As the last traces of anaesthetic haze leave my system following my recent operation, I am getting better at telling reality from fantasy. For example, it is not a fantasy that the new Potus with that weirdo thing on his head has gone into business as a sort of berserk travel agent; it is reality. Nor is it a fantasy that Roger Federer, after a valedictory period of being written off as a faded hero by the international media, has re-emerged as the world’s greatest tennis player. It is reality.
In a magic final in Melbourne, both Federer and Nadal wore pink shoes, but Federer’s pink shoes had wings. Shod like Mercury, he came back from oblivion. Only a couple of days after the actual event, I tuned in and saw it happen. I was still a bit groggy in the last set, but Federer wasn’t. He was frowning in the way he has always done when commanding a favour from the gods. In my own mind, when I am a break down to Nadal in the fifth, I at least contemplate giving up. But Federer was sucking strength out of the atmosphere.
Suddenly, Melbourne was the centre of existence. I can remember a time when it had less charisma. When Ava Gardner arrived there to start shooting On The Beach, a movie about the death of the Earth after an atomic war, she was quoted by an alert Australian reporter as having said, “Well, they sure picked the right spot for a movie about the end of the world.”
Now, a mere three-quarters of a century later, the gods come to Melbourne to play their radiant games. It’s only sport, but sport seems a big enough “only” if your own body is falling apart. When that goes, there still might be the mind, but only if you’re lucky. More and more I need to be told things are happening. Only then can I turn my majestic attention to them, like a rusty old weather vane miles behind the action.
It took one of my elder daughter’s entourage of clever women to tell me that Netflix is now running a series about Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, the great poet of colonial Mexico. Years ago, I wrote about Sor Juana, and said there ought to be a big movie about her. But the whole thing had to be made and screened before I found out it was in the works.
This is dotage: when you run around screaming that there ought to be a party, only eventually to find out that it has already happened and that you are the last one to get to it. Did you hear that there has been a huge tennis match between two guys in pink shoes?
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