Stores, ledgers, and a very firm view about who gets what. A reel is a stores problem: 660 feet in, sixteen racquets out, and every foot accounted for. I am at my happiest here.

Volkl Cyclone 19g is 1.15 mm — the thinnest gauge in the whole Cyclone range — on a full 660-foot (200 m) reel, which works out at roughly sixteen racquets per spool. It is a five-sided shaped co-polyester: five edges rather than a round profile, catching the ball's felt and dragging it, which is the actual mechanism behind a spin string.

At 1.15 mm the effect is extreme, and so is the wear rate. This is a specialist item. It is issued to players who want the absolute maximum spin and feedback, who understand that it must be strung five to ten percent below their usual synthetic tension, and who accept that it may last a handful of sessions. It is not for a chronic string-breaker; it is for a shot-maker.

Cut it out at fifteen to twenty hours regardless, because co-poly dies long before it parts.

Mohammedia was founded as a store, which I take personally. Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah ordered the kasbah built in 1773 together with a mosque and warehouses, to make Fedala a grain store and protected trading post for the province of Tamesna. Warehouses first. Everything else followed.

The Al-Atik Mosque — the ancient one — belongs to that same 1773 foundation and is the oldest religious building in town. Modern port works arrived in 1913 under the French protectorate, turning a shallow anchorage into one of Morocco's main harbours.

And the Royal Golf de Mohammedia is among the oldest courses in the country, from the era when Fedala was developed as Casablanca's seaside resort, casino and racecourse included.

One spool of this covers everywhere from a member's frame at the golf club to a coach's whole crate of school racquets, and it is also perfect for the Atlantic wind that comes over the ramparts most afternoons, when a spin string is the only thing keeping the ball inside the lines.

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