‘Wimbledon, please,’ I say to the taxi driver after clearing customs at London Heathrow Airport.

The driver recognises me. ‘Yes sir,’ he says, with a nod that seems to imply: where else would Boris Becker want to go but Wimbledon? But I’m not going to the All England Lawn Tennis Club. I’m going home. Yes, home today is Wimbledon, where my wife Lilly, my son Amadeus and I live.

To some people this may seem like a dream. A small-town boy from the rural south of Germany wins Wimbledon at 17 and ends up living within walking distance of the scene of his biggest triumph. It’s not quite like that. When I finished my playing career in 1999, I moved to Zurich after periods living in Monaco and Munich. I was still based in Zurich when I met Lilly, who’s Dutch but was living in Miami at the time. When Amadeus was on the way, we knew we had to settle down somewhere, but where? By then, a fixed part of my year was based around Wimbledon, because from 2002 the BBC had included me as part of their Wimbledon commentary team. So London seemed an obvious choice (the mayor was even called Boris!), and we decided Wimbledon, with its village feel, was the place we wanted to raise our family.