Ice Stops Play: The Only Safe Form Of Tennis That Saturday Morning Was The Table Variety
The headline is the diary note; the rest is delightful detail.
Jamil and Souad very kindly and generously wanted to treat us to dinner at Zafferano on the Friday evening. It would have been hard to refuse such a kind offer.
They usually like to treat us to Lebanese food, but they love Zaffs and we had never all been there together. Indeed Janie and I hadn’t been to Zaffs for yonkers, so it seemed like an excellent idea for a change; it was.
The other three were all talked into a delightful veal cheek dish. I felt a bit “vealed out”, having spent much of the midweek eating the most wonderful leftovers from last Saturday’s Daisy special – click here. So I tried a delightful roast guinea fowl dish.
Jamil and Souad are always both delightful company. Jamil likes to pick my brain and debate matters of political and economic importance; gently but shrewdly. You need to keep your wits about you when debating with Jamil; he usually sends the odd curve ball into the discussion, not least a playful tendency to do the devil’s advocate thing unexpectedly and see what happens.
Souad is much quieter but you can tell that she takes everything in. When she does chip in to the discussion, her points are always incisive, decisive or both.
Jamil is a very keen tennis player (proudly so despite advancing years), so we chatted about modern and real tennis – mostly the former. He had seen the latter (at his club, the Harbour Club) but never played it.
Both Jamil and Souad seemed mighty impressed that Janie and I intended to play tennis (modern variety) the next morning at 9:00. It wasn’t an especially late night, but we’d certainly had plenty to eat and drink by the time we left Zafferano and agreed that we should all meet again quite soon.
But of course it was too cold for tennis the next morning. I say “of course”, but Janie and I couldn’t resist going down to the courts just in case; it was borderline temperature-wise but definitely just below freezing and therefore still like an ice rink on the courts.
Only one thing for it; emergency rations on the outdoor table tennis table. We always carry the equipment in our tennis bag for just such an emergency.
Janie usually wins at table tennis, having mis-spent more of her youth on that game than I did, But on this occasion, I was victorious three games to one. Perhaps the extra speed of reactions and cocked wrist needed for real tennis has had unintended benefits on the table variety for me.
Janie doesn’t look angry, even though this photo opportunity came post-defeat.
Simon and I had intended to meet up before Christmas, but as December hove into view, we both felt that a get together might work better after the seasonal holiday, rather than before.
Simon suggested the Old Suffolk Punch in Hammersmith, which seemed a suitable enough venue to me, so that element was agreed and Simon said that he would book it.
What I didn’t realise, until the day itself, was that Simon had committed us to a very particular activity for the evening. Here is part of Simon’s message on the day confirming the details:
…cute online booking form that requests to know what the occasion is… it gives options to choose like: ‘family gathering’, ‘to watch the rugby’, ‘TGIF’, ‘just because’ – but I opted for ‘good old chinwag’. I guess they’ll be watching to make sure that’s what we do…
This had me worried for the rest of the day. I thought we were meeting up, “just because” and I had been looking forward that.
I tried to do some chin-wagging training at the gym that morning and indeed at the office that afternoon, but frankly I didn’t do very well at it during the day and wasn’t at all sure whether I would be up to the task that evening.
I did gently reproach Simon in my reply to his message:
I’m not sure you were authorised to make a decision on that scale, Simon, but I forgive you this once…
I then had an awkward journey to Hammersmith. Despite the tube announcers constantly telling me that there was a good service on the lines, it took 40 minutes for me to get the four stops from Notting Hill Gate to Hammersmith. As Simon said when I arrived, “thank goodness that was a good service”.
But there was far worse to come.
We got our food order in quickly. While we waited for our food, we made a start on the rather tasty bottle of Rioja we had chosen. Within a couple of minutes, Brexit was on the chinwag agenda; indeed before I had even taken off my coat Simon named a particularly venal Brexiteer; a recent Work and Pensions Minister who years ago had briefly been leader of the Tory party.
