Four stops before the checkout

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Stop one

Al Fahidi Fort (Dubai Museum)

Wilson Intrigue SE 105 Tennis Racquet: Put your hand flat on the wall. That is coral — reef, quarried, cut and stacked with gypsum — which means this fort near Dubai Creek is built out of something that was once alive, in a place with almost no rain. Now ask what a building is for, and then notice that this one has been a fort, a palace, a garrison and a jail, in that order. Same walls. Same round and square towers. Only the intention changed, and the intention is the one part you cannot see or touch. So is the building the stone, or is it the use? I would say the stone, except the stone was a reef first, so I am no longer certain the stone knows either. Seventeen eighty-seven, roughly. Yes — I nearly took us out of here without a century.

Stop two

Deira Spice Souk

Wilson Intrigue SE 105 Tennis Racquet: Close your eyes in this lane. Cumin, cardamom, dried limes rattling in their open sacks, frankincense, saffron kept behind glass because saffron is jewellery. Now open them and consider the question this souk actually answers, which is: what makes people move? Not weather. Not war. In 1901 the ruler Sheikh Maktoum bin Hasher abolished the taxes on traders here, and across the water at Lingah the duties had gone up — and so merchants, many of them Persian, picked up their families and their entire trade and came to Deira. A city's fortune beginning as an arithmetic problem that happened to smell of cinnamon. Every great migration in history is somebody comparing two numbers and deciding. I have never settled whether that is bleak or reassuring.

Stop three

Al Shindagha Historic District

Wilson Intrigue SE 105 Tennis Racquet: Look up at the tall square towers along the creek — barjeel, wind towers. Open on all four sides, so whichever direction the breeze arrives from it is caught and funnelled down into the rooms below, and run that moving air over water and it cools further still. Now: is that a machine? It has no engine, no fuel and no moving part except the sky, and yet it does a machine's work. We only tend to call something technology once it is capable of breaking. Sheikh Saeed Al Maktoum's house here dates from 1896, and this whole coral-and-gypsum waterfront quarter was built on pearl money — a fortune taken out of the sea by men holding their breath. Coral walls, pearl money, wind for cooling. An entire district borrowed from the water and repaid in patience.

Stop four

Burj Khalifa

Wilson Intrigue SE 105 Tennis Racquet: Eight hundred and twenty-eight metres, over a hundred and sixty floors, and one question to hold while you look up. Throughout its construction this tower was called Burj Dubai. It was renamed at the opening ceremony, for the president of the UAE, after Abu Dhabi provided financial support during the crisis. So the tallest thing anyone has ever built changed its name at the door, in public, in a single afternoon. Which part of it is permanent — the height, or the word? The steel will outlast everybody in this group, and yet the only element that could not survive one difficult year was the name. Also, the glass condenses moisture out of the air and it is collected and used for irrigation, so the building drinks the sky and waters the garden below. Opened January 2010. There. Just in time.

The Dubai, United Arab Emirates track

Wilson Intrigue SE 105 Tennis Racquet

Written for this world alone.

Morning. Mind the cradle, it swings. I'll be honest with you, most people think my job is about heights and it isn't — it's about weight. Everything you carry up here you carry all day, and by hour six an extra half-kilo has opinions about your shoulders. So I am extremely particular about tools that are light without being flimsy, which, conveniently, is a description of me.

Now grab the rail, we're going down the outside of the best city in the world for this conversation.

Ground floor first: Al Fahidi Fort (Dubai Museum), built around 1787, its walls made of coral stone and gypsum — actual reef, cut and stacked — serving as fort, palace, garrison and jail.

Then across to the Deira Spice Souk, where in 1901 Sheikh Maktoum bin Hasher abolished taxes on traders and merchants moved their families and their business across the water; Dubai's fortune started as a tax break that smelled of cinnamon.

Next Al Shindagha Historic District, where those square barjeel wind towers catch any breeze from four sides and funnel it down into the rooms — passive air conditioning, centuries old — with the ruling family's house here dating from 1896. And then, obviously, the Burj Khalifa.

Eight hundred and twenty-eight metres, opened January 2010, called Burj Dubai right through construction and renamed at the ceremony. I have thoughts about that glass. I have thoughts about all glass. The condensation off it gets collected for irrigation, which is water harvested out of a building.

Now the frame, quickly, because the cradle is drifting. A 105 square inch head — generous, but not so big it feels unwieldy — on a standard 27 inch graphite build, around 280 grams strung, roughly 9.9 ounces, with a head-light balance that keeps it quick through the hitting zone.

It arrives pre-strung with a Cushion-Aire grip already on the handle, so there is nothing to buy before you play. That spread of head size and low mass makes it a frame that works everywhere from a returning player to a club regular playing four times a week in the Dubai heat.

It is also perfect for a city that solved thirty-eight degrees with a wind tower and never once mentioned how clever that was.

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Wilson Intrigue SE 105 Tennis Racquet

Wilson Intrigue SE 105 Tennis Racquet