Emma Hope has forgotten to bring her golf clubs. This might seem like a fairly major oversight, as far as preparation for a round of golf goes, but it actually doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. She’s been on the phone for a large part of the morning, speaking to investors who want to help her company expand, and, as I know only too well, the prelude to the first tee is always a time of mental clutter: a period when the little questions (“Do I have tees? Drinks? A pitchmark repairer? An empty bladder?”) can easily swamp the bigger ones (“Do I have anything to use to play golf?”).

Emma Hope, on her favourite course at Saunton, in Devon, finishes a ‘Sam Snead-like’ swing

What does surprise me is that Hope does not have any golf shoes with her. The beautiful, intricate footwear she designs for a living is available in more than 150 stores worldwide, including Harrods, Neiman Marcus and her own, eponymous shops, of which there are three in London. Handcrafted in small, family-owned factories in Tuscany, her shoes have been worn by Uma Thurman, Kevin Spacey and the characters in the 2005 film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice. But today she must settle for wearing a chunky-toed, last-minute purchase from the pro shop at Saunton, on Devon’s north coast. “They look a bit like something a policeman would wear,” she says.

That someone concerned with the aesthetics of a clothed foot should even consent to play golf in the first place is probably a sign of an unusually tolerant personality. If manufacturers had only been able to use old watering cans for source material, it’s doubtful that they could have made more hideous shoes than those that have sullied the world’s fairways over the past 50 years. I’ve been playing golf since 1988, and it wasn’t until about six months ago that I finally found a pair that I could look down at without feeling nauseated. But Hope clearly has an all-transcending love of golf, stretching back to her itinerant childhood, when her naval captain father would take her to play at courses in Malaysia and at Tandridge in Surrey.

Hope still plays at Tandridge. “I’ve been there for three decades, but the course marshals in the buggies still say, ‘Excuse me, are you a member?’ every time I go.” I can’t believe they’d question the authenticity of Hope’s swing, which has a Sam Snead-like fluidity. That said, it must be a very disorientating experience for an ageing brain, driving out into your private kingdom in a glorified white dodgem, and coming across one of the 67 women in Britain under the age of 45 who play amateur golf because they genuinely enjoy it.

Hope has never designed a golf shoe, since she doesn’t think she’d be able to sell to enough women, although she quite fancies doing a “soft calf two-tone correspondent brogue with light studs and a Great Gatsby-goes-to- Harlem glamour” as part of her new Hope For Men range.

Nobody asks us if we are members during our round at Saunton’s East Course. Even if they did, we probably wouldn’t hear them. The Atlantic wind is a constant, sinister, heavy-breathing companion, and our opponents for the day are my friends Simon and Scott, who tend to view golf mostly as an opportunity to experiment with new kinds of creative swearing. This is in sharp contrast to Hope, who greets golf’s numerous disasters philosophically and its little victories with unadorned glee.

Hope had initially invited me to join her here, at her favourite west country course, almost a year ago. My reasons for prevaricating were purely down to vanity. The first time I’d played golf with her was at an event called The Notting Hill Open, which, confusingly, wasn’t played in Notting Hill, but at Stoke Park in Buckinghamshire. During the course of our round, she’d somehow got the idea into her head that I was a half-decent golfer: an impression no doubt largely down to a) me almost winning a long drive competition, and b) my performance being framed within the context of our playing companions for the day, both of whom were completely stoned.

I wanted to preserve this illusion and I felt sure, from what I’d seen and heard about Saunton, that it would reveal me as an impostor. Any venue that a grinding masochist such as Nick Faldo says is one of his favourite links courses and has holes with names such as “Anstead’s Humps” was never going to be easy. Sure enough, 10 holes in, my swing has become an ungainly prod, and it’s only a series of heroic putts from Hope that’s keeping us in the match. I’m not even any help on the dogleg 11th, when Hope’s bag falls off her trolley and rolls very, very slowly into a stream on the right side of the fairway. As the two of us stand, frozen – almost literally – to the spot, watching its descent, we must look like we’re involved in a pointless physics experiment.

Before her shoe business took off, Hope did a stint as a part-time buggy driver for a BBC camera crew during the 1985 Open at Royal St Georges. “It was harder than you think,” she remembers, “and I don’t think my navigational skills were up to the test.” I’m a bit worried, because when she says this, it’s almost pitch black, and Simon, Scott and I are relying on her to direct us up to the final hole. Who knows which of the seven buildings shining on the hillside ahead of us is the clubhouse? We make it, somehow, some of us with no ball at all, some of us with balls that weren’t ours 10 minutes ago, and call it a draw.

This is a day when it’s not the winning that counts, nor even the taking part, but the post-round drink. It’s only then, settled in front of a log fire with lively company, in dry footwear that doesn’t make you feel like you’re in an episode of Traffic Cops, that you can reflect, and convince yourself that what you were doing today was, in its own, sadistic way, a form of fun.

Tom Cox is the author of ‘Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia’

...................

The details

Saunton Golf Club accepts visitors by prior arrangement, 01271 812436; www.sauntongolf.co.uk; www.emmahope.co.uk

pursuits@ft.com