Simon didn’t merely say his trademark initials or “…Whatsit” (as the Daniel Blake character refers to him in the movie I, Daniel Blake. Yes, Simon uttered the full name. Without so much as a trigger warning.
On hearing THAT name (IDS, not I Daniel Blake), I immediately realised how extremely hot I felt in my coat and how much I wanted to wash my hands, especially before eating, having been on a crowded tube. So I rapidly took off my coat, made my excuses and dashed to the washroom.
By the time I returned, Simon had realised his mistake; indeed he thought he might have triggered a more profound reaction than mere hand washing.
But the truly extraordinary thing about our gathering was that, despite those desperate depths in the run up and start to the evening, in the end we had a most enjoyable time.
The food was very good, in a “good ingredients cooked quite simply, but well” sense. The bottle of Rioja did a grand job. The evening flew by and we weren’t chastised by the staff for inadequate levels of chin-wagging even once. Indeed it is quite possible that we were in fact chin-wagging rather well.
We haven’t yet been invited back to chinwag competitively for the Old Suffolk Punch, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we got the call.
And I’d be even less surprised if we find a suitable opportunity in the not too distant future to meet up again.
I even had a stellar tube journey back from Hammersmith to Notting Hill Gate, at a near-record speed of 20 minutes or so door-to-door, without so much as a single announcer telling me that the service was good.
From the ridiculous to the sublime. A delightful concert of early music. Richard Egarr on the harpsichord with English music spanning the late 16th to late 17th century; Byrd, Purcell and Blow.
There was one small problem though; a tube strike. In the interests of practicality and sanity, I put my principled doubts about Uber to one side, down-loaded the app and organised transport through Uber. The transport only cost a little more than the concert tickets that way.
But we got there and I’m so glad we went.
Once we were at the Wigmore Hall, the music transported us to a happy place without any difficulty.
This was the first Radio 3 Lunchtime concert of the year at the Wigmore Hall. Sara Mohr-Pietsch came on the stage to explain how it works to the live audience and started her little spiel by saying, “hello and good afternoon to both of you”, seeming to address the remark to me and Daisy in the front row.
Perhaps she realised what an effort we in particular had made to get from W3 to W1 on a strike day. Seriously, the hall was pretty much full, so I suppose Sara meant to say “all of you”. Her spiel got better after that.
The audience doesn’t get to hear her radio introductions, so I struggled to work out exactly which piece was which and exactly when Richard Egarr’s short breaks were taking place, until I listened again again on iPlayer.
Which reminds me to tell you, if you get to this Ogblog article quickly enough, you don’t have to take our word for it how lovely this concert sounded.
Clearly, the Daisy Garden did not look like the above photo on the evening that DJ and Steph came to dinner. For a start, it gets dark around 16:00 in London early January. Secondly, Daisy (that’s Janie for the uninitiated) has invested in some fancy new garden furniture since the photo was taken – painted hard wood rescued from old houses in India, recycled as garden furniture, as it happens.
The idea for the dinner started to germinate back in November, when a few of us gathered for an informal Z/Yen/alumni get together – briefly described if you click here. Janie chatted with Steph, phone numbers (or WhatsApp accounts) were exchanged and the rest is history.
Janie has long wanted to try her hand at matchmaking, possibly because she and I were (initially inadvertently, I think) match-made by Kim, DJ’s sister, back in the day. “The day” was the late summer of 1992, which is approaching its 25 year anniversary, so I’m planning a fair bit of retro Ogblogging about that era as this year, 2017, unfolds.
But returning to the evening of 7 January. Possibly in a nod to our own early interactions, Janie cooked one of her signature dishes as the centrepiece of the meal; shin of veal in a clay pot. This dish is quite similar to the ossobuco (traditional style – none of that tomato-laden sauce) Janie cooked the very first time I went to her place for a meal.
