03
Stop three
Batumi Botanical Garden
Head Hawk Touch 16g Tennis String Set: A Russian botanist, in 1912, looked at this coastline and worked out something nobody around him had bothered to check: that it was subtropical enough to grow damn near anything on earth. Then — and this is the part I want you to carry out of here — he did not write a paper about it. He proved it. He planted the world on this hillside, in sections, running all the way down to the sea. Japan on one slope. Australia over the ridge. The Americas below. Every seed arrived by ship, in a crate, across weather, on a hunch that turned out to be correct. That is the entire shape of a life's work: notice the thing everybody else has walked past, then spend the rest of your years demonstrating it in public where it cannot be argued with. He is gone. The garden is nine kilometres up the coast on Green Cape and it is still the argument, and there is no finer view of an anchorage anywhere in Georgia than the one from its top path. Whatever you have noticed that nobody else has — plant it.
04
Stop four
Ali and Nino moving sculpture
Head Hawk Touch 16g Tennis String Set: Two steel figures, seven metres tall, and every evening they move: they slide toward one another, they pass completely through each other, and then they separate again. Built in 2010, taken from a novel about a Muslim Azerbaijani man and a Christian Georgian woman on this coast around the time of the Great War — two people from two worlds that would not hold them both. Watch the full cycle. Do not walk away at the meeting, because the meeting is not the message. Here is the message: they pass THROUGH. Not around. Not away. Through — which means each of them is permanently altered by the other, and neither of them stops moving. You have people like that. Someone you could not stay with and could not go back from. That is not a failure. That is this sculpture, on this seafront, every single evening, in seven metres of steel, telling you it was worth it. Stay for one more cycle. I will wait with you.
Move slowly and nothing large takes an interest in you. Head Hawk Touch 16g is the calm one. A monofilament at 1.30 mm built around Head's Crystal Core Technology, which gives it a softer, more controlled feel than standard Hawk, supplied as a 12-metre set for one racquet. Sixteen gauge means it lasts; Touch means it does not punish the arm.
Batumi has water I would happily stand in for an hour, and a town behind it that never quite settles. We begin at the Batumi Lighthouse, a slim cast-iron tower on the seafront boulevard that has been marking the harbour mouth since the 1880s. It is not large and it does not need to be. It stays where it is and repeats itself at a fixed interval, which is most of my profession described in one sentence.
Then the port and the old oil terminal at the northern end of the bay. Batumi became the Black Sea end of the oil business once the railway from Baku reached the coast in 1883, and by 1907 a pipeline ran the whole way across the mountains from the Baku fields to this quay, the longest in the world at the time.
Caspian kerosene left for the world through here, the Rothschilds and the Nobels had refineries running, and a young revolutionary organised the refinery workers in 1902 and got himself arrested for it.
Nine kilometres north, on Green Cape, the Batumi Botanical Garden was founded in 1912 by a botanist who worked out that this coast was subtropical enough to grow almost anything, and proved it by planting the world here in terraces, so you walk out of East Asia and into the Americas in about four minutes without noticing the transition. Nobody ever notices the transition.
And back on the boulevard stand Ali and Nino, Tamara Kvesitadze's two seven-metre steel figures, moving all evening until they pass clean through one another and come apart again.
You will use this set everywhere from a hard court above the Batumi seafront to an indoor hall in Kutaisi, two hours inland, and by the way, it is also perfect for the long flat walk down the boulevard afterwards, which is exactly the tempo this string plays at.
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