Tennis at the grass roots - while it lasts

If I was a blade of grass at Wimbledon I would be worried about something a little more radical than a haircut in a year or two. In fact I’d be quaking right down to my shallow root system.

That big sliding roof that blotted out the sun this week after a few droplets of rain must have been as welcome as a nuclear winter to those pampered, tightly packed little sods that comprise the last lawn tennis venue on the grand slam circuit.

The roof is great if it’s keeping off the rain. That is what it was built for at a cost of £80m. I have to repeat that - £80m. That’s £80m for a roof the size of a tennis court. If I had been quoted £100,000 I would have blanched, but £80m. You could get.....well you could get Ronaldo for that. Roof/Ronaldo/roof/Ronaldo.....not an easy one.

Or you could buy a good sized island somewhere warm with sandy beaches and frigate birds. Eighty million quid for a bloody roof? They’re having us on. The more I say it, the less I can see it. I mean, what would have been wrong with a big ridge pole with a tarpaulin slung over and a couple of gutters? Wouldn’t that have done the trick? I wonder how the All England Club did the deal? I suspect it was with a few arms twisted behind backs after the TV networks sent in the heavy mob. There must have been coercion somewhere along the line.

"You buy that roof, OK? And the first time you get the chance, if there’s so much as a gnat’s whoopsy falls out of the sky, you close it and you keep it closed."

I don’t like the roof one bit, but then I’m an old curmudgeon who still has his wooden Slazenger racquet and who has never quite got over the day-glow tennis balls. But this roof is the slippery slope, not to mention a slippery court that is bound to handicap our man more than their’s. It always does.

You just wait; a few more evenings like the last one and the grass will begin to cut up, just as it did at Wembley. Then they will fire the groundsman just like they did at Wembley and, when that fails to improve anything, the players will complain. Finally the unthinkable will happen and the grass will go, replaced by clay, and some will say; “Why didn’t we do this years ago?

Advertising will crowd the court, the military ushers will be replaced by nightclub bouncers and the Royal Box will be stuffed with rappers and DJs sporting a constellation of bling, blinding the servers under the floodlights. The ball boys and girls will be issued with skateboards and scoops and Cliff Richard will be shunted deep in to the stands, safely out of sight of the cameras.

They’ll hire a man in a Womble suit to tour the court and when Andy Murray enters, a kilted piper will play him on to the court as the crowd hum through their noses, flap their elbows and sing the words to the Scotts Porridge Oats advert. Roger Federer meanwhile will glide on to the court like Fred Astaire in a fancy white designer suit. Sorry, I’m running away with myself now. It’s not going to happen.

Achieving affluence the Kalahari way

A taxi driver told me this week that global warming was "all a con by the government to tax the motorist". But listening to Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, at an Earthwatch lecture in Oxford on Wednesday I was wondering if the taxi driver might be mistaken.

Prof. Rapley is as certain as anyone can be that global warming is happening. Moreover, he doesn't hedge his bets by talking only about climate change that could be explained as a cyclical thing. He says that we're to blame. Us. People. That's you, me, the taxi driver and Prof Rapley. It's our mums and dads, neighbours and relatives and Karl Benz.

I wouldn't include the Kalahari bushmen, the aborigines or the pygmies in this list. Little children, too, might escape blame, although they will not escape the legacy of a 20th century that will probably be remembered - if the human race lives long enough to enjoy a memory - as the age of the internal combustion engine or maybe the oil age.

Prof Rapley showed us graphs where the line over time is a gentle, almost imperceptible upward slope - population, atmospheric carbon levels and mean global temperature. Then suddenly when the historic clock reaches the late 19th century the graph curves steeply as if it's met a big wall.

He showed us pictures of breaking ice sheets, the melting arctic and polar bears swimming (although there was a story this week of polar bear populations rising. How come?). "This stuff isn't rocket science," he said, "And I should know. I am a rocket scientist."

Saying something like that on a platform must be every rocket scientist's dream. You'd make sure you practiced that line in front of the mirror. Anyway it got a laugh.

But global warming itself is no longer a laughing matter. Neither is it a matter only for Al Gore or the next Earth summit. We all have to do our bit. I'm doing bugger all whenever I can since doing bugger all is very helpful at combating global warming.

Original affluent society

Anthropologists have noted the way that the Hadza bush tribes spend much of their time sitting around throwing dice because they don't need to hunt much to survive. "Hadza men seem more concerned with games of chance rather than chances of game," wrote Marshall Sahlins who described them as the "original affluent society".

The Kalahari bush people have life taped. They walk around as hunter gathers have always done, living off the land. They can carry all they use for the hunt and for living. Yes, they need everything they have, but they have everything they need. Now their life is endangered since diamond mining interests are shifting them off the land they have walked for thousands of years.

An ancient and successful way of life is being destroyed because diamonds are a girl's best friend. It's the price of bling.

While the rest of us are busy measuring our carbon footprints, its worth recalling that the Hadza leave scarcely a footprint. Not even Ray Mears could manage that.

If you're dubious about my doing-bugger-all approach and want to get serious about carbon offsetting, visit this site and read all about it