Edge of the Abyss: Surviving a Tennis Black Hole

It’s our first week away together, and alone, for months. It’s to our favourite part of the British Isles, Cornwall.

We love to walk. We love to sit and gaze at the waves. We’ve grown interested in birds and butterflies, flowers and trees—it comes with age!

Most of all we need to recharge our batteries, away from the workaday deadlines, office politics, and 60-hour-a-week treadmill.

We’re comfortable relaxing together, we’re equally content in following our own interests in our own company. It’s perfect, companionable and mutually sustaining.

So we anticipate with huge pleasure our idyllic week in a picturesque coastal village, in a color-washed cottage snuggled alongside the many others that straggle down cobbled pathways to a harbor bobbing with dozens of small sail boats.

There’s a modest coastal city just 10 miles away. A little shop around the corner sells fresh pasties, local strawberries, our usual broadsheet, wine and milk.

There is a handful of English pubs that all sell local ale—a must for my partner. And there are a few small eateries that serve a selection from the local catch—a must for me.

What could go wrong?

With shame, I have to admit that it’s the technology. More precisely, the promised broadband is not working. The promised digital box that should deliver news streams, weather updates and reliable mainstream TV channels is absent. And neither of the ancient and minute televisions is able to transmit basic broadcasts from the UK’s five core channels.

I know. Worse things happen at sea.

But let me paint in some detail. The cottage was deliberately chosen for these services because we both love writing and we both love sport. The time and freedom to indulge both will be integral to the pleasure of our quiet retreat. What’s more, we both have the occasional need to touch base with the wider world.

Pale golden highlights in our holiday watercolour should have been tracking the tennis results in Montreal and Cincinnati, and watching the goings-on of athletes at the world championships in Berlin.

Only a fortnight ago, I was helping to interview Usain Bolt for my university’s news site, and this week I don’t know whether he’s won or, better still, broken the world 100m record.

Thank goodness for that little shop selling my usual broadsheet: the Lightning Bolt has done both! However, more important for me is that several of our students are also in Berlin, and I can’t follow a single one.

The chalk and charcoal outlines in our painting should have been etched by my husband’s job as a teacher. His summer is measured out by appointing new staff, preparing for the next student intakes, checking the A-level results. This last milestone is during our holiday, but it’s no problem. Any communications can be done remotely. Except they can’t.

He spends several hours across several days talking to the cottage’s owner, who singularly fails to solve the problem. My husband goes direct to the Internet provider, and also fails.

By mid-week, he has wasted so much time and energy that we decide to draw a line, call it quits, resign ourselves to this black hole in the communication universe. (Maybe I forgot to say that neither of our mobile phone networks has a signal, either.)

We happily immerse ourselves in bracing coast walks, the local Tudor mansion, the nearby hostelry’s “Summer Lightening” brew, and enjoy cod fritters so fresh they melt on the tongue. Everything’s fine.

Yet between the energy sapping walks and the recuperating dinners, we are both itching to open up the networks, thrill at the sprinting in Berlin, exclaim at the Murray win in Canada, and argue over the relative merits of tennis and cricket.

I’m writing bits and pieces in those quiet interludes between action-packed daytime and unwinding evenings. I twitch towards Firefox for a quick fact-check and freeze. A row of xxxx’s in the copy will have to suffice.

I crack open my new DVD of last year’s Wimbledon final to slake the tennis thirst via my laptop. I now feel able, for the first time since I wept along with Roger Federer in the minutes that followed the live transmission, to watch it again.

But I’m quickly weeping again as Federer recites Rudyard Kipling’s apposite words: “If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same…”

The events between that Wimbledon and this come flooding back as I recall drawing on the same words in April after Federer seemed destined to implode from the pressure of winning.

So there’s nothing for it. Put the watercolours away, get the jigsaws out, crack open another bottle, and resign ourselves to our sport-free holiday.

Not one email will pass our finger tips, not one Google search will answer that urgent question, and not a single text will reveal this frustration to any one we know.

I have, though, just remembered that the final test of the Ashes series has just started. The penny hasn’t dropped with my husband yet but, deprived of the best cricket event of the year, he will pretty soon have a much better understanding of my tennis-free edginess.

And I thought things were looking up!