Court craft

The call has come through to play in the journalists' tournament at Roland Garros.

Wednesday morning at 10.15. I have no idea how to prepare for a match of this magnitude.

It’s probably not a good idea to stay up during the night to watch Novak Djokovic take on Juan Monacao in the last 16 at the US Open.

I might be best served by sleeping.

But I do know that it's probably not worth treating it like a usual game and getting up at 9 and having breakfast and ambling along to the courts.

It would have been good to have had one coaching session before but I've been working, doing my day job. I'm not a professional.

Of more importance is the boy's adaptation to his new life in the crèche. It was something of a saga getting a place. I documented the ups and downs in an article published a few weeks ago on one of the Guardian websites www.guardianabroad.co.uk/family/article/339

And after that tribulation there's an upside for the parent after dropping off the fruit of their loins at the crèche. It is slap bang opposite Chez Prune.

This is a cafe that doesn't try too hard. The food there is OK - not brilliant, not awful. The position — overlooking the Canal St Martin — is marvellous. And most importantly it was in the vanguard. It opened when the 10th was still considered a dead zone and the canal but a dirty and forlorn urban waterway.

Now of course it's a gleaming green canal — the epicentre of the bobo wonderland that has descended. At one of the spruced-up sluices Audrey Tautou ran the gamut of gamine as Amélie Poulain. Local estate agents thereafter chortled all the way to the Michelin-starred restaurants.

Maybe I'll be dining out with them with the earnings from my impending tennis career.