Hello again. It’s me, Brooke the dog, with a report of the Reviers trip to Bristol last weekend.
It’s a long way to go in the the boot of a Seat Ibiza but worth it if only because we did so much more than hang around the tennis club which, frankly, is just as well because they didn’t make the Sunday play-offs. The tournament was a complicated arrangement of doubled pairs, theirs was from the home club, with accumulated games seeing teams through to the Sunday’s finals. They played three one set to six matches at 1 and 5pm on the Friday and 8.30am on the Saturday. A 6/4, 3/6 and 4/6 mix had them in with a chance. With the rest of Saturday free, Mrs Revier had the two of them make the most of their journey. Two rounds of an all too muddy par 3 golf course was followed by an hour or more of them thirty feet up in the trees, Mr Revier clinging on desperately to harnesses, handholds and zip lines while questioning his life choices. Mrs Revier wasn’t listening. The evening had the three of us walk the two miles along the river back to the club and, given that Banksy is from Bristol, him expressing his disappointment at the quality of graffiti on offer. Worse, on arrival they found they’d not made the last day, their cause not being helped by a 0/6 suffered by their Bristol partners. The late on Sunday final was between the home club’s youngest pairings suggesting it’s not only Cambridge that struggles with pitching handicaps accurately for those new to the game.

The tennis was fun and the company good. It always is. I was spoiled rotten. It was, though, a long way to go for three sets but it had Mrs Revier tick off another club on her way to playing them all. She’s about two thirds of the way there.

Lunch in Bath on the way back and we were home by early evening.

That little tennis in Bristol was in stark contrast to the previous Sunday where Mr Revier won the 60 handicap as it took him fifty games over four hours of one day to do so. His cause wasn’t helped by Smuts Beyers and Chris Swales taking him to five all, forty all in the group stage. He overcame Felicity RB’s more elegant strokes in the final but was, he admitted later, conscious of the thin crowd cheering on his opponent. It was more than, he muttered, supporting the underdog. What was obvious at the day’s end, though, was how fortunate we are to have two courts and how much tennis can be crammed in over one day. Given the state of him the following morning, one day was enough.

Brooke