Well a very good morning to you all, you wondrous fumblers, champions of the four-walled court. I think you’re all great at squash.
Truly, you might all be great at squash. Have you ever played squash? How could you possibly know if you’re great at squash if you’ve never tried squash? I like to ask you questions. Even though I know you can’t reply. I like to imagine you answer them out loud. Do you? Do you answer them out loud? Do it now. See how it feels. Have you ever played squash? How was that? Did you cringe a little bit? Nice.
I just asked an AI language model – they don’t need free advertising on the Simple Joys Podcast, I think they’re doing OK – I just asked an AI language model to tell me what proportion of people in the UK have ever played squash. The answer will astonish you. Maybe.
Somewhere between 98 and 99 percent of British people have never played squash. Does that astonish you? Maybe I’m being hysterical. You can tell me if I am. Now’s fine, go on. Sorry, I’ll stop doing that, I can’t hear you. This is a bit like those YouTube videos where you can practise reserving a table at a restaurant in Italian. “Per cuante persone?” Now you say, “per cinque persone, grazie mille”. And that’s not what it should be. This is a podcast about simple joy, it’s not “elocution lessons for weirdos”. Contrary to popular belief, this is not a “guide to being slightly socially peculiar”. And most importantly, and I truly can’t stress this enough, it is not a conversation. So zip it.
I’ve played squash. I know, not to flex. I have a squash racket. I was twenty years old when I popped my squash cherry. In my second year of uni. I lived round the corner from a squash court and I got real squashy for a year. I had such a good time playing squash. Maybe I’ll tell you why.
First of all, it felt weirdly nice being in a closed box. I surprised myself with how much I enjoyed that aspect of it. Because in a sense, every room is a closed box. But no room I’ve ever been in has felt more like a box than a squash court. It’s just a big tall empty box. It feels like it’s as tall as it is long, which it almost certainly isn’t, but it felt like it was. I think it was also partly because it was its own stand-alone building out the back of a uni accommodation. A small building, just for squash. Oh yes. But it’s mostly because you go in there, close the door behind you, and in spite of the fact you’re an adult, you’re doing a degree, you’re a twenty year old man who cooks his own food and wipes his own bum, in spite of all of that you are given total privacy to chase a small rubber ball around a room for an hour. I went on my own quite a lot, played music out of a speaker and chased a ball around a room for an hour. It was such a silly way to spend an hour and I absolutely adored it. And the fact that I could do it in a purpose-built box cut off from everything and everyone made it feel like the most justifiable thing in the world.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that was a simple joy. I think it tapped into something I call the communal human consciousness. Activities that humans have engaged in for hundreds of thousands of years – building a den (squash box), running around and chasing stuff – make us feel a certain kinda way because they are somehow essential to what it is to be human.
The communal human consciousness is a really important thing to be aware of, I think. There’s no doubt in my mind that a communal human consciousness exists and that there are things that are fundamental to humanness, wherever it occurs. Because each new human surely can’t be born a completely blank slate. From the moment you are born, you are human. Or perhaps from the moment you’re conceived, or perhaps somewhere in between – I’m not going into this right now. Or perhaps ever! But from the very start, you are a human. And that has to mean some things beyond just an on-paper classification. There are behaviours that basically all human babies do, which no one told them to do. The most popular one is probably the one where babies grab your finger. People loooove that one. If you touch a baby on the cheek, it’ll turn its head towards you and open its mouth. A personal favourite, if there’s a loud noise, a baby will fling its arms out. Great. Almost all babies cry often, almost all babies look for eye contact with other humans, almost all babies’ first impulse when they don’t know what an object is is to put it in their mouth. Even though no one has told them to that. No other animal does these same things. And don’t get me wrong, babies are all different in many ways – but there are some behaviours they all share despite never having been told about them. They are born with the impulses to do these things hardwired in. These things are unequivocally human things.
Unequivocally human things are a place where many joys can be found, I think. I can’t find any logical reason why I became so obsessed with walking – it’s not nearly as engaging as Instagram reels or a good Netflix show. But the most plausible explanation I can think of is that humans have been walkin around for so long, and walking has been such an essential part of human existence for so long, that it strikes a familiar chord within me, I get some positive chemicals going on in my brain because my brain likes that I’m getting real human with it and wants to encourage that.
Our brains and bodies have been practically the same as they are now for somewhere between 200 and 300 thousand years. But our lives today are so hugely different to the lives we had literally one thousand years ago. Our brain wants us to walk lots, build dens, chase things. It rewards these things with chemicals that make us feel good. But these things hardly feature in our lives today. Or at least far, far less than they used to. In a way, by inventing lots of clever things to streamline our lives, we’ve stopped doing many of the things which, as far as our brains and bodies are concerned, we must do as a requirement of being a human. Walking, building dens, chasing stuff, whatever it is. Is it truly a success story of the human race that I am sitting here speaking into a microphone in my bedroom instead of trying to use objects around me to create a roof over my head so I don’t get wet or eaten overnight? I’ll leave that to you to decide, but don’t tell me. No poll for this one, no pregnant pause either. Podcasting is important. Zip it.
