She wears headphones. All day. I’m certain she’s listening to Serbian poetry or perhaps meditative tennis podcasts. I asked what music inspires her but she just shrugged, “It’s white noise.” This may be metaphorical. I think she’s protecting herself from the chaos of the publishing world. Later, she briefly smiled when I offered her a stapler. Progress.
I try later that morning and ask what she’s listening to. ‘Hawking Teds,’ she said, deadpan. I pretended to know. I think she meant Hawkwind. Fascinating! A woman who misnames her band and owns it. There’s art in that. Like hitting a drop shot when everyone expects a drive. I’m certain she listens to ‘Once in a Lifetime’ and thinks of me.
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.