Category: The Confessions Series

“A Rally Against Reason — And a Triumph” or “The Conquest That Wasn’t”? You decide!

Our good insider friends in the British literary establishment have very kindly offered some reviews of our future publication, Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant. And in true literary spat style, they’ve managed to completely disagree with each other without, I have to say (well, I would), fully understanding the nature of the beast. Here they are in all their literary glory.

A Rally Against Reason — And a Triumph

By C. W. Bramble, TLS Literary Correspondent

In Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant, the line between delusion and destiny becomes smeared with red clay, sweat, and surrealism. The novel is, unapologetically, an absurdist fable — a sort of Waiting for Godot in tennis shoes — and it is glorious.

The central figure, “Lord” Andy of Kirkintilloch, strides into Roland-Garros not simply to compete, but to conquer. This is not the tale of a tennis match, but a phantasmagorical pilgrimage. Alongside him are Hac, his Proust-quoting coach who believes herself to be Phoebe Snetsinger, and Evelyn, a club captain who channels the bombast and poise of Serena Williams. That none of this is meant to be taken literally is precisely the point.

The prose is deft, elliptical, and slyly musical. The metaphors — tennis as theatre, as ritual, as memory — pile up like ill-judged drop shots, but then resolve, suddenly, into moments of unlikely clarity. At its best, the book does what few sports novels attempt: it captures the inner theatre of competition — the rituals, delusions, and heroic self-mythologies of ageing athletes.

Some will dismiss this as indulgent nonsense. And they may be right. But what rich nonsense it is.

The Conquest That Wasn’t.

By Dr. Harriet Blore, TLS Senior Critic

There is a certain kind of novel — postmodern, self-aware, proudly ludicrous — that seeks to turn incoherence into literature. Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant is one of them. Sadly, it is not among the better ones.

The conceit — an ageing amateur tennis player staging a hallucinatory campaign at the French Open — is stretched so far beyond plausibility that satire and sincerity become indistinguishable. His companions, a woman who believes herself to be the world’s greatest birdwatcher and another who channels Serena Williams, serve as comic relief in a narrative that frequently forgets it’s supposed to be funny.

The language veers from the poetically overwrought to the embarrassingly twee. A goat offers strategic advice. Line judges become existential symbols. Characters quote Proust while doing squats. One is reminded not of Beckett, but of someone who once read Beckett’s Wikipedia page.

It is possible, of course, that this is all the point — that the novel is meant to be a pastiche, a tennis-shaped fever dream. But even in dreams, we long for form, for purpose. Here, all we find is a man talking to himself on a court no one else can see.

So, what’s it to be: “A Rally Against Reason — And a Triumph” or “The Conquest That Wasn’t”? For one week only, we’re sending out free, pre-publication copies of the book and offering you the chance to write your own review – which we will incorporate in the book itself. Just leave your contact details here and we’ll get straight back to you!

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I blame the parents! Why not hitting your grades has nothing to do with you.

Last year our publication Confessions of an Ageing Figure Skater explored the effect of parenting on young people; and this month’s new Netflix series of Adolescence is throwing those questions right up in the again.. They’re particularly pertinent now that we’re about to go into another season of breast beating, finger pointing and collective ‘mea culpas’. Yes, it’s public exam time again and yet another opportunity to shout from the rooftops of the Daily Mail:

I blame the parents!

Along with childhood obesity, teenage ennui and the impending climate catastrophe, the failure of young people not to achieve 100% in all their exam results can all be levelled at the doors of their wayward parents who clearly have not suffered long enough or hard enough in order to get their offspring to meet the highest grades that our pristine education system prides itself on.

If you haven’t made the grade and have ended up in a university you never wanted to attend in a city you’ve never heard of – don’t worry, it’s clearly your parents fault, the fault of the parents of those poor misguided examiners who set the exams in the first place and ultimately the fault of the current education minister’s parents for producing a human being whose educational mission is driven by important 21st century values of tradition, servitude and deference to the great and the good of the past – and their parents too of course.

Your parents are also no doubt are also suffering from their parents’ wilful mistakes in bringing them up, so it’s no wonder we’re all going to hell in a handcart with no more than 2 grade U’s and a cycling proficiency test between us all.

It’s tough being a parent these days. Not only are you responsible for your offsprings choice of teenage rebellion, you have to bear the brunt of their inability to dress properly, listen to the right music, buy the right newspaper, vote for the right party and do as the media instructs.

This year though, instead of beating yourself about your parental breast about why your nearest and dearest have failed yet again to find the holy grail of true perfection, why not just set a torch to those newspapers, throw those parent manuals on the funeral pyre of parental disappointments and wave your offspring a cheery farewell as they sail into their freshers week, their gap year or their close encounters of the wierdest kind down at the job centre?

They won’t thank you for it – indeed, they’ll take great delight in blaming you for it when the going gets tough – but you can sleep peacefully knowing you never did your best because of your own parents inabilities to bring you up as an upstanding model citizen.

(Philip Larkin puts it even more succinctly in his poem, This Be The Verse.)

I blame the parents! How does our DNA shape our character?

Our book, Confessions of an Ageing Figure Skater explored the effect of parenting on young people earlier last year and the subject has attracted huge interest with the Netflix series, Adolescence recently. It’s led me to wonder, how often do we hear this:

I blame the parents!

