A ticket ballot win, a £2.70 punnet, and some honest thoughts on why we still queue for all of it
Right, confession first: I did not win the Wimbledon public ballot this year, which means everything I am about to tell you about strawberries and cream comes secondhand from my sister, who did, and who has not stopped talking about it since.
The Queue Is Still The Point
For anyone who has not tried, the Wimbledon queue is not really a queue in the way most Londoners understand queuing, it is closer to a small, temporary village that assembles itself in Wimbledon Park overnight, complete with its own etiquette, its own gossip, and its own quietly ferocious sense of order. My sister described strangers sharing flasks of tea at half five in the morning with the kind of warmth you would not get from your own neighbours on a normal Tuesday, which tells you something about what a shared, slightly absurd goal does to people.
The Strawberries, Properly Considered
Roughly two million strawberries get served across the Championships fortnight, a fact I looked up specifically to include here because it sounded implausible and turned out to be entirely true. They arrive daily from Kent, are meant to be eaten within twenty four hours of picking, and cost a fairly modest sum per punnet, cream included, a price that has become almost a piece of British cultural furniture in its own right, endlessly discussed and never really begrudged.
Why The Cost Debate Never Quite Lands
Every year, someone writes the piece pointing out that you could buy considerably more strawberries for the same money at a supermarket, and every year the piece misses the actual point entirely. Nobody queues eleven hours in a park to save money on fruit. They queue for the specific, slightly ridiculous pleasure of eating strawberries and cream while sitting on Henman Hill, or Murray Mound, or whatever we are calling it this particular year, watching a match on a big screen surrounded by several thousand people all doing the exact same thing with the exact same quiet satisfaction.
A Word On The Weather Gamble
This year’s Championships wrapped up on 12 July, and my sister reports the usual mixture of genuinely lovely afternoons and one properly miserable rain delay, during which, she insists, morale in the queue remained remarkably intact, largely thanks to the tea sharing already mentioned and a communal, very British refusal to admit the weather had ruined anything.
The Bit Nobody Mentions
What struck me most, secondhand as my account is, was how little the actual tennis seemed to matter to the overall experience she described. She could not, when pressed, give me a detailed account of any specific match. She could, however, describe the exact texture of the strawberries in considerable, occasionally excessive detail, which tells you plenty about what the day genuinely delivers versus what it is nominally sold as.
A Small Defence Of The Ritual
It would be easy, and rather North London of me, to be sniffish about the whole thing, the queue, the cost, the slightly performative Britishness of it all. I find I cannot quite manage it. There is something genuinely lovely about a national institution that still runs, essentially, on people’s willingness to get up absurdly early and stand in a park together for the privilege of fruit and a view of a big screen, and I say this as someone who did not actually do it myself this year.
Where I Landed On It
Next year, ballot or no ballot, I am going. Full details on queue times and strawberry logistics are covered properly by Time Out London, and if you want the full, unfiltered sister’s account, you can find more of my own London wanderings over at my author page on The London Prat, where I promise the next entry will not be secondhand.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
