How I rediscovered my teenage love of tennis

For years, I didn’t feel I could attempt to watch tennis again. You’d be a fool to try and snog your first crush again, right? The ­perfect past can’t be recreated. In fact, when I changed my mind and decided to head to the Queen’s Club Championship for this column, I steeled myself for the ­possibility that I would hate it, and ruin my own memories.

The first good omen of the day came from the ­boulangerie near the station in Barons Court. The English, for some reason, can never quite nail a proper jambon beurre, but there in the window were sandwiches that looked like the real thing. Amazingly, they tasted like it, too, largely because they’d nailed the ratio of butter to baguette – basically 1:1.

Satisfied, I walked through security, cackled in disbelief at the poster advertising “mango and lobster salad”, then tried to figure out where to sit. For dull and complicated reasons, which we can boil down to “I’m an idiot”, I’d got a ground ticket, meaning I couldn’t actually be in the arena for the men’s singles final.

Instead, luck smiled upon me again and I landed in the best of both worlds. For the next two-and-a-half hours, I sat in Court 1, ­watching a wheelchair doubles match in front of me, while being able to keep an eye on a large screen that showed Jiří Lehečka taking on Carlos Alcaraz. I found myself instinctively rooting for the Czech, as everyone loves an underdog and, crucially, Alcaraz just looked too beautiful, which I found irksome.

In the end, I had a ball. If cricket is the BBC’s 1979 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, then tennis is a taut and sexy thriller. The way the players move is tense but elegant; the game itself is both deceptively simple yet clearly hiding countless, complex layers. The way tension builds in a matter of seconds, as the ball goes back and forth and back and forth, means that you can never afford to lose your focus. The way it then deflates in an instant means you get to keep experiencing delicious relief, catching your breath and unclenching your jaw.

As it turns out, I don’t need to be 17 or smoke cheap weed to enjoy tennis: we clearly, merrily belong together. In fact, I loved it so much that I managed to stay in place all that time without even noticing it, despite having the attention span of a toddler and a bladder as small as a thimble. I sat there for ages, and watched both games as if my life depended on it.

Well, I did get distracted quite early on, as I watched the ball girls do their job and thought about how gratifying it must be to be one of them. How fun to see a ball and go grab it! How satisfying it must feel! I realised, about a ­minute later, that I’d just experienced the ­internal monologue of a Jack Russell. Maybe those joints did get to some of my brain cells.

Photograph by Luke Walker/Getty Images for LTA