Tonight:
5°c
After Boris Johnson's rousing declaration that "ping-pong is coming home", London's youngsters are surely besieging the table-tennis tables in preparation for 2012.
But there was a serious point behind the Mayor's rhetoric, for Victorian Britain was the cradle of organised sport, from its dining tables to its prisons.
Although sports have been played since ancient times, it was not until the Victorian age that they were codified and organised.
Some evolved from medieval traditions and were championed by the great public schools. Others emerged from the new world of upper-class leisure, such as table-tennis, first played as an after-dinner amusement in the 1880s.
The first table-tennis players used a line of books as the net, cigar-box lids as bats and a champagne cork as the ball, which speaks volumes about their aristocratic lifestyle. But soon entrepreneurs were selling primitive sets to London's middle classes.
Hamleys sold a version called Gossima, while rival stores marketed it as "whiff-whaff", "pim-pam" or ping-pong. And like other British inventions, the game took root across the globe - except in Imperial Russia, where it was banned as a threat to the nation's eyesight.
Other eccentric games were no less popular. Fives, in which players smash a hard ball against the wall with their gloved hands, dates back to the Middle Ages, when bored apprentices would knock a ball against the buttresses of church buildings.
Its name derives from the Cockney slang for a fist - "a bunch of fives" - and it caught on in public schools like Eton and Rugby, where boys still play rival versions of the game.
During the 18th century, fives was extremely popular in London's King's Bench and Fleet prisons, where gentlemen imprisoned for debt played in the prison yard to kill time. By the 1780s, reports noted that inmates were using tennis racquets to speed up play.
And when Mr Pickwick is thrown into the Fleet for debt in Dickens's novel The Pickwick Papers (1837), he watches a game of "rackets" in the yard, along with a "great number of debtors", engrossed by the play.
During the heyday of the Empire, British officers exported rackets and its direct descendant, squash, to India. And British India was also the birthplace of snooker, which evolved from the games played by officers during long monsoon rains.
Legend has it that the first game took place in the officers' mess at Jabalpur in 1875. And when Colonel Sir Neville Chamberlain called his inept opponent "a real snooker" - slang for a hapless cadet - the new sport had its name.
Eccentric as all these games may seem, they are nonetheless an enduring testament to British ingenuity and sportsmanship.
And we surely owe a debt to those Victorian pioneers. How, after all, would we survive our rainy summers without the consolations of ping-pong and snooker?
