Come on Tim!

There is an argument that the best way to enjoy any sport is to watch it on telly, especially if the coverage is on the BBC and so uninterrupted by adverts featuring models from the ‘ordinary looking people’ books of model agencies, i.e. ugly kids enthusing about chips. The best way to watch Wimbledon, I have always considered, is to pack a picnic, place the telly at the end of the bed and watch from beneath the comfort of a duvet, occasionally shaking the covers to remove pork pie crumbs. Tennis being a sport so dull that it’s best to watch it in conditions safe to doze off in.

Unless, that is, you are lucky enough to get tickets. This means that not only do you have the impetus to actually attend (f**king how much for a ticket?) but you don’t have to queue, the queue for tickets famously being like the ones normally associated with an Asda check out the week before Christmas, or outside a polling booth at a newly democratic country’s first free elections since the General was shot.

And Wimbledon is an experience. Forget the tennis, that’s the least of it. What you have is a sprawling complex, like a Village, which is clean and tidy and full of happy and courteous people. The person I went with described it as being ‘like an enormous Waitrose’ but I’d go even further and describe it as a place where the normal rules of Englishness are suspended, in that people speak to one another.

Moreover, in a world-turned-upside-down way, the ground staff are incredibly helpful. Not just polite, helpful. If they see a couple doing that thing where they squeeze together and the bloke holds the camera out, wishing he had the reach of a gibbon so he could get some more background in, a member of staff will offer to take the photograph and will not even attempt to run off with the camera. Can’t see the staff on my local railway doing that.

The Village is comprised of tennis courts and snack shacks and picnicking areas, and people wander from one to the other, gazing and grazing. My first impression was somewhat influenced by being hit by a tennis ball (on the elbow, where else) two minutes after stepping into the place, and I barely had time to consider whether it was worth recovering the thing as evidence to use to sue whoever the tosser was that couldn’t keep his serve inside a court, swiftly working out that anyone that crap at tennis would not be worth suing, even if they were playing at Wimbledon, when some blazered official swooped and ran off with it. I later learned that they sell the used tennis balls. I have yet to determine whether this is to legitimate tennis fans, or pandering to some hitherto undiscovered extreme form of fetishism.

Centre court itself is like a crucible. Sitting high and looking down, it resembled a cross between the Emirates Stadium, a boxing ring and a church. Make no mistake, this is the site of fierce sporting competition played out in a theatre the design of which has remained largely unchanged since the days of the gladiators, but the crowd here at least hush when somebody serves. And there are less lions.

Was there ever such a game? Even cricket doesn’t come with this much ritual, personnel and obscure rules and scoring attached to it. There is an umpire sitting in some sort of pulpit, there are line judges, there are ball boys and ball girls and looking over it all is the all-seeing ‘hawk-eye’. Oh, and a couple of players.

In this case, Victoria Azarenka and Serena Williams. Every time she exerted herself, Miss Azarenka made a noise like some sort of whooping bird, of the type that you would not wish to have nesting outside your bedroom window. She let out a whoop like a spooked mule and the crowd really did seem to enjoy it. She lost to Miss Williams, who looks like she was put together from off-cuts from Arnold Schwarzenegger and who merely grunted whenever she thrashed the ball.

As these two battled it out on the balding lawn of centre court, there were other distractions for the crowd. Sir Cliff Richard was in the royal box, tanned to the point of mahogany and proof that after a certain point cosmetic surgery can leave you looking like a cadaverous bull’s testicle, wearing the dodgiest syrup seen outside a puppet theatre.

As polite and relaxed (glasses and bottles chinked, cans hissed as they were opened) as the crowd were, a scene unfolded in front of us that resembled a Bateman cartoon that may well have been titled ‘The woman who took a mobile ‘phone call on Centre Court’. Never has a child so mastered the art of pretending not to be with the mother sitting right next to them as the boy in front of me did.

The English love an underdog and Tennis provides something of a tricky challenge for them as the upper hand in the game can go first one way and then the other. There were chants of ‘Come on Serena’, then ‘Come on Victoria’, then the occasionally drunken attempt at intimacy with ‘Come on Vicky’ and finally the crowd wag with ‘Come on Andy’. I resisted the temptation to bellow ‘Come on Tim!’ as being bottled to death by tennis fans as a result seemed a real possibility.

Everyone was turned out immaculately, the players even exhibiting style with two balls tucked into their pants. The Ralph Lauren styling however, makes the line judges look like sinister extras from The Great Gatsby.

More than the tennis, the day is about the experience. If it was all about the sport, the courts would be packed and the bars deserted. This was certainly not the case. But panama hats off to the All England Lawn Tennis Club, one is allowed to take in a picnic, including a ‘reasonable’ amount of booze, which was quantified this year as a bottle of wine per person. Notice that they did not mention spirits and in the spirit of making the most of the day by drinking heavily at lunchtime, I managed a half bot of champagne (Christ, I sound like Bertie Wooster), followed at various intervals by cans of ready-mixed gin and tonic or Pimms and lemonade. It made the whole thing very watchable.

