Vintage Roy Kirkham Golf Fine Bone China Footed Mug – Scottish Open Links, Carnoustie & Muirfield, Sculpted Club Handle, England, 1997

The handle is a golf club. Pick it up and your fingers close around a sculpted shaft with a little club head at the top — a detail moulded in one piece, not stuck on, and the sort of thing Roy Kirkham built his name on. Around the cup runs a whole scrapbook of the game: a red bag, gloves and shoes, a trophy, three books spined History of Golf, Golfing Celebrities and Golf for Beginners, a golfer mid-swing in plus-fours — and, painted in a period red coat with a tricorn hat, a golfer from the 1700s.

Those two names in copperplate script are the point. Carnoustie and Muirfield aren't ordinary courses; they are links on The Open Championship rota. Muirfield is home to the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, founded in 1744 — the oldest golf club with a written constitution anywhere, a full decade older than the R&A at St Andrews. This mug isn't painting golf in general. It's painting where the game comes from.

Roy Kirkham trained as a copper-plate engraver before he made china, which is why the small print reads so cleanly — the book spines, the flag numbers, the stitching on the glove. He set up in Stoke-on-Trent, the heart of the English Potteries, in the early 1970s, and the firm is still run by his sons. This is proper English fine bone china: hold it to the light and it glows.

A footed mug — the raised foot is a survival of the Victorian chocolate cup — finished with a green line at the base for the fairway and a gilt rim. It is the sort of thing that was bought as a gift and often kept rather than used; this one is close to unused.

For a golfer's birthday or retirement, a Father's Day gift with more character than the usual, a nineteenth-hole shelf, or a Roy Kirkham collector.