Somewhere in the World: July 2009

It's Summer in London and the hot weather has even arrived too, with a couple of days above 30 degrees this week. Yes, of course they have all been whinging about it, but the show must go on and that show is Wimbledon at the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC).

We soon discovered that you can still get tickets for each day, all you have to do is join 'The Queue'. There are around 9000 tickets available each day, with a small number for the show courts but the majority as general admission. The Queue is the highly bureaucractic and totally English way of distributing these tickets. Basically, it's first in, best dressed. This means that those people wanting show court tickets camp overnight. It's all highly regulated and the camping and queuing is carried out in the golf course that happens to be right next door. We left home at 5:30am and arrived around 7am to join the queue (thanks to some bad connections on buses at this hour on a Saturday morning). We arrived in a constant stream of people and were promptly handed our queue card and 'Guide to The Queue'. The queue card is your proof of your valid place in the queue as 'queue jumping is not allowed and will not be tolerated'. The 'Guide to The Queue' is a glossy brochure explaining all the rules and etiquette involved in queuing for The Championships. We received queue card number 7518, as in there were 7517 people in the queue before us. We had some friends who caught a taxi and were in line by 5am and they still got 3500. So that gives you some idea of capacity of the English to wait in lines. They possibly enjoy it even more than Vancouverites.

We made it in just before midday and the experience was well worth the wait.

We wandered around the outside courts and were amazed at how close to the action you get. Standing only a few metres from the courts. We had a good mix of matches with some doubles and singles action.