Southend-on-Sea: the arty way is Essex ( Summer Goals)

At the Village Green arts and music festival in Southend-on-Sea earlier this month, festivalgoers were pictured waving placards reading “Southend is not a shit hole”. I thought this was a bit odd, until I learned it was in response to a recent outburst by presenter Paul O’Grady – during filming for an episode of Blind Date, no less – in which he branded the Essex seaside town a shit hole, and “full of single mothers”. Harsh, Paul.

Like generations of Londoners before me, I had my first taste of the seaside at Southend. No matter that the beach was more mud than golden sand, or that the water – where the Thames meets the North Sea – was a murky brown. I have fond memories of making “sand” castles in the silty sludge, riding the roller coasters at Adventure Island until I felt sick, and then walking to the end of the (world’s longest) pier for an ice-cream and to watch the container ships sliding in and out of the estuary.

But nostalgia is not the reason I keep going back. Like many British seaside towns, Southend has had its period in the doldrums but there’s been a definite sea change in recent years, with young Londoners moving into the area, and a revival of the local arts scene.

Much of the impetus for this revival has come from arts organisations such as Metal, which hosts artist residencies and workshops at its base in the town’s Chalkwell Park. It is also behind the Village Green festival and the biennial Estuary Festival – a celebration of the art, music, sub-cultures and landscape of the Thames estuary – which had its first outing last year and returns in September 2018.

Another key player is the Focal Point Gallery in the town centre, which runs an innovative programme of exhibitions and events year round. Next week it will open Twenty One, a cultural venue, cafe, bar, gallery and events space right opposite Southend Pier. This will be followed in 2018 by the conversion of an old Victorian hotel into studios for up to 30 artists and a public gallery and workshop space offering art classes to locals and visitors.

“What we’ve seen over the past 10 years is this huge burgeoning of the artistic scene in Southend,” says Joe Hill of the Focal Point Gallery. “You’ve got a lot of creative people coming out of London and looking for new, affordable spots. Southend has such an opportunity to be a thriving place for the creative industries, but you need that underlying structure to support it. This is only the starting point.”

During the recent heatwave, I took my daughter to cool off in the fountains on the promenade and afterwards we walked along the seafront into Old Leigh, where we found ourselves in the thick of the annual Leigh Folk Festival . The narrow cobbled streets of this former fishing village were heaving with people enjoying the live music.

We sat on the sea wall outside Osborne’s seafood cafe eating vinegar-drenched cockles from a polystyrene tub, listening to the music and watching a rabble of children launching themselves gleefully into the water below.

There’s nothing genteel about Southend. Although the elegant Georgian villas on the clifftop tell of a slightly grander past, its character has been shaped in more recent decades by waves of working-class Londoners coming here to let off steam. So yes, there are prettier seaside resorts, sandier beaches, bluer seas, but if you can’t have a good time here, there’s something wrong with you.

New York City Ballet Unveils Designers for Its Fall Fashion Gala

New York City Ballet on Tuesday announced the fashion designers who would collaborate with four choreographers for this year’s fall fashion gala, an annual event overseen by Sarah Jessica Parker.

The company also said that during the fall season Rebecca Krohn, a principal dancer since 2012, would retire. She won’t be going far, though: After her farewell performance, on Oct. 7, she will remain with City Ballet as a ballet mistress.

The fall gala, on Sept. 28, is to feature four premieres, choreographed by Lauren Lovette, the principal dancer who created her first work for the company for the gala last year; Justin Peck, City Ballet’s resident choreographer and a soloist; Troy Schumacher, also a soloist; and Gianna Reisen, a 2017 graduate of City Ballet’s School of American Ballet and at age 18 the youngest person to choreograph for the company.

Ms. Lovette will work with the designers Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim, who are veterans of Oscar de la Renta and creators of the brand Monse. Collaborating with Mr. Peck will be Tsumori Chisato, the Japanese designer known for her prints that have drawn inspiration from manga, among other sources. Virgil Abloh, the founder of Off-White, will design for Ms. Reisen’s ballet, and Mr. Schumacher has been paired with Jonathan Saunders, of Diane von Furstenberg.Continue reading the main story


The gala will also include a performance of Peter Martins’s “The Chairman Dances,” a 1998 work set to John Adams’s piece of the same name — an orchestral outtake from his opera “Nixon in China.”

