrews and, at 13th, the highest new entry in Golf World's list. If anything, Kingsbarns, still only two years old, should be even higher, although, despite the best efforts of the magazine's distinguished panel – which included Bernard Gallacher, Ronan Rafferty, John Jacobs and Peter McEvoy – such a list is an exercise in invidiousness. I can't believe that there are 100 better courses than the unranked Trevose, near Padstow in Cornwall, and if there are, sheep-strewn Royal North Devon (100th) is certainly not one of them. Moreover, to compare the West Course at Wentworth (19th on the list, which in my humble opinion is way too high) with Royal Porthcawl (32nd; far too low) is, in golf course terms, like comparing a fish with a bicycle.

Still, if not taken too seriously, it's excellent fodder for debate, as was the BBC's recent poll to find the 100 greatest Britons, which yielded Michael Crawford at 17th in a list in which Milton and Wordsworth and Constable didn't feature at all, although a bigger outrage in my view was a place for Boy George yet no place for Young Tom Morris. And don't even start me on the inexplicable absence of Gordon Lee.

b.viner@independent.co.uk