Life :) - Tennis

Flat(ulent) mate

February 3, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

Living with another person again has given a greyish-brown tinge to everything. I’m used to doing whatever I do without being noticed. Now whatever I do is noticed, analysed, scrutinised and critiqued in an accusatory tone, and it wears me out. This is how I live here. I try and be as unobtrusive as I can. If you don’t like how I live, you don’t have to live here. My flatmate is an eminent Wikipedia editor, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Lack of personal space is also a problem. To partially solve that, I dismantled my slat bed last night and moved it into storage in the basement. Moving the mattress was in no way a one-person job but I had no real choice. I’m now sleeping in the spare bedroom instead, and I’m turning what was my bedroom into a study. Then there’s the farting. So many farts, and they all sound like the noise a squeezable bottle of Wattie’s tomato sauce makes when you accidentally get a bigger dollop than you wanted. I’ve now got enough fascinating fart facts at my fingertips to heavily analyse, scrutinise and critique if I so wish. Of course the biggest problem with any flatmate is me; I like my own company far more than the average person, and I’ve certainly got used to it over the years.

My contract at work was due to finish on 17th October, but that has now been ripped up and my end date is now 7th April. Yes, just two months away. I got called into a meeting about this today. This has all come about because of one new manager who wants to change things just to make his mark, just for something to add to his CV to help him get the next job in a couple of years where he’ll be able to make a 5% bigger mark for 5% more money, and so on. New roles will be created, and I should be able to slot into one of them, so all is by no means lost, but it’s still an unnecessary process that causes unnecessary stress, and not everyone does have a role to slot into. In the meeting I was thinking about that lovely feeling I got when I arrived in Boston the second time. Mmm, Boston. And it’s been almost as hot today as it was on my last day there; another beautiful day in what has been a fantastic summer, but I’ve felt worn out and unable to appreciate it one bit.

I’ve now had three ransom viruses at work. They’re becoming a bit of a joke, as am I. The source of them remains a mystery. Every time I get one my PC has to be rebuilt and my ability to actually do anything is heavily compromised. I’ve got them all on Wednesdays at around noon. There’s a 4% chance you’d get them all on the same weekday so that may or may not be coincidence. Though I wouldn’t admit it to my colleagues, I was a bit disappointed not to get a virus today.

On Friday I’ll attempt to sell the Camry to Turners. I’ll be catching a very early flight to Christchurch the next morning. On Monday I’ll be picking up my parents’ Honda and driving it back here. I’m very much looking forward to the drive and the ferry, which I haven’t been on since 2004.

The Australian Open women’s final was a wonderful match with such an unexpected result, though it was seriously in doubt right until the end. I was so happy for Kerber that she won. It was the best women’s match I’ve seen in quite a while. There were surprises throughout the women’s draw, with Shuai Zhang coming from zero lifetime grand slam wins to make the last eight where she was beaten by Johanna Konta who now plays for Britain. And yes, I had to update that page (there was the very real possibility in the third set that Serena would save a match point and go on to win, and I’d have to update it for a different reason). The men’s tournament was altogether more predictable, and Andy Murray (predictably) lost to other-worldly Djokovic, falling to his seventh defeat in nine grand slam finals. But hang on a sec, nine grand slam finals. That’s quite an achievement in itself.

