How to start playing golf from absolute zero

Three clubs. A 7-iron, a pitching wedge, a putter. That's the entire starter kit, and you can buy all three secondhand for less than a night out.

Nobody needs fourteen clubs to learn golf. You need one club you can hit, one club you can chip with, and one club you can roll a ball with on a green. Everything else is an upgrade you earn later.

So skip the full set for now. Go to a used-club shop or a pro shop's trade-in rack and ask for a 7-iron and a pitching wedge from any of the big brands, cavity-backed, made in the last fifteen years. Cavity-backed means the weight is pushed out to the edges of the clubhead, which makes off-centre hits fly straighter. That's the whole reason it matters to you. Avoid anything thin and beautiful with a flat back. Those are blades, they're built for people who strike the ball in the same spot every time, and you are not going to be that person this year.

Grab a putter you like the look of. Seriously, that's the criterion at this stage.

Go to the range before you go anywhere near a course

Your first hour of golf should happen on a driving range mat with a bucket of balls and nobody watching.

Take the 7-iron. Not the driver you were given by your uncle. The driver is the longest club in the bag, the hardest to hit, and the one that will convince you in twenty minutes that you have no aptitude for this.

Hold the club with your hands touching each other, not separated. For a right-hander, the left hand goes on first, fingers wrapping under the grip, and the right hand sits below it with the palm covering the left thumb. Lefties, mirror it. It'll feel wrong. Everyone's does.

Stand so the ball is roughly in the middle of your feet, feet about shoulder width apart, weight even, a slight bend at the hips so your arms hang down freely. Your back stays long. You're not slouching over the ball like you're reading small print.

Then swing at half speed and try to brush the mat after the ball, not before.

That's it. That's the drill. The ball gets in the way of a swing that's already travelling down and forward. Most beginners try to scoop the ball into the air, which lifts the club and produces a horrible skittering shot along the ground. Hit down, and the loft on the clubface does the lifting for you.

Book two lessons before your habits set

A good teaching pro will fix your grip and your setup in one session. Those two things are responsible for a shocking proportion of what goes wrong later, and they're almost impossible to diagnose yourself.

Call your nearest club or range and ask what a block of lessons costs. Ask specifically for someone who teaches beginners regularly, because a coach who spends their week fine-tuning single-figure players is not the right fit for someone who's never made contact.

Tell them, honestly, "I've never played." Good coaches love this. You've got no bad habits to unpick.

Two or three lessons spread over a month, with range practice in between, will put you ahead of someone who's been hacking away unsupervised for a year. The unsupervised route isn't cheaper. It just spreads the cost out and adds a layer of frustration.

And put the swing videos away. Watching forty of them will leave you with forty conflicting thoughts and nothing you can actually do.

Your first real golf should be nine holes on a short course

Don't start on a full eighteen-hole course on a Saturday morning. You'll be slow, you'll know you're slow, the group behind will be waiting, and you'll spend four hours feeling like an obstacle.

Find a par-three course or a pitch-and-putt instead. Every hole is short, you can walk it in under two hours, and you'll hit the sort of shots you've actually practised. These places are usually cheap, relaxed, and half-empty on a weekday evening.

When you do move to a full course, go out late in the afternoon on a weekday. Twilight rates are lower and the course empties. Play nine holes, not eighteen. Play from the forward tees — the shortest set — regardless of what anybody thinks. Golf from 6,800 yards is not a harder version of the same game, it's a different and much worse game for a beginner.

Pace of play is the etiquette that matters most

Golfers forgive bad shots. Every single one of them hits bad shots. What they don't forgive is waiting.

• Be ready when it's your turn. Work out your club while others are playing, not after.
• Play "ready golf." Whoever's ready hits, rather than strictly the player furthest from the hole.
• Pick up. If you've hit double the par of the hole and you're not on the green, put the ball in your pocket and walk on. Nobody minds. Everybody appreciates it.
• Don't look for a lost ball for more than three minutes. Drop another one and keep moving.
• Park your bag or cart on the side of the green nearest the next tee, so you're not walking backwards.

The rest is courtesy you'd work out anyway. Stand still and quiet when someone's swinging, and stand to the side rather than directly behind or in front of them. Rake the sand after you've been in a bunker. Repair the small dent your ball makes when it lands on a green — there's a tool for it in every pro shop and it costs almost nothing. Don't walk between another player's ball and the hole on the green.

Turn your phone to silent before the first tee. If that's inconvenient, that's rather the point of the four hours.

What to wear, and what to stop worrying about

Municipal courses generally don't care. Private clubs usually want a collared shirt, no denim, and shoes without metal spikes. Check the club's website or ring them. One phone call removes the entire anxiety.

Golf shoes are worth buying eventually, not immediately. Trainers with a flat sole are fine on a dry day. What matters more is a waterproof jacket that doesn't restrict your shoulders, because the weather will turn and the round won't stop.

Don't get a club fitting yet. Fitting matches equipment to a repeatable swing, and you don't have one. Give it a year.

The scoring will sort itself out

Count every shot honestly from the start, even on the disasters. It'll be a big number. It stays a big number for a while, then it drops in sudden lumps rather than smoothly.

Keep one simple record: how many shots, and how many putts. Putting is where new golfers waste the most strokes and where practice pays back fastest, because rolling a ball across grass requires no athleticism at all. Ten minutes on a practice green is worth an hour of hitting drivers.

The real reason to learn this game isn't the score. It's that you can call a friend, a brother, your father, your son, and get four uninterrupted hours of walking and talking with them, outdoors, with a shared purpose to hang the conversation on.

Very few things in adult life offer that. Golf hands it to you for the price of a green fee.