Four stops before the checkout

Böhlen, Germany

Stop one

St.-Christophorus-Kirche Böhlen

Babolat Carlitos 23 Junior Tennis Racquet: Twelfth-century Romanesque foundations, they say. Probably. Note that word, because the building is not documented by name until 1540, and probably is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. The later windows at least come from rebuildings you can see. Now, evidence I accept without argument: the sandstone baptismal font is dated 1613, and the organ was built in 1794 by the Donati brothers of Altenburg, a Thuringian family who worked across Saxony. Comprehensively restored in 2006. And it outlived the lignite mining that swallowed several neighbouring villages outright, which is not a claim, it is a map. Fine. Convinced.

Stop two

Rathaus Böhlen (former manor tenant's house of the Rittergut)

Babolat Carlitos 23 Junior Tennis Racquet: Careful with the word castle. A manor, the so-called Böhlener Schloss, was raised on this estate in the sixteenth century, and I would happily show it to you except that nothing survives but a small park on the spot, which is precisely the kind of exhibit I cannot cross-examine. The building actually standing here went up in 1902 as the residence of the Rittergut's tenant farmer, and has been the seat of local government continuously since 1928. The estate's outbuildings ran into Großdeuben, a village first recorded in 1017 and now a district of Böhlen. That date I went and checked. It holds.

Stop three

Bahnhof Böhlen (Böhlen railway station)

Babolat Carlitos 23 Junior Tennis Racquet: When anyone tells me a thing was the largest in the world, I want a source. This one survives contact: the Tagebau Böhlen opencast mine began work in 1924 and was at that moment the largest opencast mine on earth, feeding carbonisation plants and a power station built beside the town. The railway got here first, in 1842, when the line south from Leipzig opened and Böhlen was still a small farming settlement, and it was the railway that carried the lignite out afterwards. The same station now takes the Leipzig S-Bahn, lines S3 and S5. I came to argue. I withdraw.

Stop four

Hainer See

Babolat Carlitos 23 Junior Tennis Racquet: A lake that looks natural always earns a second question, and this one rewards it: the Hainer See sits in part of the pit left by the Witznitz lignite workings on Böhlen's south-western edge. When brown-coal mining collapsed after German reunification, the abandoned pits south of Leipzig were deliberately flooded and landscaped into the chain now called the Leipziger Neuseenland. Böhlen sits between three of them, the Störmthaler See north-east, the Hainer See south-west, the Zwenkauer See west. The mining that made this water also erased whole villages nearby, Zechswitz and Trachenau among them. That is on the record, and it belongs there.

The Böhlen, Germany track

Babolat Carlitos 23 Junior Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Come closer. Closer… The Babolat Carlitos 23 Junior Tennis Racquet has something to tell you, and it will only say it in a whisper.

This is the smallest frame in Carlos Alcaraz's own junior line, built for players aged 6 to 8 — young souls between 49 and 53 inches tall — and every number on its spec sheet checks out in the daylight: a 23-inch (584 mm) aluminum frame, a 92-square-inch head, a feathery 200 grams unstrung, balanced at 285 mm, strung in an open 16×16 pattern that forgives a small swing the way the living forgive the…

no. Not yet. First you must know where this racquet wants to take you.

Böhlen… south of Leipzig, deep in the coal country of Saxony, where for a hundred years the open-cast mines crept across the land and swallowed whole villages — houses, lanes, churchyards — down into the pits… And when the digging stopped, the water rose.

It is still rising nowhere and resting everywhere, flat and dark over the old workings, and the locals gave it a name: Hainer See. On a windless evening the lake does not ripple. It waits. [long pause] …And now the part that is stranger than any ghost story: it's delightful. There is a beach. Families swim there.

Böhlen took its haunted ground and turned it into a holiday lake, which no ghost anywhere saw coming.

Two hundred grams travels well, child. It goes everywhere from a bright sports hall on a January evening to the shore of the Hainer See at dusk, and it weighs exactly the same in both places… which is more than can be said for the rest of us.

It is also perfect for the long flat walk out past Bahnhof Böhlen, where the lignite trains ran for a century, because a seven-year-old can carry it the entire way and never once ask to be carried themselves.

The aluminum build shrugs off drops, dings and being used as a sword; the light unstrung weight keeps a small arm swinging fresh to the end of a full cardio tennis class; and the shortened length puts the sweet spot exactly where a 7-year-old can find it — even in the dark. Especially in the dark.

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Babolat Carlitos 23 Junior Tennis Racquet

Babolat Carlitos 23 Junior Tennis Racquet