So said the heavy athlete slumped on the bench in the men’s changing rooms, gazing at his cracked up trainers, sodden t shirt and pale blue shorts strewn across the floor. He’d had a difficult match on a squash court, being raced around by just a strip of a lad who had humiliated him over 3 games, 27 minutes and never ending memories of how things used to be, back in the day.
True, we sympathised. There was a time, back in the day, when we did indeed get younger with the passing of the days.
There was a time, way back when, when getting older really did feel like you were getting younger: as the days passed, your skin shone a bit more, your hair grew faster, and your torso shed pounds quicker, the longer you stood looking at yourself in the mirror.
At what point did the days do a volte face and far from getting younger as we got older, did we actually get older as we got older?
The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player
“Tennis belongs to the individualistic past – a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.” (Jacques Barzun)
What happens after you believe you’ve won Wimbledon, conquered your local tennis club, and crowned yourself a sporting legend — when none of it was quite true?
The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player picks up where Confessions left off: with Lord Andrew John Paul George Ringo Murray of Kirkintilloch rescued from a burning raft of tennis rackets, arrested, and facing the small inconvenience of reality. Undeterred, our gloriously unreliable narrator sets his sights on an even greater prize — the Australian Open — while simultaneously navigating the far more dangerous terrain of love, obsession, correspondence, and self-delusion.
Told through a wildly inventive mix of match reports, fan mail, court transcripts, newspaper cuttings, ornithological “sightings,” and illustrated interludes, this is a novel that treats tennis as theatre, romance as combat, and ageing as an extreme sport. Along the way, real-world tennis mythology collides with fantasy, bureaucracy, and pataphysical logic, as Andy encounters rival “GOATs,” prison systems, phantom coaches, and women who may — or may not — be in love with him.
By turns absurd, tender, infuriating, and unexpectedly moving, The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player is a comic novel about the stories we tell ourselves to survive the fine line between confidence and delusion masculinity, ageing, and desire under pressure and the strange ways love refuses to follow the rules
Illustrated throughout by Paul Warren, this sequel deepens the world of Confessions while standing confidently on its own as a bold, original, laugh-out-loud meditation on ambition, attachment, and the enduring hope that the next match — or the next letter — might finally change everything.
Next stop: Melbourne. Love all.
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