Emma Raducanu and Andy Murray energise restored Wimbledon crowd

Welcome back, then, the great British summer picnic, a tournament where it is somehow always a muggy mid‑afternoon and where there are still, it turns out, strawberries for tea.

The All England Club was a cold, fresh, breezy kind of place as it opened its doors wide for the first time since 2019. There were dumps of chilly summer rain. The fabled queue could be seen basking in watery sunshine before the start of play, with that familiar sense of something performative, theatrically static, being British for the British, in front of the British. Other nations have parades, fiestas, fetes. We have the plastic strawberry punnet, the cargo short, a stagey politeness.

And overall it was a steady kind of opening day, decorated with British success but with a slight sense of half‑throttle around the boulevards and walkways. The hill was beautifully lush and green in between the rain.

Wimbledon is a place to luxuriate, to suck the sweetness out of the summer, to feel lush and flush and woozy and sated. The eateries thronged, the kiosks buzzed. In the shop under No 1 Court they are selling novelty oversized tennis rackets for £600. Are we really in that place?

There has been an eagerness to cling to these pegs of the pre‑pandemic summer: Glastonbury, Wimbledon, queueing endlessly for a low-cost airline seat. And this was a red-letter day for the All England Club in other ways, with first-round appearances for the only two British players to win a grand slam singles title in the past 45 years, Andy Murray and Emma Raducanu.

Raducanu was the star of the day, winning her first match on Centre Court. She looked brusque and fit and genuinely delighted at the end, as all 19‑year‑olds should, let alone a teenager who grew up a tram ride