Tennis

Interclub tennis – Week 6

January 30, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spent easily more time on court today that in any of my pre-Christmas interclub outings. In the first set of the doubles we never got a game in front and at one stage trailed 5-3, but our opponents fell away a bit and we ended up in a tie-break where we took a 6-3 lead. Unexpectedly they then played three very good points, including two on my serve (what could I have done differently?) to make it 6-6, and the final two points ended with me erring into the net. Great. We’ve just blown three set points in a tie-break, and the only way we can win this match now is in a super bloody tie-break. And they’ll be cock-a-hoop (isn’t that a funny expression?). Surprisingly our opponents’ level dropped in the second set and as we took a 5-2 lead my partner gave me one of those annoying fist bumps. I’m guessing a fist bump is supposed to make you play better. Or something. Our lead was soon cut to 5-4, but we brought up three more set points in the following game. They all came and went, including a sudden-death point, and it was 5-5. A major turning point came in the 11th game when we won a high-intensity rally to get to 30-all. This galvanised us, and we won the set 7-5, taking our fifth opportunity of the set and eighth overall. Super bloody tie-break. We lost the first three points but won the remaining ten. It was nice to win but I didn’t feel I was of much help to my partner until that big point towards the end of the second set which got my intensity level up. We played only two sudden-death points – winning one and losing one – but frankly with those tie-breaks the match was sudden-deathy enough that it didn’t need any more.

In the singles I played a bloke in his sixties with a stronger-than-average backhand for this level, making life difficult for me at times. I was comfortable if a little erratic in the first set which I won 6-2 in under 25 minutes, but the second set was over twice as long as the first and a different beast altogether. I got up 3-0 after some long games, and then won a ridiculously long point to reach deuce in the following game. My opponent stood facing the fence for a minute or more, finally saying “that was a real gut-buster”. I felt sorry for the poor bloke. I hardly gave him the next two points but I certainly eased back a bit, something I can’t ever remember doing before and will avoid doing again. He took advantage, winning that game and the next (yet another deuce game). Suddenly I was struggling, especially on my forehand. We reached 4-4. I hit two winners (they’d been in very short supply) early in the ninth game and he missed some would-be winners by small margins to leave me serving for the match. I led 5-4, 40-15: double match point. On the first of these he got lucky with a net-cord; on the second I served a nervy double fault. Bloody hell. Two more long rallies ensued and I got there somehow. I timed the match at 76 minutes but it felt longer. He was a tenacious opponent and after giving him a sniff in that 3-0 game, I never felt in control. It was a good job I’d built up a lead because I sure as hell needed it. Overall the team won by four matches to two.

I fear that both the Australian Open finals will be short, such is the dominance of Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic (and in the case of Serena, presence too). If Serena does somehow get beaten I’ll need to update this page because Angelique Kerber faced a match point as early as the first round.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

It’s a fix

January 21, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Saturday I played Risk with a bunch of people from a Meetup group, including my soon-to-be flatmate. We played at my place. Having all these relatively unknown people over caused me some anxiety which didn’t entirely disappear when we started playing. I was playing with some clever people who knew their war history inside out and backwards and could spell and pronounce “hegemony” and even use it in a sentence. Two people brought along far newer copies of the game than mine, which was quickly deemed to be old hat. We played a version I’d never played before where the objective was to complete missions instead of dominating the world. I had the chance to eliminate somebody but decided against it in order to complete a mission. Half an hour later this decision backfired spectacularly as the bloke I could have knocked out knocked me out in last place. I then just wanted to go home, but I already was home. Bugger.

I’m experiencing a lot of anxiety at the moment. The imminent arrival of my new flatmate isn’t helping.

On Tuesday night I watched the second set of Simona Halep’s shock defeat to the 133rd-ranked Chinese qualifier Zhang Shuai in the first round of the Australian Open, with commentary in Romanian. I understood a few words here and there. It was a stunning performance by Zhang who completely overpowered Halep in the last five games. She was in the zone, hardly missing at all, and Halep seemed unwilling to change her game. I think she was just hoping – not unreasonably – that Zhang’s level would drop. This was Zhang’s first win a grand slam in 15 attempts; she was on the verge of quitting the sport. She has since followed that up with a convincing win over Alizé Cornet, ranked exactly 100 places above her.

