"It’s an unattractive spectacle": Edmund Gordon on tennis parents

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Edmund Gordon writes in the London Review of Books:

I was​ a competent name-caller and a precocious smoker, but my schoolboy talents stopped short of anything that involved a ball. Catering to my eight-year-old son’s tennis abilities has involved a serious learning curve. 

The atmosphere on the London and South-East nine and under circuit can be surprisingly intense. Pint-sized competitors gather outside the clubhouse, doing warm-up exercises and footwork drills. The moment they step on court most of them become nervous wrecks. They lie about line calls and bicker over the score; if they lose, they fall howling to the ground and beat the tarmac with their little fists. 

You don’t have to look far to find the source of their angst. I’ve seen grown men and women bellowing at their weeping children for botching their ball toss or being too static at the net. It’s an unattractive spectacle, but I’m mainly bewildered by how much they care. The biggest constraint on my son’s prospects may be that, as a tennis parent, I don’t have what it takes.

Emma Raducanu ‘badly bitten by ants’ on eve of Australian Open

The judges were sorry to hear of Emma's ordeal, wish her a swift recovery and hope she enjoys every success in the tournament. 

Nevertheless, they still gave the Independent our Headline of the Day Award.

Martin Amis is no Mike Brearley

I got interested in Martin Amis's collection The Rub of Time when I saw it had an index. With his love of both high and low culture, Amis had the potential to produce indexes every bit as good as those you find in Mike Brearley's books.

It's the juxtapositions I look for in an index: the unlikely couples who find themselves paired in consecutive entries.

Sadly, Mart let me down.

Yes, he showed promise, and I enjoyed:

Camilla (Parker Bowles), Duchess of Cornwall
Camus, Albert

Keane, Roy
Keats, John

Sade, Marquis de
Sampras, Pete

but there weren't many more. Maybe tennis just isn't as literary game as cricket?

Anyway, hurry off and enjoy the indexes of Brearley's books On Cricket and On Form.

Mystery Surrounds How Cow Made Its Way Into Market Harborough Tennis Club

Sorry to have two Market Harborough stories today, but I suppose it proves that the judges are autonomous. Because they have given Harborough FM our coveted Headline of the Day Award.

For myself, I can only see this as a positive moo-ve. If British tennis is to prosper, it will have to shake off its image as a middle-class preserve and appeal to a wider population.

Cows' money is as good as anyone else's, so I say let them join.

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Marie Le Conte argues that Twitter has made politics more difficult. Now we know what every politician thinks about everything, it is harder for them to work together,

"What use is Popper to a politician?" Bryan Magee once asked. KritiK looks at his answer and calls for a more rational approach to policymaking.

David Watts mourns that there are no headlines when behaviour in school improves.

"Imagine a time without 24-hour news, when we didn’t need to be constantly updated on what was going on, when the BBC and others chose when they broadcast news and sport." Charles Runcie remembers the birth of Radio 5 Live.

"With 20 minutes to go before the start of the English cricket summer a total of eight spectators are scattered around the prim, pretty stands of the Emirates Riverside stadium." Barney Ronay details the latest move in the cricket authorities' campaign to destroy the first-class game in England - starting the season on 26 March.

Samuel Love on Eric Ravilious, tennis and Englishness.

Mystery behind buyer of tennis champ Virginia Wade’s undies as they fetch £1,600 in Ludlow

Our Headline of the Day comes from the ever-reliable Shropshire Star.

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Expert reaction to Nick Clegg's announcement on mental health, collected by the Science Media Centre.

Linda Jack offers a deeply personal reaction of her own: "Members in Watford will know Sarah as one of their deliverers, two weeks before she died she was out with me delivering for the PCC elections in Bedfordshire. But Sarah had one of the most painful illnesses known to man or woman – she was bi-polar and schizophrenic."

A Lanson Boy brings us a good idea from Cornwall: "Following the decision by the Police and Crime Commissioner Tony Hogg to agree the closure of many of the police front desks across Cornwall, I have written to him asking him to talk urgently to the council about whether the police could share front desks with the council via our one stop shop network rather than close down the service."

The National Union of Students has refused to back the brave struggle of the Kurdish people against extreme Islamism. Tendance Coatesy has the details.

Will Oremus on Slate considers what Silicon Valley can learn from the rise and fall of Hewlett-Packard.

"It is clear to me, and to every dancer I have ever brought to see him play, whether live or on television, that he is a kindred spirit; that there is a dancer in this amazing athlete." Patricia Beatty writes on Roger Federer for The Journal of Wild Culture.

Russia: Cameron gets tough

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What You Can Get Away With has been reading Conrad Russell's An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Liberalism. As you should.

"So the choice, for the foreseeable future, seems clear: do we want independent schools to continue as they are, largely closed to those who can't find the substantial fees; or do we want them to be open on merit, not money, so that a wider group of children can benefit?" On the Sutton Trust blog, James Turner asks some radical questions about private schools.

A fifth of all websites blocked in the UK, says Krystal Vermes on Venture Beat.

Carl Bromwich remembers his visit to a Soviet pioneer camp in Belarus for the Guardian.

"I got the sense that being at Wimbledon was something I was expected to feel privileged about – as if taking part in a great British institution was the whole point of the exercise. British tennis, despite Murray, isn’t doing particularly well. It’s hard not to suspect that Wimbledon may be part of the problem." William Skidelsky describes two days at the tennis for LRB blog.

