Dave's Faves 2 November

Track List:
1. Pavement - Cut Your Hair 
2. Menomena - Baton 
3. Slow Club - Giving up on Love 
4. Japandroids - The House that Heaven Built 
5. Les Savy Fav - Pots and Pans 
6. Albert Hammond Jr. - In Transit 
7. Girls - Lust for Life 
8. Titus Andronicus - Ecce Homo 
9. Temper Trap - Need Your Love 
10. Moldy Peaches - Anyone Else But You 
11. Neutral Milk Hotel - Holland, 1945 
12. Japanther - First of All 
13. Chromatics - Kill For Love

My Little McEnroe (fiction)

It took me years to realise that Sarah had been fucking Michael's tennis coach. I suppose I did always think it strange the frequency with which Michael was going to tennis—three or four times a week on occasion, and at varying times. The impromptu tennis lessons sprung upon me out of nowhere; I always thought he was just developing urgent and capricious desires for emergency tennis coaching. 'What a promising young sportsman,' I used to think. I was so proud of my little McEnroe.

I think I really started to suspect something was wrong when Sarah started taking Michael to tennis lessons but forgetting to take him with her. I would come home late to find Michael sitting on the sofa with a bag of crisps in one hand, the T.V. remote in the other and his mother nowhere to be seen.

“Where's your mother?” I would ask.

“She's taking me to tennis,” was his reply.

Things weren't quite adding up. I was fairly sure that going to tennis coaching usually involved some sort of combination of tennis and coaching, but then I never was very good at sport. Michael used to bamboozle me with tales of his sporting victories; stories of how he'd back-slapped the T-ball into the back of the net from thirty-five yards out. It all sounded so impressive.

It finally clicked when one day, in a naïve attempt at familial bonding I challenged my son to a game of tennis, hoping to witness the fruits of my huge investment in lessons.

He didn't even own a racket.