Your Woman in Wimbledon: Day Twelve

We’ve just come back from dinner in the same restaurant as Wimbledon women’s singles runner up, Sabine Silicki. True! She is still in the Aubaine Restaurant, Wimbledon Village. She’s seated at large table of mostly beautiful young people in the front room. We dined in the garden at the back. I’m pleased to report she was smiling broadly and seems to have put the angst of this afternoon’s match behind her. I would not dare interrupt her at dinner to take a photo so you just have to take my word for it.

I’ve never seen a sporting performance like hers today. Yes, I’ve seen women become emotional when they’re losing, Serena is famous for it. But when Lisicki started crying on serve in the second set after being so soundly beaten in the first, it was appalling. Face red, rivers running down her cheeks. ‘Pull yourself together woman!’, I shouted at the screen.

Amazingly she did, for a couple of games, but Bartoli came back and spoiled Lisicki’s dream sequence. Pretty girls don’t always win.

We watched with JL and Liz at their home in Barnes. The location is notable because JL was watching reclined on the sofa, Pimms and smoked salmon sandwich in hand. He is 12 days post op from a second hip replacement. Broke his femur falling from his bicycle on an ordinary morning commute to the office via Richmond Park. No second vehicle involved, just a moment of inattention, overbraking on a turn and his future was rewritten in a split second.

You can never say what will undo you.

I captured this photo out the window of the cab through Richmond Park returning to the flat. Please people wear helmets!

We leave Wimbledon tomorrow. It’s been simply marvellous! I know I sound very Noel Coward but then we did see ‘Private Lives’ Thursday night and I’m still running the punch lines in my head. How Coward creates reflexive laughter with just one word is unparalleled.

We’ll be in Sussex in plenty of time tomorrow for the men’s singles final, ensconced in a cottage with a big screen. Go Novak!

Next week is for walking, visiting friends in Berkshire, and a day at the Goodwood Festival of Speed before I board the Provident from Brixham.

It ocurred to me you may not know what’s involved in writing this blog and may be interested to know the process. It’s dead simple but time consuming.

Step one: Compose on the Pages app on my ipad.
Step two: Mail to myself and access on my iphone.
Step three: Copy and paste from the word file into the wordpress app on the very small screen on my my iphone.
Step four: Insert photos and/or videos one at a time into the wordpress app on the very small screen on the iphone.
Step five: Review and edit on the iphone.
Step six: Publish from the iphone.
Step seven: Read published version on ipad, do additional edits (much easier to see) and republish.

The preview function on wordpress is rubbish, makes the app crash. To do all this I need to be connected to internet from step two.

I leave you with a few extra allotment photos, the flowers are loving the heat, and a snap of the lovely Jacobean House, Eagle House, on Wimbledon High Street, built between 1613-1617. The blue plaque notes that in 1803 it was the home of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer had an interesting handle on the importance of heterosexual love.

‘The ultimate aim of all love affairs is more important than all other aims in man’s life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation.’

He couldn’t forsee the Pill, legal termination of pregnancy, vasectomy, tubal ligation, same sex marriage and IVF. Who could in the early 1800s?