From Jester To King -I

Though rather the worse for wear, the tennis club is a place where the sable-haired and prominent-veined can pursue a sense of community in a modest degree of comfort. The tennis club is hardly fancy; it is functional and unpretentious and gives off a sense of suburban abandon, of devil-may-care, of just being a bit too fusty and if any repairs really need doing they’re eventually seen to, but not much beyond that. Fees are affordable and there’s even a discount for those ‘seeking work’.

The tennis club is housed in a 1967 purpose-built house with a brick façade painted over with a bright brick-coloured sealant so you can’t see the mortar.  The tennis club is in a part of London neither fish nor fowl, neither city nor ‘burb lying midway between both, where house prices are reassuringly high and the club is easily accessible if you happen to own one and you can just pop over and cross the road to get there.

The age range of the tennis club is ostensibly 12 to 80, but everyone is between 44 and 72, the golden years of tennis club membership.  These are the years of worked-in tans, social ease, and where the XC90 is bought brand-new for cash on Volvo’s website by just one click of a button. The teen children of the tennis club are encouraged and welcome but prefer to sleep in or sell their parent’s old shit at car boot sales on a Sunday morning.

The tennis club is awash with women, older women, middle-aged women, women approaching middle-age, women in their mid-forties, women with hair tied back, women in conspicuous sports bras, women with wiry clumps of forehead grey with  flushed cheeks after the vigour of a twenty-three minute knock-about and some proudly displaying the wetness of hair and T-shirt pursuant to the heavy shower that passed over the skies that lie above the tennis club, feeling now intrepid and strong and decidedly unmenopausal.

The tennis club is because people need people, because they need to have themselves mirrored back by their contemporary, because they need closeness and warmth and even a suggestion of extra-marital sex, whether actually occurring, we’re not at liberty to say. The tennis club promises a ready-made friend base and very moderately subsidised alcohol. The tennis club is a home away from home. At the tennis club you don’t ever have to feel lonely.

The tennis club has square platinum carpet discs coming up at the edges and all sorts of smells ranging from the men’s shower room’s free cologne offset against a fresh poo to congealed sweat and cheese toasties just removed from the old grill in the back room kitchen that can more than satisfy a newly exercised member at £3.45 and you get salad on the side. The tennis club has ugly pebble dash walls and sports hall staircases with those wide carpet grips that make a clack noise even against the heels of your trainers. Smells of mould and damp are kept to a minimum by way of Brownian motion and general perspiration and the lack of focus on the smell of mould because people are always unremittingly chatting and moving, changing and greeting.

Some just sit alone letting out silent farts.

Everyone at the tennis club is generally in life’s higher age bracket, and within that higher age bracket in a more elevated mood than their habitual resting mood due to the recent production and uptake of serotonin or just soaking in that produced by those lounging around the bar. The mood of the tennis club is catching and permeates the space. This mood makes conversations run easily, renders greetings casual but heartfelt; this mood also dictates that people can talk and feel with a little more reckless abandon than they would in a gathering not at the tennis club.

Allied to this mood, the tennis cub invigorates and re-establishes a sense of sex. Flirting may occur either in front of or behind a husband’s back, and nothing is thought of or even necessarily known about it. No jealous victims and no one’s comes a cropper since all is encompassed by this sense of levity and social cohesion.

The tennis club boasts a walk up staircase, and at the threshold affixed to the brickwork, an old-fashioned Bell door entry system for the non-member with the cheap-looking flimsy aluminium grille with indents for talking through and the squidgy button just above but the door is always on a latch so you never have to use it making it all feel casual yet slightly makeshift and insecure.

In the tennis club people sit either away towards or askance the 54’’ wall-mounted plasma television having subscription to all Sky Sports, BT Sport, BT Sport 1020 UHD, basically every sports channel ever available ever in the United Kingdom through Virgin’s premium bundle costing monthly £139.99. Whilst the television broadcasts its dizzying array of tennis, Premier League Football, F1, snooker, and sometimes even darts, tennis club members have come from the courts and placed their racket bags on the fibrous carpet tiles, racket bags not stuffed up enough with rackets so that the fabric slackens and folds over and the logos and insignia can no longer be seen straight and the bag tends to flop disappointingly on contact with the floor.

There are a number of leagues at the tennis club, winter and summer, and leagues with the prefix U-  connoting under, an independent juniors’ club for  the under 16’s and an intra-London league for the more discerning player. The leagues and cups, and notices about the leagues and the winners of each division and any information relating to the scheduling of those leagues and games are plastered over almost every available bit of wall space, not to mention the trophy cabinet and the winners board itself, the ubiquitous brown laminate board showcasing every glorious success in gaudy gold leaf all the way back to 1965 where some bloke called Perkins seems to have been club champion 9 times in a row.

The ethnicity of the tennis club is 57% Jewish where the remaining 43% are almost all white and a goodly part of them are women who married Jewish men. There is a group of naturalised Russians who laugh a little too raucously. The catering and bar staff hail from Bulgaria, Belorussia and Moldova and feel justifiably fortunate to have been able to drink in the tennis club’s surplus of jollity and good cheer.