Last Sunday we woke up slightly hung over, having spent the evening of Jane’s birthday in London helping our friends Mick and Maureen celebrate their move to Highbury Quadrant, just a few doors down from where another of my friends, Alan Murray (late of Algeria and the Beardoes), has lived for many years.

The weather forecast promised rain in our area and, feeling fairly shaky, we were quite looking forward to the Kennedy Cup tournament at our tennis club being rained off. Come 1 o’clock there wasn’t a hint of rain and we turned up, hoping that the rackets wouldn’t fall from our listless hands.

In this type of mixed doubles tournament you are paired with someone you don’t normally play with.  In principle there is supposed to be a random draw, but my feeling is that there is a certain amount of fiddling so that you don’t find two 70 year olds playing together, or the couple who won the mixed doubles championship the year before.

As it happened, I was delighted to find myself playing with Gertrud, a Dutch woman who actually was the female half of the 2011 mixed doubles champions; and Jane, to her equal delight was paired with Martin, the under-18 boy’s champion, taking time off from his A-levels.

So both of us set off playing an interminable number of 20-minute sets, the principle being that, when the whistle goes, that’s the score.  You add up how many games you and your partner manage to win, and the overall winners each get a cup and a bottle of wine.

Now, of course, Jane and I weren’t in the same league as our partners; but what happens in circumstances like this is that you up your game, not wanting to let your partner down. And that’s exactly what happened.   Hardly any points separated the top four pairs, and Gertrud and I were very happy to come fourth.  Two other pairs came joint second, and guess who won?  (Though I think the photo and title of this piece may have provided a couple of clues).

In fact, as I watched Martin and Jane play their final set (their opponents including one of the men from the club’s top four) I was amazed and proud to see how ferociously she was playing, dominating the net when Martin was serving, while her own serve had gone up in speed and accuracy.

So brava, Jane! (not ‘bravo’, an Italian student told me some years ago). And, though the cup will only grace the bookshelves for one year, her name will be on the Kennedy Cup board for many years to come.