Ma foi! ....

.... and other exclamations registering half amusement and  half exasperation. 

It was wet yesterday afternoon so our plans for a walk went out of the window. That being  so I decided to do something I haven't done for years, which was to sit down and just watch a tennis match. I used to do that when I was student age, but somehow over the years it began to seem a waste of time, and although I have made resolutions sometimes recently to watch Wimbledon from the beginning through to the end, I never have. Time to waste however seems to be something many of us have in spades right now, so I settled down to watch the French Open men's single final. 

[When I say 'just watch a tennis match', after about 20 minutes I did look out a needle and some wool and cast on a plain sock. Because there is a lot of time in between points and between games and they spend a lot of time replaying the previous point and it's amazing how much  of a plain sock you can knit during this dead time]

When I started watching I thought I was indifferent to who won. In so far as I have followed the men's game over the past decade it's been a case of a) Murray playing - want him to win. b) Federer playing - want him to lose. c) anyone else playing - not bothered. However I realised quite early on in this match from my reactions to the play that I actually did want Nadal to win. And he did, so that was alright. In fact he won really easily but there was some great tennis along the way, so that was fine. 

If the playing was good the same cannot be said of the commentary. So irritating was it that I wonder if it was the inanities of commentating, rather than feeling I had better things to do with my time that led me to stop watching tennis in the first place. I certainly spent a fair bit of my time arguing with the commentators and correcting the stupid stuff they said. I know there's no point, they can't hear me, but it's just instinctive. And it made me feel better. 

Some of my 'favourites' were 'Djokovic is made of rubber'. Er- no. 'That game was a pivot point in this match' said when Djokovic finally won a game after losing six in a row. He then went on to lose the next four. Some pivot, eh? And 'that shot is a classic. Like Catcher in the Rye, that's a classic  - that's lasted for an eternity'. I don't know quite where to start on that one, but I'll just point out that Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951. I don't think seventy years quite counts as 'an eternity' - unless you have been forced to sit and listen to tennis commentary all that time, in which case it might well qualify.