Ms. Krohn’s final performance will be in George Balanchine’s “Stravinsky Violin Concerto.” A longtime member of the City Ballet family, Ms. Krohn joined the School of American Ballet in 1995, and became an apprentice with the company in 1998. She joined the corps one year later, and was promoted to the rank of soloist in 2006, followed by principal dancer in 2012.

This year, she originated roles in Mr. Peck’s “The Decalogue” and Pontus Lidberg’s “The Shimmering Asphalt.” She is also a stalwart in repertory works, and appeared in the premiere of Jerome Robbins’s “N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz” in 2005.

How to Stay Safe in the Great Outdoors

If you encounter a bear at a distance while hiking:
Make as much noise as possible by yelling very loudly.
Slowly back away.
Run away as fast as you can.
Play dead.

If a bear charges toward you:
Directly confront the bear in a physical manner.
Stand your ground and use bear spray when the animal is 30 to 60 feet away.
Slowly back away.
Run away as fast as you can.
Play dead.

The following will help keep bears away from your campsite:
Properly storing all food and garbage.
Cooking food with a strong odor.
Nothing will keep a hungry bear away.
Mountain lions are generally found in 14 Western states, and attacks are extremely rare. National Park Service, via Associated Press

If you encounter a mountain lion:
Run away as fast as you can.
Wave your arms and make loud noises.
Stay still and silent.


The best way to remove a tick from your skin is to:
Use tweezers to squeeze the tick’s body, then pull straight up and away from the skin.
Use tweezers to grab the tick as close as you can to your skin, then pull straight up and away from the skin.
Apply Vaseline and then slide tweezers underneath the tick, grab and pull from skin.
Use a match to burn the tick, and then use tweezers to grab and pull from skin.

After removing the tick, you should go to the doctor:
Only if you develop a target or bull’s-eye shaped rash.
If you develop a red rash of any shape.
If you develop a fever or flulike symptoms.


If you encounter a snake:
Approach it while making loud noises to scare it away.
Use a long stick to push it away.
Stay calm and keep your distance.
Toss liquid at the snake.

If you are bitten by a snake:
Have somebody suck out the venom with their mouth, making sure they spit out the venom and do not swallow it.
Apply ice directly over the wound.
Keep your distance from the snake and obtain medical care as soon as possible.


There is more of a chance of dying from a shark attack than:
Being struck by lightning.
Being struck by an asteroid.
Catching a foul ball at a baseball game.
Living to be 100 years old.
None of the above.

If a shark attacks you:
Try swimming away as fast as possible.
Stay completely still.
Fight back by grabbing its eyes and gills.

Blind date: ‘There may have been a peck or two’

Ben on Samantha




What were you hoping for?

Someone to have a good laugh with.


First impressions?

Cute, and I liked her nose ring.


What did you talk about?

Favourite music, recent travels, our shared love of The OC and Love Island.


Any awkward moments?

None at all.


Good table manners?

Impeccable.


Best thing about Sam?

Really good chat.


Would you introduce her to your friends?

Don’t see any reason why not.


Describe her in three words

Chatty, funny, creative.


What do you think she made of you?

This guy is a bit old, but somehow likes all the same random stuff.


Did you go on somewhere?

To a bar round the corner for a little dance.


And… did you kiss?

There may have been a peck or two in the second venue.


If you could change one thing about the evening, what would it be?

I’m not sure I needed the third double vodka and Coke in the second bar.


Marks out of 10?

8.


Would you meet again?

I wouldn’t mind going for another drink at all.

Samantha on Ben




What were you hoping for?

Someone to fancy, or a mate.


First impressions?

Sweet, but a bit nervous.


What did you talk about?

Babies, cheese.


Any awkward moments?
We started talking about politics and realised why you shouldn’t. Complete apathy is a deal-breaker for me.


Good table manners?

He let me try the wine first.


Best thing about Ben?

World champion on Rapstar for 21 Seconds by So Solid Crew.


Would you introduce him to your friends?

I’m not sure he would have loads in common with them.



Describe him in three words

Funny, sweet, smart.


What do you think he made of you?

He was complimentary.


Did you go on somewhere?

Yes, but we didn’t stay long.


And… did you kiss?

A little bit, but only because he asked.