But the shin of veal was merely the centrepiece:
preceded by goose rillette and vegetable nibbles;
accompanied by rice and sprouting broccoli;
followed by a platter of fresh fruits and/or chocolates…
…then followed by cheeses.
Drinks a-plenty:
Prosecco (for three)/decent white wine (for me);
Some fine gran reserva Riojas, which (as it happens) DJ gave me for my birthday and I had been saving for a suitable occasion with suitable food;
A bottle of vintage port for the cheese, to more or less guarantee “payback” to some extent in the overindulgence department.
Daisy and I were grateful for a quiet day the next day and an extra day off Monday before returning to the day jobs.
So why a photograph of the garden to head up this piece? Well, one of the most memorable characteristics of the evening (putting aside what good company everyone was, what a superb meal it was and how much we all enjoyed ourselves) was the mildness of the evening. So much so, that we were able to take our drinks and nibbles at the start of the evening in the garden, under the glow of the patio heater, which felt quite magical in January.
Stop press! Update!
Daisy has just seen this Ogblog posting and kindly taken a picture of the magical garden tonight, so readers might see what it looked like (except without the wine, nibbles and the four of us enjoying the evening, of course).
A little knowledge/research can be a dangerous thing, when exploring a field in which you lack expertise. I realise that, in our post-truth, post-expert society, that statement is controversial, but here is a cautionary tale to prove my point.
Many months ago, when I read in the Wigmore Hall brochure that Vijay Iyer was to be the next artist to hold the Jazz residency at the venue, I read his mini CV in the brochure and Googled him. I thought; “looks diverse and interesting; let’s book his first Wigmore Hall concert and see if we like it”.
What I didn’t do was look more closely at the spec. for that first concert and think about whether that particular concert would be to our taste.
I called Janie, wondering why she hadn’t even read the Whatsapp message I sent her about this evening’s arrangements. She was clearly in a stressy mood. “I’m so frustrated with my morning. I can’t get hold of anybody. I have wasted so much time. I’m starting to really stress about getting to the flat on time for the concert this evening…”
There was no point prolonging such a call.
By the time Janie was sufficiently unstressy to call me back to try and finalise the arrangements, I was all stressy because, as I said to her, “I need to wrap up warm and leave the house in five minutes to get to the doctors’ surgery on time for my jabs”.
“You’re not having jabs,” said Janie, “you are having one jab. Jab, singular. No-one but no-one makes as much fuss about having one jab as you do.”
Well, actually, that’s not what the new practice Nurse, Liz, said to me a few minutes later.
I apologised to Nurse Liz on arrival for being a big baby and she said, “just don’t look at me”, then distracted me momentarily while she did the job. “That was easy enough”, said Liz.
I explained to Liz that my mother had an anecdote about me, which she used to tell all-too regularly. When I was very small, on one occasion the doctor and my parents had to chase me around the house ahead of one of my jabs, only for one of my parents (probably mum) to pin me down under the dining room table, allowing the doctor to get down on her hands and knees to vaccinate me right there.
“The NHS was a truly community, personalised service back then, eh?” I said. Nurse Liz laughed and said that she’s had to chase a fair few people around her surgery room in her time too.
In the end Janie got to the flat in good time and I had almost calmed down from the ordeal of my jabs…sorry, I mean jab.
We got to the Wigmore Hall in good time. Despite the stresses of the day, neither of us wanted a glass of wine before the concert – we both had juice. Surely the music would be our de-stressing therapy.
We sat in our seats, where an enormous, beaten-up looking electronic keyboard instrument/speaker was blocking our view of the Wigmore Hall’s exquisite Steinway. Janie tackled a poor unsuspecting young steward on this point, only to be rebutted.
Then Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith emerged. Vijay switched on his electronic instrument, which made a loud hum which reminded me of my father’s old Grundig TK35 reel-to-reel tape recorder, which I loved dearly (the machine, not the hum). I always attributed that hum to the thermionic valves within the machine.
