Hi friends, and happy – very nearly – SPRING!!!!!
Though I have my usual, slightly fossilised Tuesday feeling, because our Mondays, here in London, are pretty mad.
On Mondays, twelve otherwise sane adults – all of us over 45 – get indoors doubles coaching/tortured by young George (aged 24, with legs like springs) at the Bromley Tennis Centre.
Yesterday, this involved our attempting:
- the net player indicating by means of hand signals behind her back where she wished the server to serve. (Yes, hand signals, in this, the internet, age. Who knew?!?!)
- the volleyer's partner then attempting to serve where the volleyer ordered, whereupon the volleyer was supposed to spring to the opposite side of the court, causing alarm and despondency to prevail in their two opponents.
- Now I was partnered with my husband, Simon, prompting me to wonder aloud whether this marriage could be saved because – although S. serves harder than I do and very much better – he doesn’t always place his serve where he’s been told to (by means of aforementioned hand-signals).
(I can't do it either. I recall one partner of mine asking me some years ago where I intended to serve. I responded that I was aiming for the square on the other side of the net.)
Have to admit, too, that I quite often forgot to spring sideways, enabling our opponents to put the ball where there was roughly zero chance of either Simon or me hitting it.
After tennis on Mondays, I teach a couple of adult cello pupils, mess about writing my new novel, and then - assuming that I have recovered the will to live - head out in the evening to lead my doughty Bromley Symphony Orchestra cello section.
At present we are messing about with Ravel’s immortal La Valse, along with de Falla’s ballet, The Three-Cornered Hat, and with the famous First Piano Concerto by Tchaikovsky. At the end of the orchestra rehearsal, a few of the elect regularly foregather at Ye Olde Whyte Lion (not a joke, this pub dates back to the 1600s), in order to recover.
For all these reasons, on Tuesdays, I am often a trifle tired, though not in the least hungover, because we only have one round, though the landlady does by now know us by name, which is prob. a Very Bad Sign... | 
