As weekend golf destinations go, Shanghai isn’t the most obvious. Not if you live in London, anyway. But if the day job requires a couple of days there, why not fix these on a Friday and the following Monday?

Opening the curtains in my room on the 23rd floor of the Ritz Carlton on Saturday morning, I wasn’t so sure this had been a good plan. A grey snow-laden sky might have been a welcome sight if I was in Les Trois Vallées at the start of a week’s skiing. Here in China, it was simply the harbinger of the country’s worst winter weather for 40 years. By the time I reached Tomson, the course which has been home to the BMW Asia Open in recent years, the bag drop zone was more in need of a rack for skis than golf clubs.