Bubbles are not bad luck, they are bad preparation. Head Hawk Touch 17g arrives on a 200-metre reel — 660 feet, roughly sixteen racquets — a monofilament at 1.25 mm with Head's Crystal Core Technology, the softer and more controlled member of the Hawk family.
Seventeen gauge is the balanced middle, which is why this is the version most people end up preferring: poly control, decent life, and manners. Smooth, even, no bubbles.
Beersheba was hung from a single drawn line, and I respect that enormously.
We begin in the Ottoman Old City south of the riverbed — a grid of low sandstone buildings at perfect right angles, in the desert, where nobody had asked for one. The Ottomans founded modern Beersheba around 1900 as a brand-new administrative town, one of very few they planned from nothing: somebody in an office drew the grid, pointed at empty ground and said there.
The governor's mansion of 1906, with its tall arched windows, is now the Negev Museum of Art. Bold move, putting an admin block in a place with no admin. I have hung whole rooms on less.
Then Abraham's Well at the southern edge of the Old City near the Hebron road, an old stone well with a modern visitor centre built around it. The name Beersheba itself carries the sense of a well and an oath, and the tradition here is a covenant sworn over water, which in the Negev is the only thing worth swearing about. Nobody argues about whether the deal happened.
Everybody argues about which hole in the ground it happened at.
Then the Beersheba War Cemetery on the eastern side, white headstones in rows, with the ANZAC Memorial Centre beside it. On 31 October 1917 Australian light horsemen charged this town at a flat gallop and took the wells — and the wells were the entire point, because no water meant no army and no anything. The most famous cavalry charge of the war was, in the end, a very aggressive trip to the tap.
And we finish at the Bedouin market on the southern edge, held on Thursdays, which is the one fact everybody needs to hold on to, because turning up on a Wednesday earns you an empty car park and a life lesson. Livestock, textiles and household goods under awnings, and haggling that is a genuine art form — two people who both already know the price, performing twenty minutes of theatre about it.
You will smooth this reel out everywhere from a hard court in Beersheba to an indoor hall up in Tel Aviv, and by the way, it is also perfect for a coffee in the shade of the Old City grid, where every corner is square and every seam lines up, which is the only sort of town I can properly relax in.
Buy on Amazon
