Tag: satire

Julian writes: the Tennis Player Quartet Podcast. Episode 2: The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player

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.

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)

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Julian writes: welcome to my Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player podcast universe!

In this first episode of our four-part podcast run, we plunge headfirst into Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player – a satirical memoir that does something both noble and dangerous: it tells the truth about what happens when an adult with a stiff back and a fragile ego joins a tennis club and decides they are, fundamentally, one good warm-up away from Wimbledon.

Check out our podcast here:

(Audio file generated by Julian Pilkington-Sterne with assistance from Mork and Mindy down in the locker room)

Our protagonist is a middle-aged amateur, heroically over-invested in the game, attempting to navigate the twin horrors of club tennis:

  • being casually dismantled by teenagers who barely break a sweat, and
  • committee politics so petty they should come with their own line judges.

And yet — and this is the point — inside his head, the story is very different. There, he’s building a magnificent ascent: a private, cinematic campaign of destiny that ends, inevitably, with Wimbledon glory. The genius of the book is how it holds these two realities together: the creaky joints, unpaid subs and damp courts versus the fever-dream triumph of the imagined centre stage.

So yes: it’s funny. But it’s also oddly tender — a sharp little critique of the English sporting psyche and that classic Walter Mitty reflex, where fantasy becomes less a lie and more a life-raft. Because sometimes the only thing standing between you and total irrelevance is the voice in your head insisting, with absolute conviction, “Next season… I’m going on a run.”

Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player

Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player

“I don’t like your attitude!” snaps “Serena Williams” as we square up over the club’s dubious grass courts. But I am “Andy Murray”, the greatest tennis GOAT ever, no really I am and you “Serena” are blocking me from my ultimate goal: chairman of our local club.

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Audiobook now available on Audible!

Literary Spat in the Offing: a critic criticises a critic on his critique

Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant – the third in the Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player series – has not yet hit the clay courts of Paris, but it is already causing a minor fracas between two esteemed literary critics. Here’s Dr. Harriet Blore’s riposte to C.W. Bramble’s response to her:

To the Editor,

Mr Bramble’s florid defence of Les Conquêtes Normandes d’un Tennisman Vieillissant — printed in your previous issue — deserves a response, if only to remind your readers that literary criticism is not a branch of interpretive dance.

I am grateful, in a way, that Mr Bramble has chosen to reveal the full extent of his infatuation with chaos. His attempt to salvage coherence from a narrative built upon gibbering metaphor is impressive in its gymnastics, but ultimately unconvincing. He writes of “deliberate form unravelling itself” — I suspect he might say the same of a dropped pavlova.

Let us speak plainly. Les Conquêtes Normandes is not a novel of philosophical depth, but of literary cosplay. Its protagonist is not Camus’s Meursault with a racket, but a man-child staging an internal Wimbledon with imaginary friends and a goat. That Mr Bramble chooses to frame this as an act of theatrical courage rather than symptomatic overreach is revealing.

There is a growing trend — and Mr Bramble exemplifies it — to mistake the absurd for the profound simply because it resists paraphrase. A goat appears. A coach quotes Proust. The net whispers. None of this is difficult to understand. It is simply not serious.

What we are witnessing is not the resurgence of the European novel’s surreal tradition. It is the monetisation of eccentricity. Mr Bramble may enjoy watching the emperor serve underarm in his invisible clothes; I prefer literature that dares to wear trousers.

Sincerely,
Dr. Harriet Blore
Senior Critic, Times Literary Supplement

If you fancy diving into the shark pool of literary criticism and offering your opinions up for savaging, then get in touch here and we’ll send you a free copy and a promise to have your review printed in these esteemed columns too. Just leave us your contact details here:

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Confessions of an Ageing Football Player: Brazil 2,014 – My Team 2,015

73 – nil! Those were the days: moments of glory on the school playing field on a foggy Wednesday afternoon when the final whistle went and your school mates would gather around you, beaming their small faces at you from every conceivable direction as they congratulated you fulsomely on the 23 hat tricks you had  just completed in your team’s undeniable slaughter of the opposition.

The juniors from Mrs. Myrtle’s class were never going to stand up to the superior fire power of Mr. Thompsons 4th years and your part in their downfall was heralded as the natural climax of a long and muddy school football season.

In those days, England had won the World Cup for the first (and only?) time and the nation rejoiced rejoiced rejoiced. We became our football heroes overnight and in the course of that fateful autumn season when I moved primary schools seven times, I was able to become Roger Hunt, Nobby Stiles, Bobby Moore, Martin Peters, George Cohen, George Best and Jimmy Greaves in six short months -playing footie with mates in a school classroom, at the park, in the garage, in a potato field, down an anonymous dirt track, in the kitchen and even once on a proper football field. We all became our own heroes overnight and never looked back, plotting our own way to football fame and fortune ever since.

We have of course all gone our different ways: Roger disappeared into medical supplies, George Best into pub management and Jeff Hurst into the funerals business: but me, I stayed lean and mean, waiting for the next major football opportunity. World Cups have come and go but I feel it in my bones: Brazil 2014 may just be the one where I make my mark and relive the joy of 23 hat tricks against the juniors.

Neymar, Messi, Oxlade Chamberlain: you have all been warned. This year is my year.

Confessions of an Ageing Football Player is out now, just in time for the Qatar 2022 World Cup! You can order your copy here.

You can listen to all the episodes of the Ageing Football Player Podcast here!

Confessions of an Ageing Football Player

Confessions of an Ageing Football Player

A satirical novel about fantasy, solitude, and replaying the beautiful game alone.

In Confessions of an Ageing Football Player, an ageing man plays out the 2014 World Cup match by match on his old Subbuteo table, narrating himself into glory long after the crowd, the pitch, and the body have disappeared.

This is not a sports memoir. It’s a comic, affectionate, and quietly unsettling exploration of football fandom, masculinity, and the rituals we invent to keep the game alive.

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