Tension, tantrums and tedium: welcome to the press conference

To spend even a little time at Wimbledon is to drown in the sheer scale of things.

- Jonathan Liew

This is a place of mind-boggling numbers: the 40 miles of racket string, the 55,000 balls, the 300,000 glasses of Pimm's, the 2.5m strawberries. But Wimbledon's true staple good is none of these. The most abundant product every Wimbledon fortnight is the word. And even on a rain-affected, slow news day, the words must keep coming.

As with everything else, Wimbledon procures its words with a suitable reverence. Post-match interviews, in contrast to the more informal on-court setup at Melbourne and New York, are conducted at a respectful distance in front of a microphone stand. But of course the majority of Wimbledon's bluff and bluster takes place in a small windowless upstairs chamber that most tennis fans have never even seen.

Here the ladies, gentlemen and species-unidentified of the international media perch on seats of dark green leather, accompanied by a professional stenographer who will assemble their efforts into a printed transcript within minutes. An invigilator at the dais keeps order and time, beginning the exchange with a question of almost artistic beigeness ("Anastasia, through to the next one. You must be really pleased.")