Climate Change is here! (for a few days anyway)

For the last few days, the Jetstream has adopted what the BBC weather guy called its "default setting", i.e. running to the north of the British Isles, allowing a large. glorious anticyclone to develop over much of Britain. And as it is July, we have enjoyed sunny skies and temperatures in the high twenties. Indeed, yesterday in my garden at 4 pm, the temperature hit 29 degrees, making it the hottest day here since 2006. Do you remember that year? I do. We took a short break in North Wales towards the end of July and even at the summit of Snowdon, over 1000 metres above sea level, the temperature was 27 degrees. Amazing! Since then, however, we have had to endure 6 lousy summers in a row. So this little heat wave is a welcome break from all that damp, grey misery. And there have been other reasons to be full of the joys of summer.

On Sunday I saw something I seriously believed I might never see: a Brit winning Wimbledon. And even in the context of other supreme sporting moments these islands have seen in recent times, from the triumphs of the London Olympiad, through Bradley Wiggin's unprecedented victory in the Tour de France, to Justin Rose winning the US Open, not even all of them put together in my mind equals the enormity of Murray's win. So many years of nearly-men, so many years of abject hopelessness- all that was negated in one wonderful moment when the umpire intoned "Game, set and match to Mr Murray".

The warm, luxuriant glow which immediately permeated my entrails has yet to abate. The entire nation, I suspect, feels something of the same. Yet will it mark a resurgence of interest in tennis at the ground roots in Britain, in which new champions will be bred from the soil of our youth? I think not. Participation in tennis has actually fallen since 2005. Murray himself owes his success to his training on the slow clay of Spain rather than the courts here at home (that and the inspired decision to bring Ivan Lendl into his team of advisers) I think Murray is capable of winning Wimbledon again, as well as other Grand Slam events elsewhere, but will I live to see another British man (or woman for that matter) take the biggest crown of all? I doubt it.