THE newsprint is yellowing, dating as it does to August 25, 1990. There are two photographs of squash players on that old paper, or one proper squash player and one bumbler.

The kosher hitter of the small round ball is Simon Parke, then 18, who would go on to be number 3 in the world. He would also survive testicular cancer five years later and is now a squash commentator.

The other man is me, qualified only to commentate on a lifetime of not being much cop at hitting that uncooperative rubber sphere around an airless room.

Rackets have occasionally been tossed on to the floor in exasperation, but that’s how it goes when you used to be the third best player in the world. Sorry, that’s how it goes when mostly you’re the third worst player in any gathering of three hitters of the small round ball.

The rediscovered feature is from my old newspaper and was called Have A Go! – the headline was ‘Sporting ambitions are soon squashed!’

That’s two exclamation marks on one page, probably two too many.

Keith Waterhouse, that great newspaper columnist and purveyor of good style, used to disparage this over-enthusiastic bit of punctuation, saying: ‘A sentence that falls flat without an exclamation mark is a flat sentence. The exclamation mark will not inject drama into it. It must be re-cast.’

Something else that should have been re-cast a long time ago is my pretence to being any good at squash. But the thing is, I like the game, and it’s kept me fairly fit (and sometimes furious) for decades now.

At the time of writing that feature, I was 33 years old. In the pictures I look youthful and still have a decent amount of dark curly hair; not so much on either count in the mirror today, with a few lines and any remaining hair turning grey.

It’s not comfortable to confront such evidence of how one has aged, but then none of us escape that. What’s more interesting is how this one average player has kept on for so long.

Simon Parke, who thrashed me 9-0, 9-0, 9-1 in our trial game, had his health struggles with cancer at a young age, while I suffered a heart attack six months ago.

The recovery advice given to me at first was to avoid squash. Too much explosive running around. Not when I’m playing, I said. Eventually I was told it would be OK to carry on, as I’d played for so long.

In that feature Parke said squash was “a simple game, really, very simple”. He advised hitting the ball while aiming for a certain position on the wall, adding that this would help me to know where the ball was going to end up. Where I don’t want it to be is often the answer to that.

It is surprising in life how often you can be told things you find difficult are really quite simple. Hitting a squash ball properly, keeping time while playing the guitar, writing novels that people might want to read. Oh, and baking sourdough bread that rises in fluffy magnificence, rather than struggling to summon the necessary whoosh.

Still, keeping doing things is better than not doing them.

At the time of that feature, Parke was about to begin his third season as a professional and his world ranking had risen to 24. At the time of writing this, I played yesterday and lost again, but did win one game, so here’s to the amplification of small victories.

On the wall before me in the study is a framed copy of the mock-up page presented to me when I left the paper nine years ago. This has a strap teasing what’s ‘inside’ the rest of the paper: ‘Eight-page souvenir supplement on Julian’s rare squash win.’

My squash playing is a long-running joke, you see. But against the odds, I’m still at it.