Tag: The Queen’s Club

A Five Set Epic At Queen’s Followed By A Jam With DJ, 26 June 2019

Photo of me on the East Court at The Queen’s Club with opponents (from a previous occasion) airbrushed out

Exile. The humiliation of it. Condemned to the role of real tennis supplicants for several weeks while the forces of global domination (cricket branch) took over Lord’s for the world cup.

We Lord’s real tennis players know how to suffer, so many of us have taken up the very generous offer of The Queen’s Club to play there for most of our weeks of exile. I say most, because the first of our wandering weeks coincided with The Queen’s Club ATP tournament for the modern variety of tennis.

But on this day, with the help of the kind professionals at Queen’s, three of us came in search of doubles practice. At one point, I think it was the day before, Ben Ronaldson e-mailed me to say he was having trouble finding us a fourth, but by the time I got to my e-mails he had e-mailed again to say that he had found us a suitable player.

So, Dominic (my doubles partner for this year’s Lord’s tournament) and Bill were joined by Chrissie for a two hour doubles slot. Ben said when I arrived:

I think this should be quite well matched. Try playing level and see what happens.

What happened was a five set epic. Dominic and I started strongly, with him facing Bill and me facing Chrissie. We won the first set 6-2. We tried the alternative server/receiver pairing on the next set, which led to Bill and Chrissie winning that set 2-6.

Dominic and I chose to persevere with the pairing of me facing Bill and Dominic facing Chrissie for the third set. We managed to turn things around and won that close set 6-4. We tried reversing again for the fourth, only to lose that set 1-6. Despite that loss, we chose to stick with that Ian facing Chrissie, Dominic facing Bill for the start of the fifth set; a set we didn’t expect to finish as we were now about 110 minutes into our two-hour slot.

But no-one came along to use the East Court at the end of our slot. Our sole (mostly sleeping) spectator from most of the match had been replaced by a keen scout who was 30 minutes early for his West Court contest. He encouraged us to continue. Or should I simply say that the crowd, as one, was baying for more and urging the metaphorical umpire not to suspend play.

So we saw through the whole of the fifth set, which turned out to be a cracker. Dominic and I got to 5-3 up, only to lose the next two games which (in real tennis, unlike the modern variety) leads to sudden death on the final game which was, as it happened, me and Chrissie doing the serving/receiving.

Somehow, at 2-sets-all, five-games-all, 30-30, with me on serve, I managed to conjure a couple of good-‘uns to seal the match. 6-2, 2-6, 6-4, 1-6, 6-5. Did that matter? Not really. Except that Dominic and I are trying to learn how to play as a pair, so the constant scoreboard pressure and trying to perform as a pair in that circumstance was just what we needed.

Great fun. Nearly two-and-a-half-hours in the end and oh boy did I feel it later in the day.

I don’t think I have played a five-setter in any form of tennis since Keele, when such matches between me and Pudding were quite common:

Plenty of Tennis Between My Law Finals And My Economics Finals, Keele, 24 to 26 May 1984

Coincidentally, much like my Keele experience described above, I developed a slight cold that evening which left me a bit husky for the next couple of days. That was not ideal preparation for a jam with DJ, except that DJ rather liked the variation it gave to my vocal range, despite that variation seeming, to me, rather restrictive.

Ged “Husky” Ladd sings sea shanties?

Still, DJ and I tried a few new ideas, sang a few of our favourites and had a good chat and a good meal. There are far worse ways to spend an evening even when you are a little husky.

Two very enjoyable activities with people who make excellent company.

A Couple Of Late Season Half-Days At Lord’s, Plus Queen’s And The LSE, 18 to 20 September 2018

A slightly strange chain of events and connections led to me being invited to give a video interview at the London School of Economics (LSE) for the LSE100 course, which is an interdisciplinary course for all undergraduates. The theme of the course this year is quite “Price of Fishy”.

Ahead of that 20 September interview, I thought I owed it to myself and to 1,600 new LSE undergraduates, to mug up a bit on The Price Of Fish – not least because it is a good few years since we last promoted it and longer still since we wrote it.

The interviewers also wanted to talk about predictive analytics and data visualisation. I felt on top of the stuff we’ve been doing lately on that topic, but also thought about the pitfalls of analytics and the graphical representation of statistics, which took my mind back to the wonderful little book How To Lie With Statistics, which I also decided to skim by way of revision.

And if you are going to skim-read books on sunny afternoons during the last home Middlesex match of the season, one might as well do that skimming at Lord’s.

Tuesday 18 September 2018

I got my other work bits and pieces out of the way, but at a slightly slower pace than I had intended, while keeping half an eye on the cricket score.

