Welcome, and thank you for joining me. If you will look at the frame in front of you — the Wilson Clash 100 Pro V3. The Clash franchise is built around a single unusual claim: that a racquet can be genuinely flexible and genuinely stable at the same time, which the physics normally will not allow.
The V3 uses Wilson's patented SI3D technology to revise how the frame bends, targeting the flex where it produces plough-through rather than letting the whole frame go soft.
The specification. Length, 27 inches. Unstrung, 305 grams — 10.8 ounces — and strung, 321 grams, 11.3 ounces, balanced seven points head light with a swingweight of 325. The beam is a uniform 24.5 millimetres. The flex is 58 RA, which is genuinely soft; most control frames sit in the high sixties or seventies.
Head, 100 square inches, 645 square centimetres.
Graphite construction, a 16 by 20 string pattern, recommended tension 50 to 60 pounds, and a Wilson Pro Performance grip. The finish is graphite black with red accents and the Clash logo embossed on the throat.
And my favourite detail, which is not on most people's tour: the end cap, bumper and grommets are Agiplast, a plant-based material, and the Click and Go system means the bumper comes off and a new one goes on without a workshop. Less waste, and a repair you can actually do.
Now — Perth. St John's Kirk was begun in the 1440s and hangs a rare fifteenth-century brass chandelier, which is remarkable. The North Inch is common ground along the Tay and has been for centuries. All excellent. All on the script.
The Fair Maid's House has parts standing since 1475.
And then there is Perth Museum, in the old city hall, and I am afraid I am going to go somewhat off my notes. The Stone of Destiny is there.
That block of sandstone — a lump of rock, no carving worth the name — was the seat on which kings were made, and it was taken away in 1296, and it sat under a chair in London for seven hundred years, and it was stolen back by four students in 1950, and it came north again in 1996, and in 2024 it arrived here.
Seven centuries of an entire country's argument about itself, conducted over one piece of sandstone that would not look out of place holding a gate open. I have been doing this job a long time and that is the only object that still stops me mid-sentence.
"Seven hundred years of argument, over one block of sandstone."
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