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Anyone for Tennis?
Sometimes life comes along and kicks you repeatedly in the teeth, but then relents and, quite unexpectedly, a great huge silver lining beams out of the cumulonimbus.

This is just what happened to me...

It had been a bad couple of weeks; Denise had finally ditched me for being too boring, although she claimed that her intolerance and short attention span was her problem, not mine, to try to make me feel better. It didn't, and when I had a prang on the way to work and the roof began leaking into the spare bedroom, in the next couple of days I felt that life was dealing me a particularly shitty hand. This was a bit self-pitying, I admit, since I did still have a job, a car and a house; however, when the features editor called me into his office I wondered whether those were also soon to be taken away.

But Rex was smiling.

"Do you know much about tennis?" he asked.

This was an unexpected cross-court volley which left me flat-footed.

"Um ... I play a bit," I admitted. "Why?"

"Thought so, your CV said you were sporty. Thing is, we've got an interview arranged with Wynette Monsoon, she's playing an exhibition match and Des has gone down with the flu and Robbo's covering the Man U fixture in Russia, so we're a bit stuck for sports coverage. Do you think you could step in?"

As a junior reporter it was normally my job to follow up on any lost cats and to lurk around the magistrates' court trying to pick up on any mildly interesting civic misdemeanours, so to bag an interview with a British Wimbledon ladies quarter-finalist - albeit a losing one, of course - was quite a coup.

"Sure Rex, when is it scheduled?"

"Eleven-fifteen tomorrow, Mercure hotel small conference suite. Her Rottweiler might be there, so make sure you're polite."

The Rottweiler was a reference to Gus, a Balkan-American who'd long since given up trying to win a major championship himself and was aiming for the reflected glory of coaching one. And Wynette was our Great White Hope of bagging a Wimbledon title for an English player, although she was barely eighteen.

"Always am, Rex," I assured him. "Especially when interviewing young ladies!"

I did some internet research on Wynette in the evening, and discovered that her father was a prominent businessman from Ghana, and had sent Wynette back to his home country for schooling prior to her returning and soaring up through the tennis rankings in less than two years. That would provide a springboard for the human interest angle rather than discussing tournaments and tennis shots, I thought, and wrote out a few open-ended questions for the following day.

As it happened, Gus was nowhere to be seen, so at the appointed time I rather self-consciously sat myself opposite Wynette in a room which would have fitted thirty people.