Tennis

I first played tennis as a child, two years of training and then a decade of nothing. I picked it up again abruptly and with more commitment than is probably sensible, which is how adults pick things up when they decide to.

Of the sports that have been measured against each other, tennis is the one that adds the most years to a life, well ahead of running, cycling and swimming. The best guess is that it's because you can't play it alone. It's as good for the head as for the heart - people who play score higher on optimism and self-esteem and lower on anxiety and anger than people who don't, and their hearts hold up better to go with it.

The person across the net is the smaller opponent. The bigger one is in your own head, and most of what gets better with practice is how quiet you can keep it. The best player most of us have watched won only a little over half the points he ever played, so losing a point is the ordinary thing that happens on a court and the skill is in not carrying it into the next one. And there's an old story about the archer who was asked what he could see and said only the eye of the bird, which is the whole game in one line - watch the ball, and the score and the crowd and the last shot go quiet.

What follows are the matches along the way, and what I've written about the game.