Wimbledon

It is currently the night before what will (please God) be my last ever A-Level examination. Whilst this is generally wonderful news, it is bad in that right now I should be frantically cramming language theorists and lexical mnemonics into my head, and am instead writing a blog post. But I firmly subscribe to the belief that revision is made far more effective if you allow yourself to have periodic breaks and rests, and over the past few days, my breaks have been centred around one thing: Wimbledon.

I'm not much of a sporty person. Okay, understatement. I am an exceptionally unfit and exercise-hating person who considered PE lessons Satan's personal attempt to torture and humiliate me. I don't give two hoots about football, I only ever watch two minutes of rugby to ogle any goodlooking players, I think cricket is one of the dullest pasttimes ever invented and boxing is just barbaric. That said, I really enjoy watching a bit of tennis. There's something so sophisticated and genteel about Wimbledon, and I feel slightly more cultured simply by watching it.

In my mind, it also has loads of positive associations. When I think of Wimbledon, my mental image is of sitting with my Mum in shorts and a strappy top, drinking Pimms and discussing my birthday (which usually falls in or just after the Wimbledon fortnight). And that's a pretty awesome picture.

Plus, it's one of the few sports I actually get excited about. Whenever the World Cup is on, my overwhelming feeling towards it is a longing for it to be over, and for my fellow Brits to get a grip (the team is NOT the best it's ever been, we are NOT going to win and you WILL end up weeping into your beer by half-time). But tennis is actually INTERESTING. I understand the rules, for a start (though the scoring system has always seemed somewhat unnecessarily complicated), there is much more male-female equality, tennis players are rarely (if ever) thugs, and the most explosive a tennis-fan confrontation is likely to get would probably result in someone getting strawberries and cream dumped over their straw hats.

There's something so tense and exhilerating about a match point, and the Wimbledon final holds my attention (and my stomach butterflies) in a far more tenuous grasp than any football match has ever achieved.

But I'm especially grateful to Wimbledon this week, because it's given me a chance to sit back and relax, to forget about my revision-dependent future and have a legitimate excuse for alcohol consumption the night before an exam. What more could you ask from a sporting tournament?