''Hark,'' said Roger the Elder (for it is he), ''the people of London are better than you. They are more highly evolved. No longer do they merely wave in greeting as us simple Mud Men do. Instead, given their heightened sophistication, they choose instead to stab each other. And wheras as us pathetic Mud Men who dwell in the wilderness must travel for long periods to reach our desired destination, the Londoner must, um, also do this...huh.''
At this point Roger the Elder was becoming tedious, so with a joyful slap of his bald head I began my journey to a land where the streets are paved with gold...
KK. Here's me engrossed in some TV tennis action beforehand. Y'know to amp up the anticipation. My favourite commentator is obviously Greg 'The Moose' Rudeski who routinely offers up some very insightful analysis. ''He'd really like to get this second serve in'' and ''Nadal wants to win this!!!'' are all valid points, that I would not have realised without being told so by some random Canadian.
Here's my ticket out of Mudville and into the Big Smoke! Er, hence the thumbs-up. The main highlights of the train journey were the lack of Zoltan and some random guy shouting ''you are a very rude gentleman'' at someone.
Wow. Anyone with a ticket fetish will be doing something to themselves over this blog. Somewhere on this document there were security warnings about how your bag had to be a certain size and stuff. Unfortunately for Chris 'Mad Hair' Collins he did not heed them. As a result, when he arrived at Wimbledon his bag was larger than the regulations allowed. So, a guard had to publicly search said bag for illicit items. At this point various, shall we say, 'personal' belongings of Chris 'Mad Ears' Collins were on display for all to see. Like everyone else, the guard was naturally repulsed by the stacks of hardcore man-on-armadillo pornography Chris had felt the need to bring to the tennis. Therefore, and in a decision I fully support, the bag was incinerated in front of Collins' very eyes. There is a lesson in this for us all: can we not at least last a day without lewd armadillo images?
Ooh, now it's really kicking off. This is me seeing if my camera's flash was on. By, um, taking a picture of the back of someones head. It took a long time to get to this point, mainly because I managed to get utterly lost on my way to the tennis looking for the mythical 'Bap Lane' (true story). Poor Chris 'Mad Dog' Collins had to wait forever for me to finally turn up after I had succeeded in wandering around suburbs and graveyards for what seemed like hours. Amazingly I managed to repeat this trick on the way back, inadvertently walking to Wandsworth which was literally miles from where I was meant to be. Still...back to the photo, the old woman on this lady's right got up to some consistently hilarious shenanigans, a number of photographs of which appear later in this blog!1!1!1
Here's Venus Williams, getting ready to annihilate some random Spanish girl. I think it was in this match that a ball boy fell over? Hilarious and definitely worth the entrance fee alone.
Yeah, this is the Spanish player preparing to get owned. Chris 'Mad Bag' Collins didn't want Venus to win. Make of that what you will...
Haha, now this was kinda gay. For some reason I took loads of pictures of this line judge. There's no point in even uploading anymore, this one pretty much sums them all up. Thinking back it's kinda bizarre, I mean there were far funnier line judges, such as the jumbo sized woman and the old man who every time he wheezed 'out' sounded like he was seconds from heart failure.
Check out this mass exodus of people, desperate to get home in time for the penultimate episode of Doctor Who. Probably.
This was the game after Venus had won in like 10 seconds. It was actually a good match, Gasquet stormed into a two set lead, Simon scraped the third set on a tie-break, before one more break proved good enough for Gasquet in the fourth. Unfortunately, me and Chris 'Mad Shirt' Collins were too hyped for the match we knew was to follow (i.e. we were going to get to see Jamie Murray's epic afro) and just spent the whole of this match desperate for it to end.
Here's the two players. Apart from a slight wobble at the end of the third set/start of the fourth Gasquet looked pretty good. He's got Andy Murray in the next round and I reckon will prove more of a test for Jamie's inferior brother than many people are expecting.
This is the comedy grandma I was talking about earlier. She was sat in front of us and basically just seemed to have an endless supply of cans of Carling which she was downing. Chris 'Mad Spine' Collins wanted to have a photo taken with her. It didn't turn out too well (why didn't he just look at the camera?) but the can of Carling took priority over any pictures of the Collins.
117 mph. Chris 'Mad Dad' Collins got a shot of a 130mph+ effort, so won this contest. Incidentally, the other day Nadal hit a backhand at 109mph. !!!
Oh yes. The moment everyone had been waiting for, as Jamie Murray's legendary afro makes its way onto court. Not a great photo this one, but trust me, once the hairband is on it gets epic.
The hairband is on! Aside from this though, doubles kinda does my head in. It goes on forever and the endless high fiving at every opportunity is really annoying. Like, Jamie Murray hits the ball out the stadium and his partner is still running over to high five him. Rubbish.
This is an OK picture. I'm kinda disappointed with how the afro has turned out in these shots. Trust me, in real life it proves an inspiration to us all.
Chris 'Mad Lib' Collins and a roof. What more could you want? Some random middle-class woman too? Oh, go on then.
As the doubles degenerated into four sweaty men high-fiving every thirty seconds yet more cans of Carling began to appear.
Ooh, Carling, but in a glass. Movin' up in the world...
Here's Jamie Murray taking a break from carting that massive hair around the court. While this dismal excuse for tennis was unfolding before our horrified eyes, over on Centre Court 'Virtua Tennis' legend Tommy Haas was getting soundly beaten by Scottish dullard Andy Murray. Boo.
And this is how the day came to an end. A silhouetted grandma on her 9th pint, while Jamie Murray, a Chinese man with big socks, and two Russians who kept whispering in each others ears rally for eternity before us. Doctor Who was on in an hour. It was time to get the hell out.But, as with all photoblogs, some important lessons had been learnt. That Knight child is German, not British. A grown man has wandered up to the fixtures board and gone ''Kiefer versus Nadal! Mwhahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha''. And walking around the endless suburbs of London for hours on end is not much fun. Marcus out.
