Ustinov, of all people, could try adopting the obscenity bleep. Just a thought.The other thing I noticed was that on days when it rains they sometimes show classic matches from the past, and on one such occasion, with Anne Jones playing Billy Jean King, I realised that they did something that no top tennis player ever does any more. I turned on Wimbledon and heard someone committing a few double faults – it sounded like a row of obscenities being bleeped out.I wonder, by the way, if anyone has ever perfected an imitation of this bleep and incorporated it into their own conversation, to use instead of swear words? I remember Peter Ustinov revealing that he had learnt how to imitate the sound of the metal detector arch through which we pass in security-conscious airports He would pass through, make the noise, and get searched. Have you noticed this? There’s a high, loud bleep when the ball does something it’s not meant to do. And – this is the important thing – it’s very like the bleep that nervous broadcasters use to replace rude words. Just a thought.But even if I have never paid to enter, I am an idle TV viewer of Wimbledon.

And this year, as I idly viewed, I noticed a couple of things I had never noticed before. One is the noise of the machine which registers a service fault. This is not true in cricket, where bowlers and umpires are constantly inspecting the marks of the run-through on to the pitch, like old men at the Chelsea Flower Show. If someone were inventing cricket now, they would never have bowlers bowling from the same place the batsman stands. I imagine the men with the lawnmowers feel much the same, seeing these horrible big tennis players come along and muck up their nice new grass. I don’t suppose any of the Wimbledon turf maintenance staff ever turn up for the tennis.

It would be too painful for them, especially watching that spot just behind the base line where people serve, getting worn down to the bare earth.It was very clever of the tennis people to make players serve from behind the line, because the worn patch is thus outside the field of play and cannot be blamed for bad bounces. This did give me the chance to see Wimbledon as it is most of the year round – completely empty except for the odd man on a lawnmower chugging up and down in the distance like a lone yacht in the Solent.
That remains my image of the real Wimbledon, so I always get a slight shock when I turn on the television at Wimbledon time and see all these people there, these day trippers. I speak as someone who has only been to Wimbledon once, and that was three weeks before the tournament started. The devastating effect on Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin is a reminder that exploration of the universe will be fraught with unexpected horrors

J A DANIELS
Yarm, Cleveland.