To paraphrase Britney, I have inadvertently done it again. Having spent the entire summer sitting around indoors in a hermetically sealed room, feeling the sun through the glass, I am now itching, as winter approaches, to resume my tennis career. This has been a feature of my six-year tennis career. Summer is a no-show, autumn and winter dedicated to slushing about in the leaves or on ice, serving in force nine gales.
If you thought the UK lacked an appetite for summer tennis - hence the lack of Wimbledon glory, etc - you should check out the desolate winter scene. Willing participants are few - most people don't equate playing tennis with the wearing of gloves or removing snow from the court - but there are advantages. For starters, you don't have to deal with the tiresome post-Wimbledon scene, when the world and his wife head down to the local municipal courts and you can't book a court for a fortnight. And at least nobody can accuse you of being a fair-weather player.
Last week I played for the first time in months. It was a little slippy underfoot, but very bracing, and it was good to be back, proving that rumours of my retirement are very much exaggerated.
I can't remember exactly why I decided to take up tennis at the age of 25, having never really swung a racket in my life. Possibly it was because my husband is a good player, and I convinced myself it would just be a matter of time before I would become one too. If I had realised how much time, I might not have started looking for clubs in south London.
Although tennis has a reputation for being elitist, there are a surprising number of clubs funded by the LTA (Lawn Tennis Association) and lottery grants. Just enter your postcode into www.lta.org.uk to find the nearest. Our patch of sunny Streatham seemed to be peculiarly well served, with four clubs in a mile-and-a-half radius, the legacy of a previous era as a well-to-do suburb, strangely incongruous with the sprawling red-light district and stretch of kebab shops of today.
We chose the smallest and the nearest. But what I hadn't realised was that sports clubs choose you. For those who have shied away from competitive sport for their entire existence, nothing can quite prepare you for the cruel protocols of joining a tennis club. First, there is the "play-in". And however desperate the club is for new members and your "subs" (an annual payment, from around £60 for a weekday member in the winter to £180 for full annual membership and voting rights), they will never just let you pitch up and join in without making you play against one of their members while your ability (or lack of) is critiqued. My abiding memory of this ritual humiliation is of wanting to cry because the chairman told me that I held my racket like a frying pan.
The truth is that in tennis, nobody really likes a beginner. But in a hardnosed way, I realised that they wanted my husband, so they had to take me too. At least I wasn't taken to one side, as another friend was, and told to "smarten up". Even in the depths of south London, a mismatching tracksuit could apparently bring a club into disrepute.
The social protocols are arguably trickier than the tennis. Fellow members could be infuriating - the woman who ran the ladies' team with a rod of iron, steadfastly refused for four years to put me on the team for something called the Millennium Cup, preferring a player who sometimes forgot her racket and ate sandwiches in between points. Or they could be endlessly well meaning: a gaggle of older ladies, who had been members for decades, insisted on catering for all social events, seemingly hell-bent on introducing salmonella by leaving prawn vol-au-vents and egg salads out in the midday sun.
There were childish rants, petty squabbles and lots of fake smiles, but these were all put to one side when our star guest arrived. For our tiny tennis club had an honorary member who was tennis royalty - Maria Bueno, a player now in her 70s, but who was ranked world number one in 1959 and 1960 and notched up 19 Grand Slam titles, including five at Wimbledon. No doubt all those former glories, celebrated with annual holidays and ticker-tape parades in her native Brazil, have paled into insignificance for Maria since the day she taught me to volley. "You need to be like a bear at the net," she advised. Volleying remains the best part of my game.
Strangely, the worst part is my forehand, the shot that most people find quite natural, for which I have probably had more tennis coaching than Andy Murray. But coaching is my favourite part: you can hit beautiful shots, without having to scramble around trying to win points. The intensity of one hour's coaching a week also means that you have to raise your fitness levels fast. And any aerobic work you do off court always has a noticeable effect on your performance.
My club coach, however, was insistent that I needed match experience, so introduced me to another venerable organisation, the South London tennis league, which ran a winter and summer league. I was launched on an odyssey of evening matches against librarians, nurses, businessmen and one very good 11-year-old girl who beat me decisively. When you come late to a sport, you must expect to be taught a salutary lesson or two from children on their way up the ranks.
Besides, I was the tennis brat. For someone who had always thought they were non-competitive, it was like an out-of-body experience to watch myself throw my racket at the net (very frowned upon). It is, however, thrilling to read about oneself in sporting language. Take this, from the South London tennis league report: "Lucy Siegle put in a late challenge but found she was just off the pace." That's me. Not particularly impressive, but doing sport! I even have some silverware - or coated plastic - including the cup for the Wandsworth Open mixed doubles 2003.
But these are former glories. Moving from the area, we were forced to leave the club. By this time we were valued members (although I still never made the team), and they were more than reluctant to let us go; breaking away from the Moonies would have been easier. Now, like a character in search of an author, I'm looking for a new tennis club, in a new place. Admittedly, summer would have been a better time to organise it, but as the nights draw in, you can see your breath freeze and thermals become a necessity, I'm asking yet again: "Anyone for tennis?"
