But wait! Is watching televised tennis necessarily a wholesome thing to do? What if doing it exposes viewers to moral danger?

I mention this because, tennis-mad myself and taking delight in watching it in the flesh and on screens, I am haunted by a passage in a recent London Review of Books. In his LRB piece Better On TV reviewer and essayist Jon Day discusses David Berry's new book A People's History of Tennis. Historian and reviewer are both fascinated by the great game's eerie watchability.

"What allowed tennis to become one of the most popular global sports of the 20th century was its watchability," Day says, distilling historian Berry's narrative.

"Before tennis, most sports were enjoyed because they were pleasurable to play, but tennis created space for a new kind of participant: the spectator (more people in the world today play badminton than tennis, but many more people watch tennis than badminton). By 1948, the Wimbledon fortnight was watched on television by 200,000 people, almost as many as watched it live."

Then suddenly out of the LRB piece leaps this challenging thought.

"David Foster Wallace, a junior tennis champion before he was a novelist, thought that 'TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love'."

What Wallace must be saying, methinks, is that the spectacle tennis athletes supply non-players (for tennis is fiendishly difficult for the average unco to play satisfactorily) seems as improbable and inimitable for average folk as what elite porn stars do (I'm told) in their salacious videos.

Day the reviewer enjoys teasing us with that thought (I know I will never quite be able to forget it, now, when I am watching televised tennis), but isn't sure he agrees with it.

"Non-players may feel differently [and not agree that they're watching a kind of porn]," Day muses.

"[For] there is something inherently legible about tennis, so you can enjoy watching it even if you've never held a racquet. With its rectangular court, small number of participants and strong, geometric play, the game can look almost as if it were designed to be watched on a screen."

Overjoyed as billions of us are to have Donald Trump exorcised from the presidency one suspects that the satirists of the world must have mixed feelings about losing him.

Trump was in one sense beyond satire but in another sense God's ribbon-wrapped gift to the satire industry. Joe Biden by contrast seems, surely, from a satirist's perspective, unpromisingly unremarkable, frustratingly nondescript, nightmarishly decent.

I mention this because, an enormous fan of the US satire institution The Onion ("America's finest new source") and deeply, deeply grateful to it for the Trump laughs it has given over the last four years (when if we didn't laugh at the swine we wept over what he was doing) I think I have long noticed it struggling with Biden.

So for example The Onion, rather scraping the bottom of a barrel, often pokes fun at Biden's one-foot-in-the-grave antiquity and the relative frailty that comes with old age. Biden will be 79 in November. Old age and frailty are not totally hopeless subjects for satirists to work with, but neither are they innately rib-tickling. They require some work.

The Onion did quite well with the two challenging subjects this week with the plausible "news story" (with dramatic news photograph) of how, at the inauguration, "Secret Service agent Marshall Cole did not hesitate to dive heroically in front of the strong breeze that could have felled Joe Biden".

I did chortle a bit and did admire the ingenuity of the piece's make-believe. But I did wince a little and wondered if there's very much more worthwhile satirical juice to be squeezed from the president's elderliness.

Elderly and slightly-built myself, perhaps, humourlessly, I am identifying with Biden's plight. While his mountainous predecessor was a kind of human heap, built like a brick White House, Biden has something about him of a spindly, little, deciduous tree - perhaps an Aspen, famous for how their leaves appear to tremble in Autumn's chill winds.

The president and I are similarly light - at a thistledown 73 kilos - but I have no burly Secret Service man to act as my windbreak when I am out walking in windswept places. These days strong breezes of the lakeside sometimes threaten to buffet me off the lakeside path and into Lake Burley Griffin, rather as Billy Slater (running like the wind) famously biffed Sosaia Feki off the pitch and into the hoardings in that 2018 NRL preliminary semi-final.

A wise advice columnist in The Spectator once counselled a slightly-built Englishwoman, now afraid of walking in her beloved windswept clifftop places, to carry heavy river stones in the deep pockets of her overcoat, thus rendering her less likely to be the wind's plaything.

Perhaps the president and I can try this one day.

Meanwhile I find that one of the many good reasons (intellectually-stimulating company is the best of them) for walking with a heavily-bemuscled mongrel dog on a leash is that this helps keep one earth-anchored on breezy days. Our dear dogs, bless them, keep us anchored, grounded, in so many ways.