The One Where David Duchovny Delivers the Post

So, it’s an overcast day, the clouds are a depressing dark grey colour and look as though they could deposit their load at any moment. So what am I doing? Of course, I’m playing tennis.

I don’t know who I’m playing against but I do know the ball, when I can get it both over the net and in play, is always returned to me. I’m struggling to unearth any semblance of tennis-playing talent from within and am just embarrassing myself with my consistently terrible shots. When I try to put topspin on the ball, I just succeed in hammering the ball straight into the ground, making it bounce around 20 feet in the air and come to rest about 6 feet away from me. When I try to put some wicked backspin on the ball, slicing at it with what people in the forties would have called ‘admirable gusto’, the ball just glances against the racquet face and then pops to the ground rather apologetically. So I try a ‘blast it and see’ approach, resulting in around half a dozen tennis balls ending up in the insanely tall fir trees which I have just realised are surrounding the court on all sides.

Then I hear a voice shouting at us to stop playing for a moment. I stop hitting tennis balls into the trees for long enough to see a postman, carrying a sackful of post, the strap straining on one shoulder and his gait is trying desperately to compensate for it. He makes his way to the right hand end of the net, as I’m looking at it, and empties the contents of the sack onto the court. It’s then that I realise that the postman is David Duchovny. There’s nothing particularly ‘Hollywood’ about him, he’s just David Duchovny, delivering post and wearing the usual Royal Mail uniform. He’s got a bit of stubble going on and is wearing glasses but it’s definitely him. He says something about me having to up my game if I want to ‘make it’, although I don’t recall his exact phrasing.

He wanders off the court and I hit a few more balls into the surrounding trees before waking up.

OK, I watched a bit of tennis yesterday and had a conversation with my housemate about how terrible I am at the game, so that kind of explains why I was dreaming about tennis. The postman link could be explained by the fact that I saw ‘Looking For Eric’ at the cinema last night, in which the main character is a postman. The David Duchovny link, however, is a harder one to explain. I can’t remember when I last saw Duchovny in anything or read about him. Why is he delivering post and why is he delivering it all to me, on a tennis court, with inclement weather moving in? And why is he so concerned about the development of my fledgling tennis career? That one, I can’t explain.