Wimbledon

The summer is officially here: days are as long as they're going to get, we're in the grip of an unprecedented heatwave (unprecedented as in "first one this year"), and people who normally couldn't care less about tennis are watching it avidly just because it happens to be going on in South West London.

It seems as if everything that happens over this fortnight is somehow related to Wimbledon. This morning's headlines were all of the form "Centre court roasts at 41 degrees!", as if the weather were somehow localised to a patch of grass 78 feet by 27 feet. I guess it is something we can relate to, the headline: "Dave's flat roasts at 41 degrees" probably wouldn't sell quite so many papers, except possibly to Dave's family and friends.

Of course, it wouldn't be such a big deal to everyone if there wasn't someone to support avidly in a fury of national pride we would otherwise be denied in a year when there's no international football tournament. And this year, we have a contender who fulfils both the criteria of having a chance of maybe actually winning, and who can be called British so the pubs have something to play on their expensive plasma TVs - although if he loses, he'll be back to being Scottish, so its win-win for us Sassenach.

As with any sport, I've been somewhat excluded from office banter (I was convinced that "Murray Mound" was some kind of innuendo) and after the recent Grand Prix debacle, I was determined to at least have something to say about the tennis. So in between cooking and dealing with household paperwork, I tuned into Murray's fourth-round match...and suddenly realised I had no idea what the score was, nor who was winning. Rather than hop over to wikipedia to quickly learn the rules of the game so I could figure out what the heck was going on, I tried to judge what was going on based solely on the cheering of the crowd. I think Murray won, but I'm not sure.

So, my valiant attempt to get "into" a sporting event thwarted, I resigned myself to another week without much to talk about in the office. I eagerly await next week, when banter can return to the latest political scandal, and how fantastic the new Mitchell and Webb series is (it is fabulous, by the way).