At half past three this afternoon, a few million of us will stop everything to watch two strangers settle nothing.

At half past three today, Centre Court gets its Ladies' Final, and a good slice of the country will do the same thing at once: put the kettle down, tell the kids to hush, and lean in as if the next two hours are the only ones that matter.

They aren't, of course. That's the point of them. Whoever lifts the trophy this afternoon, nobody's rent changes. No graduate gets hired. The tax take doesn't move. Two people will run themselves into the grass over a game that produces, in the strict accounting my economy-desk colleagues keep, precisely nothing — and a nation will care about it with an intensity it can't spare for most things that genuinely do produce something.

And it won't stop there. Tonight there's a World Cup quarter-final; the last week has been half-watched cricket in the background of every kitchen, England and India going at it in two formats at once. Somewhere a few thousand people are queuing overnight for a wristband. This is the day, more than any other, when you can see what we actually do when nobody's making us do anything.

We invent stakes. We agree, all at once, that something with no consequence is worth our whole attention. We assemble — in front rooms, in the Queue, in a pub that's turned every screen to the same thing — to feel something together that pays nobody back. If you want the founding question this paper keeps asking, what do we do when we don't have to work, you don't need a think tank. You need a deckchair and a decent forehand.

I've been thinking about that this week for an odd reason. In the same ten days the country is going to acquire a new Prime Minister without anyone playing a single point for it — no contest, no crowd, no scoreboard we get to watch. One appointment, enormous stakes, and not a soul weighing in. And then this: a game that decides nothing, this afternoon, with the whole country weighing in as hard as it can.

I'm not going to make that mean more than it does. I just find it worth noticing that we'll pour ourselves into the thing that changes nothing and receive, in silence, the thing that changes everything. Maybe that's the wrong way round. Maybe it's exactly right — maybe the tennis is where the caring is supposed to go, and the rest is admin.

Either way: it's half three. Strawberries are extortionate. Somebody's about to serve. I know where I'll be.