There has been a lot of talk about match fixing in tennis in the last few days. This should come as no surprise. It’s an extremely easy sport to fix (much easier even than other individual sports like boxing), and with the array of bets available on sites like Bet365 that go right down to point-by-point level, you don’t even need to fix the whole match. It’s also a ridiculously top-heavy sport. The top ten amass vast fortunes, while those ranked in the 150 to 200 range struggle to make ends meet. If you’re ranked 200th in the world, you’re an incredible player. If I played the 200th best player in my country of just two million blokes, I’d probably win six or eight points in the entire (two-set, twelve-game) match. Now extend that to the whole world, and you get a player who eats, sleeps and breathes tennis, someone who spends many hours at the gym, on the practice courts, travelling to play tournaments in tinpot towns like Timișoara that nobody has heard of, and he can’t make a living from it. But you’re able to bet on his matches, and you can understand why the temptation to tip the very unbalanced tennis scales a little would be so strong for him.

I’ve got friend, of sorts, in Auckland who if I’m honest does my head in. But we had a chat last night on the phone and he was genuinely interested in my plans to go overseas, dropping the little man in Google Maps and telling me what he saw at his end. It was nice that someone was taking an interest.

Language learning - Life :)

Romanian commentary 7 (and a bit of Bowie)

January 14, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had absolutely no idea David Bowie was so ill, so I was shocked and saddened to hear that he had died of liver cancer at the age of 69. Most rock stars don’t really appeal to me as people: stardom is a long way from anything I’ve ever aspired to. But Bowie is an exception; I wouldn’t have minded at all being him. He was always reinventing himself, visually as much as in his music (who was your favourite David Bowie?), and he must have had a helluva lot of fun doing that, but he also seemed a thoroughly nice bloke. My dad told me that his first TV appearance in 1964 at the age of 17 caused quite a stir, mainly because his hair was a bit long. That would be laughable now. So Bowie was lucky I guess that he was around in a time when you could still make an impact.

On Tuesday I looked for articles about David Bowie on Romanian websites. I printed off three. The first two articles gave you the facts and figures: that he died after an 18-month battle with cancer, that his career spanned 50 years, and that his latest album, Blackstar, was released on his birthday two days before he died. I didn’t have too much problem understanding them. But the third article was on a different plane entirely; the author told us how, as a very emotional 20-year-old student, he was affected by Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, and similarly how he felt when Freddie Mercury died three years earlier. In comparing those experiences to hearing of Bowie’s death, he used a lot of flowery language and complex constructions that left me all at sea, even with the aid of Google Translate (which, admittedly, is some way short of perfect). I’ve got a long, long way to go in learning this language.

To improve my listening skills I’ve taken to watching the Romanian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on YouTube. It’s great for a whole raft of reasons. The questions and possible answers appear on the screen, so you can try and figure out what the question means (and sometimes attempt to answer it), or you can pause the video and look a word up. The contestant often spends considerable time on a particular question; that’s to my advantage too. The same phrases come up all the time: “are you sure?”, “final answer”, “phone a friend” (which is “sună un prieten“; they annoyingly call the 50:50 lifeline “fifty-fifty”) and so on, so I try and pick them out. Amounts of money of course come up regularly, and I can now pick out stuff like “Marius is 36 years old and he’s a lawyer from Bucharest.” You learn quite a lot about Romanian culture from watching it too; questions on sport are far rarer than in the UK (and certainly the Aussie) version, while questions on art and the Bible are far more common. One particular question from the last programme I watched was about monkeys (maimuțe). Which of these monkeys doesn’t exist: vervet, owl, spider or rabbit? The contestant (who did well in the end) used two lifelines on that question, and I could tell that he and the host were making jokes about monkeys throughout the rest of the game, but I was nowhere near being able to understand the jokes.

Talking of monkeys, it will soon be Chinese New Year: the Year of the Monkey (anul maimuței – to say “of something”, instead of using the word for of you change the ending of the something). I’m a Monkey, born in 1980, and here’s hoping that this will be my lucky year. Pity my poor brother: he’s a Cock. (Outside Chinese culture most people aren’t going to know the full zodiac – I don’t think I do – so it would be fun to think up an animal at random and say that you’re the Year of the Alligator or something, and see if you get away with it.)

