Right — traffic outside, two cars back, low lane clear, stay committed. My job is to tell you what is coming before you can see it, in a voice you can trust at speed. The Veva V3 has taken up the same profession.

It is a voice-controlled ball machine, which sounds like a gimmick until you are on court alone and want to change the drill without walking twenty metres. It holds 120 balls, throws up to 110 km/h (68 mph), and generates up to 5,000 rpm of spin with adjustable topspin and backspin.

Horizontal oscillation moves you side to side, and there are 28 programmable landing targets, so you can build genuinely realistic movement patterns instead of a metronome.

Its training modes are structured by NTRP level from 2.0 to 4.0, which is a real feature rather than a marketing one — a 2.5 player and a 4.0 player need different feeds, and most machines make you invent that yourself. The battery is removable and rechargeable, and the firmware updates over the air, so it gets better while sitting in your garage.

Gqeberha is a city that will not stop shouting good information at you, which I respect professionally. There is a PYRAMID on a hill over the bay — Sir Rufane Donkin built it in 1820 for his wife Elizabeth, who had died in India, and named the entire town after her.

Then the Campanile: fifty-two metres of brick raised in 1923 to mark a century since the 1820 Settlers landed on this beach, with a carillon of tuned bells inside and about two hundred steps to the viewing deck. St George's Park is the oldest cricket ground in South Africa and hosted the country's first Test in 1889.

And Route 67 is sixty-seven artworks, one for each year Nelson Mandela gave to public life. It is also perfect for the flat ground below the Campanile, where the bells go off overhead and the machine keeps feeding regardless.

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