To my
admittedly pretty ancient eyes, Wimbledon
with the players wearing white is just a much classier tournament. And it also brings back the days when I
played regularly but very badly on
grass.
One of the
rules of Wimbledon, apparently, is that 'Players must be dressed in “suitable
tennis attire that is almost entirely white”—not cream or ivory; coloured trim
can measure no wider than one centimetre; every extra, be it bloomers,
headbands, even shoe soles, must also be white.'
The pic is
from a fabulously zany match between Marcus Willis and Roger Federer – watch it
if you get a chance.
I'll be
posting soon about the book I'm currently reading – The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson. But one of the early anecdotes in it caught
my fancy and I just needed to share it.
It is about how Mt Everest
came to be named that. Using paraphrase
it turns out that the mountain was named after an English chap called George
Everest. He was a surveyor who completed
a project started by one William Lambton to survey an arc or longitude across
India as a way of determining the circumference of the Earth. This arc went nowhere near the
Himalayas.
Because the
mountain had a number o local names.
Someone for reasons unknown named it after George – at the time they
didn't even know it was the highest mountain in the World! As a final irony George didn't pronounce his
name aw Ev-er-rest but as Eve-rest.
So in a
splendidly British fashion the mountain is named for a man who had never been
there and had no connection to it and whose name we don't even pronounce
correctly.
That is amazing!!! Crazy, huh??
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