"We're lookin' like droppin' our pants twice here," Shepherdson mused to his cheer squad in the gazebo just behind the lagoon-blue Plexipave court.

"Hope you've got clean undies on," a female wit in his cheer squad tittered.

Monday morning was the first session of the 2015 Australian Seniors Teams Tournament. It is a huge occasion. Eight hundred souls in teams of men and women of 35 summers and beyond, from all states and territories, are playing one another in great earnestness (relieved by the occasional passage of underpants badinage) at Lyneham and at other Canberra venues.

Monday morning's many Lyneham fixtures going on all around us pitted the 45-and-under Queenslanders against the 35-and-under ACT. (Relative) youth is not entirely wasted on the young, and the younger ACT men rather overwhelmed Queenslanders old enough to be their (the ACT chaps') uncles.

The Queensland men had a rare spasm of good luck and one of them rejoiced with mock amazement, "Two points in a row"!

"Yes, two points in a row. You're on a roll!" a woman in the Queensland cheer squad enthused, tongue in cheek.

Watchingmatches on various courts on Monday, one noticed again how older tennis players' strokes are a kind of living museum of the way we used to play.

At the forthcoming Australian Open, almost all the athletes will brandish two-handed ground strokes. But these are a relatively recent phenomenon. Bjorn Borg was a powerful 1970s role model in this but most of us who were set in our tennis ways by the time he shimmered into influential prominence have never embraced new-fangled ways of shot production.

My backhand is a (very poor) copy of the plain-but-elegant one Ken Rosewall used to play in the 1950s and 1960s, using funny little racquets that Slazenger's craftsmen made out of wood (laminated ash). It is fun, today, to tell young people that tennis racquets were once made of wood and to watch them wrestle with this bizarre concept, unsure of whether or not you are having a lend of them. There was scarcely a two-handed shot to be seen at Lyneham on Monday and in some matches, like the Victoria and Queensland post-Borgian 65s match on courts 22 and 23 next door to us in our gazebo, not one all morning.

Meanwhile, swivelling on our bottoms in our gazebo (the new, transformed Lyneham is gazebo rich) it was back to the Queensland v ACT match, where the Queenslanders were now on a three-point roll.

"Oh! Lovely hands, Rod!" a Queensland fan trilled as Rod Shepherdson instinctively stuck out a racquet to make a super volley.

But it was a roll cut short by an ACT resurgence, and the Queenslanders did lose that rubber 0-6, 0-6. But how noble and amiable they were in defeat. Your tennis-playing columnist, who might have banged his Prince and have needed counselling after a loss like that, was very impressed by the Queenslanders' demeanour. It was as if for them there had been no sheep stations at stake. I will do my best to imitate my two Queensland role models the next time I am humiliated at tennis. Sheep stations are not everything.

The Seniors Teams Tournaments continues today at Lyneham, at Belconnen, Weston Creek and Melba. Admission is free, the tennis is of a very high standard and (rapture!) you may find role models at the tennis you needn't bother looking for in today's rat-like Australian public life.

But wait, innocent and trusting readers! Did your columnist really go to Lyneham's tennis on Monday, or is it just a made-up story?

Truth and fiction can become confused and blended in the mind of a journalist who reads a lot of fiction. And how Elizabeth Farrelly (Let's hear it for the frightbats

As an avid reader of fiction (not only because it is good for the soul but also because it is helpful with my journalism) I have tried in vain to find a reading group with some men in it. Told I'd never find such a thing because fiction reading was women's business, I scoffed at this stereotyping of my sex. But it has turned out to seem to be true, even here in the notoriously literate and well-educated ACT. In my closet I have been reading almost every word ever published by Alice Munro (she deservedly won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature) but have no males save my dog to discuss her wondrous work with.

One very large reading group that I attended, just once, was utterly female save for me, making me feel like a novelty, a token. It fascinated the women (most of them angry grannies fuming that Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap was pornography) that I was there at all, doing something so unmanly.

Farrelly thinks that this well-researched phenomenon is a kind of a tragedy because "reading fiction, especially literary fiction, like Dickens ... builds empathy" and that men, compared with women, are already empathy impoverished. Yes, it wouldn't surprise, would it, to find that abominably cold men like Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have never read a word of fiction other than, when they were pre-pubescents, W.E. Johns' adventures of Biggles.

Wide-eyed Australian troops arriving in Egypt must have felt they'd come to a different planet. One hundred years ago today Melbourne's Age ran its embedded correspondent's eye-witness report.

"A STRANGE LAND. It was afternoon before the first train left [the port of arrival] for Cairo. For the better part of an afternoon and until well on into the dark the troop train wound through the teeming flats of the Nile delta. The men were interested in everything [including] camels and donkeys ridden or driven along so piled up with maize that all you could see of the animal was a head protruding from a wandering load.

"It was long after dark when this first trainload of Australians reached Cairo. There was a hot cup of coffee waiting for them by the side of the train. Then the Fifth Infantry, in full marching kit and with its band at its head, set off. Half an hour later the men first saw before them in the moonlight the distant shape of the Great Pyramid. For nearly two hours they marched towards it, near the foot of it passing through a plantation of gum trees and wattles, for all the world like a bit of Australia.

"It was already midnight, but the baggage had to be unloaded before sleep could be thought of ... Its work finished, the regiment threw itself down where it was, wrapped itself in its blankets under the the moon and the stars, and slept."