Doesn't SW19 look like SWIG?

Yesterday we had a ‘Sports Day’ of sorts at Ted and Beryls. They set up a barbecue and a drinks table, and four different televisions, and people congregated in the room of their choice to watch whichever of the many individual or team events they wished to follow most closely. By my counting, there was the Wimbledon Mens Singles Final, the Mixed Doubles Final, the British Grand Prix, the Tour de France, the Scottish Open golf and the Euro2016 football all taking place in tandem or in isolation, and about 47 people in the house to enjoy them. (I may have missed an event or two in there somewhere - The First Invitational City of Swansea Three-Legged Race For Pantomime Geese, or something - as it was all a bit of a blur.) It was an unusual, unrestricted, unbridled celebration of sporting fun, for everyone apart from me. There aren’t many sports I enjoy watching on TV, but when I do, I prefer to watch them alone. Not with four dozen rapidly intoxicating ne’er-do-wells who mistake my indifference for some kind of ancient unheard-of Puritanism. Womens tennis I love, but that’s because it’s basically an excuse to spend two hours watching young ladies in the prime of physical fitness behaving athletically in the kind of tight, white clothing that would be banned from most public places just decades ago. It’s a perverts paradise, and therefore best visited alone.
Men’s tennis just isn’t the same; not for me anyway.  I admire the athleticism, and I appreciate the enormity of Murray’s success, but watching a sweating, grumpy Scotsman out-serving a sweating, lanky Canadian didn’t attract my attention the way that three sets of Mlandenovic vs. Cibulkova would have. That’s just the way it is, and that’s just the way I am. So most of my day was spent slowly supping lager that I didn’t really fancy while Philippa lost herself in a world of sporting eye-gasms.

I did have a lot of stuff to write about when I started, but I seem to have gone on a bit already and I think we both need a break, so I’ll leave it there for now.
Let’s call this the end of the first set.

RC 11-7-16