Yesterday's France Story: Guttered

The bowling alley in Cherbourg doesn't open until the afternoons. That's fine. We just went and looked round La Cité De La Mer, which was remarkably interesting and features, among other things, 33cm thick Plexiglass fishtanks, a nuclear submarine, and seahorses. Still, we managed to pull ourselves away and headed off to throw heavy things at less heavy things, a pastime as noble as any on Earth.

Once a lane freed up and we'd been handed our shoes, one of the very few downsides to sandals hit me. Bowling shoes aren't very comfortable without socks (or, indeed, with them, but I'm sure you get the point). This is Thing I Blame My Terrible Game On #1. After a brief period of confusion when my dad tried to bowl with a ball one of the people in the next lane had brought with him, we got down to it.

After I'd lost my first three balls down the same gutter, it occurred to me that I was far worse than I remembered. That said, it had been a good few years since I had last bowled, and this is Thing I Blame My Terrible Game On #2. The next ball caught a few pins, and things continued in this vein for a little while.

A few frames later, Mum went for drinks, as is the place of the person not taking part. While she was up, I went from terrible to mediocre, scoring a respectable spare. It became clear to me at this point that she is some kind of bowling jinx, and so she became Thing I Blame My Terrible Game On #3. This was confirmed when she came back and my balls rekindled their brief romance with the right gutter.

This was shaping up to be my worst bowling game ever by quite a distance, so I started glancing about the screens to find someone, anyone, who I wasn't doing worse than and who didn't appear to be half my age and height. There was only one, one faint beacon of hope, and for me, the rest of the game was about beating Anelise, whoever she was.

I failed. A spare in the last frame and I could have done it, but that just wouldn't have been in the style of the game. Overall, I lost eleven balls down the right-hand gutter. Eleven. That's a one followed by another one. That's more than half the balls I bowled. That's absolutely ridiculous.