A quick roundup of events today before I start my main thesis. We’re quite happy today as we have tickets to see Russell Howard at the Apollo tonight. You know who I mean, don’t you? No, not the “Titter ye not” guy from Up Pompeii – that was Frankie Howard. Certainly not Henry VIII’s wife, Catherine Howard (or is that Sree from Big Brother at the moment?). Howard Jones, 80’s singer/songwriter: no! Russell Howard, off the telly, does stand-up, always on Mock The Week. Floppy blond hair. Well, him. So that should be fun. Whilst on the subject of comedy quiz show whores, happy birthday to Phill Jupitus too. Never sent him a card, but there again he missed my birthday this year, and didn’t send for my bonkday yesterday either.

It is also George Michael’s birthday. He’s gone to pot recently, bless him. I heard he’d invited all his mates to join him in a mass debate in a cottage in Devon, but hardly anyone came and most of them couldn’t give a toss. Still you gotta have faith.

It is also the anniversary of Juan Peron being elected President of Argentina in 1972. Damn – if we’d still been in Budapest we could have done a re-enactment. I’d look good on a balcony.

And a mention of note too for George Orwell, he of Animal Farm, and 1984 fame. He’d be 106 today and probably feeling double-plus-un-good at the prospect of no longer being able to keep his aspidistra flying! Mind you, in this temperature pretty much anything is likely to go droopy!

And what the heck is going on? I’m not happy. I feel a strongly-worded letter of complaint coming on, but I’m not quite sure who to send it to. Something is seriously amiss, and I demand a full enquiry. Do these people not understand that we have rules in England? We have certain expectation of what is right and what is wrong. Ways of doing things. How things work, or rather don’t work.

Let me explain. This is the first week of Wimbledon. And what does that mean? Torrential rain. All week. And what do we get? Glorious sunshine! Yesterday it was hot enough outside to melt aluminium! NOT wet enough to start investing in ark manufacturers! Come on, this is just not done. It’s not British! Every year, without fail, the first week of Wimbledon is a complete wash-out.; so much so that this year they have built a fancy new retractable roof over the centre court. That’s the bit that really rattles my cage though. We have a tradition to maintain here. You see, what is supposed to happen is this:

We plough unfathomable amounts of money into a large engineering project (ideally something that the vast majority don’t want but we have committed to anyway). We then take forever to plan and start construction, run almost instantly into financial difficulties causing further delays, have to bring in outside help and finally deliver a project over budget and late. The final few points of perfection require that the end result is either useless, dangerous or at least just doesn’t work. That is the glory of being British and applies to pretty much any building project much bigger than a loft extension, small conservatory or garden pond (although all of these present their own opportunities).

Our land is riddled with examples – you’re probably already thinking of the Minnellium Dome (sic) and the facilities for the 2012 London Olympics which look set to cost at least £6 billion, rather than the £2.4 billion first quoted. Brilliant! It’s not just the English though – recall for a moment the wonderfully troubled Scottish Parliament building, which cost ten times its estimate and was delivered three years late. The new tram lines supposed to be completed in Edinburgh for 2010 are already months behind schedule and projections suggest they will be millions of pounds over budget.

The privately-financed Channel Tunnel opened a year behind schedule in 1994, at a cost of £10bn - more than double the original budget. All right and proper. That is what we expect to happen. Even looking around my own region I see the Manchester skyline now jagged with the half-built carcasses of new blocks of flats, which were committed prior to the credit crunch and now do not have the funding for completion.

Of course sometimes we get it wrong by getting it right. The shining example of this being the Millennium Wheel – which was only intended to see out 2000 and never meant as a permanent installation. By rights it should have fallen down by now, so someone screwed up big time! That said, in its defence, it WAS late in opening and missed the Millennium celebrations by three months and was regarded as a political embarrassment. Now the re-named London Eye is the capital’s biggest paying tourist attraction – something of a blot on our landscape of failure, but nevertheless costing a king’s ransom in maintenance (£12.5 Billion has just been set aside to replace the ‘pods’), so I’ll let it off on a technicality.

The new British Library opened in 1997 at a cost of £511m. It was three times over-budget - and construction work had overrun by five years.

Not wishing to be racist, I can’t miss out the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff – only ¾ complete when the first game was played there – ‘wet paint’ notices in the dressing rooms I should think. “Please don’t use the showers, the tiles aren’t set”. Amusingly, during its construction Welsh football and rugby games were hosted at Wembley; a favour that Cardiff was able to return when the new Wembley Stadium plummeted behind schedule. I used to work for an organisation who supplied IT facilities for Multiplex, the construction company behind Wembley, so their lack of progress was a matter of some interest to us. In the end, the contractual wrangling in respect of late payment charges and additional funding were a tangle of loose ends, crossed wires and general mayhem akin to the worst knotted mess you might find behind any British home TV/DVD system! But that is what happens in the UK. Hell, these things have implications beyond sport or entertainment or even the comfort of our politicians – we have a whole workforce of lawyers to keep in employment too. What would happen to them if things just started to go to plan? Specialists in conveyancing, procurement law, arbitration and conciliation all out of work. Can this country cope with a deluge of pin-striped tramps called Tarquin, in des-res cardboard box houses (constructed to the highest degree of health and safety legislation I’m sure)?

We know where we are when things go wrong. It is built into a very being. It’s who we ARE. We are known the world over for our stiff upper lip, it’s iconic. We built an empire on it. People go for collagen injections just to maintain it! But you don’t need a ‘stiff upper lip’ when all is running according to plan. We’d loose our national identity. Civilization as we know it would fall into the entropic void.

Back to Wimbledon via the minor digression of a Tweet from Sue Perkins last night that made me smile: ”When will the incessant she-grunting of Wimbledon be over? I play a spot of swingball, and I don't mind saying I've never come close to a full throated hog-yodel, even on a tricky backhand.” Perfect attitude. In any given year Wimbledon serves but a few genuine purposes:

1. To provide a source of endless humour, often involving Cliff Richard, Lesbian tennis players or excessive grunting – maybe all three. (By the way, could Transvestites enter the mixed doubles by themselves?)
2. For those who go to complain about the price of the strawberries, and those who don’t go to complain about those who do go and then complain about the price of the strawberries.
3. To provide another opportunity to demonstrate how the Brits have a singular talent for inventing a game, sharing it with the world and being shit at it. (Still, at least OUR world championships are open to people from abroad – which is more than can be said for the Americans!)
4. As an unfailing guarantee of rain

And it is point 4 where the problem arises. No rain. So no goddamned opportunity for the roof to fail. I know they tested it, but things always go fine in tests – dress rehearsals are all well and good but no use if the actors all get swine flu for opening night! What they need is a real, live, critical application of the roof, so it can show its full lack of potential. Not some drizzle but a storm of biblical proportions, so heavy that the centre court fills up like a huge bucket before the 3000-ton roof can be coaxed into place, drowning thousands amid the flotsam and jetsam of flailing ball-boys, Robinsons Barley drink bottles, empty Pimms glasses and John McEnroe’s collection of sweaty wrist bands. Or, failing that, just as soon as the roof is fully deployed, the sun comes out and we discover that the translucent ceiling acts as a massive magnifying glass and burns Princess Michael of Kent to a crisp. (Do you think she’s known to her close friends and family just as Mike?) .

We finished the roof on time, so we’ve got to redress the balance somehow. It just isn’t meant to go so smoothly. It’s not meant to work. It is meant to be an unmitigated disaster. Poor show Wimbledon: It’s just not cricket!