And by way of light relief from all this, I have gone to work. And what do I get? The greatest exponent of the cliffhanger in sport since — well, anybody, really. Has there ever been a sporting hero who mixed such fallibility and such magic in such generous proportions? Tim Henman, I’m talking about. All that stuff above about Harry reads just as well if you substitute the word “Tim”. It’s all too, too awful, and there were times when I could hardly bear to look.

But look I did because, well, you’ve got to find out what happens next, haven’t you? You owe a duty to the hero to try and see him out of the next scrape, even when the hero has only himself to blame. That is, of course, if the hero is as basically sympathetic as Henman — for aren’t we all flawed geniuses at heart?

But my God those flaws. At times this was like watching an elaborate spoof, an ingenious bit of performance art that highlighted all of the worst things that Henman can do. “Now understand, folks, that this isn’t supposed to be realistic. It is just supposed to show what would happen if Henman was able to do all his worst things at once.” And the first and worst thing he did yesterday was to raise our hopes.

It looked easy. It looked — a word never to be used about Henman — authoritative. He wiped the floor with David Nalbandian, playing at a sustained peak of perfection that had me foolishly thinking this would be all be over in an hour and a half.

But that boy is a glutton for drama. He simply can’t bear the easy way. Perhaps he is reluctant to hurt anybody’s feelings, until he has worn the entire nation to a frazzle first. But at least we could enjoy that lovely period in which he broke Nalbandian at will and served and volleyed as if the thought of defeat — or even minor imperfection — had not entered his mind in his life.

Do you know what I wish? I wish that every time Henman broke serve, he didn’t feel he had to double-fault on the next point. Perhaps he thinks it is fairer that way. It is so much a habit it induces a physical wince in those that have watched him too often.

To be fair to Henman, Nalbandian was a maddest sort of opponent to come up against. Nalbandian, an Argentinian, is every bit as much a mood-swing player as Henman, and yesterday he oscillated from sleepy bewilderment to incisive brilliance and back again in the space of a single service game, and did so game after game.

He must be dreadful to play against because you simply don’t know who is going to be standing across the net from one point to the next. One minute you’ve got Andre Agassi returning your serve, next point, me. That sort of thing unsettles a chap. And Henman, of course, can do plenty of unsettling just by himself.

He then brought into play one of his trademarks. Whenever I see anyone else play the shot, I shall always think of Tim. It is, of course, the Suicide Leave, the time when you let a returnable ball go by and then watch it drop in. Sometimes we get to think that Henman is nothing but flaws.

If that were the case, though, we wouldn’t keep on with the story. Henman mixes all these things up with tennis of great courage and brilliance, and he seasons it all with the most outrageous limelight-hogging showboating of which a shy man is capable.

After the Keystone Cops third set in which the rare occasions that either player held serve were decisive, we cranked the intensity up a notch. With Henman, intensity is rather like the lead guitarist of Spinal Tap whose volume knob goes up to 11. Most tennis matches, like most amplifiers, go up to ten. The fourth set was 11 all the way.

It’s not the volume of noise that does it, it’s the volume of drama, the proximity of disaster, the perilous grip our hero has on the edge of the cliff — and above all, it’s the volume of hope.

Henman rode the tsunami of hope across Centre Court like the Silver Surfer of Marvel comic fame and satisfied even his own extreme taste for drama. And so the chapter ends, but just as you think the ending is one that we can sleep on, we realise that it is in fact yet another cliffhanger.

On, I fear, into the next round: another round of horror and drama and twists within twists within twists. The master of suspense has worked his old magic once again. From the ashes of this match, a new chapter, the same hope. Tim Henman and the Order of the Phoenix.