As well as Paul Warren’s series of prints entitled The Mill being on display at the Museum of Making in Derby, you can also get to see the work of one of Paul’s contemporarys in the same gallery, John Fineran.
John was Paul Warren’s art teacher at the Joseph Wright Secondary Art School, Gower Street, Derby, in the late 1950’s, a time when Bill Haley and the Comets were ‘rockin’ around the clock and Elvis Presley was dwelling at the Heartbreak Hotel. Paul says:
“As far as I remember I got on quite well with him. I do remember meeting him some time after I’d left the school and we eventually said hello but he did say that ‘one has to be a little circumspect when approached by ex-pupils’ but he needn’t have worried about me. He told me of an exhibition of his paintings being prepared at a gallery at Derby Cathedral. he’d called the exhibition ‘Happenstance’…I did go and the painting in the Museum of Making could well have been part of that exhibition…It had something familiar about it that clicked in the back of my mind and when I saw his name in the lower left corner my thoughts were confirmed though I may have seen the painting at another exhibition at the Derby Museum’
A lively series of 8 figurative prints exploring mill life, industry and community through humour, character and conversation. Full of narrative detail and social energy, The Mill series combines historical reference with a bold contemporary style.
The eight Gclee prints are all of similar dimensions: Landscape view, H 400mm x W 500mm and the Portrait view, H 500mm x W 400mm.
The prints are for sale as seen and priced at £70 each – framed, glazed, mounted print (black frame, 20mm width x15mm depth) all with ‘neutral’ mount.
The Mill is a character-led series of 8 figurative prints that brings the world of industrial change vividly to life through humour, conversation and social observation. Each work captures a different exchange between workers, investors or townspeople, using expressive poses, simplified forms and distinctive colour to suggest the energy, tension and personality of mill life.
Across the series, Paul Warren explores themes of innovation, labour, trade, housing, textile knowledge and everyday community life. The quoted titles and captions give each print a dramatic, often witty voice, while the minimal backgrounds keep the focus firmly on gesture, interaction and narrative. Together, the 8 prints form a lively and theatrical portrait of a changing society, balancing local character and historical reference with a fresh contemporary style.
The eight Gclee prints are all of similar dimensions: Landscape view, H 400mm x W 500mm and the Portrait view, H 500mm x W 400mm.
The prints are for sale as seen and priced at £70 each – framed, glazed, mounted print (black frame, 20mm width x15mm depth) all with ‘neutral’ mount.
Right. Yes. The Fantastic Confabulations of an Ageing Tennis Player. The fourth volume. The “finale”. The “capstone”. The one where — and I think we can all agree on this — everything finally becomes… considerably more conceptual.
Now, I’ll be honest: I’ve always felt the quartet operates less as four books and more as an ongoing atmospheric event. A sort of… tennis-adjacent weather system. There’s narrative, of course, but it’s mainly pressure, movement, sudden fog, and occasionally a goat.
Anyway. Hear the podcast. Here it is. See what I did there?
(Produced by the one-and-only Julian PS with the trusty support of Mork and Mindy down in the Podcast basement. Thanks guys! You’ve been… what can I say? Immense.)
Anyway. Just in case you can’t be dealing with a podcast, here’s the story as I see it.
The early books: a man, a racket, and… an energy
So in Confessions, Courting Lives, and The Norman Conquests, Andy is, broadly speaking, a tennis player (except he isn’t – except he is – except he’s “Lord Andrew Murray” – except he’s in trouble – except none of this is confirmed.) But what is clear is that Andy narrates everything with the swagger of a man giving a victory speech while physically losing.
He tells you he’s in command. He tells you he’s adored. He tells you it’s all going brilliantly. And the reader is expected to do the decent thing and nod politely while the walls fall in. There’s also a coach (possibly a bird), a woman who is (or isn’t) Serena Williams, and a general atmosphere of “I won that match spiritually.”
Book Four: screenplay, drones, and what I can only describe as “admin”
Then we arrive at Volume Four, which makes a bold artistic choice: it switches into screenplay format, which I assume is because Andy has finally gone professional and Netflix are now involved. That’s certainly the vibe. Suddenly there are cameras. Drones. “Monitoring.” People talking as though Andy is both a person and a piece of equipment. It’s all very modern and, frankly, quite unsettling, but in a premium way. And the important thing is: Andy is no longer narrating. Now, I’m told this is because the book is exploring “external surveillance” and “dispossession” and “care regimes” and so on. Possibly. Or possibly Andy has simply delegated the narration, as champions often do.
The “twelve years” thing (apparently significant)
There’s also an absolutely classic moment where Andy believes he’s been in a hospice for a weekend, after a minor knee injury — which sounds reasonable enough, we’ve all iced a joint and lost a fortnight – except it turns out it’s been twelve years. Twelve. Now, do I think the book is being literal here? Hard to say. This could be:
a comment on memory,
a comment on time,
Brexit,
metaphor,
a typo that nobody caught in proofing,
all of the above.
But the key takeaway is that Andy has missed major global events, which is either tragic or enviable, depending on your views on morning news.
Sedation: narrative editing, but with syringes
Andy’s “confabulations” (a word the book uses a lot, presumably because “lies” felt too on-the-nose) are repeatedly interrupted by Mrs Carter, who administers sedation. Now, one might interpret this as the system silencing him – his story being chemically curtailed – a bleak commentary on control and autonomy. Or, equally, one might interpret it as: Andy is simply too powerful as a narrator, and the staff have to keep him under a certain decibel level for the other residents. It’s difficult to be sure.
The ending: Raducanu, waived bar bills, and… closure? maybe?
