I’ve marked my balls, I’m doused in alcohol…now get me on that tennis court

Oh tennis, how I’ve missed thee. Seven weeks you have been gone. Seven long weeks.

For the last 54 days I have walked past the sad looking tennis courts and hoped that one day we will be reunited. One day.

But in the normal world I play almost every day so it feels like I’ve been mugged of something I treasure.

In the grand scheme of things an absence of ball hitting is not even remotely important. Obviously.

And I must make it exceedingly clear that I’m no tennis pro…I just love it. I’m actually pretty hopeless, but I just love it when one of my crazy wild baseline volleys pays off and I float to a backcourt nirvana.

People often have ‘phantom phone vibrations’ when they think they feel their pocket is alerting them to a mesaage. I’ve had an auditory abnormality going on instead.

Throughout lockdown I’ve had the weird feeling that I can hear a tennis ball being hit.

My immediate thought is how dare anyone be flouting the rules and hitting a ball. If I can’t hit a ball. No one can.

Theh weren’t. How can you be so sure, well dear reader the tennis FOMO was so bad that I checked. I walked across to the court to see if tennis was in play. I’m not sure what I’d have done if it was. But I needed to be sure no one was having any tennis joy.

As you can imagine, when I heard we might be allowed to play tennis once again I was over the moon.

But then I suddenly felt deeply fearful as the rumour was that you could only play with people living in your household. I live alone. This would be almost worse than no one being allowed to play tennis because I’d know everyone would be playing. But without me. This would be like tennis FOMO on speed.

One sleepless night later…as I wondered if perhaps I could move into a friend’s house just so we could play…and constantly checking tennis rules post-lockdown in other countries it was going to be okay.

Luckily, and I thank you from the bottom of my dark-heart Mr Tennis-LTA-Man, you can play singles with someone you don’t live with.

Hoorah. I will go to the tennis court again! Order has been restored. I will live to hit another ball.

I whooped. I actually did. I was on a work conference call at the time when I saw the LTA tweet and I had to quickly mute my mic for some whooping. I set about lining up some games.

Then it dawned on me. Having been so so careful during lockdown I soon realised that you need to play someone who takes germs equally seriously.. and this could pose all manner of problems

The LTA guidance is that you both bring your own balls, which you mark, and then you each only touch your marked balls. So you serve with the balls and instead of passing back your opponent’s balls you flick them back with your racket. It would slightly get in the way of the flow but I’d much rather that than the alternative.

But would everyone abide by these rules? Or would they just get on court and start picking up balls willy nilly with scant regard for the rigours of antibacterialing?

So I found I was suddenly posed with evaluating tennis friends in terms of their willingness to take this seriously. I rang a tennis friend and we discussed other tennis players and their likelihood of abiding by the rules.

We found ourselves judging others. So wrong. But our logic was that those that were quick to move from handshakes to elbow bumps pre lockdown were going to be the safest bets post lockdown. So we’d play with those we rated as early adopters!

So far everyone has been fastidious and it’s made getting back on the court an absolute joy.

One thing we hadn’t considered after our antibacking, ball marking, distant ball flicking and generally not touching our faces style tennis…was what if we hit a ball out of the court and someone else picks it up.

The chivalrous-ball-getter might think they were being kind. But nooooooo!

So of course this happened in our first game. I could see a friendly dog walker approaching the ball. I ran like lightening out of the court to the ball and almost leapt on it like I was scoring a try…but then realised it wasn’t one of my marked balls so started hacking at it with my racket to flick it back on court.

Dog walker was utterly bemused as I hacked and flicked in a weird OCD-ball-phobic way. He left me to it.

I returned triumphantly to the court having ensured the safe return of the ball.

“Phew, that was close,” I puff.

“What are you doing, our ball is still out there.”

Nooooo. What had I done. He wasn’t a chivalrous dog walker at all. He was a man trying to claim his property as I hacked at it with my tennis machete.