LONDON—Wimbledon is no longer the sun at the center of the tennis galaxy, but it still has enough clout to go ahead and do what it pleases. Start the show courts before 1:00 after three days of rain? Not going to happen. Put Isner and Mahut on Centre Court because a few saps in the papers want to see them there? Nope—Court 3, fourth up, live with it. Consider easing the schedule on other days, playing on the middle Sunday, and selling a whole lot of extra tickets in the process? Sorry, nice idea, but not on.
And sometimes that’s for the best. The middle Sunday breather may seem like a criminal waste of money from an American point of view, but Wimbledon has always had the long-range perspective to realize that its traditionalist image is its strongest selling point. You mess with that brand for short-term gain at your peril (though it’s an American company, IMG, that has helped them maintain that unique balance over the years). The upshot is that everyone involved with the tournament, from players to writers to security to food servers to the people who haul the ice in, gets a day off. While I suppose some of the people who haul the ice in wouldn’t have minded the Sunday overtime, I’ll take the rest. Writing the Keeping Tabs post this morning was fun, knowing that I had a trip to the city in store for the afternoon. Even better is the anticipation that goes with Monday’s lineup. You relax, you take a breath, and then you come back to the best kind of chaos.
My own middle Sunday tradition has been to spend it doing two things: looking for sneakers in Soho and perusing the bookshops on Charing Cross Road. I’ve also included a visit to the Tate Museum in this itinerary in the past, and I would have again today if I’d had the time.
My first post today got me a late start, and I got horribly lost—why I thought I could get around without a map, I have no idea—in the winding, two-block streets of Westminster for at least an hour, but I still spent a lovely, sunny, busy but calm, warm but not too warm, late afternoon strolling and looking. Highlights:
—The early afternoon walk down a one-block backstreet in quiet Parkside, near my flat. Sun and blue sky, snug brown-brick homes with modest driveways, trees along the sidewalks, a car or two parked on the street, but not bumper to bumper as they are in my Brooklyn neighborhood, a tolerable humidity, a bird chirping, and otherwise, absolute silence. It’s a rare experience for the city dweller. I imagined how nice it would be to sit in one of the second floor rooms in one of those those snug homes with the window open, just sitting and reading and hearing nothing but that one bird chirping. But I also realized that even if I were up there, even if were leaning backing in a rocking chair with Charlie Parker on the stereo and Proust in front of my eyes, my mind would still be racing a million times faster and more violently than the still world around me. I would, in other words, still be edgy. Nature, when left alone, doesn’t seem to move at all, while we walk through it with our brains flying and veering in more directions than we can control. If only I had more time in the stillness, maybe my mind would adjust to its speed.
—The two-block center of Southfields, which is the tournament’s quieter neighborhood. The players and coaches you see here are less famous; less famous even than a journalist, Italy’s Gianni Clerici, who I saw there today, and who has been coming to Wimbledon for 50 years. In the past I’ve stayed closer to the first-class Wimbledon village, but as fun as it is to see famous people walking past you on the street, there’s also a sense, once you’re no longer star struck, of exclusivity. Tennis’s hierarchy, its inside and outside, is made plain. I like it over here, where you can feel like someone getting to see a little slice of England as you do your job.
—The tube, without air-conditioning. You start to sweat before you reach the first station, and you need to sit down soon after, much earlier than you do on a New York subway car. This obviously wouldn’t be a highlight if I had to do it every day, or even once a week. But once a year? I like feeling like a soft American who needs his subways AC’d. And I’m grateful again to have them that way.
—The view from one of the new bridges that were built over the Thames earlier in the decade. The Union Jacks snapping away above the government buildings, in place of where I think the Stars and Stripes will be; the golden color that the Houses of Parliament take on later in the afternoon; the couples asking strangers to take their pictures with Big Ben in the background, and putting their heads together and smiling; the men, who might have been screaming bloody murder with their friends last night over a football match, as pleased and sentimental about it as the women next to them. There were no bad shots today.
—The sneakers at the top of the page. They didn’t have my size in stock, naturally. I’ve always been a retro Nike guy, and I got a pair here that I haven’t seen in the States for a while (London is the place for sneakers), but I may have to make the sacrilegious switch to Adidas. Vintage-wise, they’re running circles around Nike.
—Some people like the British Museum, some like the Tate, some like Big Ben. I like to spend a few minutes in London each year at Henry Pordes Books in the bookstore ghetto on Charing Cross Road, if only to listen in on the conversation among the owners/clerks. They have no inventory they can access; if you ask them for a specific title, they’ll say, “I don't believe I've seen that lately.” The weathered, weighty hardback bios of Richardson and Saintsbury look great, and I would buy them, if they weren’t so unrealistically overpriced—I recognized a few of them from my last trip here, two years ago. But it’s worth it, at least for an American, to hang around and hear the three men at the desk banter. Year after year I come back, year after year it’s the same three, and year after year they seem to be making each other laugh. Year after year I wish I could understand them. How they ever sell a book I have no idea.
—A conversation overheard while I was sitting on a bench and reading in Embankment Gardens by the river. It was between two women who were sitting in the grass and, against the rules, drinking wine.
“What’s the alcohol content of this?”
“9 percent.”
“God, that’s rubbish! Most wine is 12 percent, right?”
A bit later:
“Have you ever gone to work still p---ed [drunk]?”
“You mean still actually drunk, not just hungover?”
“Right, yeah. I mean, it’s kind of crazy, I know, but . . . ”
“Oh, countless times.”
Those are a few highlights, but still, when I think of the “U.K.,” I think of music. It starts with “Anarchy in the U.K.,” but it goes way beyond that—no city has let me get a sense of it through its music like London. Walking today, I looked up and saw a sign for Wardour Street. I thought, “How do I know that?” Of course, the great song by the Jam, “A Bomb in Wardour Street” (not a great thought as I walked along it, admittedly).
So here, in tribute to a city, is a little London soundtrack: