What a load of bowls

A couple of posts ago I wrote a post about football. My musings were lost on Tennyson ee Hemingway, my excellent Australian follower. (NOTE – he’s an Australian who follows me, not a follower of Australians. Although, maybe he’s that too….?).

Anyhoo, I replied to a comment, made by Tennyson, that he felt left cold by the world’s favourite game (not counting bedroom gymnastics ;-) and offered to write a post about his fav sport. He then replied requesting that I write a post about bowels. Not the indoor version, made famous by King Pin, though. He wanted something on the lawn variant made famous by Sir Walter Raleigh (discoverer of the potatoes, inventor of the bicycle and defender of the realm again the Spanish Armada under Queen Elizabeth part 1).

It’s funny you should mention this noble and wonderful old English sport Tennyson, but I have recently been recruited to the company team!!!! What an amazing coincidence eh!? A space has opened up on the team after Dan put his shoulder out of joint during a particularly gruelling game at the weekend.

I have to confess that your raised query and me joining the team are actually quite closely related. So it’s not that much of an amazing coincidence that I joined the team. I never would have considered joining a lawn bowling club before as I assumed it was the preserve of doddering old right wingers like bloody Roger.

When I overheard Dan boasting that he’d “absolutely f*cking nailed it,” recently, I assumed that he was talking about his latest conquest, but he was actually talking about a particularly masterful stroke against the jack ball. (Which, now I’ve written it down, makes Dan look like a practicing homosexual – ha! Lol).

He says it was the concentration and controlled power of pulling off such a great shot that made him relax momentarily causing his finely tuned physique to spasm throwing his shoulder out. As a consequence they needed another player. Naturally, I felt this was the perfect opportunity not only to bond with my co-workers, but also to learn about bowls in order to write a post for Tennyson.

If you want to find out more about bowls but are not lucky enough to have the opportunity to join a club, I suggest you check out this Wikipedia page. If you can’t be arsed to click on the link here are the basics:

There are lots of variations on the theme, but essentially the idea is to roll your bowl as close as possible to a marker ball known as a jack. You take it in turns and score individual points for each bowl of yours that is closer to the jack that you rival.

Sounds somewhat more boring than the indoor version where you get to smash down pins at the end of an alley. But that pretty much sums up the difference between the Americans and the English. They invented Elvis, we invented Cliff Richard, they invented McDonald’s, we invented Wimpy, they invented the Jackson 5, we invented 5 Star…the list goes on...

Not sure how I get on, I've never been great at sports, but it strikes me that bowls isn't really a sport, so I should be all right.

Hope that'll do you Tennyson, there's not much more I can say on the subject.

Baz