What the hell am I doing at the World Indoor Bowls Championship? I'm surrounded by a thousand or so elderly bowls fans: the air is thick with the odour of grandma's perfume (lavender?) and cabbage. Across the blue-carpeted rink, a rotund man with a red face is belting out an atrociously Casio-tastic version of Return To Sender. "Rattle your jewellery!" he shouts - and around me several people do just that. OK, this piece has footnotes. Whether you read them or not depends entirely on how much time you want to waste today. So when you see a random numeral, that's why. Sorry they're not in tiny script. Here's the first: (1)
The World Indoors are held in a place called Potters Leisure Centre, a high-class holiday camp five miles outside Lowestoft. There is more to do at Potters than I would conceivably get around to in a decade of very occasional activity-taking. We're not just talking about sports here, but serious organised fun. Bingo, quizzes, social dances, musical shows (which are, I'm repeatedly told, 'West End quality' (2)) . Once you check in, there is pretty much nothing left for you to worry about. It's a little like a landlocked cruise ship.
I am the only guest here - bowls players and officials apart - under 50. Worse, everybody seems to know each other: the staff are on first name terms with the guests, and everyone banters with the players and umpires (3). Even the technical guy - Pete - is a kind of small-scale hero to these people. I find this slightly weird. Mainly because I'm a total stranger. And then I remember that I'm the guy on his own, looking like he's just lost a tussle with a hedgerow, walking around asking dumb questions. If anyone is weird here it's probably me.
And how can you not be charmed by a place where every meal is followed by the question "Can I get you a dessert?" and that by "Custard, cream, or ice-cream?"
My first ever live game of bowls is between Alex Marshall, a four-time World Champion. He has an MBE for his services to the sport. This is a little like catching Roger Federer on your first time at Wimbledon. He's playing an 18-year-old qualifier from Ireland called Gary Kelly. I've heard about Kelly over lunch; apparently in the doubles he and his partner had pulled off a surprise win by outfacing a pair of older hands through high-fiving each other and whooping and hollering when they won a point. This, I'm told "whipped the crowd into a frenzy".
Marshall, a hefty and dour Scot, destroys Kelly in the first set (4). In the second, somehow, the 18-year-old comes back to win 9-8, pinging the jack into the ditch and then rolling his next wood right up to the lip to steal the win. The meticulous precision it takes him to do this, to roll a weighted wood onto a target that small from 28 metres away, kind of blows me away. As it does the crowd, who, by now, are cheering and clapping every point. Marshall goes on to win the tie break 2-0. And, as we filter out of the auditorium in a painstakingly slow shuffle, I realise that I'm already intrigued and even a little enchanted by this game.
There are three reasons why this feeling only grows stronger. Bowls is satisfyingly hypnotic and tactically complex enough to be compelling, especially at this level. The fans, and the atmosphere they create, is serenely, uncomplicatedly, happy. And I'm a little envious of the constant low-end pampering that staying here involves.
The best thing about the tournament though are the players and officials themselves, who are friendly, welcoming and endearingly passionate about their game. Unsurprisingly, bowls is an amateur sport. Apart from four or five big names who have swung gigs promoting bowls manufacturers, everyone else has to hold down a day job. Not only are a lot of players having to use their holiday allowance to come here, but they're having to pay £55 a night for their accommodation.
That evening the world No1, Dave Gourlay (5), is knocked out by an unseeded player. This is the first thing people are talking about in the bar that night. Otherwise most of the chat is about the world rankings: If you're not in the top 16 (6) you don't get entry to the three other major tournaments on the tour (7). The prospect of slipping out of that group, being robbed of the security it provides, is what keeps a lot of the teen-ranked players awake at night.
That is why 15 of those top-16 are in Hopton-on-Sea and not Christchurch, New Zealand at the World Outdoor Championships, which, bizarrely, is also going on right now. While a lot of the players I speak to would like to be at the outdoors, all of them point out that there is a) no cash on offer for winning and b) no ranking points available for taking part. Apart from world No2 Greg Harlow (imagine Shane Warne if he'd born in Ely), who is, as far as I can tell, too successful to be bothered with playing outdoors anymore.
The World Indoors is actually an open tournament. If you have a spare £60, you can enter. Hence the presence of Gary Kelly, and, fascinatingly, Ceriann Davies. Ceriann is 29, from Port Talbot, unseeded, and a woman. There have been women in this tournament before, but none of them have ever got beyond the first round. Ceriann did, and then she won her second round match as well. Admittedly her seeded opponent had just got off a long-haul flight and had, I'm told, spent the time in-between tanking 10 pints in the bar. But still, she now has a third-round fixture against Alex Marshall.
Incredibly, Marshall has never played a woman at bowls in his entire career. While a lot of the younger guys are unfazed by the prospect, for Marshall - four world titles and all - it is actually more than a little intimidating. The crowd is likely to be against him, and frankly, the prospect makes him a little uneasy.
Ceriann is blond, buxom and charming. When I ask whether she's ever had trouble making her way in a male dominated sport, she admits that for some of the older players it can be an issue. "But really, I don't see a problem" she says, "I mean in bowls terms there's no difference between me and the men physically." I nod. "Except for my tits." She pauses. "And the fact I don't have a penis." She is going to be a star, and if the BBC began its Potters coverage a week earlier than it does, she'd already be appearing in the minor headlines.
I'm kind of galled that I won't be around for her match, but my stay in this strange purgatory was only two days long. As a community, the people involved are hoping for a resurgence in popularity of bowls, along the lines of what has happened to darts (or indeed, in the 1980s, snooker). I'm not sure whether this will happen, though there is talk that Barry Hearn - the man who did so much to modernise darts and snooker - will be setting up a super-league of bowls sometime soon. Frankly, apart from the top players and the administrators, I'm not sure that many people at Potters would care. Theirs is a tightly-knit community, which dawdles serenely onwards regardless of the interest of the wider world.
