Anyone for tennis?

This weekend I had the chance to go and see the semi-finals of the tennis at the Queen's club.  My friend Clare - a school friend I hadn't seen in years - is properly into tennis, and she enters the ballot for tickets for Wimbledon and Queen's every year.  It was my good fortune that she'd got tickets for this year, and that she was looking for someone to go with her.  Hoorah! :o)  Here we are, enjoying the sunshine...:

We travelled down as a family, as the boys thought it would be a good opportunity to go and do some London things...  They dropped me off, and went to visit the Monument, Tower Bridge and have a general wander about.  This obviously had to involve going on a tube train.  Small boy heaven...

I met up with Clare, and we had the chance to catch a little bit of the Doubles Quarter-finals, before heading into Centre Court for the main event...:

Andy Murray was in impressive form.  A bit too impressive for us actually, as we would have liked the match to go on a bit longer.  Still, it's great to think that Andy is in this sort of form before Wimbledon, and he showed he can battle through a longer, grittier match by beating Jo Wilfred Tsonga in the final yesterday...

After Andy Murray had finished his demolition of Andy Roddick, we got to see James Ward have a good tustle with Tsonga.  I was chuffed that I'd got to see two Brits on my first ever trip to a tennis tournament.  James did very well.  I'm sure we'll be seeing more of him.  I'm glad his run at Queen's has got him a wild-card for Wimbledon; he certainly deserves it.

A lot of spectators left at this point, but for those of us who stayed - there was a feast of Doubles.  We even saw arguably the best doubles exponents of all time - the Bryan twins.  If you want to be good at doubles, play with your twin - one right-handed, one left-handed - start practicing when you're tiny, and basically read each other's minds...  Amazing to watch...

The end of the day came, and the rest of my family snuck in to find me...  Even being given some souvenir tennis balls on the way:

So now we are playing tennis in the garden even more than we were before.  Joel likes to pretend he's Andy Murray or Rafael Nadal...  Good choices, I'm sure you'll agree.  At the moment, Nathan just wants to be the ball boy :o)