Grundig TK35, ram-packed with thermionic valves. Photograph by Michael Keller, from Rad-io.de.
You see, the bit I hadn’t researched properly before choosing the concert was the other half of the pairing for this gig. Had I done so, I’d have learned that:
Wadada Leo Smith is an American trumpeter and composer, working primarily in the fields of avant-garde jazz and free improvisation…
I guess the pairing of Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith is not entirely “free jazz”, more like BOGOF – “buy one get one free” jazz.
Anyway, that noise was not going to calm us down and make us feel relaxed for the weekend.
Worse – unlike our experience at the Festival Hall nearly 10 years ago, tonight’s concert was primarily a one piece wonder (80 minutes or so) and we were sitting front row central, so the type of early escape we had managed from the Festival Hall in 2007 was out of the question without being rude and disturbing to other punters.
Neither of us were in the best of moods when we left after two encores and some unintelligible speechifying, which put a proverbial cherry on top of our concert experience.
We consoled ourselves with some delicious Persian food from Mohsen and some more soothing music back home as we ate.
I broke it gently to Janie that there were tube strikes planned for Monday, so we would need carefully to plan our trip to the lunchtime concert at the Wigmore Hall that day.
“Who are we seeing Monday lunchtime?”, asked Janie.
“A solo recital,” I said, “I believe it is the trumpeter from this evening.”
“YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN”, hollered Janie.
That was a poor choice of joke for that moment. Actually we’re seeing a harpsichord recital, which should be lovely.
We know a lot more about early music; we didn’t need research or third party expertise to choose that one.
I define daytime television as programmes that are designed for a daytime audience and regularly, probably exclusively, broadcast during normal working hours. Catching up on TV news while I am at the gym or following cricket matches during the day through the TV don’t count as daytime television by this definition.
So, in the five years 2012 to 2016, I guess I had watched daytime television twice.
The first instance was around 2012 or 2013. Hugh Rycroft, one of my old writer friends from NewsRevue, who now devises quiz-based game shows, mentioned to me at one of our Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinners back then, that he had devised a new show, Tipping Point, a daytime quiz, being broadcast on ITV.
“I’ll take a look at that”, I said, meaning it. “I don’t think Tipping Point is your sort of quiz show”, said Hugh, meaning it.
I looked up the timing of the show and resolved to watch it the next time I was at the gym in the afternoon at that hour. Thus I took a look at Tipping Point, as promised. Hugh was right; it’s not my sort of quiz show. The conceit of the show is a facsimile of a coin pusher arcade machine, for which contestants win tokens to play and from which they get (or fail to get) prizes.
My second instance of watching daytime TV in recent years was Bargain Hunt in 2014, when Z/Yen’s practice manager, Linda Cook together with her friend and Z/Yen alumna Marie Logan, appeared on the show. We wrote this big moment up for the Now and Z/Yen blog – click here. As it happens, this programme’s momentous first broadcast was on a Friday when I had no meetings, so I actually watched the programme when it was first shown.
I don’t think Bargain Hunt is my type of programme either, although it was great to see people I knew so well on that show.
But let’s be honest, whether or not these programmes are my kind of show is rather beside the point. They must be a lot of people’s kind of show, because they are phenomenally successful. According to Wikipedia at the time of writing (January 2017):
Tipping Point had 10 series and 508 episodes (at 6 January 2017);
Bargain Hunt had 39 series and 1264 episodes (22 January 2016 figures).
Anyway, I saw Hugh again at this year’s Ivan Shakespeare Christmas Dinner – click here. He mentioned that he had devised a new quiz show, which would start broadcasting on the New Year Bank Holiday Monday; Impossible.
“I’ll take a look at that”, I said, meaning it. Indeed, I intended to watch it on that Bank Holiday Monday.
Come Tuesday evening, after finishing work, I was pondering my evening (probably planning to do some Ogblogging), when it occurred to me that I had clean forgotten to watch Impossible; indeed I hadn’t even set the vid to record it.