When I left home, Sam Robson was in the eighties. When I arrived at Lord’s he was on 96. I ran into Richard Goatley and Rob Lynch, who were in the Harris (no relation) Garden. They soon came and joined me in the Allen Stand gap to watch Sam clock up his first century for a while.

Feeling a bit sheepish about reading my own book in public, I decided to sit in the sort-of sun trap end of the Grandstand, where that stand meets the Compo, which is always very sparsely populated and does not seem to attract the usual suspects.

I wrote up this surreptitious Price Of Fish experience in a King Cricket stylee, which was eventually published by KC in February 2019 – click here for a link.

Just in case anything ever happens to King Cricket, I have scraped the piece to here.

By the time I had delved through those bits of The Price Of Fish that I needed to recall, it was getting very cold so I took sanctuary in the Pavilion Writing Room, where I chatted with a gentleman who looked mightily familiar to me although not in a Lord’s context. Turns out he lives around my way.

Wednesday 19 September 2018

I played tennis at The Queen’s Club that morning and had been asked to return that evening. The Lord’s tennis court is being refurbished this October so we have very kindly been granted real tennis refugee status at other nearby courts, including Queen’s.

I worked out that, between those real tennis gigs, I could get a few hours of cricket watching and book skimming done.

I felt a similar queasiness about being seen reading How To Lie With Statistics as I did about being seen reading my own book. Of course, I am drawing attention to the pitfalls and the ways that bad people might deliberately lie or mislead…not advocating the use of deceit, but that might take a bit of explaining.

My King Cricket piece on this reading day, published November 2018, can be found here.

If by chance anything ever happens to King Cricket, you can see a scrape of that piece here.

So I returned to the Grandstand/Compo corner and again saw/was seen by hardly anybody – certainly no-one I know.

Horrific traffic the last few hundred yards of the journey back to Queen’s, but I got there just in time…which is a little more than can be said for my opponent.

Thursday 20 September 2018

I did my LSE interview in the morning, which seemed to go well.

In fact I could have gone to Lord’s that afternoon for a while, as my afternoon client meeting had to be postponed. But it was well cold on the Thursday and in any case I could think of a zillion things I ought to get done with the unexpected few hours, so I went home and did those things instead, keeping at least one eye on the cricket score.

The match ended up looking like this – click here for scorecard and other resources.

Tennis At Queen’s Followed By Dinner With Simon Jacobs At Brasserie Blanc, 12 September 2018

I have been playing real tennis at The Queen’s Club this September, as the Lord’s court is closed for refurbishment and a few other clubs, such as Queen’s, have, very kindly, offered us MCC tennis types refugee status for the month.

It’s been a somewhat sobering experience at times.

My first gig as a refugee was a singles friendly match against a 12-year-old…

…who absolutely took me to pieces.

To be fair, he is the champion player at his age group and, if “the book” is to be believed, he is even capable of beating the U15 champion now. Here is some film of him winning the French Open:

I’m pretty sure he’ll be an exceptionally good player. Remember where you first heard the name: Bertie Vallat…

…I know, you couldn’t make up a more Wodehouseian name than that…

…he’s the boy in the foreground at the start of the filum.

Anyway, point is, after that ego-bruising episode, I decided that I needed a lesson in technique, so arranged to play an hour-long friendly match with one of my Lord’s chums, then an hour of coaching, ahead of meeting up with Simon in Hammersmith.

I did well in my friendly match – reclaiming the handicap points I had lost to Bertie. Then I enjoyed my lesson too, which I think will help my lawners as well as my realers…am I starting to spend to much time hanging around the arcane language of this game?

Then, after killing some time in a couple of coffee bars along the way, I met up with Simon Jacobs for a relatively early dinner at Brasserie Blanc.

I explained my difficult hour at the hands of a twelve-year-old the previous week, which led Simon to suggest that I might have “done a Serena” and/or resorted to corporal punishment. Neither of these suggestions seemed, to me, worthy of Simon.

But then Simon might well have had other things on his mind. He was very kindly taking time out to have dinner with me just a couple of days ahead of the launch of his latest single; Top Of The Pops. How cool is that?

Well, you can judge for youreselves by listening to and watching the following YouTube:

We discussed without irony the increasingly ghastly political landscape. The absence of irony is not because we have lost our senses of humour – heaven forbid. No, it appears that we never did have a sense of irony,  due to ethnic accidents of birth. No point mocking us (we wouldn’t get it), simply pity us.

The food was very good indeed. The wine was also very good. The service was excellent, until we asked our waiter to leave us alone for a short while to consider what to have for, or indeed if to have, desert. Then we complained when the waiter returned because he had neglected us for so long.

