Welcome back, then, the great British summer picnic, a tournament where it is somehow always a muggy mid‑afternoon and where there are still, it turns out, strawberries for tea.
The All England Club was a cold, fresh, breezy kind of place as it opened its doors wide for the first time since 2019. There were dumps of chilly summer rain. The fabled queue could be seen basking in watery sunshine before the start of play, with that familiar sense of something performative, theatrically static, being British for the British, in front of the British. Other nations have parades, fiestas, fetes. We have the plastic strawberry punnet, the cargo short, a stagey politeness.