If you could change one thing about the evening, what would it be?

Maybe no kiss.


Marks out of 10?

7.


Would you meet again?

He kept saying he didn’t think I’d see him again. The more he said it, the less I wanted to.

Barbara Sinatra, Philanthropist and Singer’s Widow, Dies at 90

Barbara Sinatra, Frank Sinatra’s fourth wife and a prominent advocate and philanthropist who raised millions of dollars to help abused children, died on Tuesday at her home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. She was 90.

Her death was announced by John E. Thoresen, director of the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center.

With her husband’s help, Ms. Sinatra founded the center in 1986 as a nonprofit organization to provide therapy and other support to young victims of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

In the years since, Mr. Thoresen said, more than 20,000 children have been treated at the center, in Rancho Mirage, and hundreds of thousands more throughout the world through videos it provides.

Ms. Sinatra, a former model and Las Vegas showgirl, was born Barbara Blakeley on March 10, 1927, in Bosworth, Mo. She was a Palm Springs socialite before marrying Sinatra in 1976.Continue reading the main story

She met Sinatra through her husband at the time, Zeppo Marx, a former member of the Marx Brothers comedy team who had become a talent agent. Her marriage to Sinatra was her third, his fourth and the most enduring union for both. They remained married until his death in 1998.

The Sinatras played an active role in the children’s center. “Frank would come over and sit and read to the kids,” Mr. Thoresen said. “But the best way she used Frank was she would say, ‘I need a half-million dollars for this, so you do a concert and I get half the money.’ ”

Ms. Sinatra had remained active at the center until recently. She is survived by a son, Robert Oliver Marx, and a granddaughter.

Charlize Theron’s Sick Work Ethic

Ms. Theron is, of course, a powerhouse actress who has old Hollywood glamour and a mile-wide range. She has also played a series of lethal ladies so convincingly it is hard not to conclude a part of her is tapped into a rich vein of redirected rage. Obviously, being an Oscar winner, she’s ace at her job. But her slam-dunk portrayals of real and fictitious killers — the convicted murderer Aileen Wuornos from “Monster,” Imperator Furiosa in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” Ravenna in “Snow White and the Huntsman” and now a merciless hand-to-hand combatant in the new “Atomic Blonde” — all suggest a woman who does not easily suffer fools.

Ms. Theron does, however, suffer colds, and had to cancel a few hours before our lunch and reschedule for the next day. She was fighting a virus, she later explained, and shortly before our planned chat had downed daytime cough medicine that left her a little high, and not all that cogent.

“So sorry,” Ms. Theron said as she scooched into a corner banquet table at a restaurant on the Universal lot. She is luminous, lanky and, by all evidence, poreless. (Defying celebrity profile protocol, I neglected to jot down either what she had on — I dimly recall black pants and a black top — or what she ordered for lunch.) She still sounded somewhat froggy, and her eyes were a little rheumy, but she had rallied. As the extended fight sequences in “Atomic Blonde” show, Ms. Theron’s work ethic is, in a good way, sick.Continue reading the main story

“I did two movies with Jean-Claude Van Damme as his stunt double,” said David Leitch, a former stunt coordinator and a director of “John Wick,” who directed “Atomic Blonde.” “She’s trained as hard as he’s ever trained. Not to disparage Jean-Claude, who’s great. But she didn’t have a martial arts background, and went in at ground zero. She had the will to want to be great right off the bat.”

Beyond positioning Ms. Theron solidly as a compelling female action hero, “Atomic Blonde” feels like the logical next step for an actress who stunned in 2015 as the one-armed warrior Furiosa, effectively stealing “Mad Max: Fury Road” from the film’s ostensible star, Tom Hardy. After shining throughout her chameleon-like career, be it playing the romantic interest, the dramatic lead, the darkly comedic antiheroine, or, of course, a serial killer, Ms. Theron is, at 41, deploying a brand of female empowerment and ferocity that audiences crave now more than ever. Like Furiosa, and also Cipher in the most recent “Fast and Furious” film, Ms. Theron’s “Atomic Blonde” character is unapologetic and cunning, wholly owning her space, rather than merely populating or decorating a world defined by men.

