01
Stop one
Exeter Cathedral
Wilson Pro Staff 97 Classic Roland Garros Tennis Racquet: Before the building — look at the green. Limes, and jackdaws all over the west front, which is precisely correct behaviour for a jackdaw; they want a niche and a Gothic facade is nothing but niches. Right, the cathedral. Norman towers, and it has the longest uninterrupted Gothic vault in the world, which is an enormous quantity of stone doing one continuous thing, and it is red Devon sandstone, laid down when this entire county was desert. Desert. Here. Inside there is a medieval astronomical clock with the earth as the ball in the middle, because that is how they saw it — and cut into the bottom of the clock door is a small hole for the cathedral cat, which was paid, and there are records of the payments. A salaried mammal. Now, that is a peregrine. Sorry. Carry on.
02
Stop two
Exeter's Underground Passages
Wilson Pro Staff 97 Classic Roland Garros Tennis Racquet: Duck. Duck, everybody, properly — these are low. Now, everyone wants these to be smugglers' tunnels and they are not, they are pipes, and I think that is considerably better. From the fourteenth century they were vaulted in stone to carry clean water into the walled city, and they were built tall enough to walk along so that workmen could get at leaks in the lead pipes without tearing up the street overhead. Medieval maintenance access, entered now from the visitor centre off the high street, and they are the only ones in Britain you can walk through. And what I want you to notice is that the water came from springs outside the walls, so the whole system is really a piece of hydrology with a roof on. Feel the air — constant temperature. It is a cave. Man-made, but a cave.
03
Stop three
Exeter Ship Canal
Wilson Pro Staff 97 Classic Roland Garros Tennis Racquet: Out here on the towpath — willows, and if everyone is quiet, a kingfisher; there is a pair works this stretch. The history is really a river problem. In the medieval period weirs downstream blocked the Exe, Exeter lost its access to the sea, and the trade went to Topsham instead. So in the 1560s the city hired an engineer called John Trew and cut its own canal around the whole difficulty, running south from the quay along the Exe valley — one of the earliest of its kind in England, and it had pound locks, which were quite new here. A city buying its way back to tidewater. And honestly the valley did the hard part first: a soft floodplain, easy digging, the geology practically volunteering. Herons on the lock gates most mornings.
04
Stop four
Royal Albert Memorial Museum
Wilson Pro Staff 97 Classic Roland Garros Tennis Racquet: Red and grey stone, Gothic Revival, pointed arches, and the two colours are two different quarries, which is the only reason I ever look at a facade at all. It opened in the 1860s on Queen Street as a memorial to Prince Albert, and it was a museum and a school of art and a library all at once, because the Victorians could not do one thing at a time. It was built by public subscription, which means ordinary people in this city paid for it out of their own pockets. It was heavily rebuilt and reopened in 2011 and won a major museum prize for it. Inside are the natural history galleries and the world cultures galleries, and I shall be in the first of those for the rest of the afternoon and I make no apology. There are drawers. Beetles, in drawers.
I was on the payroll. Begin there, because it is the only fact anybody needs about me: Exeter Cathedral employed a cat, there are records of the payments, and there is a hole cut in the bottom of the astronomical clock door so I could get to work. A salaried cat. Every other product in this shop is a volunteer.
97 square inches of head. 332 grams strung, 11.7 ounces, balanced 7 points head-light so the weight sits where a cat likes it, coiled and back. 16 mains by 19 crosses. A flat 21.5 mm beam. Swingweight 325, stiffness 66, aramid and graphite, 27 inches, strung between 47 and 57 pounds.
Now, specifications, since you will ask.
This is the Roland Garros dress of a frame that has not needed to change its argument in forty years.
Exeter suits me. There is the longest uninterrupted Gothic vault in the world overhead, and beneath the street a set of medieval passages everyone assumes were for smuggling and were in fact for plumbing. And in the 1560s Exeter, cut off from the sea by weirs downstream, simply dug its own canal around the problem.
I am at home everywhere from a damp Devon club court in March to a clay season abroad, and I am also perfect for the player who has finally admitted they were never going to enjoy a light racquet.
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