But these days, what used to be impossible (seeing a programme despite such neglect) is now more than possible, thanks to iPlayer.
Thus I spent a chunk of Tuesday evening watching daytime television.
I did spend some evening time not all that long ago watching bizarre (in this case comedy) telly on the computer, in bizarre circumstances, but that’s another story, click here for it.
The conceit of the show Impossible is that all the quiz questions are constructed to have three rather than two types of answer: correct, incorrect or impossible. Impossible answers fail some aspect of logic in the question. For example, the name of a British film star would be an impossible answer to a question starting, “which American film star…” Impossible answers get contestants eliminated or make them lose their accumulated winnings, adding an additional dimension of pressure to a time pressure-based quiz.
Surprisingly, I rather like Impossible. As I said to Hugh in a congratulatory e-mail:
…I liked it and enjoyed watching it far more than I can ever remember enjoying watching such a programme.
The format is clever without being too clever. I am tempted to watch it again…
Hugh seemed pleased with this note and even suggested that he plans to use the phrase “clever without being too clever” in his elevator pitches henceforward; which surely means that I get a significant share of the (presumably substantial) earnings from successful “clever without being too clever” programmes, for ever.
Joking apart, my fear, though, is that the very fact that I liked Impossible might be the kiss of death for it. I don’t suppose I am a barometer for successful daytime TV shows; I might be an anti-barometer for them.
Indeed, on reflection, I’m not sure that Hugh should want his shows to be “clever without being too clever” at all. The phrase reminds me of Spike Jones’s explanation for why his hugely talented comedy orchestra was not more successful:
“We’re too sophisticated for corny people and too corny for sophisticated people.”
Still, I am rooting for the TV show Impossible. I sincerely hope it gets the hundreds or thousands of episodes it deserves.
If only I could hold sway over Dumbo-pan (above) and Daisy-pan, the way that Aishol-pan the Eagle Huntress can control her horse and eagle.
Our original plan had been to see this movie on Boxing Day, but the excesses of Christmas Day – click here – encouraged us to defer the visit.
The next convenient slot for us was New Year’s Day itself. I didn’t book the tickets in advance of the day – that would have been tempting fate. But our restful Twixtmas and New Year’s Eve – click here – meant that we were fit as fleas and raring to go to the movies.
So, early morning, before being thrashed on the tennis court by Janie- click here for that Twixtmas link again, I logged on to the Curzon site to grab the best seats. After all, who books for afternoon showings of movies that far ahead? Turns out, quite a lot of people do for New Year’s Day; there were not all that many seats left. I grabbed two good ones in the middle of the penultimate row, having missed out on our favourite double seats at the very back.
We went in my car, Dumbo (above), or Dumbo-pan as I was calling him by the end of the outing. It was bucketing down with rain that afternoon.
Anyway, it turns out that George is precisely the sort of person who books his cinema tickets earlier than sparrowfart on the day of the viewing – he’d booked their seats the evening before. Naturally, George had booked “our” favourite double seats. This sorry tale disproves the adage that the early bird always catches the worm. The early bird only catches the worm if the late bird hadn’t caught that worm the night before.
Which brings me neatly back to the subject of birds hunting for live prey. i.e. the film, The Eagle Huntress; that’s why we were all at the cinema.
The Eagle Huntress is about an ethnic Kazakh girl in Mongolia, Aishol-pan, who has an extraordinary aptitude for and love of eagle hunting, the traditional (male) sporting/lifestyle/survival activity of her tribe.
It turns out that George has been in Kazakhstan recently, helping to get a new financial centre properly established there. He showed me a picture of himself trying on a Kazakh hat; a spectacular-looking piece that apparently comprises several dead animals, which George (wisely) declined to purchase. I showed George a selfie (shown below) sporting my comparatively modest-looking but animal free Vermont from Locke & Co.
Despite appearances to the contrary, no animal suffered in the taking of this selfie.
