So thank goodness for those tennis lessons. The only thing you can rely on in this world is your own brain. This week I volleyed and smashed, but didnt serve, and I think I know why: the coach was giving my brain a bit more time to improve the ball-toss. There is nothing more irritating on a tennis court than someone (trying to serve) chucking the ball up ineptly 12 times in succession and calling "Sorry!" and "Oh dear!" and "How did that happen?" after each one. The bad news is that this lovely cognitive phase wont last for ever. In the end, tennis will turn into hard work. But I doubt it will ever be like dealing with BT, so I dont care.One hates to drop names, but it was who once told me about one of the great (real) newspaper placards of the world. We were talking about unfortunate headlines, and he told me hed once seen one that said BINS STRIKE FEAR IN CITY. Well, how we laughed. However, speaking as someone who lives in the City of Brighton and Hove, where there has recently been a bins strike, I can attest that when industrial action of this sort does occur, both meanings of BINS STRIKE FEAR IN CITY are actually borne out. First, there is a fear in the city of a bins strike. And then the city runs in terror from the bins. Having been through the bins strike, I feel like someone who has survived an apocalypse. It lasted only about a week, but the place turned into Armageddon. Helped by foxes and the seagulls (and a high wind), a tide of used tea bags, eggshells, soiled kitchen paper, banana skins, smelly tin cans, and used sanitary towels (yes!) advanced in such a determined and menacing manner down nice residential streets, you could almost hear it breathing. "Avert your eyes!" I would say to the little dog. "I was around in the Seventies, so Im all right, but youre much too young. Avert those innocent eyes!"I suspect that the main reason sporty people exempt golf is that its so low-risk and low-impact. The players dont even get tired. They walk back in after 18 holes without so much as a snag on their canary yellow pullovers. Also, crucially, they dont really compete against each other. Each player competes with the course, and the one who plays it best is the winner. Proper sports lovers find this unsatisfying; they prefer something a bit more Darwinian. In golf, you see, you can do almost nothing to influence the performance of your fellow competitors you cant punch them in the face; you cant tackle them with a flying leap; if you took the ball away from them just as they were about to play it, there would be very serious repercussions. Meanwhile, sledging is highly unusual in golf; and golf fans only rarely throw coins, seats, bottles of water or other missiles onto the field of play. Yes, in golf the only performance you can influence is your own. In Joyce Carol Oatess book On Boxing, she makes the memorable point that boxing is "not a metaphor for anything else". By contrast, golf is all metaphor, and its message is pretty bleak. If life is like golf, you see, you are born alone and you die alone, and you do all the rest of it on your own as well.Theres a line in s ancient play The Philanthropist that I am very fond of quoting. The hero of the play is a young academic whose mental curiosity (linked with an almost autistic emotional detachment) is forever getting him into trouble. When his girlfriend complains, "You never understand what Im trying to say!", its obviously a cue for him to apologise, but instead he analyses the accusation, and says carefully, "Yes, but I think I do understand what you do say." Well, its getting less and less useful in life to be able to read things accurately not just for the punctuation, but for the plain sense. A couple of weeks ago, I found myself looking at the statement for an old Nationwide mortgage, which showed that I had "overpaid" by quite a large sum. Thats what it said. However, when I called the Nationwide to demand my money back, they explained that this heading concerned a sort-of notional reserve that I could re-borrow if I wanted to. "So why does it say 'Amount Overpaid?" I asked. "Why doesnt it say 'Amount That May Be Re-Borrowed?" Naturally, they didnt understand what my problem was. Someone in charge of mortgage statements had tried to represent a concept in words and had come up with the wrong ones, but only a pedant (and an awkward-minded one at that) could possibly object.A Good Reads only rule for selection is that the book is in print, and in paperback. This remit being so generous, one has a lot of big decisions to make. A famous book, or a more obscure book that you would like to champion? A novel, or a work of non-fiction? What do you do if your favourite book is (genuinely) Enid Blytons The Secret of Spiggy Holes? This time, I sent in a list of about 10 books, and about half of them had been featured before two of them (John Steinbecks Travels with Charley and Evelyn Waughs Decline and Fall) had even been done twice. Another consideration is whether to choose a dense, massive book that will ruin the life of ones fellow guest. I remember an appalling moment on the programme when a contributor said (quite reasonably) that she found a book by the late Leonardo Sciascia a bit hard going because it required prior knowledge of the Sicilian Communist Party, at which her fellow guest sneered, "Not every book has to be a primer."I write this, of course, because I have just discovered a jolly interesting biography of Rex Harrison lent to me about three months ago, which I had completely forgotten. I wonder: should my friend have sent me a little note after a month a nudging reminder, with perhaps a warning of a penalty fine? Should we, in short, adopt a more library-based approach? Well, no. The one thing I know for certain is that this would be a terrible way to proceed. I once knew an anal sort of person who genuinely kept a detailed log of books he had loaned, on the grounds that it kept things simple. "Look, Im writing it down," hed say. I think he even required a counter-signature. And in the end inevitably he fell out with his best friend because he swore the chap had never returned his What Ho, Jeeves (or whatever), and the chap swore (with equal vehemence) that he bloody well had. We are all fallible in these matters, and lending books is supposedly a friendly act. When it ends with people shouting, "But its here in black and white!" and "Listen, you bastard, I gave it back!", something has obviously gone horribly, horribly wrong."Nlike thith?" I asked, arching my tongue.