I love it here. I want to say that first, because I am about to get sentimental about a string reel. This is 200 metres (660 feet) of Babolat RPM Team in 17 gauge — 1.25 millimetres of low-density co-polyester monofilament with micro air bubbles worked right into it, so it plays soft and flexible where most polys are stiff as a guesthouse mattress.
The octagonal profile gives you honest spin, the control is the sort you can lean on far from home, and the durability is pure RPM family; it holds up the way good things should.
A reel this size restrings a club's worth of racquets, sixteen sets or so, and there is something about that generosity that reminds me of my grandmother, who also refused to buy anything in quantities smaller than everyone is staying for dinner.
She would have understood Paphos, which is a town where nobody has ever quite left.
We begin at the Tombs of the Kings on the coast north of the harbour, a necropolis carved down into the rock and in use from the fourth century BC through the Roman era. No kings are buried there.
The name comes from the grandeur: chambers opening onto sunken peristyle courtyards ringed with Doric columns, built in imitation of the houses of the living, for the officials and aristocrats of Hellenistic Paphos when the city was the Ptolemaic capital of Cyprus. The architecture leans Alexandrian, and traces of frescoed stucco survive in some chambers.
Later, early Christians sheltered in them. People made houses of the dead and then people lived in them, and I had to sit down for a while.
Then the mosaics of Nea Paphos in the Archaeological Park. A farmer's plough struck stone in 1962 and turned up the House of Dionysos, a wealthy Roman residence of the late second century AD with over five hundred square metres of floor celebrating the wine god, alongside Pyramus and Thisbe, Phaedra and Hippolytus, and the vintage.
The neighbouring Houses of Theseus, Aion and Orpheus added more, including the famous panel of Theseus and the Minotaur. Earthquakes destroyed the city in the fourth century, and the mosaics are the reason Paphos was inscribed by UNESCO in 1980.
Then Saranta Kolones, the castle of the Forty Columns, named for the granite columns scattered through its ruins, salvaged in antiquity from the ancient city.
A Byzantine fortress went up here around the end of the seventh century to shield the harbour from Arab raids, and after Richard the Lionheart took Cyprus in 1191 the Lusignan Franks rebuilt it as a compact concentric stronghold with a three-metre curtain wall, four great corner towers and a moat. The earthquake of 1222 brought it down.
Excavators later found a man who had died trapped in the main drain trying to get out.
And we finish at Agia Kyriaki Chrysopolitissa and St Paul's Pillar in Kato Paphos. Tradition says the Apostle Paul, preaching here with Barnabas around 45 AD, was bound to a pillar and given thirty-nine lashes before converting the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus, which made Cyprus the first territory governed by a Christian ruler.
Around the worn marble column spread the excavated remains of a seven-aisled fourth-century basilica floored with mosaic, destroyed in the Arab raids of the seventh century, and the small medieval church built among the ruins is still in use, shared between several congregations.
You will string off this reel everywhere from a seaside hard court in Paphos to an indoor hall over in Limassol, and by the way, it is also perfect for a long table of meze near the harbour at the hour when nobody is counting the plates. String soft, swing full, call your mother.
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