There is a weight at which a racquet stops being an object a child holds and becomes an extension of the arm, and this one has found it. The VOSTRA 8 Junior is 235 g. 8.3 oz. It is 63.5 cm long — twenty-five inches — with a 660 square centimetre head, 102 square inches, a 25 mm beam and a balance of 30.5 cm, head light.
String pattern 16×19, grip size 00, and it arrives strung with high-performance synthetic gut, which means the racquet is ready before the child's patience runs out.
Carbon-fibre composite, with a Vibration Absorber Handle to take the shock out at the hand. What that produces is easy power and real spin potential in something small enough to be swung properly, which is the whole thing, really — a child given a frame they can move learns a stroke, and a child given a frame that moves them learns a flinch.
One of those is a game and the other is a wince that lasts thirty years.
The Dolmen de Menga was raised somewhere around five and a half thousand years ago with capstones of thirty tonnes, dragged and lifted and set down by people with rope and timber and an idea. Thirty tonnes.
Antequera is the city I would send a light thing to, because Antequera is a place obsessed with weight.
And the corridor of it points, not at the sunrise as almost every dolmen in the world does, but at a mountain — the Pena de los Enamorados, the Lovers' Rock, which from that doorway has the profile of a face lying down and looking at the sky. They aimed a tomb at a sleeping mountain. I have not recovered from that and I do not intend to.
Above the town, the Real Colegiata de Santa Maria la Mayor stands beside the Arco de los Gigantes, and up on the ridge behind it the karst pavements of El Torcal go on for miles: limestone weathered into stacked plates, like a library left out in the rain. Enormous stone, everywhere, in a town that will hand your child something that weighs less than a bag of sugar.
"They pointed a tomb at a mountain shaped like a sleeping face. On purpose."
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