WIMBLEDON

The great thing about living down the road from the Wimbledon Tennis Arena is that when you’re experiencing rain delays on the TV, it’s actually raining outside your window as well. Magic. You can’t see that in Australia.

Only joking. We did go to Wimbledon on Thursday, and (I’m trying not to rub it in too much for Mum’s sake, but) it was really very enjoyable. It felt like going to the Ekka for the first time, without being forced to walk through the cattle arena. I’m still afraid of large cows.

I walked down to the tennis centre at about five o’clock (Shelley had not got back from work yet) and joined the queue, which was 1000 yards long. Literally 1000 yards – it had a sign saying “You are 1000 yards from ticket sales”. Still, it did move quickly at some stages. Quickly, as in we eventually got in there at 6.40PM. (Now daylight lasts here till about 9.15-9.30 for those of you thinking we were stupid for going at that time).



We were wholly expecting it to rain, because it had been forecast on every website we checked out, and it looked very gloomy outside. However, I am learning to completely disregard weather forecasts over here. In fact, I’d like to insert a little Dennis Quaid quote here from the box-office smash ‘Twister’ – “You can’t explain it, you can’t predict it, it just happens!” It didn’t rain.

By the time we got in there, there were doubles being played on all 18 courts, bar 1, which you had to pay 40 quid extra to get into. “No way!” I said to a man called Jose, who happened to be walking by at the time. So we just walked around and saw all the people you haven’t heard of before playing doubles, which was a lot more engrossing than you’d think. I mean those no-name suckers are still pretty good. We saw Sam Stosur playing doubles (which won’t mean anything much to anyone except perhaps mum). That girl has a pair of legs that any butcher would be proud to have in the front window.


Anyway, so we walked around, bought strawberries and cream, which Shelley doused in fine white sugar (“Mm Mm!” she said, “This cream tastes REALLY good”. Yes). They were actually very nice strawberries. I was expecting them to be horrible, ala Ekka strawberries.



Oh, and Shelley saw Rod Stewart. Here we were, walking along when suddenly we heard some patron shout out, “Rock on Rod!” Shelley turns the direction he was shouting, then turns to me and whispers, “Julian, it’s Rod Stewart, look”. Alas, it was not that master of the Great American Songbook Volume III, but instead a man from the same age group, with the same highlights in his hair, wearing a leather jacket. So we’ll put that in the close call column for now. Close call because I still had some sugary cream left in that cup.

Despite the seemingly anti-climactic ending, we walked home feeling quite fulfilled. I did see a famous person somewhere else though. But you’ll have to read about it in the next entry.