We’ve known for many a year that genetics can explain a lot when it comes to predicting the frequency of brown hair and blue eyes in a population and whether or not you’re born with an appendix. Ever since Mendel carried out his famous experiments cross breeding peas in a monastery in upper Bavaria, our understanding on how huge complex sequences of generic material can affect everything from whether we’re green, have wrinkled or smooth skin and whether we can glow in the dark in the right atmospheric conditions has increased exponentially.

These days we like to determine whether or not our characters can be explained by our generic makeup (‘I blame the parents’ is a common explanation offered by the popular press these days) – and recent experiments and huge statistical studies across the world have demonstrated some startling new insights into how our characters are shaped by our DNA.

The popular press have recently identified the scientists who have themselves identified important genes in our genome: for instance the gene which determines whether or not you are a lying bastard or not. This gene (the ‘lying bastard‘ gene) is located on the Y chromosome in men and consequently explains a lot of many men’s behaviours. It is located we are told next to smaller gene complexes entitled ‘scurrilous’, ‘shifty’ and ‘tosser’. Clearly, depending on whether your genes demonstrate dominant or recessive behaviour, your chromosomes will determine whether or not you are a scurrilous, shifty, lying bastard of a tosser – or just a tosser.

The X chromosome – possessed by both men and women – also has several character traits now clearly attributed to it. These include ‘not good at games’; ‘gets distracted easily’; and ‘rather fancies themselves in front of the mirror‘.

The future potential that character mapping of human DNA provides us with is immense with many economic and cultural implications. Whenever we say for example that something runs in the family, we’ll be able to point to the relevant gene sequence and either feel comforted that we come from good genetic stock (genes such as ‘self satisfied’; ‘holier than thou’  and ‘smug‘ will all help this process); or we could decide to excise them from our genetic lineage in future by sponsoring stem cell technology which replaces undesirable genetic material with more suitable alternatives.

The media will no doubt help us in this desire to help us purge ourselves of undesirable genetic features, exhibiting as they do all the positive qualities of a future genetically engineered population: ‘honesty’, ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’.

The Parent’s Lot: how Adolescence offers us hope to the challenge of a lifetime.

Parents will never be enough. And we will always have children whose parents have deluded their children, abused their children, forgotten their children or simply never been up to the standards we wished for ourselves when we were children. Thew new Netflix series, Adolescence, throws a stark light on to these realities and amongst much else, it reminds that the parents lot – to expect, to be expected of and yet to fall and find it impossible to meet those expectations -is not a happy one.

We want so much for our own parents and yet they fall short; we want so much of ourselves when we become parents but learn too quickly that hypocrisy, double dealing and shape shifting come too easily and too quickly for our liking. We are seduced by the flattery that a child is simply and solely the biological and cultural product of two parents: so that if your child takes a path which horrifies you (like Jamie did in the TV series), then somehow we parents are completely at fault. There was something wrong in our DNA, or in our upbringing which has caused that outcome. It is somehow all our fault.

But that flattery is delusional. No child is simply the product of two adults who have combined their DNA. They are a product of their peers, their environment, of the world they live in – and of their own free will. Perhaps the most uplifting moment in Adolescence is when Jamie tells his family that he is going to plead guilty for the crime he committed and in doing so, takes responsibility for his actions, acknowledging he has agency, and is not just the result of other people’s pressures or two other people’s DNA profiles.

No one, no thing can be a parent alone: it requires partnership, a veritable village of influencers who can fill gaps and step up when needed, be quiet when required and to speak out when it’s essential. No two parents can do everything that’s required, especially in these pre-war days when the nation is gearing itself up for existential questions about who we all actually are and what we stand for. But one thing is crystal clear: we all need love, attention and support, all of the time. All of us.

Bientôt disponible dans une librairie près de chez vous: Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant

“Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing—turn out your toes as you walk—and remember who you are!”  (The Red Queen, Alice through the Looking Glass).

Yes, you read it right: the sequel to the Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player continues with the third in the series: The Norman Conquests of the Ageing Tennis Player, currently out on the Roland Garros practice courts in time for the French Open Grand Slam which plays out between 25 May and 8 June 2025.

The Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player series tells the story of a man of a certain age – known to himself as “Lord Andrew John Paul George Ringo Murray of Kirkintilloch” – who moves seamlessly from sporting zero to hero and back again during Wimbledon in 2013 when Andy Murray was the first British male player to win there in decades. By the end of that story, he has not only become Sports Personality of the Year but also succeeded (he thinks) at being elected Chairman of his local tennis club. Buoyed by these immense achievements, he immediately continues his success by winning the Australian Open in Melbourne amongst much Covid-19 inspired delirium and thwarted love stories via The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player.

So what’s the next challenge in store for him? Well, the third in the ‘Confessions’ series, Les Conquêtes Normandes picks up from where Courting Lives left off and tracks the ongoing drama between him, ‘Serena Williams’ and ‘Phoebe Snetsinger’ in a race to see whether he can add to his Grand Slam trophy haul before he loses all grip on reality.

Illustrated by Paul Warren, Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant will be available on 8 June 2025.

The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player

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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