In “Atomic Blonde,” a top MI6 agent, Lorraine Broughton (Ms. Theron), buzzsaws her way through an espionage ring in 1989 Berlin as she tries to solve the murder of a fellow spy. This is no teased-hair-and-Day-Glo sendup of the ’80s. The film is luscious and cool, and Ms. Theron’s Lorraine has the looks of Debbie Harry and the toughness of Chrissie Hynde.

She is also a ruthlessly efficient killer, laying waste to 200-pound men, flipping them and hurling them down stairwells and into walls. During production, Ms. Theron bruised her ribs, wrenched her knee and clenched her jaw so tightly that she cracked two teeth. “I was a nervous wreck,” said AJ Dix, a partner at Ms. Theron’s production company, Denver and Delilah, which helped produce the film. “Nothing scares her.”

Ms. Theron optioned the story before the graphic novel it was based on, “The Coldest City,” came out in 2012. She loved that Lorraine was impenitent and fought out of professional duty, rather than to avenge, say, the loss of a husband or child. (There are intimations that she had a personal connection with the dead spy.) Part of what is so arresting and even transgressive about the film is its forthright depiction of Lorraine’s battle wounds. Her face is bruised because she has done her job, not because she has been victimized.

“I became very aware of women in certain circumstances not being allowed to play by the same rules guys get to play by,” Ms. Theron said. “I was actively looking for a protagonist that could break those rules.”

Is This the Woman Who Will Save Uber?

A little over a year before Bozoma Saint John became the first chief brand officer at Uber, the transportation company’s best hope to rehabilitate its tarnished image, she hailed a ride from the Four Seasons hotel in Austin, Tex., to a nearby business dinner. What pulled up was a wreck.

“Hey, nothing’s going to happen to me in this car, right?” Ms. Saint John said half-jokingly to the driver. “You can drive, right?”

She expected him to banter back. Instead, he told her that a group of taxi drivers at the airport had vandalized the vehicle and that he needed the money from this ride to fix it. He also mentioned that he had been saving to see Iggy Pop, his late brother’s favorite rocker, at the South by Southwest festival, which Ms. Saint John was attending as the head of global consumer marketing for iTunes and Apple Music.

The two women first met at a dinner in Las Vegas last January hosted by Kristin Lemkau, the chief marketing officer of JPMorgan Chase. “We had an instant connection,” Ms. Huffington said. That night, she posted a photo of herself with her arm around a beaming Ms. Saint John on Instagram with the hashtag #thecoolkidsdinner.” The next month, Ms. Huffington attended Ms. Saint John’s 40th birthday party in Los Angeles. (Another Instagram opportunity: “Hard to imagine what she’ll do by 50!” she posted.)

“Sometimes it takes you months to get to know someone,” Ms. Huffington said. “With her, I felt like she has this incredible capacity for intimacy and for sharing her story and for sharing others’ stories.”

And, Ms. Huffington said, “She’s great at social media.”

Indeed, while women have long feared that putting family pictures on their desks might impede their climb up the corporate ladder, Ms. Saint John has broken the glass frame: posing in a bikini with her “baddies” on a beach; snapping a selfie as her daughter, now 8, tags along on a business trip; and posting the last red-carpet photo she took with her husband, Peter Saint John, who died of Burkitt lymphoma in 2013.

“I’ve been told that I overshare,” she said. “Sometimes I get criticized for it, but how else would I be if not all of me?”

Ms. Saint John knows it might seem overly calculating of Uber, which has been accused of fostering a hostile work environment for women, to hire an African-American single mother to make over its public image. She doesn’t care. “To me, there’s no sense of tokenism because I know I can do the job — I’m qualified to do the job, I can do a great job,” she said. “Being present as a black woman — just present — is enough to help exact some of the change that is needed and some that we’re looking for.”

She amplifies this presence with statement-making ensembles like the ruffled, lilac Marni skirt and crop top, gold-encrusted Chanel purse and stiletto heels she wore on a recent morning at Uber’s San Francisco office. “That’s my own personal thing,” Ms. Saint John said of her interest in fashion, so distinct from the hoodie aesthetic around her.

She has stood out from the crowd since her family settled in Colorado Springs when she was 12, after an itinerant childhood spent in Connecticut, Washington D.C., Kenya and Ghana, where her father was a member of the Parliament from 1979 until the 1981 coup d’état there. Her mother designed and sold clothes and ensured that Ms. Saint John and her three younger sisters stayed connected to their culture, especially once they moved to the Southwest.

