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Better than God. Better than Best. Not as good as Binface.
I won't let you know how few new paid subscribers you need to get this far up the charts. But do feel free to give me £5 a month and get me to the top of that chart.
Thanks so much to those of you who have made that step already. I only need another 2500 of you to do it and I could probably make a living from this! But luckily I do this for love (as the 20+ years of not even attempting to monetise it probably attests).
My first real test of potential recovery today with an early morning game of tennis. I had played tennis and badmington with the kids at Center Parcs, but this was going to be a competitive match versus an adult for a full hour. If ever my tennis partner had a chance to beat me, surely this was it. I am a year older than I was in our last encounter (in June) and also recovering from cancer treatment.
But although it took a couple of games to warm up, I was in good form and if anything felt better as the game progressed and it was another comfortable victory for the cancer-raddled. Or maybe all the cancer is gone (for now) so this was the unfettered me.
It was a competitive game and it felt good to be back, even if the early morning sun had us sweating. At one point a ball got knocked over the fence on to the path behind. This happens every now and again and usually a passerby will throw the ball back.
An old lady wheeling a pram with (presumably) her granddaughter was toddling along the path and got to the ball. She looked at it, picked it up and then popped it in the basket under the pram.
Perhaps she hadn't noticed that she was right by a tennis court or maybe she believed in finders keepers, but it was an audacious attempt at theft. The baby looked too young to play with a tennis ball, so who knows what the plan was for this unexpected bounty.
I shouted, "Excuse me," though she pretended not to notice, so I moved a bit closer and said "That's our ball."
She acted as if she was shocked that the ball had an owner -perhaps it had fallen from a tennis ball tree - and tried to pretend that she hadn't just tried to nick it. She threw the ball back, which took some effort as she was pretty old, adopting a football throw in technique, that nonetheless got the ball over the fence.
I was so surprised by her actions that I hadn't had time to think - oh just let her have it. There was a spare abandoned ball on the court that wasn't ours (that had just been thrown back by another less criminal passerby) and if I hadn't been reeling from what I'd seen I would have thrown her that one. My ball was practically brand new and I didn't really want to lose it, but sometimes they get knocked into a river or into a less accessible area and I just shrug and figure that they only cost a couple of quid.
I guess this is Burnham's Britain though. Old women have to steal tennis balls just to make ends meet.
It ended up being a very active day as a badminton net that we'd ordered on line turned up and the kids and me played with our shuttlecocks. The space in our garden isn't really quite big enough for a proper game, but we made do. We said that if we could get the shuttlecock into the basketball hoop (some way away) that it would count as 100 points. So I tried to score, but ended up knocking the cock up on to our roof. I was surprised that a scurrying old lady didn't appear to steal it.
There were also some pickleball bats and balls in with the set so I had my first go at this strange sport. Again not quite enough space for anything super competitive, but it was fun. We tried to create some other new racquet sports by using the wrong kind of balls with each kind of bat. Badminton cocks with pickle ball bats might be the best, but ping pong balls are more challenging
We're getting to the point where we could stage the Olympics in our small garden, with ping pong, badminton, pickle ball, boules, volley-ball (potentially) and one-hoop basketball all available. And you can also try basketbadmintonshuttlecock or picklepingpongball or countless other new sports. Probably don't get the boules involved in the racquet games unless you want some head injuries.
I was knackered by bedtime, but I think we can say that I am well on my way to recovery and in danger of actually getting fit if this continues.
In other news, "Thank You Moriarty" T-shirts are on their way. Thanks very much to those who bought them.
