In a volatile world, summer offers a promise — Wimbledon

A burly Englishman with a love for water is leaning precariously over the starting blocks at the Singapore Sports School.

- Rohit Brijnath

Mick Massey is holding Paralympic champion Yip Pin Xiu's hands as she polishes her backstroke start.

Starting blocks are uncomfortable and so Massey has a folded towel beneath him. But it's not any towel, but green, purple and precious, with the year 2014 stencilled on it.

Massey, grin plastered on face, says he got it from a friend who works at Church Road in London. To be clear, that's the address of Wimbledon. To be precise, this towel belonged to Maria Sharapova.

That same day, a retired literature professor in Delhi, a serious woman who recently translated a famous work in Hindi, had a question about an English sport played in a historic suburb.

"When does Wimbledon start?"

"You watch?" I asked, for in years of friendship she'd never mentioned sport.

"Of course," she replied and launched into stories of her ear pressed to her uncle's ancient transistor radio in the early 1970s, listening to Wimbledon commentary and learning as a child the meaning of 0-15. What began as an education is now a romantic rite of summer.

If it's June it means swapping stories of that place the writer Bud Collins called the "granddaddy, first-born of all tournaments". In 1877 a "temporary three-plank stand offered seats for 30 people"; now there are 18 courts and The Queue outside of hundreds of desperate folks spending a night in tents for tickets.