Anyway, we all enjoyed the film very much. Some of the sequences seem a little set up, such as the snippets of old eagle hunters complaining that eagle hunting is not suitable activity for a girl. The music was more blockbuster than art-house movie style.
But you’ll probably forgive this film its attempts to commercialise the story, because it is a true story and it does show a truly remarkable talent in a young girl and the setting is simply stunning. At times it seemed anathema to be hearing Daisy Ridley’s dulcet tones narrating, because those types of wildlife and landscape scenes have to be narrated by David Attenborough. Isn’t there a law about that?…there should be.
I don’t often implore people to “go see a movie”, but this one really is 90 minutes or so well spent. This is not the sort of film that I would choose to see on reading what it is about, so I’m really glad that Janie (Daisy-pan) nagged me into seeing this wonderful, life-affirming movie.
Mercifully the rain was relenting when we left the cinema and waved goodbye to the Littlejohns. I tried calling “Dumbo-pan” and “Daisy-pan”, but I have no sway over the untameable. Probably just as well.
Janie demonstrates the use of an infeasibly large tennis racket to defend an infeasibly small court
Where does a week like that go?
We had planned to go to the flickers on Boxing Day, but due to my self-inflicted bloating from the previous day in Paradise we decided to defer that visit until New Year’s Day – the next Ogblog piece will cover that visit – this one’s about Twixtmas.
Ah yes, Twixtmas. Everything has to have a name these days, or more accurately in this case, a marketing term.
Janie and I have long enjoyed Twixtmas, without knowing that the week between Christmas and New Year even had a name.
As long as the weather isn’t too cold/icy, we normally play tennis during that whole period; Christmas Day itself and Twixtmas, as indeed we did this year. Even my feeling of indisposition did not stop me from turning out (and competing) at the appointed hour on Boxing Day.
Bank Holiday Tuesday was a lot colder and too frosty to play; just as well, really, because Janie had got her dates a bit muddled and booked some work that day. I decided I might as well go back to the flat, exercise at the gym and do some work that day too. Janie hadn’t booked work for the Friday, so we decided simply to swap the Tuesday for the Friday.
We had a brace of titanic tennis battles Friday and Saturday; on both occasions we played for well over an hour and called it a draw at 6-6. But on Sunday Janie was unstoppable, making me fight and fight (often as not in vain) to hold my serve. Still, I kept the set going a full hour, we had fun and we got good exercise, which is mostly what it is about. Mostly.
What else did we do?
We both worked a bit.
We watched A Taste of Honey, the movie, which somehow Janie had never seen, then discussed teenage pregnancy for a while.
We had the next door neighbours, Joy and Barry (one side) plus Marcie (the other), in for drinks and “nibbles” (no-one wants dinner after Janie’s nibbles) on the Friday evening.
We watched a few episodes of the Attenborough Planet Earth II over the week. We recorded the series when it was broadcast, but we normally make very little time for TV. These Planet Earth II programmes really are the bees knees. Indeed, if the programme makers wanted to show us close ups of bees knees, I’m sure they would.
We had a quiet evening in for New Year’s Eve, just as we like it. I think we watched one of those Attenboroughs and then both went to sleep an hour or so before midnight. Needless to say, we didn’t notice the leap second which added fractionally to the very end of 2016.
I Ogblogged a lot during Twixtmas, mostly working on my 2008 retrobogging. I did at one time consider writing Ogblog pieces describing the Ogblogging that I am doing, but came to the conclusion that even my loyalist readers (I include myself in that category) might draw the line at that degree of post-modern, geeky detail.
Janie can even hit the ball infeasibly well off the wrong foot, although only occasionally does so in the heat of battle.
Unusually, he, Kim and Max were going to be around on Christmas day. The idea of Christmas day with friends for once, without cooking/washing up pleased us enormously, so we were up for it.
It was fun.
