Cause of death, in my professional experience, is usually blunt trauma repeated many thousands of times. Which brings me to the Babolat Gold Championship: a pressurised, ITF-approved ball in a can of three, with a woven felt specifically adapted for hard courts. Hard courts are what kill balls. This one is built to last considerably longer on the slab than a ball that was not.
Kigali, where we are going, is a city that keeps its records properly, and I will drop the shop talk at the gate.
We begin at Gisozi, at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, where a very large number of victims of the genocide against the Tutsi are buried in mass graves under long flat concrete slabs set into terraced gardens of clipped hedges and roses.
The exhibition traces the colonial construction of ethnic division, the political build-up, the killings and the aftermath, through survivor testimony, photographs and personal belongings, with a room given to the children. It is the country's principal memorial and documentation centre and the place almost everyone starts.
Up on a ridge above the centre stands the Kandt House, a single-storey colonial villa with a wide verandah on stone piers, built for Richard Kandt, the German physician and explorer whose choice of this hill effectively founded modern Kigali; it is one of the oldest buildings in the city and now holds the Museum of Natural History.
Across town, the Presidential Palace Museum occupies the 1970s residence of Juvénal Habyarimana, in whose garden pieces of the Falcon 50 shot down on 6 April 1994 still lie where they fell.
And at Camp Kigali, a bullet-scarred brick building is kept exactly as it was found, beside ten tall stone columns of differing heights — one for each Belgian paratrooper killed there on 7 April 1994, the heights recording their ages.
You will get through this can everywhere from a hard court on a Kigali hillside to a clay court down in Kampala, and by the way, it is also perfect for the long climb back up from the valley afterwards, which this city does to you roughly four times a day and never apologises for.
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