When ambition meets reality

Thank you. I was touched by your kindness. Last week I declared that in defiance of time and fat I was going to play squash. And almost none of you tried to dissuade me.

Though the plan was absurd, though doom loomed, you refrained from telling me so. You were like parents who, having bought their only child a bicycle, stand waving in silence trying to smile as he pedals away down Abduction Ave towards the Mall of Molestation. There is no kinder gift than to let people make their own mistakes. So thank you.

And thank you too for not being solicitous after the event. The game was at 2pm so one might have thought that by teatime, say, the phone would have been ringing and the inbox overflowing. But no, almost nothing bar the usual rabid illiteracies from the Trump lovers. (Why is it that so few of them can spell?)

Momentarily I felt deserted, until I realised that

the cause was yet more

kindness. For if I was lying on a hospital bed, biting on

the twisted sheet, the last

thing I needed was a ringing phone, a stream of visitors,

and the grapes of insincerity

piling up on the bedside table. No doubt you itched with curiosity, with worry even, but out of basic human decency you held back. I was touched and I was grateful. And your reward for not asking how it went is to learn how it went.

When I found my old squash bag, the racquet was still strung and the shoes still fitted, but the shirt, well, I got a new one at The Warehouse for 10 bucks. Should I never play again I can rent it out as a marquee.

To step back on to the squash court was to be assailed by memory. Ghosts thronged the place, forehand and back. Most were giggling. So was I until I saw my opponent, who was taller, younger and considerably slimmer than he had implied in his email. By way of a warm-up I put 111 on speed dial.

But there was little danger. We had agreed that this first encounter would be merely a hit-up, just knocking the ball affably back and forth.

I said last week that a moving ball excites the male brain as a running rabbit excites a dog. Wrong. What excites the male brain is competition. Take competition away and a moving ball has all the thrill of knitting.

After two minutes I was bored. I looked at my opponent.

‘‘Let’s play a game,’’ he said.

‘‘What could possibly go wrong?’’ I said. Hitting the ball was like riding a bike. It was seared into muscle memory. Getting to the ball, however, wasn’t. The muscles had forgotten. And when reminded, they protested.

So the game was a struggle between ambition and reality. I had constantly to tell myself that I could not get about as before. Many a time (not to mention Anne Doft) I gave up on a ball that once I’d have reached at a canter.

Thursday morning I was stiff as a mortuary slab but I wasn’t on one. And it was then that the Inquiries came. But not about my health. People wanted to know, I’m sorry to say, who’d won.

Ha. As if it mattered who won. As if I cared or remembered who won. And as if, if I’d won, I would crow. I did not honour those Inquiries with a reply.

But I did reply ‘yes’ to the following email: ‘‘Same time same place this week, Joe? So I can get revenge.’’

Take competition away and a moving ball has all the thrill of knitting.