Love All

Advantage, to the early blipper.

It's not often you see the municipal tennis courts in the Meadows empty like this.
They are generally full of racket whackers manfully trying to put the ball over the net but mostly running about picking up wild shots.
Occasionally there are players who look slightly more proficient, but most often it is the inept of the tennis world who go through the gate.

Not that I can talk of being inept in the same breath as tennis.
I must be the world's worst at ball games where the ball comes out of the sky towards me. I don't seem to see it in time to hit it, and as for serving, neither can I see over the net to where I have to place the ball, nor can I throw the ball up in a straight line.
Captain of the hockey team I may have been, but black sheep of any tennis practice I certainly was.

My all girls' school shared a playing field with a well known Edinburgh boy's School a bus journey away through the city, and it was my wont and several other summer tennis defaulters to slip away unnoticed to a quiet part of the field and watch the stalwart young adonises in their cricket whites arriving for practice.

I hasten to add that there were no liaisons with these young males, at least with my group of friends.
We were well brought up young ladies and such a flouting of sensibilities in school uniform would have been completely reprehensible.
To us, pupils in an all girls' school and without older brothers, they were simply exotic creatures from a different planet to be admired from afar.

If we were even bolder in avoiding tennis practice, we might slip out of the queue for the bus just before we exited the school and hide behind the toilets before slinking off home. This was a practice fraught with the danger of being caught; but I can't remember that happening.

Ah, the heady, innocent, summer days of youth. It's a pity that life gets in the way in the end.