Para Bowls in Eden

Sis dragged me there just in time to stop me going totally ga-ga. We had been nursing Mum twenty-four seven for over a year and were worn out. Most days I rode my ninety-nine cc two wheeler to Jen’s house to put in a full day of feeding, toileting, making tea and cooking, washing, making beds and entertaining our darling ninety-three year old stroke destroyed mother, then riding back to Tiziana to be rocked to sleep or battered into wakefulness by extremes of Eden weather.

To get me out, she organized a sitter for Mum and booked us in to play indoor bowls at the Sports Club. I must be odd. I am happy to watch a cricket and do appreciate the skill of a good lawn bowler, but had never played bowls, I was a cleanskin.

We were introduced all round then the bustling good humoured woman in charge assigned us to teams. As a newie, I got to bowl second.
Of course, I did all the dumb things like releasing the bowl with the bias on the wrong side, seriously disrupting a game two rinks away, running off the mat and threatening the glass windows at the end of the room, but I did improve and by the third end was keeping the bowl on the mat.
By the fourth and fifth end I was outbowling the lead player in our team, a young woman of maybe forty, fit and confident looking and began to congratulate myself on my emerging prowess.

At the point in the last end when the skip plays for keeps, the young lady who had been providing the benchmark to which I had aspired than surpassed, walked out of earshot. Taking advantage of her absence, the skip leaned over and whispered,
‘She’s not bad for a blind person, is she!’