Language learning

Romanian commentary 6 – some challenges

January 11, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve made reasonably good progress with Romanian so far, I think. Off the top of my head I know how to say I’m happy or sad or bored or tired or proud or ashamed or tall or short. I don’t remember knowing any of that after the same length of time learning French. I’ve spent a good number of hours in the last ten weeks reading and listening to Romanian, and a smaller but still significant amount of time writing it. What I haven’t done yet, and what I really need to do, is speak it. (OK, I have spoken it a bit, to myself, but I’ll soon be getting a flatmate and he might think I’m nuts.) So far what I’ve done is the equivalent of learning how to play tennis by hitting against a wall. I can now hit a half-decent forehand, backhand and volley, but I’m buggered if I have to react to someone else’s forehands, backhands and volleys. Problem number one: how do I find someone in Wellington to speak Romanian with? My best bet was the Romanian lady who turns up to the tennis club every six months or so, but she never replied to my email. It looks like I’ll have to go online, and for me that will take cojones or whatever the Romanian word is. I haven’t got that far yet.

Problem number two: as a native English speaker, the bar is constantly being raised. By that, I mean that the standard of Romanian I’d need to reach before it becomes really useful gets higher by the day. That’s because the average Romanian’s English gets better by the day, and unless I get fairly good at Romanian, people are likely to just respond to me in English if and when I get over there. Interestingly when I last went to Italy in 2010 I didn’t have this problem, even though my Italian was only at a high basic (or low intermediate) level; if you speak German at that sort of level you don’t stand a chance. I expect Romanian to be somewhere in between. A day will probably come when it is no longer worth an English speaker’s while to learn any foreign language; that will be a sad day.

Problem number three: there aren’t a ton of textbooks, phrase books, CDs or websites to help me learn the language. This isn’t French or Spanish or German or even Mandarin. It just isn’t very popular. But there is a lot of real-life material out there like YouTube videos and online articles. After all, over 20 million people speak Romanian and a great many of them have large digital footprints. In a way, having to use “proper” material makes the learning experience more fun. It reminds me of the time I tried to figure out badugi, a relatively obscure poker game, with the aid of a spreadsheet. I made enough money from that game to pay for a month-long trip to America. I hope Romanian treats me as well as badugi did.

I’ll talk about exactly what real-life material I have been using in my next post.

Life :) - My big plan

Not a lot to lose

January 10, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

This has all happened out of the blue, but my flatmate will be moving in, perhaps next weekend but more likely the one after. I think – hope – this experience will be a lot less exhausting than the last one.

I’m looking forward to having some company as well as, obviously, the extra income. Having a mortgage hasn’t made life easy financially. In the last four years I’ve spent next to nothing on clothes, next to nothing on eating out, next to nothing on entertainment, next to nothing on my car (but see below), and next to nothing on my apartment itself. That’s five line items that a lot of people take for granted, but which for me are pretty much blank cells in the spreadsheet, not that I feel in any way deprived. There was the small matter of my trip to America a few months ago, but that was my first overseas trip since 2010. (Travelling overseas gave me such a boost that I simply have to do it again. For a good length of time. And soon. I just wish I could have made that boost last a bit longer.)

Those aren’t the only “blank cell items” in my life that many of us take for granted; I can add in a partner, a family, a career, and a real sense of identity, whatever that’s supposed to mean. And it’s because of all these blank cells that I can do what I’m planning to do later in the year. I don’t have much to lose. But I do have a British passport and an apartment I can hopefully rent out for $500 a week, and those are two positive reasons that I can do this. I’ll get a rental assessment soon and find out just how much I can get.

