bowling


sunday 18th.   asplin, wappers and me were bored.   we had all planned to meet everyone else at the bowling place around 8pm but that was over three hours away.   feeling a little bit hungry and eventually headed for goldberg anyway, we decided to go for a burger king.   it had definitely been the week of the king, with several visits each under our belts, we felt as if we'd earned yet another one.
a general air of amiable contentment as we bounced off the train entirely missing the goldberg wait headed in roughly the correct direction.

this way, boys we walked mostly in silence through the cooling twilight - opting to forego the 'shortcut' through the field.   it must have been at least six years since any of us have been anywhere near a compass, pair of knee-length grey socks or a green jumper with red triangular badges dutifully sewn onto the arms... so our collective sense of direction was 'a little off'.   we took a shortcut through a forest which parallelled the motorway.   needless to say, we were headed in entirely the wrong direction, and after coming across a wire fence blocking our path, we turned back.
getting back to the road and looking in the right direction, we realised that we could actually see the sign for burger king from there.   we had literally walked past the road towards it.   duh.

now, being a saturday night in the middle of nowhere, we weren't expecting the huge queues that we saw.   it took us fully twenty minutes to get served.... time enough for us to agree that the bloke serving the queue to the left of us had very nice hair and that the woman serving over *there* looked a bit like someone wappy used to, errrm,  know. ;-)
we ate the food [sic] and returned to goldberg city centre.   asplin schnapped and legged it for the train and went home.

we remaining two sat in the bowling centre foyer watching the world go by waiting for the inevitable herd of sheep to arrive.   we entertained ourselves by playing cards with a few beer mats.   needless to say, i was crap at this game and lost every time.   the sheep never turned up but our friends arrived shortly after wappy legged it to the bog.   a move so brilliant and inspired i kicked myself for not thinking of it first.
we went to a far table under the guise of wanting to sit down when actually we were casing the joint for 'nice arses'.   shamelessly, miler sat next to bev wearing his half-life pulling tee shirt.   it did not have the desired effect.  phew! 		we dont get on
grrrrrrrrrrr!!!! 8pm hit.   the bowling place went a bit dark.   balls started glowing, pins luminesced.   yes - it was moonlight bowling!
we were called up to the desk to get our lanes.   robbing the sock deodorant blind and discussing the relative merits of the english shoe size system we got kitted out.
some loud bloke started yelling down a microphone at us.   i ordered my first turbo shandy in almost 2 months.   its always a good night when turbo shandy's involved...
the first game (or is it called a frame, i never am shure) was terrible. my usually unshakable consistency faultered leaving me with a score somewhere in the low nineties.   heather was boasting about how she got a hundred and fourty blah blah... whatever.
something inside clearly snapped, because the next game i played with pure finesse.
that loud bloke at the mic was still trying too hard but now he was offering free drink!
 all your glowing pins are belong to us
one handed lorry pool! six strikes, two spares and a total score of 198.   king!   and we won the bottle of cheap jaegermeister rip off too.
bonus
as the night was young, we went upstairs to play some pool.   this may have been the day that lorry pool was born.   i can't really remember much about the night after this point because i drank half the bottle of free shit.
the pile of people kept growing larger and larger.
heather got rather scared when we tried to bundle people out of the window.
dan "the man" charmed his way into all kinds of situations.
the train ride home involved a game of 'hang tough'.
all good stuff.   all totally random. 		a whole pile of people?
... it had been so long since smiler had been in a hedge.   he ended up upside down in a thorny thicket along with his aggressors.
personally i think this was just a devious ruse for dan to stick himself full of thorns so his newly formed friendship could blossom with the application of germoline.
i drank some short shots of tequila with sparky marky, almost unconscious to all that was going on around me.
rather unfortunate that, because what was going on around me included bev and heather kissing, with andy filming the event for later consideration.

plenty of frivolity involved, but a little too much for a sunday.   i sulked off to bed after the cheesy music accompaniment kicked in.   thankyooo very much.