Wimble-done...
As a resident of London's popular SW19 borough, I am often grumpy at this time of year. Everywhere is full of Americans, or, even worse, Daily Mail readers who, for 2 or 3 weeks, are suddenly fully-fledged tennis fans, cheering on whichever no-hoper happens to be English, and losing at tennis, that particular year. Recently it's been Tim Henman. Proir to that, it was Jeremy Bates. Before him - I don't know, probably the National Front supporting Buster Mottram.
Why? Why do this bunch of braying Hoorays congregate every year around what seems now to be known as "Henman Hill" to cheer on yet another loser in the one of the most dull sports on the planet? OK, some of it I can appreciate. There's something in me that is attracted by the almost insatiable "naffness" of it all - the air of bumbling incompetence that always seems to be bubbling under the surface. A Woosterish Englishness. But always overridden by the sheer unpleasantness of the audience, who you know will be happy, once the tournament is over, worrying about falling house prices and racially abusing asylum seekers. And of course, the game is very boring.
I believe that George Orwell once wrote something along the lines of "If you want to wipe out fascism in England, plant a bomb under the main stand at Twickenham" (I may have the quote slightly wrong, but it's something like that). The modern day equivalent, now Rugby Union has become professional (although it still is dominated by the public-schoolboy "Let's drink beer out of each other arses, then beat up some working-class types" drone), must surely be Wimbledon.
And that's before we've even got onto the subject of Cliff Richard...
Why? Why do this bunch of braying Hoorays congregate every year around what seems now to be known as "Henman Hill" to cheer on yet another loser in the one of the most dull sports on the planet? OK, some of it I can appreciate. There's something in me that is attracted by the almost insatiable "naffness" of it all - the air of bumbling incompetence that always seems to be bubbling under the surface. A Woosterish Englishness. But always overridden by the sheer unpleasantness of the audience, who you know will be happy, once the tournament is over, worrying about falling house prices and racially abusing asylum seekers. And of course, the game is very boring.
I believe that George Orwell once wrote something along the lines of "If you want to wipe out fascism in England, plant a bomb under the main stand at Twickenham" (I may have the quote slightly wrong, but it's something like that). The modern day equivalent, now Rugby Union has become professional (although it still is dominated by the public-schoolboy "Let's drink beer out of each other arses, then beat up some working-class types" drone), must surely be Wimbledon.
And that's before we've even got onto the subject of Cliff Richard...
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