Wii conquer Wimbledon...

I have never been a ‘sportie’. From my earliest years, I hated having to chase a dratted ball around a pitch, either to get it to some place or stop it going to somewhere else – I was never sure which. School games were a nightmare. I simply couldn’t get to grips with the perverse plastic bubble that always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, namely, wherever I was. Why did it always seem to be shooting in my direction, however fast I ran from it? Why was it my job to stop it, or catch it, or whatever?
I didn’t invent the horrible game, nor lay down the tarmac pitch and paint the white lines, as mysterious and incomprehensible as prehistoric markings on a lump of old stone. I didn’t ask to be on the dratted pitch on a freezing Monday morning with a flock of lively, noisy females, whose credo seemed to be ‘I score, therefore I am’.
Even today, I break out in a cold sweat when I so much as hear a ball bouncing off of concrete. Netball was bad, volleyball horrible and tennis the worst of all.
In games like netball, you are shielded by gangs of said females – they did have their uses, after all – but in tennis, you are alone on the court, blindingly obvious for all to see. I couldn’t play the game, I just could not. I just could not run quickly enough to hit that white little blob that seemed to have a life of its own. When my long-suffering opponent cottoned on to this, she (if a nice person) made life easier by pitching the ball in my direction. But then, I just couldn’t return it to the ‘right’ part of the court. I always seemed to be ‘out’. Soon, I was ‘excused’ from tennis, at official levels. I grew up with a tennis phobia, unable even to watch Wimbledon for a goodly number of years. When I eventually overcame this, I found tennis an oddly watchable game, the more so because the television viewer is elevated slightly over the court. He or she sees what is happening on the entire pitch, the total picture, something the players cannot – just how do they do it?
When my young niece asked me to join in a game of screen tennis, thanks to a Wii delivered by Santa Claus, I had misgivings. No-one wants to look foolish in front of a very young relative., but, oh joy! The view on the screen is that of an elevated TV viewer, rather than the spot of a professional player. I threw myself into it. For the first time in my life, I saw the words game, set and match to… Delighted, I let little angel win the next game, and the one after that. One must encourage the young, after all.