The waiter laughed and told us that we were his favourite table of the evening. Poor chap, he clearly thought we were being ironic…he didn’t realise that we really meant it – he didn’t realise that we don’t do irony.

We talked a fair bit about music; not only Simon’s new single but his plans for the album and also the stuff that I am fiddling around with at the moment. Simon set me some homework around “I Only Have Eyes For You” and also “Nothing Rhymed”, the latter of which has yielded faster results than the somewhat tricky former.

The evening whizzed by and I had no idea how late it was until we got to Hammersmith Station. Still, not so late that the tubes get tricky.

As always, it had been a very enjoyable evening with Simon.

Lawn Tennis At Queen’s, In Which I Inadvertently Deployed Gamesmanship Masterfully, Yet Still Lost, 24 June 1999

I was reminded of this incident in June/July 2019 while Lord’s is too busy with the cricket world cup to allow us to play real tennis there, so several of us are playing in exile at Queen’s.

A Five Set Epic At Queen’s Followed By A Jam With DJ, 26 June 2019

The recovered memory arises because these 2019 visits, like the 1999 one, are occuring just after the ATP tournament has finished at Queen’s, making the place a bit of a maze/building site. This is not a complaint, btw – I think it is very generous of Queen’s to let us real tennis addicts play there at such a disrupted time.

My 1999 visit at the same time of year was an invitation for an after-work game of tennis by my friend/client Abe Koukou, who was a member of The Queen’s Club and who knew that Janie and I play modern (lawn) tennis regularly.

I told Abe, truthfully, that I had never played at Queen’s before and that I was delighted to be invited.

Which was true.

What I omitted to tell Abe, because it seemed irrelevant at the time, was that I did know The Queen’s Club rather well, having done some advisory work for the Club back in the early 1990s. At that time, I was still laid up with my multiply-prolapsed spine and had been unable to play. Indeed had that not been the case, I might have got addicted to real tennis back then. I do remember Howard Angus showing it to me when there was a major tournament on, being fascinated by it and feeling regretful that I was not fit enough to give real tennis a try back then.

Some 27 years after my first look at real tennis at Queen’s…

…but I digress.

Point is, although Abe was hosting my first go at playing tennis at Queen’s in June 1999, I knew the place pretty well.

On our arrival, Abe was discombobulated by the cordons and the fact that his usual route to the changing rooms was blocked off. But I knew multiple ways around the complex.

That’s OK, we can get there this way instead

..said I, going into automatic and taking the route past the squash and real tennis courts.

I thought you’d never played here before?

…said Abe, quizzically.

I explained.

After our tennis match, my first experience of playing on carpet as a surface as well as my first experience of playing at Queen’s, we retired to the bar.

There, by the bar, was Jonathan Edwardes, then the Club Secretary (a role now called the Chief Executive Officer).

Hello Ian, how lovely to see you here. So sorry I wasn’t able to accept Michael’s invitation onto that sailing barge of his. I’d have so enjoyed that…

At this juncture, Abe’s eyes widened a little, so I introduced Abe to Jonathan.

It then dawned on me that I had inadvertently, but comprehensively, deployed a version of gamesmanship, known as guestmanship.

The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship, or the Art of Winning Games without Actually Cheating by Stephen Potter 

I have long been a fan of Stephen Potter’s books and especially like the Gamesmanship one.

In the Guestmanship section, Potter explains that the host at a sports club is at an advantage…

He is playing on his home ground. He knows the ropes…there are plenty of opportunities for making his guest feel out of it…

…so the seasoned gamesman finds ways to reverse the advantage, by mugging up on the host’s club. The prepared gamesman ensures that the host:

would wonder whether he was a host in any valid sense…indeed he would begin to wonder whether he really was a member of his own club.

Potter then gives some examples of what the gamesman might do to deploy guestmanship masterfully…

…but I must say that none of Potter’s examples seem to me quite as masterful as my guestmanship at Queen’s that day in 1999. Indeed, I believe that my application of the art of guestmanship one-upped Stephen Potter’s original example. Having one-upped the one-upmanship chap, even inadvertently, is quite a thing.

So did my guestmanship result in Abe succumbing to my dark arts of tennis? Did it heck. Abe thrashed me in the first set (which reminds me, I need to go out to get some bagels). I did a little better in the second set.

And did the combination of my guestmanship and my comparatively limited skills at tennis make this the first and very last time I ever played at Queen’s with Abe? Of course it didn’t. Abe is such a genial, friendly and good-humoured fellow, he simply found the whole incident very funny. My subsequent visits as Abe’s guest were mostly with two other players making up a doubles that would be well matched. In real life, give me good sports (like Abe) over gamesmen any day.

But the book Gamesmanship, though over 70 years old now, is still a hoot; I do commend it.