Serving it up to stupid forced errors stat

To say tennis is just a game seems a kind of blasphemy, like saying that Shakespeare's plays are just entertainments, or (more of this later in the column) that a mango is just a fruit.

It is because tennis is about Life that the sensitive tennis fan winces at the notion of the "unforced error", serially gibbered by tennis commentators and reporters.

Since in Life (which tennis mirrors) there is no such thing as an unforced error (all of the mistakes we make are forced by something) it is absurd to think they are found in tennis.

Whenever a fine tennis player doesn't play the shot he or she intended there is nothing "unforced" about the mistake.

Commentators gibbered of John Millman's "unforced errors" in his first round Open loss when in fact his errors were forced by all sorts of things, including his opponent's fine conservative play, (forcing Millman to take some daring risks if he was to win points), by the jitters that come with being an actor on so public a stage and carrying a nation's expectations on one's shoulders, by whatever personal angst and biorhythms a player brings to the court in heart and head.

One Canadian player at the Open, Rebecca Marino, was calculated to have made "42 unforced errors" in her first-round match, when the fact of her struggles to resurrect her career, her known struggles with assorted dark issues in her life suggest all sorts of forces likely to force her into understandable mistakes. The 42 unforced errors ridiculously attributed to her in just one match are far more unforced errors than any of us make in an averagely error-pocked lifetime.

Diana Spencer's error in marrying Charles, Prince of Wales, was forced upon her by a zillion forces of class and upbringing, of bullying family and national expectations of her, and by her own girlish immaturity and naivety, since God help her, she was only 19 (19!!!!) when Charles, 32, a mountebank, slithered up to her and proposed to her, and just 20 when she so misguidedly married him.

All of us poor creatures in our less remarkable ways (less remarkable than Di's) make our everyday errors for reasons forced upon us, if only by our personalities, our upbringings.

Those of you who make the error of voting Liberal perhaps do so because of your blighted personalities, perhaps blighted in your childhood by Liberal-voting parents exemplifying Philip Larkin's famous observation in his This Be The Verse:

They f---k you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

All errors, in Life and in tennis (which some of us cannot tell apart from one another), are forced errors.

For fun, to amuse dear childhood friends still living in England and to help clear my own migration-bewildered mind (I migrated to Australian from England in my nave teens) I am composing a list of The 100 Best Things About Australia.

At the moment, giving them a guernsey well behind vastly more momentous Australian wonders of nature and human achievement, I have Australia's mangoes, at 87.

This summer's mangoes are indescribably wonderful.

And yet, even as I use the word "indescribably" in discussion of our relationships with a mango (for to eat a mango is to have a meaningful relationship with it) I find mango-eating wonderfully described by a writer.

Up in my daily post from LitHub pops Urvi Kumbhat's ripper essay "On The Complexity Of Using The Mango As A Symbol" ... as well as its scholarly discussions of the mango in history there are the author's descriptions of his personal mango raptures. All of us, mango lovers, have gone where Urvi goes with this.

"In Calcutta, we cut mangoes into crescent moons, the skin still attached. The mess is the ritual - we drag our teeth against each rind, tear the fruit from skin, prolong every sweet note. I work meticulously through the mango, like a duty, until it would be sin to touch anything else; my hands covered in juice, yellowed and sticky. And yet I want to touch other things-my face, the sofa, my clothes, the people I love. I suck the fruit from the [mango seed]. I sit there with wet hands, waiting to wash them clean. This is what I crave without warning: the mango's tactility, the excess of the fruit, the way it necessarily comes into contact with more than just the mouthl," Kumbhat writes.

Fresh, tropical fruits were unknown in the grim, grey, turnip-gnawing, cabbage-boiling England I grew up in. No wonder my first ever experience of an Australian mango during my first migrant-bewildered days here was a yellowing, sticky, tactile revelation. Thank you, Australia.

Urvi's Kumbhat's piece includes a link to a startling poem Self-Portrait As A Mango. It is just the kind of exciting poetical thing we will expect of the ACT's first poet laureate when my campaignings for the creation of that essential post (every worthwhile city in the USA and the UK has its poet laureate and Canberra will not be a real city until we have one) at last turns the head of our chief minister.

Watch this campaigning, poetical space.