“The first few months were really hard,” Ms. Saint John said. “Having a name that people can’t pronounce” — it’s BOZE-mah — “having a mom that refused to serve pizza on Friday nights when friends came over. She was like, ‘No you’re going to have this pepper soup, I don’t care if you’re sweating.’” (She’s come to appreciate that steadfastness: Accepting an award at an arts fund-raiser hosted by Russell Simmons this month, Ms. Saint John thanked her mother for ingraining her love of African culture.)

Hot Enough for You? Try Eating Something Even Hotter

There are less daunting methods to beat the summer heat than by wolfing down still-boiling chicken soup for lunch. But followers of a Korean tradition say that few are as effective.

Their mantra is “yi yeol chi yeol,” or “fight fire with fire,” and their weapon of choice is samgyetang, a whole young chicken or Cornish hen stuffed with glutinous rice, ginseng root, red dates and garlic, served piping hot in its own broth.

At the peak of summer, and especially on “sambok,” the three days of the year Koreans believe to be the hottest, according to the lunar calendar, many of them seek out roiling bowls of samgyetang in the belief that it replenishes nutrients, improves circulation and helps balance the body’s internal and external temperatures.

“The concepts that make it good for you on a hot day are rooted in traditional Korean medicine and are very old,” said Maangchi Kim, the Korean-Canadian cookbook author and YouTube star. Her video on making samgyetang has been viewed more than 1.4 million times.

The dish predates written records, Ms. Kim said, but an early printed recipe for what is now called samgyetang appeared in a 1917 Korean cookbook and called for ginseng powder instead of fresh roots. By the 1960s, refrigeration had made fresh ginseng easier to buy, and the practice of eating the soup as a summer tonic, thought to refresh and re-energize, spread widely.Continue reading the main story



Those wilting under the sun today still turn to it, often instead of chilled foods, as a way to cool down.

“If I have something cold on a hot summer day, I may feel some relief as it goes down,” said Ms. Kim, who lives in New York City. “But the temperature difference between my body and the environment becomes too large, and after a while, I actually feel hotter than before.”

“If I have some hot samgyetang,” she added, “I sweat a bit, and my body feels more in sync with the environment.”

We very much concentrate on the stock,” Mr. Ro said. “We try to adhere to the traditional way of preparing it.”

He said his recipe is a secret. But samgyetang is almost always made from just a handful of ingredients, with none of the pungent, spicy flavors that Korean cuisine is often known for in the West. The chicken is stuffed with aromatics and simmered until the meat can be pulled easily from the bones with chopsticks.

At Hansol, the soup is silkier than many versions, most likely from an extra helping of starchy rice in the stock. Otherwise it’s typical of the uncomplicated comfort dish that has steamed up Korean kitchens for generations.

Whether it provides relief from the heat ultimately depends on one’s definition of relief. Any cooling effect is not always immediate. “I guess we’re thinking more toward the longer-term benefits,” Mr. Ro said. “The food you intake will have an effect on your health, and that makes you feel better.”

At Berryessa National Monument, Wildflowers and Rebirth

This week, we visit three national monuments (more than two dozen are under review by the Trump administration and could be made smaller and opened to logging and mining): Berryessa Snow Mountain in California (below), Gold Butte in Nevada and Bears Ears in Utah.

The sideways dawn light as it winks across the vineyards from the east: It was the first thing I noticed as I pulled off a California freeway.

As I drove, the vineyards gave way to wheat-gold foothills, black cows in fields.

The fields gave way to darkly arching oaks, tree tunnels shading a narrow country road outside Winters, Calif. The early-hour brightness indicated the nearness of summer.

Here, an hour and a half northeast of San Francisco, the dense press of civilization lifts, and the open wilderness weaves itself into the landscape. The light is somehow ventilated, given more space. I watched a cloud bank slowly roll over a cliff, rearranging itself like a gauzy muslin scarf.

In the six o’clock glow of the last days of May, I entered the southern boundary of Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, one of our country’s newest national monuments. The knobby fullness of the surrounding hills resembles rising bread. Named for the craggy 3,057-foot peak at its northern end, the monument runs along a ridgeline that stretches south through seven counties to Blue Ridge, where I would start my hike. One writer called Berryessa’s outline a long, lumpy Christmas stocking. This is the toe, and I’m dipping in.