Finally, Andy is greeted by young tennis stars (including Emma Raducanu), and he’s told his subs and bar bills are waived. Now this is clearly either:
a triumphant return,
a final hallucination,
a metaphorical absolution,
a fantasy sequence,
a customer service gesture,
or simply the author being kind at the end.
Personally, I read it as the universe finally recognising his greatness. Because that’s what literature does: it rewards belief.
In conclusion (and I do mean that, because I have a meeting)
So yes — the final volume “doesn’t abandon him” but “no longer belongs to him”, which I interpret to mean the narrative has matured beyond Andy and is now operating at a higher organisational level. A bit like NOP, frankly. Andy begins as the author of his own myth. He ends as a man being documented. And the quartet as a whole is a powerful reminder that tennis is rarely about tennis. It’s about identity. And paperwork. And occasionally drones.
Inspired by Rip Van Winkle, the short story by Washington Irving, The Fantastic Confabulations of an Ageing Tennis Player is the fourth and final book in this ‘Confessions’ series. Andy Murray wakes up twelve years late, trapped in a hospice that feels more like a prison, with his memory missing, his bar bill unpaid, and the US Open still somehow to be won. A darkly comic, surreal finale to the cult Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player series.
Welcome, ladies, gentlemen, ball-kids and baffled bystanders, to another Julian Writes instalment — the podcast series that bravely asks: what if Roland Garros is less a tennis tournament and more a literary ambush?Alors… bienvenue, mes amis. (Nailed it.)
Today we’re going neck-deep into Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant, where our “hero” — the ever-modest, entirely reliable, definitely-not-spiralling Lord Andrew Murray of Kirkintilloch — takes a polite tumble down a rabbit hole of grandeur. And who’s holding the ladder? Lewis Carroll, of course. The Red Queen practically runs the warm-up: speak in French and remember who you are — advice which Lord Andrew interprets as: become a legend immediately, preferably on clay, and preferably while hallucinating.Très chic. Très officiel. Très… oui.
Ready, steady…? Allons-Y!
(Podcast generated by Julian Pilkington-Sterne with a little help from Mork and Mindy down in the Podcast Basement)
We unpack the rhythmic pop-ups of the ball boys Dum and Dee (because nothing says “elite sport” like a nursery-rhyme metronome), and the moment his opponent Corentin Moutet commits the ultimate crime: he gets turned into a pig on court — a glorious little nod to Carroll’s Pig and Pepper logic, where reality is negotiable and dignity is optional. Mon Dieu. Quelle surprise. Ooh là là. (I’m fluent now, apparently.)
Then there’s the recurring “awoke with a start” motif — the book’s way of winking at us and whispering: this entire Grand Slam may be a dream-state. Letterboxes widen into walkways, tennis balls develop French accents, and the court itself starts behaving like a sentence that’s forgotten how to end. C’est n’importe quoi.Pas possible!Mais… voilà.
And just when you think it’s all pure nonsense, we drag in Jean Cocteau — that delicious phrase about being plunged back into the night — and suddenly the comedy has a bruise underneath it. Because these Carrollian fragments aren’t just playful flourishes: they’re masking something darker. A dazed, fractured consciousness. A man trying to narrate himself into glory… after a glider crash near Calais. Quel drame. C’est la vie.Je suis fatigué. (Emotionally. Spiritually. Grammatically.)
So yes — bon… on y va — come with us as we lovingly dismantle the “Greatest GOAT’s” fantasy layer by layer… until what’s left is not just satire, but a strangely poignant story of delusion, denial, and medical distress — served, naturally, with a side of French and a pig in the baseline. Bien joué, hein?D’accord, d’accord. And if any of that was wrong, look: on fait comme on peut. Voilà. À la fin!
The third in the “Confessions” series, Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant picks up from where The Courting Lives left off and tracks Andy’s inexorable rise to become the greatest GOAT: or Greatest of All Times as they have it in contemporary tennis parlance by challenging for the French Grand Slam at Roland Garros. But the thwarted love stories continue and take on a darker tone as his fans become more fanatical: ambition, delusion, unrequited love… it’s all here in…
Episode two of our quartet campaign, and (how shall I put this?) things take a slight turn from “creaky knees and committee politics” to “arson charges and incarceration.”
Welcome to The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player, where Nick Owen doubles down on the central proposition of the series: that the human mind, when cornered by mediocrity, will build itself a private Wimbledon and move in permanently.
Our man this time is Andrew Murray—a protagonist so devoted to the fantasy of sporting greatness that he upgrades himself into “Lord Andrew Murray”, an unreliable narrator with impeccable self-belief and absolutely catastrophic life management. In his telling, he’s collecting imaginary scalps at the majors, gliding through tournaments as if destiny has a wildcard with his name on it. In reality, he’s navigating a much less glamorous circuit: legal consequence, mental unravelling, relational wreckage… and prison.
(Podcast generated by Julian Pilkington-Sterne with a little help from Mork and Mindy down in the basement).
The book plays this brilliantly in a picaresque, comic-surreal mode: big, swaggering inner monologues colliding with the hard surfaces of courts, cells, and consequences. And crucially, Andrew isn’t only witnessed through his own delusions. He is tracked. Documented. Observed.
Enter Phoebe, an amateur ornithologist who records “sightings” of Andrew like he’s some endangered and baffling species – rare, volatile, and liable to appear suddenly in the wrong habitat. And alongside her: Evelyn Williams, writing letters that try (and sometimes fail) to make emotional sense of a man who is both magnetic and impossible.
What you get, in short, is a sequel that turns the dial from midlife sporting fantasy into something darker and stranger: a pataphysical journey where imagined glory keeps trying to outrun the literal bars of reality—and keeps, inevitably, running straight into them.
So: laugh, wince, and keep your belongings close. Because in Courting Lives, the line between creative imagination and psychological collapse isn’t merely thin. It’s… being called in by the authorities.
