As a nation, if there is something we take more pleasure in than our lawns, it is the sight of people falling over Picture the scene: a retired colonel is lying on his belly, maintaining absolute silence, brow furrowed with concentration and the effort of keeping his hand steady as the nail scissors he holds approach their target. Snip! And with one practised movement, another daisy is excised from a (near-) perfect home-counties lawn. But the colonel is not happy; indeed, as he rights himself, a single tear trickles down his crinkled cheek.
As a nation, if there is something we take more pleasure in than our lawns, it is the sight of people falling over
Picture the scene: a retired colonel is lying on his belly, maintaining absolute silence, brow furrowed with concentration and the effort of keeping his hand steady as the nail scissors he holds approach their target. Snip! And with one practised movement, another daisy is excised from a (near-) perfect home-counties lawn. But the colonel is not happy; indeed, as he rights himself, a single tear trickles down his crinkled cheek. His wife, approaching with a tray of homemade lemonade, stops in alarm. What ever can be wrong? “Joyce,” the military cove intones, “the blighters are dissing our lawns.”
OK, OK: the colonel might largely survive in the imaginations of Wodehouse and Betjeman fans, but his message is nonetheless truthful for that. Competitors at Wimbledon, be careful: we heart our grass. We love our lawns. Respect the blades on which you are guests. Do not complain when you go, as Wodehouse himself might decorously have put it, A over T, or find yourself, Bambi-style, doing the splits. Not for nothing did the aristocrats of this country, in centuries long past, cultivate their greensward. The message was clear: we have a surplus of land on which we are not forced to grow turnips, and we have the leisure time in which to disport ourselves upon it. Anyone for tennis?
We must be entirely fair; last week’s high-profile SW19 casualties, who included Maria Sharapova, Roger Federer, Marin Cilic and Victoria Azarenka, were bested in a variety of circumstances and there has not, thus far, been talk of disgruntled aces breaking into the All England Club with trowels and cement mixers. The cynical might even suggest that had Sharapova’s mishaps not been so vividly captured by the cameras, we would have heard a great deal less about it.
However, the taint of slipperiness persists. Turf wars are mooted. But here the tennis players find themselves up against another problem. As a nation, if there is something we take more pleasure in than our lawns, it is the sight of people (and animals; we’re not species-ist) falling over. From Norman Wisdom and Miranda Hart to countless toddlers and cats on the internet and clip shows, we love to see bums in the air. What else could explain the enchantment of Bob Mortimer’s plaintive cry of “Oh Vic, I’ve fallen”?
We wish no one any serious harm, of course, and we are always ready to substitute proper sympathy for laughter. It has never been satisfactorily explained why the racehorse Devon Loch stumbled so catastrophically as he was poised to win the 1956 Grand National, but one consequence was even greater devotion to his owner, the Queen Mother, who took the whole thing rather stoically (of course, she wasn’t doing the falling over). And we adore bravery; Mary Decker’s blubbing after her crash in the 1984 Olympics 3000m final provoked unprecedented warmth for her rival Zola Budd, with whom she had collided, but who remained dry-eyed.
And what greater tennis tumbler has there been than a 17-year-old Boris