The Tuesday Game

The court is booked under the name of a man who hasn't played since 2019. He moved to Portugal. Changing the booking would mean logging into the club's system, which would mean remembering a password, which would mean an email to the office, which would mean a conversation. So it stays as it is. Four of us, half past six on a Tuesday, under a name none of us answers to.

Nineteen years, give or take. Nobody organises it. There was a group chat for about eight months in 2016 and it died of natural causes. You turn up or you don't, and if you don't, somebody notices, and that is the entire accountability structure.

The composition has changed twice. Ravi replaced a man called Douglas who developed an allergy to losing. Steph replaced Ravi's brother, who took a job in Leeds. Both changes were handled the way these things are handled: somebody brought somebody, the somebody was decent, nobody said anything about it, and after about five weeks the new person stopped bringing their own balls because they had stopped being a guest.

We play doubles because four is what we have. The pairings rotate on a system nobody has ever written down and everybody obeys. The first set is always slightly bad tennis played at speed — a warm-up conducted at full pace, which is not what warming up means, but is what we do. By the second set the standard has quietly improved and the talking has stopped.

The talking is most of it. Between points there isn't any; between games there's a great deal. Somebody's daughter has applied to four universities and heard from none of them. Somebody's boiler. Somebody has read the committee minutes about the top two courts and has views, at length, which the rest of us have learned to receive while retrieving balls.

I could not tell you the score of a single match we have played. I can tell you that Ravi serves into the body when he's nervous, that Steph has a forehand she trusts a good deal more than she should, and that Michael calls his own faults from a distance no linesman could justify. I could tell you, fairly precisely, what each of them was worried about in the autumn of 2019.

Nobody has ever called it a commitment. It just isn't the sort of thing you cancel.

In February the club resurfaced our court and moved us to the far end for six weeks. The far end has a low-sun problem after four o'clock and a fence that swallows balls. We complained about it every single week and went every single week, and when we got the proper court back, three of us admitted we would slightly miss the light.

Last month Michael turned sixty and mentioned, in the way you mention things between games, that his knee had opinions now. Nobody said anything useful. Ravi said his did too. We played out the set. The subject will come back, probably in a year, probably between games, and we will deal with it then, and we will keep the slot.

Which is still booked in his name. Nobody is fixing it.