01
Stop one
Southend Pier, the longest pleasure pier in the world, with a train to the end of it
Wilson Pro Staff Super Tour Tennis Bag: Here it rests at the foot of something truly magnificent — Southend Pier stretches 1.33 miles into the estuary, a long iron sentence written in the sea, grammatically unnecessary and absolutely essential, much like a good backhand. There is even a small railway to carry you to the end of it, which is either a poem about human ambition or simply a very sensible idea, and honestly I cannot decide which.
02
Stop two
the Cliff Lift down to the seafront
Wilson Pro Staff Super Tour Tennis Bag: The Cliff Lift is a funicular railway, opened in 1912, connecting the clifftop town to the seafront below — it is, if you will permit me, a zipper on the face of the earth, slowly undone by the desire for candy floss. Right, yes, the bag: it holds nine racquets, which is precisely nine more than the lift could ever need.
04
Stop four
the Central Museum, where the Prittlewell prince's grave goods are shown
Wilson Pro Staff Super Tour Tennis Bag: Inside this museum rests the Prittlewell Prince, an Anglo-Saxon nobleman whose burial chamber, discovered in 2003, contained gold foil crosses and a lyre — a man who understood that you bring beautiful things with you, wherever you are going. The bag understands this too, though its beautiful things are mostly polyester and tungsten, which is also a kind of poetry, I think, though perhaps a lesser one.
It is shaped like a long low boat and it carries a season the way a pier carries a town out over the water — further than seems reasonable, and then further still. Nine racquets. Two main compartments, both thermo-regulated, which is the part that matters and the part nobody thinks about until a car boot in August takes the tension out of every frame in the bag at once.
The lining does not cool anything. It slows the heat down, the way a thick wall does, and slow is enough.
Two large exterior pockets swallow balls, grips, a towel, the things that migrate. The zippers lock together. The side panels are reinforced where bags of this shape tear first, which is the corner that meets the ground every time you set it down.
The rest of it is plain and well made.
It measures 29 by 13 by 13 inches and carries two ways — padded backpack straps for the walk from the car, handles for the last few yards — and it wears the copper and black of the Pro Staff V14, dark as the estuary at dusk.
Southend is the correct home for a thing built to go a long way out and come back. The pier runs 1.33 miles into the Thames, the longest pleasure pier in the world, and it is long enough to need a train down the middle of it, as if the town simply kept walking and never quite stopped.
“The lining does not make it cool. It makes the heat arrive slowly, which is all anybody can ask of heat.”
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