There was so little to discuss about the match that Henin was asked if she liked her opponent’s lilac dress. “Yeah,” she said.Albert Costa, of Spain, who missed Wimbledon in order to go on honeymoon after winning the French Open in June, opened proceedings in Louis Armstrong Stadium with a 6-2, 6-4, 3-6, 6-3 win against Magnus Norman, of Sweden, who is feeling his way in at the top level of the game after a hip injury. While not wishing to race ahead of events, it seems appropriate to acknowledge that Paradorn Srichaphan, Thailand’s No 1, should figure prominently in the fortunes of British tennis. He may play Greg Rusedski in the men’s singles second round here, a contest of great interest given Britain’s Davis Cup World Group qualifying round tie against Thailand in Birmingham next month.Two American wild cards stand in the way of a Rusedski-Srichaphan match here. In addition to becoming the first Thai to win an ATP title, Srichaphan also became the first man from his country to be ranked in the world’s top 50 (he is No 33) Not that he is instantly recognisable. Srichaphan was stopped by security on his way to the practice courts yesterday and sent back to the accreditation office because there was an error on his ID badge.

Blips happen: for two days your correspondent masqueraded as Joshua P Roberts.Rusedski has no doubt about Srichaphan’s potential and expects him to test Britain in the Davis Cup irrespective of what happens at the US Open. Contemporary art, Turner prize art, for all its virtues and variety, isn’t very interested in other people There’s no shortage of self-centred work. You could make a good list of artists, from Gormley to Emin, whose art focuses on their own body or their own biography. But as for the infinite world of individual others, contemporary art has not much concern. When contemporary art does other people, it does them in impersonal ways.

It tends to stress psychological extremity or social conditioning. People are strange, people are stereotypes, that’s the basic repertoire. The individual personality – that more or less stable mixture of role and soul, knowable, mysterious, predictable, spontaneous, the traditional stuff of portraits and novels – is not an entity that it entertains.But since this subject continues to fascinate, since we still desire to contemplate people in their individuality, the only option is to turn to art that still does the job in the traditional way Portrait painting, for instance. Yes, the contemporary portrait, it sounds an interesting proposition.

Or so you might think, in hope.A visit to the contemporary rooms of the National Portrait Gallery is usually enough to dash this hope. The newly commissioned painted portraits of the living famous are a parade of sometimes breathtaking ineptness But I never learn from this experience. I always look forward to going back there, with a thought of simple pleasure: mmm, faces! (So strong the desire remains.) And then, each time, the sorry truth.To take one example. The portrait of Christopher Ondaatje, who gave the NPG a lot of money to build its opulent Ondaatje Wing, is of such staggering crappiness that the only rational explanation is a deliberate wish to publicly insult the benefactor. (If I was Ondaatje, I’d have taken my Wing straight back.) But the NPG is not in a rational situation There was surely no intention to be rude.