Four stops before the checkout

Sanaa, Yemen

Stop one

Old City of Sanaa tower houses

Volkl Vostra V3 Tennis Racquet: Look up at the fanlights — those half-moons above every opening. Qamariya, from the word for moon, cut alabaster or coloured glass set into gypsum, and as the sun crosses the sky the colour inside the room moves with it, all day, on a schedule nobody set. Rammed earth and fired brick below, white gypsum patterning over the top, and these houses climb five, six, seven storeys, family stacked on family, with the kitchen at the very top so the smoke leaves the building. I played an exhibition once in a hall with coloured glass in the roof and the light came down across the court in bands, and I have never struck a ball better in my life. Fifty-odd years ago now. Sorry. The windows. Look at the windows.

Stop two

Great Mosque of Sanaa

Volkl Vostra V3 Tennis Racquet: One of the oldest mosques anywhere in the world, founded in the seventh century, right in the heart of the Old City — low walls, a flat-roofed columned prayer hall, two minarets. And then this. In the 1970s workmen went up to repair a leaking roof and found a sealed cavity packed with parchment: thousands of fragments of very early Quranic manuscripts, some of them written, erased, and written over again. Scholars are still working through them now. A leak — and out of the ceiling falls the earliest history of the book. I kept a trophy in a cupboard for thirty years behind a broken kit bag and could not have told you which one it was until a plumber pulled the cupboard out. Not the same thing. Nowhere near. But I know what it is to have a roof hand something back.

Stop three

Suq al-Milh

Volkl Vostra V3 Tennis Racquet: The salt market — that is what the name means, though salt is the least of what is in here now. It is divided by trade: a lane of coppersmiths, a lane for raisins, a lane where the silver is worked, a lane for spices, and you could find your way through the whole covered warren blindfolded on sound and smell alone. Hammering means copper. Sweetness means raisins. I used to be able to name a stadium from the noise of the crowd with my eyes shut — Melbourne came at you flatter than anywhere, Paris arrived in waves — and that took thirty-odd years of listening and went out of me in about a season. This place has been teaching people to navigate by ear for centuries. Their skill has outlasted mine considerably.

Stop four

Dar al-Hajar (Rock Palace)

Volkl Vostra V3 Tennis Racquet: A palace standing on top of a freestanding rock pillar in Wadi Dhahr, a short drive northwest of the city — several storeys of mud brick, built in the 1930s as a summer retreat for Imam Yahya, though people had been using this rock long before he ever arrived. And here is the detail I keep coming back to: the well. They cut down through the stone of the pillar itself, so the household never had to descend for water. A house that drinks through its own foundation. Never needing to leave the rock in order to survive on it. I retired at thirty-four and discovered I had no such well, and it took me the best part of a decade to dig one. Right. That is more than you asked for. The valley is very green from up here.

The Sanaa, Yemen track

Volkl Vostra V3 Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

A composition has a top note that arrives at once and a base still there an hour later. Most people buy the top note. The base is what they live with. Racquets are sold the same way.

The Volkl Vostra V3 is the most generous frame in the Vostra line. A 710 cm² / 110 in² head, 270 g / 9.5 oz unstrung, and an extended length of 70.5 cm / 27.8 inches, with a 16×19 pattern. Read those together and the intent is obvious: a very large sweet spot, a light frame you can get round quickly, and extra length for reach and leverage on the serve.

That is the top note — instant, easy depth. The base note is Volkl's comfort engineering, RED Cell material and REVA damping working to keep the harshness out of contact, which is why these frames are so often recommended to players nursing an arm. It is a power racquet for beginners, improvers and seniors.

A player who generates their own pace will overhit it, and should be looking at the 300-gram end of the range instead.

Sanaa is the most beautifully composed city on earth and I will not be moderating that. The tower houses of the old city carry qamariya above each opening — half-moons of cut alabaster or coloured glass set into gypsum — so that as the sun moves the whole room changes colour on a schedule.

Then Suq al-Milh, the salt market: a lane of coppersmiths, a lane for raisins, a lane where silver is worked, so you can navigate it blindfolded by smell alone. My idea of a map. The Great Mosque, founded in the seventh century, gave up thousands of very early Quranic parchment fragments from a sealed roof cavity in the 1970s.

And Dar al-Hajar grows out of a rock spire in Wadi Dhahr. You will use this frame everywhere from a dusty public court in the afternoon to an indoor hall where the ball never dies, and by the way, it is also perfect for an hour spent doing nothing in a room with qamariya in the windows, because 270 grams is a weight you can hold up while the colour crosses the floor.

Buy on Amazon

Burn, Laugh and Learn

THE TENNIS TACTICIAN, LLC

Volkl Vostra V3 Tennis Racquet

Volkl Vostra V3 Tennis Racquet