They start reaching for their picnic hampers and feeling a little sporty. And when it isn’t the Henley Regatta, when the middle classes parade with blazers, Leander ties and white trousers which used to fit them in their youth, it has to be Wimbledon that captures the imagination. In fact, it dominates the way the English frame their memories of an English summertime, watching the hopeless struggles of the English players at teatime, or drinking Pimm’s in the afternoon sunshine to the gentle sound of THUMP, THUMP, Thirty forty. The very word ‘Wimbledon’ conjures up a spirit of luxurious hopelessness, as successions of American women or Central European men slug it out on Centre Court in white, sending the English challenger packing. There is something erotic in an English way about the first appearance of sun on a tennis court, when – ‘oh, weakness of joy’, as John Betjeman described Miss Joan Hunter Dunn – the gentlemen eye the ladies and vice versa. Wearing white is de rigueur.
