I played tennis on a different courts this morning, one that was properly maintained and that I had to pay for and didn't have tiny urchins running around on it hoping to be hit in the face so they could launch a lawsuit against me. To begin with we were the only players on the four courts, but gradually some other people arrived.
One of them was an attractive pneumatic young woman who was having tennis lessons. The tennis coach looked a bit like he had been invented by a lazy film writer who had come up with the brilliant idea of having a lothario style handsome continental tennis coach, who looked slightly washed up, and whose tennis career had hit the rocks due to injury, but all the women who he teaches love him and he has affairs with them. He was big and strong and had a long pony-tail and within minutes of arriving on court he had stripped to the waist (thankfully the top half was stripped). I would have thought he would have been worried about looking like a terrible and unrealistic stereotype, but he seemed quite happy with himself and not self-conscious about his semi-nudity in the English spring. It was quite warm, but warm enough to justify this flagrant peacock display of his admittedly impressive torso. My female opponent was quite distracted, but so was I, mainly because I was hoping that the pneumatic young lady he was teaching might also decide to strip to the waist (either or both ways would have been fine with me).
I didn't try and compete by taking off my own top in the hope that all the ladies on the courts would have some more eye candy to enjoy. I am not a piece of meat. I want women to like me for my personality, not for my naked torso, which I will thus keep hidden away. I mean, I do look as good as the tennis coach, but I have some self respect and don't want to put sexual temptation in the path of women who might be happily married or whatever. They would see my beautiful body and start chastising themselves for having settled down so soon.
I tried to concentrate on my own exciting match, and not listen to him laughing and flirting with his pretty pupil, though he did seem to be shouting "Bounce, Bounce, Bounce" a lot, which I hope was an instruction to do with the ball rather than her impressive bosom. It didn't put me off imagining himn probably driving her home after the lesson and popping into her flat to help her with her stroke. I wasn't jealous about that at all and didn't regret deciding to become a comedian, rather than concentrating on my tennis more so I could spend my thirties and forties coaching a succession of bored widows and flaunting my man chest at them. What kind of a life would that be? A sad one. And I do not envy him.
