Game, set...

It may seem perverse to call this blog Journeys from Wimbledon Common and then make my first port of call Wimbledon...but I have my reasons. In no particular order, they are:

1. Wimbledon is the first place I've visited since starting the blog

2. It was the final day of the annual Tennis Championships today

3. Er...

4. That's it

I'd never been to the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) and I may well never go again. This isn't a moan - nothing bad happened - but nothing great happened, either. I was planning to visit Wimbledon Windmill Museum and the Wimbledon Society Museum before they both closed, so this meant I couldn't stay to watch Roger Federer win 202-200 (or whatever the final score was) in the final set of the men's final. It took two hours of queueing to get into the All England Lawn Tennis Club. This experience could have been a lot worse than it was. The weather was warm and dry, the queue kept moving most of the time and the stewards gave me "A Guide to Queueing for the Championships" to read...while in the queue. Thus I was conversant with the Queue Code of Conduct (pages 13-14). I've never heard of queues having codes of conduct. Among other things, this one states that:

"Pizza / 'take-away' orders must be arranged for delivery at the Wimbledon Park Road gate."

This is Wimbledon's equivalent of those signs you see on the London Underground which state: "Dogs must be carried." Whenever I see such a sign, I wonder exactly how I'm going to acquire a dog. In similar vein, I ignored the All England Club's stricture about pizza and take-away orders, as I wasn't hungry and didn't see the need to order anything. As a result, they will in all likelihood bar me from the Club for life. To be fair, some thoughtful sponsors gave us free bottles of mineral water and free cartons of watermelon juice.

Once inside, I was struck by how unmanic everything was. No doubt it would have been much more exciting if Andy Murray had made it to the final. There didn't seem to be any problem getting anywhere you could go within the Club. Mind you, a lot of the human traffic was diminished because so many people were eating. One of the diverting little quiz Q&A boards we read while queueing estimated that, at an average Wimbledon fortnight, 8,000 litres of Robinson's barley water, 135,000 ice creams and 300,000 cups of tea are consumed. There was plenty of eating and drinking in evidence, but I resisted the lure of half a lobster with salad for a mere £20, opting for a more economical but less interesting Cornish pasty. The AELTC decor is very green and purple; the flowers are very blue. As it was the final day of the Championships, and the men's final had yet to start, there wasn't much play to see. I did watch a few points from the women's doubles wheelchair final (pictured above). The finalists' adaptability and competitiveness was admirable. But I didn't feel the Club had the atmosphere of one of the world's great sporting venues. As a cricket fan rather than a tennis fan, I am biased, but it wasn't a patch on Lord's.

The day was not, overall, as useful as it might have been. I walked to the Windmill Museum to acquire a Great Uncle Bulgaria and a Bungo, for later stages of the project. Some misguided fool chose to design this version of Bungo with his cap on back to front, as if he were Lleyton Hewitt or Andy Roddick. Shame, but I'm sure he and Bulgaria will be excellent travelling companions. Photos to come soon. My other stop today was supposed to be the Wimbledon Society Museum of Local History. I wanted to find out more about the rifle shooting contests which used to take place on the Common and about the Prime Minister who fought a duel there (Pitt the Younger). But the Museum was closed. I checked their website yesterday and found nothing about closure - it is normally open at weekends - but it was my fault for not checking earlier in advance. The day also served to remind me that I need to get some serious walking practice in the next few weeks. I'm walking for a week in the Rodopi Mountains in Bulgaria in early September - anything up to 15 miles a day in high temperatures. Judging by my wheezing efforts as I yomped up and down Wimbledon Hill Road, it might be a struggle...