As for my car, I took it in last week and they told me the clutch and master cylinder would need to be completely replaced. I was quoted $1150, more than the car is worth, so that’s that. I can still drive it for a while, but it’ll only get worse. My parents have a spare car – a ’95 Mitsubishi RVR – and I might fly down there and drive it up here. There’s no point in buying anything if I can help it, when I only plan to be in the country for another eight months.

I’ve played tennis twice this weekend. Yesterday I was shocking, today a bit less shocking.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan

Didn’t think I’d do the flatmate thing again, but…

January 3, 2016 plutomanby 0 Comments

My potential new flatmate is about to come over. He’s the same age as my previous one (born in 1977) and about the same height, but that’s where the similarities end (I hope). He might not be here for long: he intends to go to the UK soon, probably before I embark on my adventure. Anything to get my mortgage down, even by a small amount, before I go away would be really helpful.

Here are some pictures of the big futon move at Makara last weekend. It was a beautiful day there:

DSC00029a

DSC00032a

DSC00035a

And this was my attempt at making a crossword in Romanian:

DSC00038a

ZVON was a word I’d just come across in an online article; it means “rumour”. COZI is the plural of coadă which means either a tail or a queue.

I think we’ve already had our hottest day of 2016 in Wellington. It got to 28 on New Year’s Day.

Life :)

A simple Christmas

December 31, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a good Christmas with Mum and Dad and nobody else. It was far less stressful, particularly for Mum, than anything involving extended family would have been.

On Christmas Eve we went to the church across the way. We had the same priest as two years ago. He’s fluent in at least three languages, including Maori and Spanish, but I bet he knows more. We sang carols (well you could hardly call what I did singing) including some in Maori and a lovely one in Samoan that I hadn’t heard before. Unlike in Geraldine or Temuka (or our local church in the UK for that matter), the congregation was a real melting pot and the service was an interesting and uplifting one.

The weather could hardly have been better the whole time my parents were here. Island Bay on Christmas Day was simply beautiful. Our Christmas dinner included turkey and ham (as all six of my subsequent dinners have done). I got a new camera for Christmas and will put up some more photos when I get the right sort of adapter.

On Boxing Day we went to Palmerston North to see Mum’s younger brother and his kids and grandkids; one day of that kind of thing is enough. I was able to pop out and see a friend who has just moved there from Wellington. He was busking in the middle of town. I was slightly envious of him for being able to (a) play the guitar, and (b) do so in front of people. He said he gets a better hourly rate from his busking than from his job, and I imagine on a 27-degree Boxing Day it was better still. His repertoire is currently only twelve songs; he’ll need to expand that. I hadn’t been to Palmy since 2004 and it was good to have a look around. The Regent Theatre stood out as a very attractive building amongst some rather ugly ones.

CAM01413

On the 27th we went back to Island Bay so that Dad could take some photos (his batteries were flat the first time); I’d like it if he could do more paintings of Wellington. We all agreed that Island Bay would be a good place for my parents’ hypothetical fifth house. (I say hypothetical. I wouldn’t totally put it past them.) As well as being very picturesque, I think it would be an invigorating place to live. That evening Dad and I saw the latest Star Wars film at the Embassy. Dad hadn’t seen any of the previous films; I had but I’m not exactly fanatical. This one was great though. You didn’t need to have seen any of the others to enjoy it, and it was a whole heap of fun.

The next day went to Peter Jackson’s incredibly lifelike Great War Exhibition just across the road. I’d been there before and will definitely go there again. After lunch we went to Makara. I’d been wanting to go there for ages but I’d never really had anyone to go with. It was a lovely spot, and on yet another perfect day it was very popular. Someone had just bought a futon and transported it by (barely big enough) boat to their home. There are some good walking tracks there, which I’ll keep in mind should I ever get back there. My car had a good workout getting to Makara and back. Its clutch is slipping, and the cost of a new clutch (if I need one) might be prohibitive. I might have to get by without a car for a while, just like I plan to in Sibiu or Timișoara or wherever I end up. (I’m too far down the track now to let anything in my control stop me from going to Romania. Of course plenty of things could happen between now and September that are out of my hands, but otherwise if I don’t go through with this I’ll regret it. Mum and Dad are very supportive of my plans, and for that I’m grateful.)

