Bringing you the Most Thrilling Action

It was bowls day at the green in the library gardens yesterday, and as afternoon turned to evening, the ladies and gents were out there with there score cards, bowl holders, and the new green and yellow jackets to go with the traditional white.

All very genteel and English, and very different with some of the street drinking and drug dealing that goes on the other side of the fence on some days.

I've never played, never. Not proper bowls on proper greens, with thoking great woods the size of cannoballs. Oh I've bouled on beaches, and petanqued clankily, and played in a friend's garden with carpet bowls, but I haven't done the real thing.

Nor will I ever. I'd feel like I was admitting I was old.

I do remember a time when it seemed very important to me however, and that is when I was a young child in Scotland, watching from the window of the house on Kilndale Terrace overlooking the bowls club where mum and I lived with granny and old Auntie Queen. Summers evenings I'd never be allowed to go out and play after a certain time, but the bowlers would appear as the evening went on, and play on seemingly till 11pm in the endless twilight of the Scottish summer.

I'd watch with my face pressed to the glass.

Only once did I ever go in the club, on some function night, and sat eating pea and pie next to their hallowed green as the folk went in and out of the pavilion - NO CHILDREN ALLOWED - chinking their glasses.

I wonder why I was there. I really can't remember at all. But seeing folk playing bowls always reminds me of this time of my life.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 12.07.16

The Colour of the Weather Girl

I notice that a schoolfriend - well I doubt that, I doubt she ever said more than two words to me in seven years - is now back presenting the news on East Midlands Today after being relegated to early morning weather-girling. You can see her at lunchtimes, although the “lovely” Ann Davis still holds court in the evenings, sticking pins in dolls of Kylie Pentelow while wearing twelve different outfits a week.

At school, that girl was the elite of elites, one of a group of about four who only communicated with the socially connected in crowd and who dressed as Greek Goddesses to a school disco once and carried it off as if Athena and Aphrodite themselves were in our presence.

To them I was satanic spittle on the floor, I suspect.

(I was dressed as Woody Allen dressed as a robot in his movie “Sleeper”.  Suited me.)

She was a blue girl I think, was The Weathergirl. Our school was divided into four houses, named after famous stately homes, with corresponding coloured jerseys all rendered a brown sludge irrespective of origin during house rugby matches.

Weathergirl was in Clumber, the blue house, if I remember right. To my memory, this is where all the posh kids, sons of daughters of school governors and prominent townsfolk ended up. Rufford was green, and was the sporty house that always won at school sport’s days APART FROM WHEN THE CRICKET TEAM I CAPTAINED MURDERED YOU BY TEN WICKETS!

Welbeck was yellow, and had major problems with obesity. They were the worst at everything. They were paired with us in lessons. Us being Thoresby, the house of crimson. We were weirdoes. Well I know was, but I wasn’t alone. We were the bohemians, us Thoresby types, with generally the coolest musical taste. We were geeks before geeks were cool, nerds before nerds were a thing. We were goths, New York Warholians, Civil War pipe smoking heroes and bespectacled geniuses.

We were (I was) despised, and ourselves and Welbeck were kept well apart from the Clumber and Rufford heroes. Different classes. Different form rooms, I swear to god they were in the nicer parts of the school. Prettier girls. Better looking boys. Richer parents.

But we in Thoresby, we were The Big Bang Theory before it ever existed!

In retrospect, we rule! With hindsight, we conquer!

Si

All text copyright CreamCrackeredNature 22.01.16

The Bottomless Lake

Memories of Crete again today, prompted by visitations into my mind of this...

Lake Volusemni, the so called "Bottomless Lake" by Artimy Pavlov, Wikimedia Commons

...The Bottomless Lake.

The Bottomless Lake lives in the Cretan holiday resort of Aghios Nikolaus, and the above view is one I've never had of it. I was usually found, on the two family holidays we had in the area, sitting with my dinky little yellow and black fishing rod just where the short canal joining the lake to the harbour enters the lake.

The Bottomless Lake isn't really bottomless. Some boring English nautical fellow took a sounding and found the depth as being around 60 metres. Which is still incredibly impressive for a body of water that my memory reckons is no larger than a football pitch, but destroys the local legend somewhat. You can imagine the bottomless lake as being an entrance to Hades, where evil souls are tortured with deathless drowning before emerging into endless fires and the mocking laughter of the three headed dog Cerberus.

Sisyphus and Damocles look up from their own ordeals only briefly to look the newcomer in the eye with knowing sympathy.

I fished in the Bottomless Lake. Not at the bottom, I didn't even have 60 metres of line on my reel, just four lead shot and a piece of bread on a hook. On an earlier holiday in Elounda along the coast I had fished for grey mullet with some success, although I caught only small ones. They still went down very well fried with lime juice, although my stepfather in his own display of Underworld cruelty made me bone and gut them myself.

Much bigger mullet lived in the Bottomless Lake, as long as my arm or so. But you could never get them within a mile of a fishing hook, and indeed here I never caught any mullet at all, or any of the saddleback bream that were also common in Cretan waters, I only caught those gloppy bug eyed little rock gobies and blennies, ugly, slimy Marty Feldmans of the sea.

But from what I remember, you wouldn't want to eat any of the fish from these waters in any case. The long sea front of the resort used to have a tidal sweep of used toilet paper about a mile long that the windsurfers used to hurtle through in a frenetic cholera death wish. And then the harbour was full of bluey oil slicks from the Playboy cruisers and rusting ferries, deep and cold sea urchin waters somehow far scarier to me than invisible bottom of the Bottomless Lake.

It was about our only Hotel holiday that one, and in the fog of increasing years, not as good as I thought it was at the time. I never swam in the sea or played with other kids on beaches made scary by the local hornets.

It was all sit down meals and swimming in the rooftop pool, a gloomy pit of Weil's Disease that surely one day must have featured in a "That's Life" story about holiday drownings.

I'd rather have swum in the Bottomless Lake, and met the fate of Titans.

Si

Words are copyright CreamCrackeredNature, image as credited