Lot fifty-one, and I open on the frame: Babolat, Drive Junior, twenty-five inch, eleventh generation. Graphite composite and aluminium — graphite for the feel, aluminium for the toughness, and the blend is why this frame survives being dropped, thrown and left in a hot car boot, which it will be. Do I hear a bid? It is a junior racquet. It is going to have a hard life.
The 25 is cut for a child between 130 and 140 centimetres — that is 51 to 55 inches — which typically runs ages nine to eleven. Height, not birthday. Next: the handle.
Sizing, and this is where the value is, so listen.
Babolat studied children's hands and built about the thinnest grips on the market, because a child holding a handle too fat for the palm cannot rotate the wrist, and a wrist that cannot rotate cannot make topspin, and that is how a promising nine-year-old ends up hitting flat forever.
The string pattern is 16 by 17 — open, forgiving, and cutting the shock that reaches the arm at impact. It comes prestrung. Ready. Now. Going once.
Bigger head, more power, less effort.
N'DJAMENA. Fast, because I talk fast and this city rewards it. The Chad National Museum first, and its terracotta heads from the Sao towns of the Chari floodplain — faces modelled a thousand years ago by people whose towns are now farmland, and I would not put an estimate on a single one of them.
The Grand Mosque, twin minarets, visible from most of this low flat city, which is how you find your way back when you are lost, and you will be. The Cathedrale Notre-Dame, rebuilt after the shelling of 1980 — rebuilt, note, not replaced.
And the Marche Central, a short walk from the river, camel-hide goods and dried fish and a hundred voices calling at once, which is where I feel most at home for reasons I hope are obvious.
“A thousand-year-old face out of a riverbed. No estimate. Some things do not go under the hammer.”
Graphite and aluminium, thin grip, sixteen by seventeen, strung and ready. SOLD.
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