I play tennis. But I don’t serve. Ooooh, that’s contentious. Or rather, non-contentious; how can you play if you don’t serve??? If you don’t score?? Well, due to long-term shoulder-fuckage, I stopped serving about 15 years ago when, as a keen statistician, I noted the subtle correlation between serving, overhead, four times, and the agonising pain emanating from my right shoulder. No serve; no pain. Let me just crunch those numbers…

The answer was ’42’. So I stopped serving. And started, essentially, ‘just knocking up’. And purists find this odd, bizarre, un-worthwhile and faintly amusing. Like ‘what’s the point of that then??’ Competitive types simply can’t understand why you’d ever do anything in which you can’t WIN!!!!

So, to put things in perspective, I want you to consider what happens when you watch tennis on tv, or play ‘a tournament’ or whatever it is that enables you to score lots of winning points.

You play an amazing rally, a Federer/Nadal kind’a thing, 15 shots, running round, amazing, incredible, HOW DID HE GET THAT????? Then they stop. They sit down. They drink a glass of Ribena, eat half a banana, chew half a dozen salt tablets whilst towelling themselves off. Then they stroll back to the court, bounce a ball 28 times and hit it into the net. Then they bounce another 28 times and play another point.

In my peculiar, unserving, non-scoring tennis its different. We play an amazing rally, but, if the ball is going well out, we play it anyway, we volley from the base-line, if its way short, we let it bounce twice then hit it back into play, and finally, when it goes into the net, we immediately throw another in and start playing again. Or keep playing again. No pauses, no breaks, no changing ends, none of those effeminate affectations that plague the more princessy verion of the game. We just keep playing. Its hard, fast, non-stop and relentless.

And I love it. And so does Spurs Paul, and others. Who just want to play for play’s sake. In the snow (yesterday), in the rain (today; though not too much rain), whenever.

Its what I like to do. Don’t like running, hate swimming (unless its 85 degrees and a marguerita involved), get bored on a bike after 5 minutes, I just want to chase a ball around. Like a Labrador puppy.

I certainly don’t want to watch football, though the rugby was totally outstanding. Totally.

Have a lovely (cold, wet) Sunday

A xxxx