You want to know what a twelve-racquet bag is really for? It is for the day everything goes wrong at once. Rain delay, a broken string in the first game, a temperature swing of fifteen degrees between the warm-up and the third set, two frames strung tight for the fast court and two strung loose for the one they moved you to.

Nobody carries twelve racquets because they need twelve racquets. They carry twelve because the forecast is a lie and the schedule will change.

The build is the Pro line, which is the tournament end of the range.

Two main compartments so the frames sit in separated groups rather than grinding against each other; YKK zips throughout, which is the single most weather-exposed component on any bag and the one that fails first when it is cheap; multiple further compartments for shoes, kit and the small emergency items; and backpack carry, which matters enormously when you are hauling twelve frames across a car park in horizontal rain.

Midnight navy or cobalt blue.

At the start of the 1300s the Marinid sultan sat down outside these walls and did not merely camp — he built a city. Mansourah: walls, palace, a great mosque with a minaret over thirty metres high, an entire rival town raised for the sole purpose of starving this one out.

Tlemcen is my kind of place, because Tlemcen has survived a catastrophe of pure human construction.

Eight years of siege. Today the minaret still stands out there inside the ruined walls with one whole face fallen away, alone in a field. A storm takes a roof. That took a city.

Then the sultan was killed, the siege collapsed, and the besieging city was abandoned to the weather.

Nobody carries twelve frames because they need twelve. They carry twelve because the forecast is a lie.

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