Emails unanswered, carpets unhoovered, garden unweeded, blogs unblogged.  And the culprit?  Wimbledon.  What’s been happening for the last couple of weeks is that Jane has been away most afternoons with her group of fellow artists (for the annual Bucks Open Studios) leaving me to record the main matches. That sounds easy enough: just set ‘record’. Sadly it doesn’t work like that. The BBC can’t make up its mind to stay with one channel for any given match.  Suddenly a British kid is doing surprisingly well on court 98, and we’ll be going over to that now, so retune to BBC 2 if you want to see Murray slaughtering Feliciano or whatever.

That means that I have to watch the whole match, changing channels as necessary, so that Jane - tired from several hours of talking about her work to elderly enthusiasts who, sadly, have not an inch of spare wall space to display anything new - can flop down and watch the recording. This, of course, is when I could be emailing, hoovering, weeding or blogging. But somehow it’s tempting to sit down with Jane, iced Pernod and small bowl of Indian Chewra mix to hand, and watch the whole thing again.

No complaints, though.  At least I can actually watch the matches these days.  In years of living abroad I had to settle for a sometimes creaky commentary on the BBC World Service.  I still remember the frustration of following the now legendary 1977 semi-final clash between Bjorn Borg and Vitas Gerulaitis (eventually going to Borg 6-4, 3-6, 6-3, 3-6, 8-6) and trying to visualise what was going on.   The low point was when the commentator said ‘Oh, that passing shot was indescribable!’, causing me to bellow at the radio ‘You’re paid to describe it, you bastard!’

So, best actually to go to Wimbledon. Which is what I was able to do in the early 80s, for three or four years in a row, without paying a penny.   What happened was that Jane had a friend, Shelley Morrison, who came from the USA to cover the tournament for NBC, I think it was, staying with us in Waterloo in exchange for the use of her spare press pass.  In those days security was pretty lax and the passes didn’t even have your name on, let alone a photo. So, on a Saturday, I would hang the pass round my neck, bypass the queues and just breeze in, heading for the press box on whatever court had the most interesting games.

The one I remember most vividly wasn’t a great singles match but an astonishing example of men’s doubles. Peter Fleming, when asked who were the greatest doubles players replied ‘John Mcenroe plus anyone’. On that day, as on many others, the ‘anyone’ was Peter Fleming himself, and the couple on the other side of the net were the great Australian pair, Paul McNamee and Peter McNamara, the two Macs. And, for an astonishingly high percentage of the time, the four of them were planted no more than two or three metres from the net, showing greater skills and faster reactions than I have ever seen, before or since.

Shelley, sadly, moved on and our Wimbledon freebies went with her. And after we left London in 1999 it all seemed too much trouble. But then, five or six years ago, after years of just playing occasional tennis on public courts, we joined our local club and discovered that we could take part in a draw for Wimbledon tickets.

The first time one of us won a pair of tickets, Jane was absolutely delighted. (Less so, however, when she learned that what we had won was the right to buy a pair of tickets rather than the tickets themselves). Still, it was a great treat, we had decent seats on Court One and enjoyed watching Andre Agassi win his final match there as well as Venus Williams on her way to a title.

The second time we went we were very pleased to learn from the day’s order of play that Rafa Nadal would be playing on Court One. And we did, indeed, see him play: three times;  firstly for 10 minutes or so; later for 7 minutes, I recall; finally for a whole 40 minutes. Long enough, anyway, not to be entitled to a refund of the ticket price. For the rest of the time we were entertained, not by Cliff Richard, thank God, but by some of the most torrential rain in the history of The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.

When this year we won a third pair of tickets, for the Tuesday of week two - women’s quarter finals day - we said to ourselves that we’d be fine. After all, lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. Well, I’m here to tell you that it does.

I was slightly disgruntled that the two matches I really fancied watching (Marion Bartoli - pictured above - versus Sabine Lisicki, and Maria Sharapova versus Dominika Cibulkova) were to be played on Centre Court, and we had to be satisfied with Petra Kvitova v.  Tsvetana Pironkova and Victoria Azarenka v.  Tamira Paszek.

As it turned out we did get to see the Bartoli/Lisicki match after all: on the Court One screen, the two of us listening via a shared pair of earphones to the Five Live commentary on my portable DAB radio while the rain poured and poured down, with great flashes of lightning and thunder claps, some no more than a couple of seconds apart.  (Later, on television, we saw the privileged spectators under the Centre Court roof flinching at the noise, poor dears.  They should have seen what it was like where we were.)

Eventually, after a good three hours and a half, the covers came off to great applause, the ground was inspected, the ball kids were clapped on, as were the line judges, the umpire and, finally, the players. Sadly there were none of the dramas of the Centre Court match and Kvitova (despite going off the boil in the second set) made mincemeat of the young Bulgarian who, surprisingly, had reached the quarters by beating Vera Zvonareva, the second seed, as well as Venus Williams.  (Don’t worry about my pair of mixed metaphors; they’re practically obligatory when you talk about tennis. Yesterday I heard former teenage star Tracey Austin say that someone or other had ‘taken his foot off the gas, and needed to get fired up again if he wanted to come up with the goods’.)

Later, the second pair came on, and there were some hard hitting rallies, much more exciting than anything we’d seen in the previous match, for all of two games. Then the rain started up again. It was 8 pm, we’d had enough and set off for the long trek back to Buckinghamshire. (Just as well; they eventually switched the match to Centre Court).

So disgruntlement all round.  Not helped by the fact that, two hours ago,  after a spirited and exciting start, the great British hope, Andy Murray, just let Rafa walk all over him.  And I’m too depressed to even try to think of a second metaphor.