Lawn Bowls, an addiction.
No burning of bitches, no sex and no seriousness at all
I moved to mid-Wales to retire; I also wanted to break an unhealthy circle. My wife, who died six years ago, had a circle of friends who all felt duty-bound to try to look after me as my Barbara did. I got non refuseable offers of dinner four or five nights a week.
I was well off, had a good pension, and then, to cap it all, I had a good win on the national lottery. Not millions, but enough to let me dip a cowardly toe in the water. I kept it completely to myself; my life was styfling, and I needed to change it.
So I bought a house with my winnings and had enough left to "do it up". It is on the outskirts of the pretty little Welsh town of Machynlleth. It's where my maternal grandma, "Nian" came from. I wish she could see my house; it's a picture inside a picturesque village.
The house was previously owned by some poor guy who had a very bad end; he died from the effects of early-onset senile dementia. The house hadn't been cleared by flocks of scavenging relatives because the poor old boy was on his own. He had relatives, but as they had ignored him for years, he ignored them until his death. The house was sold with all its contents; the money was added to his bank balance and given to the board of trustees of the town sports hub. When I bought his house, I bought everything. It is quite a big house. I now have five bedrooms and two bathrooms, plus the en-suite to my main bedroom. I'm very much looking forward to my daughter and my grandkids visiting.
One of the bedrooms was a loft conversion and had been used as a hobby room when I bought it; it has a huge train set in it. I was going to sell it on eBay, but the guy couldn't collect immediately. He then wanted to argue about the price, and now six months later, he has just left it here. Thinking I would relist it, I packed it all away. My daughter now tells me my youngest grandson has a huge fascination with trains, so grandpa is keeping it.
However, I now had a door I didn't know I had. A board had been lent against it. The estate agent was surprised when I told her there was another room; her reaction was funny. I was a bit miffed with the surveyor I had paid a small fortune to. He had missed it as well.
When I opened the door, I found inside a mass of records, record decks, CDs, CD players, and a laptop computer. The laptop looked as though it must have been new when I bought the house. It wasn't password-protected, and there was only one programme on it. A DJ program. Now, I'm a rock and roll fan, and I've seen this programme before. A friend of mine from Surrey who was a specialist R&R DJ used it for his dances. I gave him a call.
When he talked me through it, there were thousands upon thousands of old and modern rock and roll tracks. Plus loads of other 60s, 70s, and 80s music on this computer. There was a separate mass storage unit that had a 5-terabyte capacity. It was very nearly full of music. This held a lot more interest for me than a train set.
I also had amps, speakers, lights, and a DJ controller unit, none of which I knew much about. Within a few weeks, I was fairly comfortable using the gear. I love most kinds of music; this was a very good find for me and gave me much-needed interest.
Gywenneth is my next-door neighbour. Where our gardens meet, there are the remains of a fence that has been better described as a row of posts for years. She has the floweriest garden I've ever seen. It's not one of these gardens with not a blade of grass out of place. Gwynn has cultivated wild flowers, flowers from seed, swaps with neighbours, and quite a few plants from my garden. She pinched them; between the last owner and me, the estate agent had sent in a bloke with a strimmer to keep it under control. Gwyn told me she cried when he massacred the garden with that horrible machine. So she did a daring midnight raid and saved as many plants as she could.
Gwynn loves me; I made her very happy; she does my garden for me, her way. I love it, she loves it, and I don't have that horrible feeling that I've left all the weeds and pulled up the undeveloped flowers. She won't take a penny from me, though, and if I take her for a meal at our superb local, she insists on buying it next time. She does let me drive her to the shops when I go on my weekly pilgrimage to Tesco to buy stuff that rots in the fridge, then I go into town and eat at the pub or from the chippy.
On one of our shopping trips, she told me the village bowls club wanted to put on a dance after a local derby against Carno. "What music do they play?" I asked. "Oh, we have a problem, Mike. Your predecessor next door used to play lots of good old stuff for us. The last dance we had was terrible, too, loud and too noisy, and the DJ was too young by far." She went on, "We always have a dance after the Carno game, but we must find someone more suited. I'd have slapped him just for his hair cut." Then she laughed with a wonderfully full, musical laugh.
I've never bowled in my life--well, not the sort they do here. I may be of Irish/Welsh decent, but I was brought up in the East Riding of Yorkshire. My old man was a Crown Green bowler. My god, that is a boring game. But my idea of bowls down south was worse. Old men in blazers, white shirts, club ties, and flannels Complaining about everything from the grass being half a millimetre too long to the shortening length of lady bowlers skirts. Drinking pints of warm flat beer out of tins and standing in the absolute correct order around a lawn, you had to know the password just to stand on.
Gwynn had asked me to come and bowl with them, but being a world-renown expert on swerving ladies of a certain age, I'd managed to avoid it. So feeling completely in debt regarding the huge number of hours she spent on her knees in my garden, I said, hesitatingly. "I've got all his gear."
"Pardon!" exclaimed Gwynn.
"Mike, my predecessor, I have all his gear. It came with the house; my solicitor tells me it was his wish; it went with the house."
"Have you really?" said Gwynn.
"Yes, every bit, I think". I said.
"Do you know how to use it?"
"Yes, it's quite simple, actually." I replied.
"Will you please do it for us? It's next Saturday."
My last hope was dashed. I'd nothing on, and I just couldn't lie to Gwynn.
"I'll talk to Jenny and Betty," she said. We will sort the food and get a few last-minute posters up.
"I thought Dai, who drinks in the waggon and horses, was the captain."
