A jaunt before the first coffee of the day

Just been on an hour and a half's walk up around Queen St, the street that really doesn't do much honour to anyone royal, since a few hundred metres of it is stuck down on the flat by Woodhaugh Gardens, a chunk climbs up umpteen steps to the top level, and then it's divided in two for quite a way before finally settling down into being one actual street.  In the section where it's divided in two, there are two lanes side by side, both part of the street, and both of these are no exits as far as cars are concerned....unless they want to do a plummet over the cliff into Malvern St.  There are steps and lanes and more steps and houses so much higher on one side than the houses on the other that the roofs of the lower ones are substantially below the basements of the other. 

The walk (which comes from Paul Hayward's Further Intriguing Dunedin Street Walks) took in various other bits as well, of course, with more lanes and more steps (we didn't go up Khyber Pass, which was something) and the discovery of the Cosy Dell Tennis Club, which I didn't know existed.  We also found that the area has perhaps more large mansions and houses per hectare than most other parts of the city.  Some of them, in Regent St, for example, sit so far above the actual street than another house could be fitted in comfortably below them.  That's not an area I'd like to be in an earthquake...

My wife says I should mention that I got rather irritable on the walk.  It may be because I'm now yet another year closer to seventy, or maybe it was because the dog was more frisky than usual and not listening to instructions (he says that's definitely not the case) or it may be that I found Hayward's instructions for this particular walk a little obscure in places (unlikely, but possible).  Anyway, I'm now in recovery mode, having my first coffee of the day.  Which reminds me that I gave the world premiere performance of one of my new piano pieces last Saturday, at the fundraising concert held at St Peter's Church in Hillside Rd.  It was a piece called, (somewhat long-windedly), Rachmaninoff has his first cup of coffee of the day.

The Tennis Player's Grunt

Does anyone else wonder at the sound top tennis players make when they're hitting the ball these days? My wife says it's always happened and we can only hear it now because the players are miked, but I have my doubts. I think it's become a faddy thing to make a great grunt that sounds like a diaphragmic expletive every time you hit the ball. To me, adding that extra noise must add to the energy involved in hitting the thing. Why not just shut up and get on with the job?
I also wonder if there isn't a sexual element in this: tennis stars are so full of their own status and glory that many fans 'adore' them. You wonder if the noise isn't a hint of the sound the fans would hear in the bedroom if they were lucky enough to be there. Or am I going over the top here?
It might be something you'd accept from men - a great heaving grunt. But when the women do it as well, it makes me want to switch off the sound and watch them hit the ball in silence.