Taken from https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/av/tennis/66170486

Patiently I Wait For The Lord – featuring Edward Baker – Duly – guide vocal for Theophilus – the Musical – recorded by Joffy James

I am usually more interested in Test cricket, especially, when it is the Ashes, but I just had to share this clip of a 67 year-old tennis player at Wimbledon. If anyone thinks they are getting old when they near the “three score and ten” landmark then they need to watch this.
Incidentally my Virgin email has been down now for 7 days due to what has been described as an “outage” – basically an internet shutdown. I did not realise how much I relied on communicating through email and it made me wonder how people survived waiting for a letter to be delivered in the “olden days”.
Here is an extract from a history of the Royal Mail:
When Charles I first introduced public mail service in 1635, letters were carried from one ‘post’ to the next ‘post’ by carriers on foot or on horseback. Up until that time, the post system was reserved for the use of the King and his Court. At each ‘post’ the ‘postmaster’ would remove the letters for his immediate area and then hand the rest to another ‘post boy’ who would carry them on. Letters took a long time to reach their destination with foot messengers travelling less than eighteen miles in a day. A letter sent to Edinburgh from London might not receive a response for nearly two months. However, this system would continue for another century and a half.
There were six main post roads throughout England and Scotland and the very first ‘post office’ was set up in Bishopsgate Street in London. The four main post roads ran between London, Dover, Plymouth, and Edinburgh with Bristol and Yarmouth being added by the end of the century. Letters sent through the public postal service could travel only over these routes. This meant that a letter sent from Yarmouth to Edinburgh would have to travel through London. However, under this scheme, letters were to travel both day and night, and therefore could travel 120 miles in a 24 hour day. In the beginning, a letter written on a single sheet of paper would cost 2d to travel 80 miles with postage to Scotland from London being 8d and to Ireland 9d. In addition to this official post service, hundreds of carriers delivered letters and packages across the dominion in direct competition to the service.
And I’m complaining !!!

Quote of the week