Saturday 2 July 2016

Saturday Potpourri



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.

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