In The Summertime

Another British summer has just started, heralded by the sounds of cricket balls on bat, tennis balls on racquets, rock bands on a Glastonbury stage, and thumping rain on the roof outside my bedroom window.

As I write this the carefully planted bedding flowers along my garden borders are getting battered in to the ground by raindrops guided by NATO and causing loads of collateral damage. I have just given in and put the central heating on but it’s June for goodness sake. Did someone forget to tell the weather fairy?

A pal of mine, Paul, has just called to say that, because of the rain, he’s given in and booked a family holiday to Portugal after telling his wife he couldn’t afford it this year. How he’ll pay for it goodness knows but to get away from the cold and damp he’d sell his body, which should just about take care of the price of a coffee and a Kit Kat on the flight over.

While walking through the puddles yesterday I got a call asking me if I’d like to go on Saturday for a week’s work in Dubai, flying off to a country where rain and cold are about as plentiful as gay pole dancing bars. I asked for time to think it over, took a breath to make it sound like I was giving it some thought, and then screamed something like “you’ve saved me, thank you, let me have your babies” whilst lying on the pavement waving my legs and arms in the air before high fiving a passing basset hound. I’m going to see the sun at last.

Summers in the UK are depressing when the weather’s not great, and even more depressing now that Wimbledon has a roof on Centre Court, meaning tennis takes over TV every evening no matter how wet it is outside. I like the fact Wimbledon insists on white clothing though as even I, who think Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat is just different shades of grey, could get the colour coordination right.

Living so close to the tennis championship courts, I try to go every year but this year I can’t be bothered. It’s not just that I’m not an Andy Murray fan – he’s too petulant and sullen for my tastes and reminds me of a kid who won’t learn it’s not nice to shout “in your face” every time someone’s kicked off musical chairs. I just find that the game has slowed to the point of boredom.

I hate the toilet breaks, the calls for the physio and the sitting down between games for longer than it takes me to cook and eat a five course meal. I detest the constant asking for a towel to mop sweat even when nothing has happened, the ridiculous sorting of balls in the hand and then asking for another one before serving, followed by bouncing the balls several dozen times before the actual serve takes place. I don’t like the game stopping while players challenge the umpires and we wait for the video replay, and the constant changing of shirts makes me feel I’m watching CCTV video of a Primark changing room.

I need to find another summer sport to get me interested.

Cricket doesn’t do it for me as it takes too long and I can’t get my head around a game that goes on for a week, with up to maybe three or four spectators on busy days, and always seems to end up as a draw. My neighbour, who is a keen cricketer, also has a croquet pitch on his lawn but that sport seems a bit too genteel and Brideshead Revisited for a rough Glaswegian lout like me.

What about Biking? I’ve done Spinning classes so long at my gym I don’t think I could handle a bike that actually moves. Swimming? It stings my eyes. And as for Morris Dancing? No, it seems a bit like mocking the afflicted.

So I think from now on Summer sport is going to mean Golf for me. We have a crop of world champions, the top world event happens here in a couple of weeks, and we have several best of class, world leading, courses.

So it’s Golf then, just as long as the players don’t start grunting, punching the air, asking for towels, demanding video replays, juggling the balls before hitting them, or shouting “come on Tim” on the 18th green. I’m going to convert.

Just don’t ask me to buy the multi coloured clothes.

The Games People Play

I live near Wimbledon, the town where for the next two weeks all the residents pull together to put on a posh face for the tourists. For fourteen days no one hangs out their washing or goes shopping in their curlers, door handles are polished till they shine brighter than a Channel Four newscaster’s tie, people get their cats and dogs permed, some wife swapping stops, and the local yobs are sent off on work experience with Club 18-30 tour guides in Ayia Napa.

It’s the annual bar and restaurant crawl known as the All England Lawn Tennis Championship where men who really should know better dig out their straw hats and striped blazers and sit around drinking Pimms while looking at the legs of pretty, tanned, visitors.

In Wimbledon suntans are nothing new – we’ve had sunbeds mandatorily installed on all street corners and in all public toilets, libraries, delicatessens and bijou coffee shops since Queen Victoria first looked pale – but this time of year the tourists remind us that other countries really do know what the actual sun is as we watch the rain stream down incessantly on Centre Court’s new, designer, roof.

I feel especially sorry for our American visitors. Fancy knowing two thirds of the world doesn’t like you and the other third are back at home in The States. They gave us Apple and Microsoft, we gave them BP. We gave them tennis and they embraced it, they gave us baseball and we ignored it and then called it Rounders and organised leagues of drunken office workers to play it over summer in public parks before falling down drunk and snogging each other.

Our lack of gratitude gets worse. They sent us Hollywood and we gave them Piers Morgan. If any Americans are reading this incidentally then please believe me that we really do think it is better to give than to receive, so please keep the present and don’t send it back for exchange or refund as a refusal often offends.

For some reason, the colours of the Wimbledon Championship seem to have been replaced in the village this year by flags from sponsors Evian, who have picked a colour of pink left over from a Mary Kate and Ashley sleepover pyjama pack. It now looks as if Wimbledon village is ready for the tennis tournament but also London’s gay pride march if it gets re routed by mistake.

I spoke to Tim Henman this week who says Wimbledon is the best tournament in the world, and he should know, but he’s not one of the locals who can’t park anywhere or finds roads suddenly changed to decorative one way systems. Anywhere else, flowers on lamp posts mean some accident has occurred but here it means bespoke flower arrangements in All England colours with ribbons fluttering in the hailstones.

The locals canot wait for the tournament to be over. Apart from the restaurants and bar owners we all think it’s a pain, but it’s our pain so we’ll leave you thinking we love it as we keep up the pretence of being posh.

But let me let you in on a secret. Come to Wimbledon over the next couple of weeks and you’ll think we all live in a perfumed garden eating the Queen’s venison stuffed with champagne soaked strawberries accompanied by cream from a sacred cow, but the reality is that for the other fifty weeks of the year we let our expensively coloured hair down and behave like a bad episode of Eastenders. We’re as common as muck.

That’s exclusive organic muck, of course. From cashmere goats.