IanVisits finds fragment of London’s Roman wall hidden in a car park.

Tiredness causes racism, hay fever causes sexism

Media Guardian previews a Radio Times interview in which John Inverdale seeks to explain his comments about last summer's Wimbledon champion Marion Bartoli. You may recall he said:

"I just wonder if her dad, because he has obviously been the most influential person in her life, did say to her when she was 12, 13, 14 maybe, 'listen, you are never going to be, you know, a looker. 

"'You are never going to be somebody like a Sharapova, you're never going to be 5ft 11, you're never going to be somebody with long legs, so you have to compensate for that. 

"'You are going to have to be the most dogged, determined fighter that anyone has ever seen on the tennis court if you are going to make it', and she kind of is."

Why did he come out with all that? Apparently he tells the Radio Times:

"I was feeling so ill that day, I had terrible hay fever and all I could think of was that I wanted to go home to bed. I had Andy Murray in the final the next day. I knew I had to be on form. Your mind is going all over the place, we're on air from 12 noon till 7pm with not a single word written and you've got to fill the time."

Inverdale helpfully adds:

"I'm not making excuses here, just trying to explain."

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Blood & Treasure says Andy Murray does not come from Scotland or Britain: "Like every other modern tennis player his nation is the court, the training camp, the hotel room and the airlines that link them. One thing that struck me about today’s classic Murray mumble is that he sounded more or less identical to the man he beat, Djokovic."

Edward Snowden wants asylum in Venezuela, but Venezuela is a surveillance state, argues Isabel Lara on Boing Boing.

"Children and adults need nature, yet our technology shapes and defines us more and more. We are products of nature becoming confined by our technology. Our innate design skills, driven by our imaginative human mind, has allowed people to settle and to farm the land, further advances saw us leave the fields and villages for a contrasting urban life detached from the natural environment. We increasingly enjoy the natural world as observers – we are of nature, but not in it." Journeys of discovery are not just to wild landscapes, but can be found in simple places close to home says Miles Richardson on Outdoor Nation.

A. Barton Hinkle of the Richmond Times Dispatch writes on the increasing militarisation of the police in the USA.

Martin Cloake, on the New Statesman site, mourns the relegation of the Doncaster Belles: "The case appears to starkly illustrate all that is wrong with modern football – a successful club with strong community roots relegated because its commercial model didn't pass muster, in favour of a new team established by moneybags Manchester City."

Sefton Focus looks at an engineering gem on the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.

Andy Murray wins Wimbledon - That I should live to see this day

Today something happened that I genuinely did not believe I would live to see. A British man won the singles title at Wimbledon.

I can remember a time in the late 1960s when Mark Cox and Graham Stilwell could beat a lot of top players on their day. In 1973, when most of the best players were not playing, Roger Taylor got to the semi-finals. And Cox was still around to play doubles in the late 1970s when John Lloyd and Buster Mottram took us to the David Cup final. (Imagine that now!)

But we never really looked like have a men's Wimbledon champion. Lloyd got to the Australian final, but that was in an era when it was still played on grass, intercontinental travel was more daunting and many of the best players did not enter.

Greg Rusedski got to the US final and, with his big left-handed serve, should surely have done better than he did at Wimbledon. But for years Britain's hopes were on the shoulders of Tim Henman.

With his serve-volley game in an era of identikit baseliners, there was something magnificent about Henman. He was like a clean-cut young officer on a white horse riding into the machine guns of the enemy.

No wonder he lost. The truth is that, for a serve-volleyer, Henman did not have a huge serve and was forced to hit numerous volleys to win his points. And that is a difficult skill, however easy he made it look at his best.

But a British men's champion? Never.

We did better in the women's championship - a fact that a lot of this evening's coverage has ignored, whether out of sexism or ignorance.

I am a too young to remember two British women meeting in the final in 1961, though I know that the wrong one (Angela Mortimer) won, defeating the crowd's darling Christine Janes.

But I do remember Ann Jones winning in 1969 and beating the two best players in the world (Margaret Court and Billie Jean King) to do so. With her bustling attitude around the court, there was something of the housewife gone to war about Jones. You felt she had left her husband's supper in the oven or under a tea towel before setting of to play.

And then there was Virginia Wade. You did not support her so much as suffer with her. She was extraordinarily talented, but when things were going will you knew you were only a couple of points away from a crisis. Tim Henman had a little of that quality, but Wade was far more wringing to watch.

I remember 1977 when Virginia Wade won, beating Betty Stove - to whom Sue Barker had somehow contrived to lose in the semi final. I was at school in the lower sixth and saw the final in a classroom with a TV. The room gradually filled with pupils and teachers, none of whom had any right to be there, but no one worried about that as Wade won - after having lost the first set, of course.

So well done Andy Murray. You have triumphed over an awful lot of history.

Headline of the Day

The Daily Telegraph wins with:

Novak Djokovic buys up annual supply of donkey cheese

Thanks to Dr Mark Pack.

Trivial Fact of the Day with Andrew Castle and Annie Besant

As this 2007 Daily Mail article reveals, the television presenter and former top-ranked British tennis player Andrew Castle is the great great grandson of Annie Besant.

Wikipedia has more on Annie Besant.

Thanks to @HiddenAberdeen and @openplaques on Twitter.