One does not, as a rule, discuss string gauges at the dinner table. My grandmother — the Countess, you understand, not the lesser branch — would have had the footman remove your fish course simply for raising the subject indoors.

And yet here I find myself, seated on a rather municipal bench beside Ansan Lake Park, the water performing its adequate best, compelled to address the Babolat RPM Soft in sixteen gauge, because frankly someone of discernment must and the alternatives are too ghastly to contemplate.

I came to Ansan under what I shall charitably describe as complicated circumstances. A misunderstanding involving a property dispute that dates, in its essentials, to the fourteenth century — recent enough that the paperwork is theoretically recoverable — brought me east, and east one went.

The Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art is here, which I visited with the measured optimism of a man who has been disappointed by modernity since approximately sixteen forty and has made his peace with the condition. Plants, one finds, have the good manners to simply grow without issuing manifestos about it.

The Ansan Botanical Garden surprised me.

I spent a pleasant hour there before the tennis matter reasserted itself.

The Babolat RPM Soft 16g is a co-polyester string — a monofilament construction, for those who have not yet been initiated into the particular theology of modern string materials — and it exists to solve a problem that the RPM Blast, its rather more aggressive sibling, creates with some enthusiasm.

The Blast is a tremendous string, the sort that generates spin as though spin were going out of fashion, which in certain eras it rather was. But it is stiff. The Soft exists as the correction, the amelioration, the diplomatic note sent after the cavalry has already arrived.

It communicates every mishit to the arm with the cheerful directness of a bailiff.

At sixteen gauge — which is to say approximately one point three millimetres, for those who prefer the metric rendering — this string occupies the territory between the brutally thin and the reassuringly substantial. It is, in the taxonomy of strings, a full set, the standard length sufficient to string one racquet in the conventional manner.

The construction retains that co-poly characteristic that Babolat's tour-descended philosophy demands: the string bites the ball, encourages the heavy topspin that the modern game has decided is its entire personality, and then — and this is the rather civilised part — it does not punish you for the privilege. The softness in the name is not decorative.

The feel at contact is genuinely more forgiving, more plush, which is a word I do not deploy lightly.

I watched a group playing near the Ansan Wa~ Stadium last Thursday — energetic young people conducting what I was informed were Fort Lauderdale themed cardio tennis programs, which I accepted as a phrase belonging to the present century and moved on — and I noticed that the players who were not wincing after their forehands were, to a one, using softer polyester setups of precisely this character.

The arm, you see, accumulates. Decades of tennis accumulate. One does not arrive at my stage of life — and I have been at this stage of life since the nineteenth century began to get ideas about itself — without understanding that the body keeps its own ledgers.

The RPM Soft in this gauge suits the player who has already acquired their technique and now wishes their technique to remain available to them into the following season, and the season after that, and frankly the one after that as well.

It is not a beginner's string, not because beginners are unworthy of it, but because its particular virtues — the controlled power, the spin-friendly surface texture, the forgiveness distributed across the full face — are virtues one learns to value only after one has suffered sufficiently under less enlightened arrangements.

I strung my racquet here, in a small workshop near the botanical garden where a gentleman of considerable technical skill and admirable economy of speech attended to the business with the focus of someone who considers the work sacred, which I respect enormously.

The result was a tension that held its character for rather longer than I expected, poly strings being historically ungrateful about tension maintenance. The RPM Soft, I am told, performs respectably in this regard.

Babolat has been making strings since the eighteen seventies, which means the firm has existed for longer than several of my outstanding disputes, and there is in that longevity a kind of argument. They know what they are about. This string is evidence of exactly that.

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