What do we want from our wildlife areas? Something so remote we’ll never see it? Or something close enough, braided into our tangle of civilization, to remind us of all that exists alongside us in this world?

When Theodore Roosevelt signed the 1906 Antiquities Act into law, he gave presidents the power to protect cultural, historic and natural resources under threat with the national monument designation. More than a century later, millions of acres of public lands have been protected, many across the American West. They include the Pacific Remote Islands, the largest marine reserve in the world, which was proclaimed by George W. Bush and expanded by Barack Obama, and the Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, an astounding, alien landscape of plateaus and cliff faces created by sedimentary erosion, chock-full of fossils.

This year, 27 national monuments were made newly vulnerable to oil, gas and other resource extraction, placed under review by President Trump for what he deems as presidential overreach amounting to a “massive federal land grab.” But it’s important to note that these places were never meant to be walled off or untouchable. They’re meant to be explored.

Designated by Mr. Obama two years ago, Berryessa Snow Mountain was a complicated puzzle of orphaned lands managed by a host of government agencies. But looking at the pieces together now, you’ll see they make up a rich wildlife corridor amounting to a third of a million acres, with densely forested slopes and some of the rarest plants on earth.

Because the monument is situated north of Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay, all of it intersects with human activity. Its landscape reveals more than 10,000 years of Native American artifacts and cultural sites, and is flush with places to hike, camp, fish, hunt, bike and go boating. Locals advocated protection for the region for years. On the editorial pages of California newspapers, the outcry against Mr. Trump’s order has been fierce; along with Berryessa Snow Mountain, seven other national monuments in the state were covered by the order.

In these contentious times, it seems fitting that Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument was birthed in flames. Days after Mr. Obama’s July 2015 designation, wildfires raged across Napa and Lake counties, eventually engulfing 100,000 acres by the end of the summer, including much of the landscape earmarked for the monument. The trails in the area reopened to the public just one year ago.

I came to Berryessa Snow Mountain to see about the possibility of rebirth — indeed, to remind myself how to imagine what that could look like. One thing rebirth looks like is an explosion of wildflowers. As I ascended the Blue Ridge Trail, it was hard to ignore the vibrant, in-your-face display of fire-follower blooms: white Stebbins’ morning-glory and delicate yellow whispering bell, for instance, whose seeds lie dormant in the soil until heat and smoke trigger germination. At every step, a new floral arrangement seemed to present itself: woolly sunflower, fire-red Indian paintbrush and pale pink splendid Mariposa lily, all taking advantage of the extra sunlight and soil moisture freed up by the recent fires.

The trail I chose, the Homestead-Blue Ridge Loop, is considered the gateway to the national monument. It’s a terrific — and tough — five-mile loop that starts and ends along Putah Creek, with a steep elevation gain of 1,300 feet over two and a half miles to the highest point. What you get for the effort, along with sore legs, are those thick blankets of wildflowers, a panorama of the Sacramento Valley and glorious ridgeline views of Lake Berryessa from the very top.

The General Joy of Wimbledon

A few minutes after I arrived at Wimbledon, walking through the grounds, I felt a flutter in the air, a quickening. Heads were turning, looking up. A murmur rippled through the throng, and then a cry: “Roger!” I looked up. Roger Federer was crossing the bridge connecting Centre Court with the players’ area, trim in a navy polo. He paused at the shouts and looked down. The crowd below was at a standstill, necks craning, phones out to record the moment. He raised his hand in a wave, acknowledging his adoring subjects. The shouting turned to a roar. I—who have never had trouble cheering for his rivals—felt the silent cry in my own heart. Long live the King!

Roger Federer won a tennis tournament today. Perhaps you’ve heard: Wimbledon, his eighth. His nineteenth Grand Slam title. The final match, a 6–3, 6–1, 6–4 victory over Marin Cilic, was entirely forgettable. Cilic showed only flashes of the impressive serving, aggressive baseline play, and quick reflexes that brought him this far. After the first few games, Federer was never tested. It was unlike the tense and brilliant match that Cilic and Federer played in the semifinals at the 2014 U.S. Open, or the tight contest between the two in the quarter-finals of Wimbledon last year, when Cilic held match points but Federer went on to win. There was only one memorable moment this time, when Cilic was down a set and a break and began to cry. He was struggling with a bad blister on his foot, and with the moment. “It was just that feeling that I wasn’t able to give the best,” he later explained. He sat in his chair during the changeover, surrounded by the physician and trainer, and sobbed.