But I don’t want to give the impression I put together an irresponsible picnic, I also packed several pork pies.

The thing about an English summer is...

It’s July in England and the rain is coming down with vulgar enthusiasm. For the last couple of weeks it has been Wimbledon fortnight. In recent years this fortnight has extended into three weeks as days of matches were rained off and rescheduled. This time, it just felt like three weeks. I have concluded that it does not matter how tight the top or how short the skirt, tennis is just not a spectator sport. This is partly because the lesbians playing women’s tennis are not, as on the internet, gorgeous and only exercising as a precursor to showering together, but mainly because it’s so dull.

Dull, but not restful. All that grunting, all that thwacking, all that self-conscious banana eating. With a small tweak though, coverage of Wimbledon could remove these unwanted intrusions and become positively medicinal.

There’s a DAB digital radio station you can tune to called ‘Birdsong’. It is, as the name would suggest, not the sound of disturbed giggling but rather the fruits of sticking a microphone in a hedgerow at dawn. The only sounds are the restless twitter of our feather friends and the occasional grumbling of an ill-humoured baker driving to work. This plays on an endless loop and is designed to be a test signal. It also squats on digital radio stations when they go off air. This recently happened to a station and they saw their audience share double when they turned off Jay-zed and turned on starlings.

What digital telly needs is the visual equivalent – the sight of the rain falling on Wimbledon, the gentle hiss, like static from the telly, of rain falling on the covers, ball boys and stubborn tennis-fans who retain their seats in the pouring rain, camped out under one of those transparent ponchos with ‘maid of the mist’ written on it, consuming scotch eggs in a revolting fashion.

There is something relaxing about watching the rain, especially when it is on the outside of a pane of glass, especially if that glass is etched with the name of a pub.

Certainly, I experienced the rain in a far more al fresco and immediate fashion this morning on my walk to the station, which became an undignified sprint to the station and ended up gasping squelch to the station. Odd really that the inferno of anger, frustration and rage directed at the rain, the weather-gods and anyone who happened to be dry did not turn the rain to steam as it approached a ten metre radius of my quivering body.

Sitting damp on the train, I decided that it was time to break yet another personal rule. It was time to buy an umbrella. I don’t like umbrellas, if you attempt to walk past somebody using one, you risk eye-poke or, as the angle turns, having a half-pint of fresh rainwater decanted onto you. If you try to use one then you discover that rain rarely happens without a great deal of wind to go with it, and unless you are lucky enough to have an umbrella that turns itself inside out at a zepher’s breath, you are left fighting something that is capturing the wind with all the energy of a rebelling spinnaker on the Cape leg of the America’s Cup.

Still, I have never had the slightest problem sacrificing my morals for the sake of personal comfort. So, on the way home I bolted into M&S and did a circuit of the men’s section like a wall of death rider on ketamin. No brolly, but a mac! Fantastic, it was of just the right material (shockingly unnatural and hence waterproof), cut (early 1970s dirty-old-man) and colour (ealy 1970s drab) to make it irresistible.

Then I saw the brolly, which came with that perfect handle, the sort that is hooked like the end of a question mark, making it ideal for hooking round the neck of the chap in front of you who is going to beat you to your seat on the train.

The brolly is perfect John Steed. The mac is exactly tailored to make me look like a bent copper from one of the seedier police forces. Perfect.

Anyone for tennis?

The sound of grunting, punnets of strawberries at eight quid a pop and middle class people sleeping rough and queuing like refugees at a border post can only mean one thing – the start of Wimbledon.

Tennis is the most middle class game in the world. Before you have a racquet, ball or any kind of skill, you have to have a decent washing machine or at least a tub of water and a shedload of bleach because this is a game played in whites. At least it is at the all-England tennis club and I suspect the reason behind this is because, well, if you allow aged male duffers to set the dress code, then white sensible knickers combined with micro-skirts is going to be the result.

Wimbledon is soaked in tradition, and usually rain. By tradition, this sport sees the great British hope pluckily get through a couple of matches before they meet somebody good, or Australian, and then they are pounded into the court in a chalk-dust raising display of home-turf humiliation.

Tennis, though, isn’t really an English game. Okay, it was invented here and so on, but like a middle class family, it’s emigrated. Football is the same, except that like a criminal, it was deported. In the case of Football it went to South America and became a religion. As for tennis, it’s now played more on the Continental courts of those with a second home is France, or in Australia, where the clay surface was invented, or as I believe it’s termed, the outback.

One thing is for sure, the ground may not be saturated (yet) but the telly coverage is. And I don’t really mind this to be honest – there’s something therapeutic about the light green, the gentle thwock thwock noise and the occasional grunt or trouser cough of a straining athelete.

There’s only one thing that’s slightly disquieting – the muscles on the women players, and the way they tuck their spare balls into their knickers.