I wasn’t properly up for such a stonking big meal though:
antipasti (prosciutto, salamis, artichokes);
pumpkin soup;
turkey with stuffing and all the trimmings;
Xmas pud;
cheeses;
mince pies;
chocolates…
Not only that, but the feast was served for six although there were five of us, as Pinball Geoff was due to be there but dropped out at the last minute. That was a shame for several reasons, not least that Geoff would have enjoyed my plastic tashe, as his group, The Bikini Beach Band once supported Sparks. I love that Kimono My House look.
I know you don’t have to eat it all. I know you don’t need to drink half a bottle of Barolo on top of the aperitif of a big glass of white. Oh how I suffered the next day.
Ogblog readers will sympathise with me en masse, I just know they will.
With thanks to Toni Friend for the picture, taken during the famous match between MCC and the visiting Australians in September 2016
I took some real tennis lessons in January 2016 and started playing tentatively in March, perhaps in earnest since April when I started playing twice a week.
This end of year piece builds on that July piece and reflects on my whole first calendar year playing this intriguing game, including some astonishing statistics.
August to December 2016 News Update And Ogblog Links
Strangely, just a week after writing my July 2016 reflective piece, I was selected to play my first competitive match for the MCC, against a party of visiting Australians in September.
I had in any case decided to have a few more lessons in August, once I had played about 50 competitive hours on court.
I also spent some time in Manchester in September, getting a chance to play a couple of times and have a lesson at the Manchester Real Tennis Club in Salford, which I enjoyed enormously.
Here are some links to pieces I wrote August through October – please note that the pieces might not be exclusively about real tennis:
You might observe that I was having a great time playing real tennis during those months, but there was one small problem. Between early July and late October my handicap signally failed to come down; it simply hovered around the rather inauspicious mark of 67.3 – better than my early mark in the mid-seventies, but certainly not the steady improvement towards 60 and beyond that I had been hoping for.
Apparently, this tendency to plateau at times is quite normal, although I think my first plateau was a little lowly and lengthy for someone of my age and stage.
Anyway, I got a good win the afternoon after the House of Lords (27 October – see the last link in the above list of links) and since then the progress has been relentless for a couple of months, ending the year at a more impressive 64.1 – still a long way to go but definitely back on the improvement curve.
Real tennis is quite a good game for a stats geek – not least because the real tennis on-line system is full of stats and tools through which you can measure yourself and weigh up your opponents. Not that I am even faintly at the stage (if indeed I ever shall be) that such tools would do much for me personally.
Digging deeper into the system, I can see how I have got on against each opponent and how those opponents have got on against other opponents – hours of fun to be had if/when I can be bothered.
However, one set of general stats has caught my eye, as this real tennis on-line system, including the handicapping, is used by every real tennis club in the world. I can see my handicap against pools of other players on various measures.
For example, if I look at my handicap compared with the current handicap of everyone who has ever had their handicap recorded on the system (about 15 years worth of data), I am ranked around 6,300 out of the 10,300 or so people who have ever been ranked. That puts me somewhere around the 62nd percentile. Not bad for a beginner.
To be more accurate for playing purposes, it is probably better to restrict my search to active players – i.e. everyone who has played in the last year. On that basis, I am around the 3,000 mark out of 4,100 or so people who have played in 2016. That is around the 74th percentile or “bottom of the third quartile” mark. Still not too bad for a beginner.
But returning to the larger data set, I am intrigued by this 6,300 figure. Because that really is close to the sum total of people on the planet who could possibly stand a chance of beating me at this game. The game is so unlike other racket sports, it would be virtually impossible for anyone, even an elite sportsperson, to simply pick up a real tennis racket and beat someone who knows how to play, without having a lesson or two and a few goes first.
Think about that statistic for just a moment. If an alien being from another planet were to come to planet earth and select a human being at random to play me at real tennis, there is only a one in a million chance that the other person would win.
I admit that this one-in-a-million stat is not a very useful statistic in practice, of course, but it is a rather awe-inspiring one in theory.
Just look at my technique again in the light of my impressive stats
