Community Notice

A year ago I added this very silly sign to our local free tennis courts. A month later it featured in a column in the Daily Mail and a day after that it was taken down. Here’s what all that taught me about lockdown, local community and lazy journalism.

I’ve played tennis on and off since I was little, often at the free local courts which are in the centre of Windsor, the town in which I live. To have free courts so close to home is wonderful, and a very Windsor thing to have. But they have never been brilliantly maintained.

When outdoor tennis courts initially reopened after the first lockdown we found — I generally played with either my dad or my brother — that the middle of the three nets had been removed (although the headline wire cable had been left, suspended almost invisibly above the tarmac as an extra safety hazard) and the two that remained were at various stages of decay. On one, the tape or headband was so damaged that in places the net no longer clung to the wire and the other net drooped, pathetically. After a couple of weeks we brought some bungee ties and bulldog clips to help repair them (they remained, keeping the nets in their just about playable state of disrepair for months afterward).

The condition of the nets didn’t really matter. After the restrictions of the previous two months, just being out, out to do something other than a walk or a trip to the supermarket was a treat. Although playing sport isn’t the same as having a drink or a coffee with friends and family it was also amazing to spend time with other people again. I still couldn’t go round to my dad’s to have coffee in the garden, but we could go to the courts to play tennis.

So, the sign. It’s obviously not a very mature or clever thing to do, but we found it funny. We were initially amused, the first time we turned up, to see competing signs on the door to the courts. Had the council really gone to the effort of printing, laminating and affixing the new notice without bothering to remove the old one? Yes, they had.

We also found ourselves joking, in the weeks that followed, about the official guidance on playing tennis safely, which really did include the instruction to only touch your own tennis balls (although by the end of May that had been updated). A few weeks later, before we started our match, we added our own sign above the competing ‘official’ ones to emphasise that very important bit of guidance. Route one humour, perhaps, but it only required the removal of the word ‘tennis’ from the original guidance to make the joke.

In the weeks that followed, every time we played we saw people — other players and passers-by — stop when they saw the sign. The courts are right in the centre of town, positioned between the river and the castle, down a pedestrianised street that gets plenty of footfall. Most laughed and pointed it out to their companions; a few looked very confused, staring at the sign with angry, furrowed brows; many took photos. The sign was not very sophisticated, and to my eye, clearly a joke. It was clear to me that the laughers massively outnumbered the brow-furrowers, at least based on the people I saw.

That suspicion was confirmed a few weeks later, when my brother sent me (and the rest of the family) a screenshot from a local residents’ Facebook group.

I requested to join the group, keen to see the reaction and glad that it had raised a smile. I’m still a member of that residents’ group, for the place I live in and grew up in. But before the pandemic, the lockdown, and that sign, I’d never even thought about joining.

I’m not very active on Facebook, but that residents’ group is always among the most prominent content on my newsfeed when I do log in; it has thousands of members and hundreds of posts and comments each week. I imagine it is like thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of other groups and is very much a collection of the good and the bad.

Among the good: local information on where to get the vaccine, support for the volunteers, information on road closures and local amenities, higher levels of civic engagement and stronger connections to community. Local councillors (and local council watchers) use it to keep the members informed about potential changes to the area. The recent local elections included a referendum on a new town plan, which was approved with around 90% of the vote.

Among the bad: bitter, angry debates about lockdown and mask wearing that resemble the worst of Twitter (except that here there’s a higher chance you’re yelling obscenities at your neighbours). At the time of writing, some members of the group are enraged after admins have moderated racist comments about Travellers.

Wherever you live, there will be a Facebook group just like the Windsor one. In many places, like Windsor, the weekday population will have been swelled over the past year by expat commuters, exiled from the city and spending more time in their own neighbourhood. Since that first lockdown, a common discussion, across the UK, has been whether the community spirit that many have felt throughout 2020 and 2021 will continue once restrictions end. My view is that yes, it will, in at least some sense, because there are new ties — in the form of residents’ groups like this one, or local newsletters or podcasts — to go alongside the growing ranks of people, like me, who will spend more time close to where they live, and less time in offices in city centres.

Everyone in the residents’ group got the joke. But one person didn’t. Or maybe he did, I’m still not sure. On July 21st, exactly a month after the sign was posted, and a week after it featured in the Facebook residents’ group, it featured in an altogether more glamourous place: Richard Littlejohn’s weekly Daily Mail column. Here’s a link to it.

Littlejohn specialises in a very specific kind of outrage: he’s against do-gooders and officials, people who give advice and especially the kind of interfering experts who want to enact public health policies in the face of a pandemic.

Here, he’s been sent the sign and it confirms all his worst suspicions about Public Health England; they’re ‘overpaid clowns’, useless bureaucrats and this sign they’ve added to the municipal courts (his words) confirms them as ‘a racket’ (boom boom).

Among PHE’s worst crimes, in Littlejohn’s view: encouraging over 60s to have safe sex (recent data has shown STDs are rising rapidly among older people), urging retailers not to put daffodils too close to fruit and veg (as they can be mistaken for vegetables among some people whose first language is not English) and ‘inflating’ coronavirus death figures during the first wave (this is technically true, but does not indicate that tens of thousands didn’t die of Covid, or that PHE’s totals were much different to the actual numbers).

Except, obviously, the sign isn’t real. Littlejohn even flirts with this notion, generously admitting he considered it might be an ‘elaborate spoof’. But that brush with reality is all too brief. Within a few words, he’s on to the diatribe. It would have taken a single phone call, to either Public Health England or Windsor and Maidenhead Council, to confirm that no, clearly, the sign is just a joke, an elaborate spoof, if you will. But that would get in the way of a good rant.

Two things happened soon after Littlejohn’s article, but only one has anything to do with it. By the next day, the sign had gone — no longer attached to the entrance to the tennis courts and no longer raising a smile from passers-by. A month later, the Health Secretary announced that Public Health England is to be abolished, replaced by a new body designed to protect the country against a future pandemic.

There’s one more thing of note from this very silly, very juvenile story. I’ll emerge from this pandemic with a different relationship with my town. Its amenities are more important to me, I’ll spend more time here, and thanks to networks like the Windsor residents’ group, I’ll be more connected, even if only passively, to my neighbours. This is the kind of increased attachment to a local area that is behind the optimism about community renewal and common, I’m sure, to millions of others.

I’d always referred to the tennis courts as our ‘local’ tennis courts. They belong to all of us, they’re free and can be used by anyone. In his article, Littlejohn refers to them as ‘municipal’ tennis courts. Maybe it’s just me, but that’s a much colder word to use.