Let us begin, as all sound decisions do, with the unit economics. The Babolat Pro Hurricane Tour 17g Tennis String Reel is 660 feet — 200 metres — of co-polyester monofilament. A racquet takes about 12 metres. That is roughly sixteen restrings per reel, which works the cost per string job out to a figure that makes the individual set look like an indulgence.
If you restring often, or string for a family, a team, or a habit you refuse to examine, the reel is simply the correct line item.
The asset itself: 17 gauge, 1.25 mm, extruded to an octagonal profile — eight edges that bite the felt for heavy topspin — with the firm, crisp response, excellent control and reliable tension maintenance the Hurricane line is known for. The thinner 1.25 gauge buys extra bite and liveliness over the 16, at a modest and fully disclosed cost in durability. No hidden fees. I checked.
Its city is Djenné, and I confess a professional admiration, because Djenné runs the finest maintenance schedule on earth.
We begin at the Great Mosque, the largest mud-brick building in the world, standing on a raised earthen platform above the market square: three tapering towers crowned with ostrich eggs and a buttressed facade bristling with rows of projecting palm-wood stakes.
A mosque has stood on the site since the thirteenth century, when Koi Konboro, the twenty-sixth king of Djenné, converted to Islam and demolished his own palace to build one. That structure was allowed to fall into ruin in the nineteenth century and the present mosque was rebuilt in 1907.
Sun-dried banco brick under earth plaster, with the palm beams left projecting to serve as permanent scaffolding. Every spring the entire town replasters it in a single day — the Crépissage, teams racing mud up from the river.
A capital asset with its annual maintenance built into the design and the labour donated by the beneficiaries.
I have never seen a better arrangement anywhere.
Then the Monday market, which fills the square in front of it and has done for centuries: striped awnings, calabashes, mounded spices, drawing Bozo fishers, Fulani herders, Bambara and Songhai farmers and Moorish traders from across the inland Niger delta. Salt from the desert, dried and smoked fish from the Bani and the Niger, millet, indigo cloth, pottery and livestock.
Djenné controlled the riverine end of the trade between the southern gold fields and the Saharan caravans that left from Timbuktu, from the fifteenth century under Mali and then Songhai. That is a toll position, and a toll position is the best business there is.
Then the tomb of Tapama Djenepo outside the town, a small earthen shrine with rounded pinnacles standing alone on open ground with offerings left at its base. Tradition holds that a young woman was sacrificed and buried alive in the town wall at its founding, to secure the prosperity of the settlement, and the story remains part of Djenné's foundation narrative.
It is replastered in the same banco technique as the mosque.
And we finish three kilometres out at Djenné-Djenno, a low grass-covered mound scattered thickly with broken red potsherds and fragments of terracotta figurines.
Excavation from 1977 by Roderick and Susan McIntosh found an urban settlement founded around 250 BC and occupied until roughly 1400 AD, with iron working, rice agriculture and long-distance trade in copper and gold — and no evidence of a centralised state or royal monumental architecture.
It grew instead as a cluster of specialised settlements, which forced a wholesale revision of assumptions about African urbanism. Note that.
A city that ran without a head office.
You will draw on this reel everywhere from a sandy court in Djenné to an indoor hall down in Bamako, and by the way, it is also perfect for the Monday market itself, where sixteen restrings' worth of savings buys a great deal of indigo cloth. Depreciate accordingly.
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