First The New Inventors... now the lawn bowls? Oh no Aunty please stop. http://bit.ly/opj5i3 #abc (Tweet from Amanda Meade, retweeted by Mark Colvin)
This is weird. The ABC is no longer going to televise the lawn bowls on Saturdays from 5-6 PM.
Laugh if you must, but in the past year, the weeks of my life have been counted by the Saturday lawn bowls.
Don’t misunderstand. I'm not a huge devotee. I admit to watching it occasionally, as there’s nothing wrong with a good game of bowls as a spectator sport. It has thousands of followers who deserve their sport being represented on TV, and that time on ABC1 was just fine by me.
But that’s not it. You see, in this household, it has become a ritual of the counting of the Days of our Lives. Weeks of Our Lives then.
Many times I have been forced into an afternoon sleep. Daily, in fact, I have to sleep, and often wake in the late afternoon.
So I come out from the bedroom round 6 pm on a Saturday.
‘Oh NO!’ I cry out plaintively.
‘What? What’s the matter?’ says Tracey.
‘I’ve missed it!’
‘Missed what?’
‘The BOWLS!’ I gasp.
‘Not... the Bowls?? The Lawn Bowls!!???’ she responds with the appropriate degree of horror. ‘NOOOO!’
‘I guess I can pick it up on iView,’ I say, brightening up a little.
She gives me a hug.
We laugh.
OK, it’s a charade of sorts. But there are those of us with medical conditions that ritualise our lives with schedules, as we observe the weeks flying by at a breathtakingly ascending rate. We know there’s a deeper meaning when a ritual is shattered.
I for one will be sorry when the bowls are stopped from being televised, even if I don’t see them all that often. You see, I won’t be able to complain about missing them. I want to be able to express my anguish.
I want my ritual!
I want my ritual!
But then again, it appears that it will be continued till the end of the year. Maybe... maybe.... Never mind that maybe. You don’t want to know that thought.
Block that thought, as the New Yorker would say
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