Bowls, Beer and Barbecue

There are certain things one doesn’t expect to do until eligible for a bus pass and discounts on visits to National Trust properties - watch day-time TV every day, play practical jokes on people with your dentures, figure out where all the best early bird specials are within a fifty mile radius, take a packed lunch to the midday showing at the cinema (my granny actually does do this), and play lawn bowls. I have still got the first four of those to look forward to in my dotage but I can now tick off the latter. Yes, yesterday The Husband and I donned our whites (well, he wore a white polo shirt and I lightly coloured tailored shorts – due to the constant presence of red dust here, white doesn’t feature much in our wardrobe) and stormed the green for a few games of that classic British game.


I must point out at this juncture that this was a work do and at no point in time has either The Husband or I joined a lawn bowls club. It was an unusual choice for a corporate function but scored high points for originality. The fact that beer and wine was free-flowing throughout the day also helped. Most people there had never played before and therefore hardly anyone knew the rules, which made for an interesting game. Each time we played a different team, we played by different rules. I’m still not sure what the correct rules of play are. I had played boule on the beach during many a family holiday so I understood the general gist of the game but I was rather too eager to begin with, sending my ball right to the back and into the ditch on more than a couple of occasions. Things weren’t going too well for me until, that was, I decided to see how beer affected my standard of play. I can conclusively report that, following my eminently technical scientific study, the amount of beer consumed directly correlates to the form of the lawn bowls player. The more I drank, the better I played, although I imagine there must be a ceiling, after which the standard rapidly decreases. By the end of my first bottle however, I was on fire. We ended up annihilating our opponents.

A break for a barbecue lunch and a glass of wine followed the first game, before we were back on the green to play the winner of another game. We had spotted this team at the other end of the green – it wasn’t hard to notice them as they whooped and cheered constantly. They were all dressed in red t-shirts and dark trousers so they had clearly been thinking about this for a while; they seemed to take the sport very seriously. We were in trouble. As predicted, we lost (although it turned out that they had been playing by an incorrect set of rules so we are convinced we were unfairly done by) but that did mean we could sit the rest of the afternoon out and just watch the other games, beer in hand. During the course of our combined three hours of play, we discovered that there was definitely a limit to the amount of lawn bowls one could play in a single day. Perhaps when we’re retired we’ll find our lawn bowls stamina and be able to play for an entire day. Until then, I might just stick to tennis.