We have always had some kind of misguided blind belief that it never rains on our tennis court. Living in the wet, windy winter-rainfall region of the Western Cape, that faith was a bit like my mother driving into the only tree within a 10 km radius in the middle of the Namibian Desert, yet she managed it. We have since had a reality check. It has been raining on our court every Sunday for more than five weeks. No tennis, and even worse, no champagne.
Something had to be done and since that fantastic retractable roof that they have over Wimbledon centre court is a little out of the Club budget, we decided to avail ourselves of the Club’s other indoor facilities. We decided to try out our tennis skills on the table tennis table in the clubhouse.
The transition was not as easy as we thought, especially since we hadn’t left any of our competitive killer instincts back out in the rain. It soon became apparent that we weren’t used to any kind of confinement when Theresa leapt onto the Foozball table table to retrieve a cross court smash from Meg. The kids playing Foozball at the time didn’t seem to appreciate having their plastic goalie trampled underfoot and then when I inadvertently scored a goal with our errant pingpong ball, they looked positively mutinous. My enthusiastic attempts to high five them were met with a lot of muttering and dirty looks as they rearranged and realigned their plastic soccer players.
According to Table Tennis rules, it is also unacceptable to jump up and swing wildly from the vertical blinds in attempting to return Theresa’s blistering serve. I think she may have been secretly training with the Korean Olympic team. This however didn’t seem to impress the darts players, in fact I think they were a little put off their aim because one dart missed the dartboard completely, narrowly missing my butt as I swung down from the pelmet!
Table Tennis turned out to be short-lived after Theresa, diving across the neighbouring pool table, mistook the white snooker ball for our pingpong ball and sunk it in the left hand corner pocket with her bat. The pool players were a little more threatening than the Foozball kids, I think they might have had money on the game, so we decided to pack it in and drink champagne instead.
They also have yoga classes at the Club, and since the table tennis table had mysteriously disappeared, purportedly for repairs, we decided to try out the yoga class the following week. That was even more short-lived than the table tennis. Our “Yogi” didn’t think it was funny when I tried the Three-legged Dog Balance using the champagne bottle as a support. When Theresa popped the champagne cork during the post-yoga rest period and disrupted everyone from their blissful meditative states, we were encouraged to seek out another diversion, preferably at another club. Far away, and at least until the sun comes out and dries up our tennis court.
