Six racquets. Not twelve — six. And nobody wants to talk about why the six-racquet bag is the one the people who actually play buy, but I'll say it, because somebody has to. Allegedly.

Black. Six-frame capacity across protected compartments, which is a match bag rather than a haulage operation — enough for two strung setups, a spare, and the frame you keep meaning to get restrung.

Here's what's in it, and every word of this is on the record.

Thermal lining, which is the part they don't put on the poster: it slows the heat getting to your strings when the bag is sitting in a car or on a sunlit bench, and heat is what takes tension out of a stringbed. Not hitting. Heat. And a separate shoe compartment, so the clay you carried off court stays away from your grips.

Prince has built tour bags since the 1970s.

They know exactly what they are doing and they have known for fifty years.

Now. Elblag. They will tell you it's a quiet town, and the official story is that nothing much happens there. Nothing much? There is a canal at Elblag where boats are hauled overland on rails. Out of the water. Up a hillside. On a cradle. Because the engineers looked at the drop and decided locks were for other people.

That has been running since the nineteenth century and it still runs, and you may draw your own conclusions about a place that solves problems that way. The Market Gate has stood since 1319. The cathedral tower goes up ninety-seven metres. And a Dominican church became an avant-garde art centre, which is the sort of thing that happens when a town has ideas. Wink.

They tell you it's the felt that goes first. It's the heat. Always was.

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