I LOVE Wimbledon – clearly I’m not alone there – but my affection for the tournament has always puzzled me as for 50 weeks of the year I can take or leave tennis.

My suspicion is that my passion for SW19 owes as much to the now defunct Bolton holidays as it does to the tennis itself.

For me, Wimbledon is summer. When I was growing up it straddled the town’s traditional factory holiday fortnight, which started on the last Saturday of June. I would come home from school demob happy to watch plucky Brits losing valiantly in the first week, before drifting in and out of the business end of the competition in some far-flung place – normally Cornwall.

My early memories of the Nelsons on tour are interspersed with classic Wimbledon moments.

I first became aware of SW19 at the tail end of the Bjorn Borg era and my love of the Swedish star – my prized possession on Trevone Bay was a Bjorn Borg beach tennis set – was equalled by my fear of John McEnroe.

His brattish behaviour, swearing and snarling at the referee, not to mention his wild hairdo, were unsettling to me as a child.

I can vaguely remember watching the momentous Borg v McEnroe tie-break of 1980 in a hotel foyer as we briefly sheltered from the searing temperatures on our first family trip abroad, feeling comforted that good had triumphed over evil again.

I realise now that the warm feeling the Grand Slam tournament gives me owes as much to these early associations as it does to the sport itself, which, due to the fact it takes about three hours for the drama in each match to unfold, is not exactly child-friendly.

From a purely sporting perspective, it’s hard to argue that any of the Wimbledon eras of my youth – from Borg/McEnroe through to the Becker/Edberg years, Agassi’s golden moment and the Sampras domination – hold a candle to the one we’re living in now.

There’s no doubt the battles between Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and our own Andy Murray – played out in unbelievable tension under the new Centre Court roof – will go down in history.

Yet, now I’m all grown up, I can’t help harking back to the good old days, before McEnroe cunningly morphed into the cheeky-chappy commentator Wimbledon watchers know and love today.