You do not get fruit by rushing the tree. You plant the right thing, in the right ground, at the right size, and then you wait. The Yonex Junior 19 is the smallest frame in Yonex's 2025 junior range — a 19-inch racquet, prestrung and ready, for children below the height band the 21-inch model is built for, which Yonex puts at 100 to 115 cm.

That means the very youngest beginners: light enough to be held out in front, short enough that a swing is a swing rather than a heave, and built by a company that puts the same care into a first racquet as into a tour frame. That is the whole job.

Bright, tough, and correctly proportioned.

The Casa Hacienda Huando, on the edge of town, was one of the great estates of the Chancay valley, worked from the colonial period onward, and in the twentieth century it made the country's most prized seedless orange — the Huando. I am biased. I am also right.

Huaral is my valley and it grew something famous.

Up on a high ridge at roughly 3,500 metres in the Atavillos Bajo district is Rúpac, a pre-Inca ceremonial and residential site of the Atavillos culture with 51 stone buildings, stairways, courtyards and storehouses, some still roofed. On the coast at Chancay stands the Castillo, built on a cliff over the Pacific in the first half of the twentieth century by Consuelo Amat y León.

And on the Plaza de Armas, the Church of San Juan Bautista, whose feast on 24 June is still the town's great celebration.

A 19 goes with a child everywhere from a coastal court in the sea mist at Chancay to a swept yard high up the valley, and by the way, it is also perfect for the shade of the orange rows at Huando, where a small player can hit a wall all afternoon and nobody will move them on.

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