ANYONE FOR TENNIS?

For the first time in a long time, the morning starts warm and pleasant.  Even though it is early June, the last few weeks have been a monotonous round of cold winds and sombre cloud.  The sun isn’t shining today, but that doesn’t matter as long as it’s not raining and the temperature is higher than sixty degrees.  I put the bird food in the half coconuts early this morning, and a diminutive house sparrow is busy pecking at the contents, three yards from where I sit typing.  There have been no ‘spuggies’, as we used to call them in the North-east of England, in this street for thirty years, but now a family of them has settled and I, for one, am pleased to see them.  A pair of blackbirds recently nested in the clematis that clings to the front of the house.  I would sit in my easy chair next to the window and watch them to-ing and fro-ing.  They were as industrious as navvies. The male, with the bright yellow ring around each eye, would perch on the windowsill with a beakful of wriggling creepy-crawlies and look quizzically through the window at me, as if to say ‘What is that hulking great brute doing there, idling around, when he could be working?  Of course, he’s useless.  He hasn’t even got any wings and he can’t fly a yard, and with that great ugly mouth of his, he couldn’t even pick up a stick insect.’ They raised just a single fledgling.  I saw it come to the edge of the clematis and flap its little wings.  It was on the cusp of life's great adventure. The next morning, I came down to fill the coconut shells and I saw it again.  It was lying on its back in the drive, feet in the air.  Its head was a few feet away, in the gutter.  A cat had obviously decided that the little blackbird was fair game for some cruel fun.  Of the parents, there was no sign, and I haven’t seen them since.  I doubt if they’ll be nesting in the clematis again.  Still, the morning is warm, and I can watch the squirrel galloping up and down the maple tree in the back garden.  It’s quite exhausting, doing nothing, and it takes up quite a lot of my time. However, tomorrow will be different.  It is the official opening of the new tennis courts and I have foolishly agreed to look after the refreshment tent.  What typically happens on such occasions is that no-one engages at all in the tennis-related activities, such as the Fun Round Robin, the Cardio Tennis, the Speed Gun Measurement Competition, the coaching and the Parents versus Children Competition.  They all make a beeline for the refreshment tent, where they devour everything in sight within ten minutes and then there’s nothing left for me to be in charge of. I always find these occasions such an ordeal.  Instead of my unstinting ability to be curmudgeonly, I have to smile at the miserable little hoodlums who come back for a third helping of strawberries, when I really feel like giving them a sharp clip round the earhole and telling them to go home and study Latin declensions. At least it’s better in the refreshment tent than the junior coaching, for which I have no patience at all.  ‘Look, this is how you serve.  You place your two feet behind the line, throw the ball up in the air and hit it with the racquet when the ball drops down to the height of your extended arm.’  Five swipes later, the little child has yet to make contact with the ball, and exasperation for the coach and his protégée is growing. ‘You’re not teaching me proper, mister.  You had better show me.’  Blow me, when I throw up the ball and serve, it almost hits the service line on the other side, and the child says, sweetly, ‘Is that how you do it, mister?’  I sulkily go on to the elements of the forehand drive, where at least there is a thirty per cent chance that the kid will hit the ball.  The parents stand at the side watching, saying ‘Isn’t he brilliant, he’s going to be as good as Andy Murray’, when, by the look of his flat feet and squint, he’ll be lucky to reach the standard of Ruby Murray. I can’t wait for Sunday when the whole sorry show will be over and I can get back to what I’m best at – doing nothing.