After dinner that evening the three of us played Scrabble. Big mistake. Scrabble really brings Mum’s competitiveness to the fore. This time it made me more competitive too. Mum played very well and both she and I made big scores. I won in the end but that hardly mattered; the game really wasn’t fun. This morning I tried making a Romanian Scrabble crossword without a board and removing the K, Q, W’s and Y’s. I started with ten letters and then added another five whenever I had a completed crossword or got stuck. I tried to do as little rearranging as possible along the way.

My parents left on the 29th. It was almost a stress-free Christmas. We were able to appreciate the simpler things like the pohutukawas which are wonderful at this time of year, and the baby seagulls which hatched on the roof of the apartment block opposite, as they have done every early December since I moved in here. This year there are three, and they’ll fly the nest any day now.

We almost certainly had our last earthquake of 2015 this morning (there’s just half an hour left), and for once I’m optimistic about the year ahead.

Life :)

Modern gestures: please translate!

December 21, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I sat on the bank of the Basin and watched some provincial cricket, along with, er, forty-odd other people. It got me thinking. Sportsmen are really tactile, aren’t they? During Otago’s run chase against Wellington there were fist bumps, high-fives, low-fives, shoulder slaps and all manner of other gestures that I can hardly describe. I hadn’t taken much notice of this before, in the same way that until a couple of months ago, I wouldn’t have taken much notice if two people were conversing in Romanian. And that’s precisely it: this vast array of modern gestures is a foreign language to me. When I drop my colleague off after work, he’ll sometimes want to shake hands with me. That’s a gesture I’m entirely comfortable with; to me a handshake implies acknowledgement of the other person, and it’s good to acknowledge the other person. But other times he’ll want a fist bump or even a high-five, and on those occasions I feel distinctly uncomfortable. I’ve even seen him fist-bump our boss, who unlike me, seems au fait with the concept. I’m guessing fist bumps are meant to imply mateship, something more than just acknowledgement.
As it happened, Wellington’s early declaration paid off, and they skittled Otago’s last six batsmen cheaply when all three results had been perfectly possible. As I walked home (all of three minutes) I passed what must have been the Wellington changing room and I could hear them singing something in celebration of their victory. That’s some kind of mateship going on there again, isn’t it? Even low-grade rugby and football teams have those rituals, don’t they? I’ve never been part of anything like that myself. I play my interclub tennis, and I win and go home, or I lose and go home, or I stick around a bit to watch other people win or lose, and then go home. I have certainly played in teams where we’ve been to the pub afterwards and had a good chat, but singing has never been on the menu.

Temperatures soared into the mid-thirties today. Not here in Wellington – that would just be silly – but on the East Coast of the South Island. Christchurch and Dunedin both broke their all-time records for December; Timaru equalled theirs. (Note that this is New Zealand where “all-time” isn’t that much time. In the UK I’d sometimes hear that it had been “the wettest October since 1806” and those two centuries of weather records would remind me of how pioneering the UK was.) My planned adventure will give me both extremes of temperature to look forward to.

The Spanish general election was interesting, and it will now take a long time to form a government. Sometimes a messy outcome can be a good one, and I think this is one of those times. The two-party system has been well and truly obliterated by two newcomers to the game whose leaders are barely my age. Interestingly, as far as I can see, Spain doesn’t have a significant far-right anti-immigration party. This result is a version of what might have happened in the UK in May if (a) the polls had been accurate and (b) they had a better electoral system, not that the Spanish system is perfect (it gives extra weight to rural voters). Gosh, when the UK exit poll came out on that Friday morning (my time) I almost fell off my chair. I had to go out for lunch and had a hard time keeping the food down.

