The wind howled like a banshee and rain drove down occasionally, just enough to drive us from the tennis courts for several minutes a couple of times. Only eight of us, the hard core of the tennis club, turned up. From the town centre end, where the wind was blowing into your face like a hair-drier, you had to hit the ball as hard as you could just to get it as far as the net. Needless to say, my dicky tennis elbow gave up the ghost, even though I was wearing my tight-fitting neoprene sleeve, albeit not now so tight-fitting because sweat has literally rotted away much of the stitching. By the end of the last set, I could hardly lift the racquet. When I complained, my friend Trundle, who had heard this chant many times before, remarked: ‘Time somebody put you down, then.’ Such sympathy. I walked home disconsolately. I was wearing my white shorts with the cross of St Andrew and the legend ‘England
I spent the afternoon in the garden. Leaves lay malevolently all over the back-garden grass (I hesitate to describe it as a lawn) and the patio. I raked and swept the leaves, as crisp as new fivers, into neat piles, only for fresh bursts of energetic wind to rearrange them like a kaleidoscope all over the ground. In the end I gave up completely and took the old dog out for a short walk instead. His great age means that he can now only manage a few hundred yards or so, and his arthritic back legs seem always on the cusp of giving up the ghost completely. I have visions of having to drag him around with his back legs on a cartie. His limbs might have almost given up the ghost, but his nose certainly hasn’t. Walks of even a few hundred yards could stretch to several hours, if I let them.
As I took the footpath leading away from the large roundabout signalling the entrance to the town, I witnessed a marvellous sight in the sky. Stretched out like binary numbers on a computer print-out, thousands of geese were heading towards the coast to roost. They honked cheerily to each other, if honking is what geese do, as they flew in loose formation, like little aeroplanes being directed by an inebriated air traffic controller on the ground. I reminded myself that you don’t see sights like that in Maryhill.
Much later, I took my wife shopping to the supermarket that never sleeps, and picked up a machine-washable charcoal-grey suit for £28. The material feels like a cross between crimplene and fibre-glass mat, and is guaranteed to dissolve after six months, but so cheap are these items that they are as consumable as daily newspapers. I know that they are manufactured in Cambodian sweat-shops where the five-year-old tailors are paid a fistful of beans a day, but I have to remind my detractors that these are straitened times.
I arrived back home at 22:00 hours, before the clocks went back. The temperature gauge in the car read 14 degrees and the wind had dropped. It felt like a balmy evening in mid-May - quite extraordinary. I know that the situation will get a hundred times worse in just a few weeks, but right now it feels like the rugby league coach felt upon preparing to take on the might of the top team, only to find that the latter had put out its reserve side. “I came expecting to fight George Foreman, he said, “but I ended up fighting George Formby.”