If you, like me, believe that there’s a communal human consciousness, then there’s something else you have to confront. You are not as unique as you think you are. And I don’t mean that in a nasty way. You’re gonna live your whole life inside one single brain, through one pair of eyes, ears, nostrils, hands, mouths, and you’ll never get to try out another person’s experience of living. So it’s easy to believe that your experience of life is unique to you, and you start becoming an metaphorical island, even without realising it. But you’re not – you’re a human, and you share so much of yourself with billions of other people. When you were a baby, you gripped someone’s finger, and so did I, and so did pretty much all of us. Sometimes it can be handy to remember that. When you and I were babies, before we knew anything about anything, we did really similar stuff. You can’t know if anyone sees the world like you do, but sometimes it can be nice to choose to believe that they do. Because they probably do.
But there’s a reason why I said we should be aware of the communal human consciousness, rather than just bask in its sunshine. Because its not all sunshine. There are parts of the communal human consciousness which are not so nice.
We’re naturally anxious, and for good reason. For hundreds of thousands of years, our greatest fear was being killed and eaten by a large animal. Literally, for 99.9% of human existence that has been an issue. And the anxiety was pretty damn helpful to our survival – it kept our bodies and minds in a state of readiness, so we could absolutely leg it if a lion turned up. Now, not so many lions about in South London anymore. Times have changed, but our bodies and brains haven’t. We still have that stress response hardwired in, but we don’t really have the use for it anymore. So we get anxious about other stuff, stuff that we wouldn’t need to jump out of our skins and run away from. But our brains give us the feeling that we’re under attack. Nowadays, we are naturally predisposed to lie in bed at night with actual existential fear of our unread WhatsApp messages, that job application you haven’t done, the disturbing rise in cheese prices. It’s no wonder you can’t get to sleep – your body is in a state where it’d be ready to jump out the window to escape a bear.
What else? We are predisposed to be tribal. Your survival depended on the strength of your connections with other strong people, and it seems like those bonds have always been formed more through exclusion than inclusion. If there’s going to be an ‘in’ crowd, then some people will be kept out, and that breeds hate. I don’t know much about it and I won’t claim to. But it seems that way to me.
And one final sinister thing to consider is that, historically, across the whole span of human history, a very small proportion of sex has been consensual.
So as I say, our shared human consciousness is light and shade, and we have to be aware of the wide variety of ways it enters our lives. I don’t think it’s a valid excuse for bad behaviour – your hardwiring as a human will never have the final say on a decision. But it will push and pull you in certain directions, and it’s not helpful to ignore it.
The second reason I like squash is because of the texture of the ball. It’s rubbery, hollow and squishy. Squashy. Yes, that is why it’s called squash, I’ve googled it. So that you didn’t have to. I’m a nice guy. It’s called squash because it uses a squashy ball. It developed from the game of rackets, a game with the same concept – take turns to hit a ball against a wall, win by hitting a shot which your opponent can’t return legally. Rackets was invented by inmates of London’s prisons in the 19th century – apparently they would play it in the yard, and they would use a hard ball. I’m struggling to get a read on exactly what that ball would’ve been made of, but I’m assuming it was something hard covered with something slightly less hard. Like a cricket ball but smaller. I won’t take questions on that, but please do comment if you know.
At some stage, someone decided to try it with a squishy ball. Compared to a hard ball, a squishy ball doesn’t bounce nearly as high off the ground or far off the wall, so the game became much less about power and more about accuracy and strategy. You have to warm a squash ball up at the start of a game to get it bouncing correctly – a cool ball bounces less than a warm ball. You warm it by rolling it around under your foot and then smashing it against the wall a few times. Squash balls are so satisfying to hit – you can really smack it super hard if you want to, but it won’t necessarily make it harder for the other person to return – in fact, it might make it easier. A squash ball might be my favourite of all the balls. Maybe second after the sliotar used in the Irish sport of hurling. That’s an exceptional ball.
The third reason I like squash is that it is possible for players of any ability to have a good game. Tennis is really very hard, and if you match up two players who are both not very good at tennis, they probably won’t have a particularly competitive game. To have a good game of tennis, not only do both players need to be of a similar level, but that level needs to be quite high.
But in squash, because of how comparatively easy it is to hit a squishy ball against a wall with a big racket, two players of a similar level can have a great competitive match, even if they’ve both just started. You gradually work out strategies, and it’s not just ‘whoever can hit the ball the hardest wins’. There’s lots to it strategically. And the evidence of that is this: a 70-year-old who has played squash their whole life will beat a young, fit, tennis-playing 20-year-old every time if that 20-year-old hasn’t played squash. My grandad used to be a squash coach, and he’d probably still beat me today at 82 years old with a double hip replacement.
I think we can all agree that padel is quite a silly game, and I do feel bad for squash in light of the recent meteoric rise of padel. Maybe squash has suffered for how long it’s been on the scene. It’s not new and it’s not sexy and Spanish like padel. But it is a huge amount of fun and significantly cheaper. Just saying. Go play squash.
And excitingly enough, squash has won a great victory recently. Just in the last year or so, it has been recognised by the International Olympic Committee, and it will feature in the 2028 LA Olympics. You don’t see padel on the bill, do you. Pigs.
I’m sure padel’s really fun too. But just like certain AI language models, padel doesn’t need my endorsement. It’s doing just fine.
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