My singing sisters of the baritone section of Brisbane City Sounds chorus had a fun Sunday at the bowls club.
My team lost 57,348 to 1. I might be exaggerating their score a little bit, but it was a lot. We lost every single round, by anywhere from 3 to 7 points, until we finally eked out a single point in the final round before retiring for lunch.
If you've never seen lawn bowls, it's a bit like bocce (or curling, if the center circle was a small ball that can move), where all your team's bowls that are closer to the little ball than any of the other teams bowls count. Except the bowls are non-spherical and weighted, and they curve when you roll them! I don't think it's meant to be played with 3-person sides, which is 12 bowls per team and quite chaotic, but we don't actually know what we're doing, and it was fun anyway!
Hardly anyone in Australia apparently bowls anymore, yet just about every town seems to have a bowls club (including my tiny suburb, but we went to a much nicer one with a covered green). They are friendly little local gathering spots for all sorts of things.
We couldn't think of an actual smoking song that we all knew, so we went with "On Top of Old Smoky". We couldn't bring you a barbershop song, because we all sing the same part!
As we were singing, and it dawned on all of us that we'd actually never heard the full lyrics, I was delighted to discover it includes the word "hug", which makes it a serendipitous twofer.
That's Bonnie, Veronica, Sheryl, Natalie, and Clare behind me. Apologies for the terrible exposure! I did my best to correct it in the edit.