Tennis is a game that tortures souls. It is the loneliest sport, a contest not only of player against opponent but mind against body, mind against self. Everything about it is brutal, on and off the court: the pace and the weight of the ball, the pressure, the travel, the redundancy, the expectations, the carping press. It is not uncommon for players—including many of the greatest champions—to show their nerves and their temper during a bad patch, to crack.

Federer is different. Yes, he was once a kid with frosted hair and a habit of wrecking racquets. (The first time his wife, Mirka, saw him, he once recounted, he was on the court in Switzerland screaming and smashing his stick. As he told the Guardian, his voice adopting a mocking tone, “she was like . . . ‘Yeah! Great player, he seems really good! What’s wrong with this guy?’ ”) But he long ago became the paragon—even a parody—of gentility, calm and regal.

It can be hard to see past the legend, even on the court, if only because his play is so beautiful. Whether you’re religious or not, watching him is an aesthetic experience. I realized that I had lost whatever credibility I had as an analyst of his game, if I ever had any, during the 2015 U.S. Open, when he hit a squash shot instead of running two feet to his right to hit a routine forehand. It was a lazy shot, but, as his racquet scythed the air, I thought it was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen.

Still, what he has done in the past six months, since taking the second half of last year to recover from a knee injury and to give his aging body time to refresh, is amazing by any measure. At the age of almost thirty-six, he has kept improving. He has changed his backhand, driving it more emphatically; he’s recalibrated the balance between his net and baseline play; he’s hit serves with perfect accuracy. He has used his preternatural timing and reflexes to unsettle the game of grinders, shot-making his way to win after win. “I’ve never felt more pressure playing against another player as I did against Roger when he’s on, where you feel like you have no room to breathe,” Tommy Haas, who is thirty-nine, told me at Indian Wells in March, which Federer went on to win. (Haas, as it happens, became the last man to beat Federer, when he did it in Stuttgart in June.) “You’re on your toes. You don’t know—is the ball going there? Is it going here? And the court is so big. You can play really good tennis, and you feel like you have chances, but you lose 6–4, 6–4, you’re not close.”

Against Cilic, Federer played a startlingly clean match. He won eighty-one per cent of his first serves and seventy-one per cent of his second ones, and had twenty-three winners to only eight unforced errors. An underrated returner, he also easily handled Cilic’s big serve. Federer won Wimbledon, his second major of the year, without dropping a set.

When it was over, he sat in his chair and also cried. The title meant a lot to him, you could tell. Still, the victories are not the most extraordinary thing about Federer to me these days. Winning seems like a natural consequence of a more general joy.

He loves tennis. Not just the titles, not just the competing, though he loves those, too. He loves the travel. He loves practicing. He loves the fans. He loves the press conferences. He loves the tradition, the history. He loves makinghistory. He even appreciates anxiety. (“I always say when I’m nervous, I care, which is a great thing,” he said, earlier in the tournament.) When asked what he had missed during his time off, he said his fellow tennis players, the fans, even the tournament organizers. Half an hour after I saw him on the bridge, I was in the press center, standing outside of tiny Interview Room 2—a room I doubt he has ever stepped inside—when I saw him down the hall. He spotted Yuichi Sugita, a twenty-eight-year-old Japanese player who had just notched his first match win in the main draw of a Grand Slam. Federer turned and came down the hall toward us, then congratulated Sugita on the excellent win. It was a small moment, easy for Federer; still, it was something to see. Federer seemed to enjoy the encounter as much as Sugita did.

Every court that Federer plays on, everywhere in the world, is a home court for him. People travel from China, Australia, Egypt to witness him win. “It’s always a joy to see you play,” a reporter began a question after Federer’s first-round match. “Thank you,” he serenely replied. It is good to be Roger Federer. Yesterday, Venus Williams declared it “kind of uncool” not to be a Federer fan. For a long time, I might have disagreed. Now, why not? He takes pleasure in his life. He gives me pleasure in mine. Long live the King.