Quintus

It's planned disorientation. Supermarkets rearrange regularly because the last thing they want is people going straight to the items they need. They rely on a percentage of casual / impulse purchases, which means drifting you past as many shelves as possible hoping that unplanned items will catch your eye before you find what you came in for. That's also why staples like the bakery and booze are at the back of the store. You appear to have foiled their strategy though!

Anyone going, plan to arrive early! The Wimbledon day 1 entry process was so chaotic that despite being in good time, we lost a good hour and a half of spectating, and the queue built up to way over half a mile. There were problems with the scanning system itself, then the ongoing issue that scanners don't read screens in bright sunlight (which is why other tournaments had awnings up!!!), and ultimately the fact that they concentrate the whole scanning and security process inside a very narrow gateway instead of distributing it in an external buffer zone as they do to an extent at Roland Garros.. Once inside the perimeter of course everything works so well that it's a painful contrast!

thanks, I put some on Instagram and a couple of the players asked for copies to use on their social media, which is always gratifying

We had a great five days at the Rothesay Classic in Edgbaston last week. Such a good tournament as you get top talent in a small venue, and a tradition of players pausing for a few words and a quick pic - we have quite the selfie collection now . We always 'discover' someone interesting to follow and this year we found we were about ten years late to the game in noticing Sorana Cirstea; a super nice personality and with a fast, hard game. Below clockwise: Giorgi, Martincova, Garcia, Cirstea.

A few pics from Roland Garros; Watson, Bogdan, Kostyuk, Ostapenko, Azarenka, Giorgi.. Looking forward to Birmingham in a week or so; some good players there this year. Shame Iga is now too big for that venue, though frankly at the moment she also seems too big for all the other players - today's final was so one-sided.

reminds me of some of the scenes in Woody Allen's film 'Midnight in Paris' !

We went to Roland Garros for two days last week, the usual mixture of delight and chaos. The scheduling has been interesting to say the least - timing the Nadal-Djokovic epic to start near 9pm, hardly any women's matches in the evening sessions, putting the world no 1 on a secondary court for early rounds as she was deemed too good to give an interesting match... It was noticeable that the crowd was most interested in the domestic players, no matter how minor, so they got put on the big show courts and with our cheapo 'courts annexes' tickets we got to see the big international stars from really close up instead!

ooh, didn't know they'd started arriving, will have to go out and have a look. Love watching them head out to sea and return with a fish in their bill.

I managed to escape a road trip from hell for a couple of hours yesterday to pop into the wonderful Bempton Cliffs reserve. I was fortunate to see Albie the much sought Black Browed Albatross do a couple of circuits (someone nearby was saying their friend had made five trips from Chichester to Bempton and not seen it!), and there were lots of puffins about. Clockwise below: 1. Albie 2. 'go on, tickle me again' razorbills 3. gannet 4. puffin

You never know, but I got the impression that this is not just about wanting a new phase in life. She'd already withdrawn from tournaments this year, and said that she has given all she can and is both physically and mentally spent; I think the tour is just too much for her (as it may prove for some of the young stars coming through). It's one thing achieving slam victories and another coping with the strain and stress of defending them, and matching expectations, year after year after year - that's a real endurance challenge. I don't much like Serena Williams but I have to admire the sheer resilience she showed in maintaining her level over such a long period. Ash has already done tennis and cricket - perhaps she'll pop up as a top swimmer or golfer next!

So farewell Ash Barty, retiring from tennis and life on tour. We went to Roland Garros in 2019 and walked miles to find a restaurant open; we ended up in a bog standard Chinese in a backstreet, and who should be on the adjacent table but Ash and her team... a choice quite illustrative of her unassuming nature. With her money I'd have been in Maxim's. Rumour has it that marriage and kids are on the cards, so here's wishing her all the best. The usual routine for a retirer is to ask for their ranking points to be withdrawn, which would put my much-mentioned-here protegée Iga Swiatek up to world number one, and needing to win just one match at Miami to defend that position. Jazda Iga!

We saw Phantoms at Dance East on Friday. Green Apples is a great attention-grabbing opener, full of energy and shifting dynamics between the couple. Folk Tales was my favourite, moving from bravura display to nursery rhyme horror to folksy humour. Phantoms itself was pretty bonkers, to use a technical term, and I gave up trying to follow the plot somewhere around the point where a goblin gets distracted from gutting a villain by his mobile phone ringing. I thought it needed tightening a bit, but the dancing was excellent. For me too, Jonathan Goddard was the outstanding dancer of the evening, fluid, assured and able to convey characters. The whole company was impressive though, and I note that several have a Rambert background. Great stuff.

Our local venue, Dance East, hosts some excellent small touring contemporary dance and dance theatre companies. Whenever I look at these companies' websites, there's a handful of their artists who list the well known ballet schools in their profiles. At what stage they went from ballet to these other forms, and whether it was through choice or from diminishing options is not clear, but this seems to be a well trodden path.

Look who I met today. No sign of Baldric though.

with Jasmin Vardamon, the production to look out for is Medusa, which is excellent. We recently saw Pinocchio, also good fun.