02
Stop two
Staatstheater Cottbus
Wilson Adult Tennis Bag (15 Racquet): On your right, the Staatstheater, completed in 1908, one of the most complete Art Nouveau theatre interiors in all of Germany, domed, sculpted facade, sinuous ironwork, standing on Schillerplatz in a fairly modest provincial town. And that is the lesson, that is the whole lesson: nobody told Cottbus it was allowed to commission a building of that ambition. Towns competed through their theatres the way they later competed through stadiums, and this one entered a category it had no business entering, and it won, and it is still winning, over a century later. Who told you what size of thing you were permitted to build? Were they qualified? Photographs during the performance are not permitted. Photographs of that ceiling, beforehand, are frankly encouraged. Look up. Then aim higher.
03
Stop three
Brandenburg Pharmacy Museum (Loewen-Apotheke)
Wilson Adult Tennis Bag (15 Racquet): This is a working pharmacy with a museum attached, and a pharmacy has traded on this square, the Altmarkt, since the sixteenth century. Baroque fittings, herb garden out the back. Now read the drawer labels, and read them properly, because here is where I get sincere with you. Every jar of dried, powdered, frightening substance behind that counter was somebody's best available medicine on the worst day of their life, and the herb garden behind the building was the entire supply chain. Those pharmacists ground, and mixed, and guessed, with what they had, in the time they had. Some of it worked. That is all any of us are doing, and it counts, and it counted then. Please do not open the drawers. Somebody always opens the drawers. Do not be the drawers person.
Good morning, everyone. The schedule allots me four minutes on the equipment and I fully intend to overrun. Please keep to the gravel path.
The Wilson Adult 15-racquet bag. Fifteen frames is a coach's number, or a family's, or one very seriously equipped player's, and the thing that makes that workable is not the volume, it is the partitioning: 3 main compartments rather than a single cavern, so racquets, kit and everything else stay apart.
2 of those compartments are thermally lined, and the script says this protects string tension and grips. The script is, for once, adequate and also understated — heat in a car boot on a July afternoon is the commonest killer of a string bed there is, and nobody ever blames the boot. There is a ventilated pocket for shoes, so they are not sharing air with your towel.
There are accessory pockets for grips, balls and dampeners. There are padded backpack straps as well as the shoulder strap, which at full load is not a luxury, as anyone who has carried 15 frames across a Cottbus car park in February will confirm. It will carry everywhere from a Saturday junior squad to a full week of fixtures.
Cottbus, our subject, is a place that has repeatedly turned an enormous quantity of one thing into something else, which I appreciate professionally.
Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau sold an entire estate to fund his landscape gardening habit, built earth pyramids at Branitz, and lies buried inside the one standing in the lake — and the famous layered ice cream is named after him. A dessert. Named after a man interred in a pyramid. I think about this constantly.
By the way, it is also perfect for a region rebuilding at scale: the Cottbuser Ostsee is an open-cast lignite mine being deliberately flooded into what will be Germany's largest artificial lake, sailing club and all. I am contractually obliged to call that regional structural transformation. I would call it a region turning its biggest wound into a beach.
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