My parents arrive here tomorrow night. They’ll be staying with me until next Tuesday; we’ll have a very low-key Christmas. I’ve blown up some balloons and hung a bit of tinsel around the place, but really I haven’t been arsed. It will be great to have them here though.

Tennis

Handicap tennis

December 18, 2015 plutomanby 0 Comments

I played in a handicap tournament at the tennis club last weekend (and nearly didn’t because I was still a bit, um, handicapped after the tumble I took in my interclub match). Tennis has never embraced handicapping in the same way that golf has. I think that’s because tennis between players of vastly different standards isn’t much of a game, and giving one player a head start doesn’t magically change that. In golf you’re playing your own game, which isn’t affected (except maybe psychologically) by whatever ridiculous shots Jordan Spieth pulls off if you happen to be playing alongside him. There’s no golfing equivalent of “getting his high kicking serve back” or “combating his heavy topspin”. However, it’s fun to try handicapping in tennis once in a while, and last weekend’s tournament had a certain novelty factor which I enjoyed.

We didn’t use normal tennis scoring; instead we simply played up to 31 points, swapping serves after every five. I played six matches in all:

Singles:
Round 1: started 10 points behind (‒5 to +5), won by 12
Round 2: started 5 points ahead (0 to ‒5), lost by 2.

Mixed doubles:
Round 1: started 5 points ahead (0 to ‒5), won by 8
Round 2: started 5 points ahead (0 to ‒5), won by 11
Semi-final: started 10 points ahead (0 to ‒10), lost by 5.

Men’s doubles:
Round 1: started even, lost by 13.

There are more “levels” in tennis than people think. A better player can easily overcome a ten-point handicap against a weaker player, even in a first-to-31 match. In my first-round singles match I needed to win 36 points out of 61, or 59% of the points. I comfortably managed that, winning 72%. Naturally I was disappointed to lose my second-round match by just two points. My opponent wiped out my head start on a few occasions, but each time I was able to win the next point, most notably at 24-all when I served an ace. He did get his nose in front for the first time at 28-27, but I won the next point and then hit an angled return winner to lead 29-28. At that stage I thought I would do it, but crucially he hit my backhand sideline in the middle of a long rally on the next point, and he always had the upper hand on the last two points.

The men’s singles draw was spiced up somewhat by the presence of a ten-year-old by the name of Angus. He’s at the club with his dad all the time; he can’t get enough of the game. He scored two wins over fully-grown men, one from scratch, the other giving away five points! I’d have played him in the semi-finals, giving him ten points, had I won my second match. One of Angus’s victims (the one who had the head start) was from the UK; he said he’d tell his mates back home that Angus was six foot four with biceps and pecs that you wouldn’t believe.

My mixed doubles partner, who was all of five foot two, was something of a surprise package. She was very consistent and had some unorthodox shots, as I do sometimes. In our second match we seemingly had a zillion match points up our sleeve and needed about half a zillion as our male opponent found some form right at the end. Some way through our semi-final we still had our ten-point buffer, but starting from 0 to ‒10, instead of 5 to ‒5 as my first singles opponent did against me, made it a longer match. I knew they had a long time to catch us up which they jolly well did. It was a good match all the same. Starting the men’s doubles at scratch was a bit of a joke; they were strong doubles players and we’d both have been amazed if we’d got within cooee.

Britain’s recent Davis Cup triumph was their first in almost 80 years. It was rightly celebrated, but it shouldn’t disguise the fact that Britain has a dearth of top tennis players: just two men and two women inside the world’s top 100. Having lived in France (where they currently have ten men and three women in the world’s top 100), it’s easy to see why. In France, it’s seen as a game for everyone; in the UK it’s seen as a game for toffs. Unless the image of tennis changes radically in Britain, Wimbledon and Davis Cup wins are likely to remain once-in-a-lifetime events.