Real life | 3 May 2018

Because my mother is always telling me everything will be all right if I join a tennis club, I’ve joined a tennis club.

In fact, I haven’t joined a tennis club so much as joined a group of women with a tennis coach who meet once a week for instruction at a court in Surbiton.

A friend of mine is a member of this group and kindly agreed to take me. I borrowed a spare racket of hers and dusted off some dusky pink Lycra hot pants left over from my flirtation with hot yoga.

As we gathered on the sunny court down an alleyway between two houses in a genteel residential road, she and the other four ladies wasted no time in telling me that the coach was going to be unutterably rude. ‘We’re so sorry,’ said one of them. ‘It’s just the way he is. You’ll get used to him.’

The coach bounded up as we unsheathed our rackets and looked for all the world as I wanted him to be: tall, beefy, silver-haired, tanned, the sort of chap who would have played a bit part in Dynasty.

After a perfectly nice pep talk in which he had me fill him in on what tennis I had played — lots as a teenager and not much since — he began the session with an exercise in which two ladies stood on each side of the court one end, with the other four lined up on the service line behind them waiting to step into their place, while he whacked balls to us from the other side of the net.

After the first two ladies had volleyed a few shots, I realised that something else far more complicated was going on.