I don’t know about you, but I always think it’s a bit sad the day after Wimbledon tennis finishes and all the paraphernalia comes down. Like the circus has left town overnight. This year with the huge disappointment of another national defeat in the football, it made for a particularly difficult Monday. The weather was also miserable and overcast which didn’t help matters.
I watched the England match at the AFCW Wimbledon Stadium in their main conference hall with a packed and mixed crowd of families and regular fans. The youngsters will have to get used to the disappointment that the rest of us have suffered for years. I was 5 years old when England last won a men’s football tournament in 1966, but sadly it was shortly after my dad had left us and my mother still cannot recall what she was doing – other than caring for three young distraught boys at that time. I’m not sure we had a TV anyway!
After the match on Sunday, we headed to the town centre for another drink and ended up in a pub where they had a guitarist who wasn’t going to let the result get everyone down and insisted on playing some upbeat songs to change the mood. Which it did – at least until Monday. But a few days later the weather has improved dramatically (now too hot?), life moves on, and other things refocus our attention be it work, family, holiday, social engagements or passions.
I’ve mentioned before the nature of how people sometimes group together around a particular cause or event and sport is one of those strange things which can unite people around a special shared need to belong. I suppose with the Olympics and Paralympics following very soon there will again be that shared sense of national pride – or disappointment – in our athletes.
Belonging brings with it, a sense of our own personal identity that makes us feel complete or fulfilled at least whilst we share that time with that person or group of people. Sometimes, as in international sporting events this can bring together the vast majority of people in a country (let’s be honest, not everyone is a sports fan) but then when that’s over we search for other smaller groups, old or new bonds, to latch on to. It feels like we’re cells drifting around looking for that next important connection, a complex series of infinite Venn diagrams. Sometimes breaking apart then coming back together again.
I generally scan over the news headlines from various sources once a day but often find it far too depressing to linger on any story that focuses on hatred, violence or divisive behaviour here or abroad. Most of the time we actually come together surprisingly well in that map of disparate cells but inevitably as the global population increases and gets older, new demographics come to the fore and conflicts emerge or get reignited which grab media attention.
Last week I re-emphasised that we as a charity are essentially here for everyone within our local community of Merton (‘Wimbledon and the surrounding area’ as it is actually defined in our constitution) though that includes people who work, socialise or are just visiting. We have yet to have that more serious conversation as trustees about how we target our efforts given our size but at some stage we will want to explore that with our members and the wider community.
Perhaps the news item that grabbed me the most this week was the global IT failure that apparently occurred after a system designed to protect people from cybersecurity attacks seemingly did quite the opposite and impacted on travel, banking and other systems across the world. Fortunately, as we are so small we don’t have the resources to invest in massive infrastructure defences to our advantage this time, but that was one group of people who got brought together in a way they didn’t expect when the day started! A theme to be revisited.