01
Stop one
La Piscine (Musée d'Art et d'Industrie André Diligent)
Yonex Percept 97L 290 Tennis Racquet: I came here for weather and they have handed me a building that drowned indoors. A magnificent art deco municipal pool of the 1930s, with a stained-glass sunrise blazing away at one end, and then in 1985 they closed it for safety reasons – structurally spicy, water everywhere, precisely my sort of forecast. So what do you do with a hole full of water? You fill it with art. It reopened as a museum in 2001, sculptures standing along the basin, the pool still lying there, and the old changing cabins pressed into service as display cases. A room built for humidity, now full of paintings. Every conservator in France should be having nightmares, and instead it is the loveliest room in the north. I am delighted and faintly disappointed.
03
Stop three
Hôtel de Ville de Roubaix
Yonex Percept 97L 290 Tennis Racquet: Look up at the frieze. Most town halls carve saints and generals across the front; Roubaix carved wool – sorting, spinning, weaving, the actual day job – right along the facade, finished in 1911. This town went from small to more than a hundred thousand people in a single century on cloth alone, which is why they called it the French Manchester, a comparison I suspect is a compliment in exactly one of the two cities. And here is my interest in it, because you know I have one: cloth is a weather industry. Damp air is what keeps the fibre behaving, which is why the great textile towns always sit in the parts of the world where it will not stop raining. This entire skyline is a side effect of bad weather. Best thing I have heard all week.
I lay stones that punish anyone who is not paying attention, and the Percept 97L is a frame for people who pay attention. It is the light one in Yonex's control line: a 97 sq in head, 290 g / 10.2 oz, 27 in long, with a 16×19 pattern and a genuinely slim 21 mm beam all the way round — 21 / 21 / 21.
Balance is 325 mm, about three points head-light strung, with a swingweight near 315 and a flex around 64, and it takes 45 to 60 lbs. The layup is HM Graphite with 2G-Namd Flex Force and Yonex's Servo Filter for vibration control.
A slim beam and a soft flex means it bends into the ball instead of slapping it, so you get the feel of a player's frame at a weight a club player can actually carry through a third set.
Roubaix is my life's work. Two mill owners invented a bicycle race in 1896 to get people out to their new velodrome — pure marketing, and it became the hardest one-day race on earth. The Roubaix Velodrome is where it still finishes.
La Piscine is a magnificent art deco swimming pool of the 1930s with a stained-glass sunrise at the end, closed in 1985 for safety and reborn as one of the finest museums in France. Look up at the frieze on the Hôtel de Ville: most town halls carve saints and generals, and Roubaix carved wool.
And at La Manufacture they run the Jacquard looms, which used punched cards to control the pattern — a programmable machine, in a weaving shed, decades before anyone said computer.
It works everywhere from a slow clay court in the Nord to an indoor hall in Lille through February, and it never once asks for more arm than you brought. It is also perfect for the walk out to the Roubaix velodrome, because 290 grams is nothing at all to carry over pavé — and I would know, I set some of it.
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