SATURDAY afternoon, and driving rain is pinging off the leafy shrubs and rather disconsolate-looking garden furniture spread out on the hotel terrace behind me. I’m staying with my husband at The Grove, a new golf and spa hotel just outside London, in Hertfordshire; our room boasts widescreen TV with DVD library, fluffy bed, temptingly full minibar and a bath made for two. Romance ahoy, you might think.

Well, you’d be wrong. Instead I am wearing an oversized (borrowed) fleece, sheltering in a souped-up Tonka toy car by the 15th hole, while my husband squelches around looking for his third lost ball. Before it started to lash with rain, I sporadically got out of the Tonka toy to remove a flag from a hole. Who says romance is dead?

If I wasn’t such a dedicated wife, I’d be somewhere else, most probably the spa, trying to indulge in a rosemary and seaweed wrap, only to be told that it isn’t something I can eat. The golf-spa combo: we’re all at it apparently, unable to spot a free weekend in the calendar without booking a couple of nights away stacked with rounds on the golf course (him) and treatments in the spa (her).

But in our all-men-moisturise, all-women-can-swing-a-club egalitarian society, women are an ever-growing pastel presence on the golf course, while men have finally realised that spa treatments are generally about having some 20-year-old lovely rub oils into your unclothed skin. Consequently, they’re starting to book them. It’s a rare man, however, who would swap a five-iron for a facial. But my husband was that man.

And so I found myself, on a wet Saturday afternoon, shivering by a variety of bunkers, picking up tips on eagles and birdies in readiness for my lesson the next day. To my amazement, I was rather enjoying it. This had little to do with the golf, however, and rather more to do with the golf buggy I was driving: a mechanical cart that looked rather like a downsized “Popemobile”, only without the rosaries.

An afternoon on the golf course does shape a weekend away somewhat differently. Gone is the room-centric, indulgent kind of day that has long been my favourite — lots of snoozing and soaky baths and, er, more snoozing.

Instead, I came off the course feeling strangely invigorated and by 6pm we were on gin and tonics in the bar, with Rob celebrating the fact that he had finally got me on to a golf course, and me celebrating that I was off it. Drinks blurred pleasantly into dinner, with only the briefest stopover in the room to swap muddied jeans for spangly frock, and it seemed I’d barely gone to bed before it was time for me to be up and out in golf w orld again.

And it is a world. It’s supposed to be trendy of course, all Tiger Woods and Golf Punk magazine and Hugh Grant snogging someone’s wife behind the driving range, but in reality it’s Surbiton circa 1973, where ladies look pretty in peach and a man without a collar is something of a lout.

As I swung my seven-iron with all the elegance of a Russian shot-putter, I felt as if I’d walked into a little-known episode of Terry and June. I chipped and putted and drove and even occasionally made contact with the ball, and with the autumn sun shining and a gentle breeze blowing, it was all rather pleasant. But it was still another world, and when I walked into the spa — all slick cream sofas and essential oil candles — to meet my newly buffed husband, I felt I’d returned to the 21st century from a galaxy far, far away.

What golf does offer is companionship, particularly if you eschew the delights of the golf buggy and actually walk. This assumes, of course, that you will both be out on the golf course, which is not the point of a golf/spa break at all.

And this is my main problem with the whole concept — why go away with your partner and spend almost no time together? We were so busy with me biffing balls around and Rob being pummelled in the spa that we barely saw each other. Yet isn’t that what a weekend away is all about? For my money, and Rob’s, as it turned out, the best way to have a golf and spa weekend is to do both together. “The massage was great but I did long to be out in the fresh air,” he said, looking unusually shiny. “Ideally I would have a round of golf and then a massage, then I’d feel I really deserved it and it would really spark me up after three or four hours on the course.”

Doing both together can make for an unusually varied weekend; good spas usually have a couples’ treatment room where you can have gloriously indulgent treatments together, slope around in your dressing gowns sipping hand-pressed juices and pretend to read newspapers; a lovely way to spend a rainy afternoon.

And a morning on the golf course with your loved one doesn’t have to be all bad. There is nothing more life-affirming than waiting until the exact moment your husband is about to slot his five-iron into the golf bag on the back of the buggy, and then driving off at speed. Several times. Oh, how we laughed. Well I did, anyway.

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