Everyone's A Winner

It was one of our bowling nights at the local bowl last night.Pictured above are overall individual score winner Kirk Harrison (centre),runner up Gavin Ford (left) and third placed Gary Rodwell (right). Kirk had a huge run of strikes in game one but his consistency suffered in game two and left him an overall score of 289 for the two games.



And these are all winners too as the team captained by Max Vidal (left) won the overall team contest with a total of 1187 over two games. Pictured with Max are, left to right, Lee Moore, Kirk Harrison,Gary Rodwell and Craig Buckley who was also the overall winner of game two with a score of 144.



This is where the everyone's a winner theme starts to get a litte tenuous. My team had an individual winner in Craig Mercer who beat the rest of us. Here he is (not quite Victor Ludorum this time Craig)pictured centre with, from left to right, Joey Jones, Phil Joce, Nick Neal and me.



David Boutle was highest scorer in this team with 242 points. Here he is (in striped shirt) with (left to right) Steve Eyres, Andy Fyles, Jenny Buckley and Dave Wilson.



Gavin Ford, left was the highest scorer in this team with a total of 280 points. Gav is picture with his mum Margaret, Sean Johnson, Tony Mercer and Natalie Drummond. A good night was had by all and there was so much food that we didn't eat it all (it usually looks like the buffet has been attacked by a plague of locusts).



After my total memory failure the other day, we have decided to make tonight our weekly cinema trip. We'll miss out on the Orange two for one offer but at least we'll get to the pictures. I somehow doubt that the film will live up to the hype but what the heck, it looks like a bit of fun.

I'll close with a bowling shot to make our players feel a bit better about themselves.

**** BT's Indian Call Centre

You know what it's like. Your wireless broadband goes down and you are left panicking. For someone like me it's as if the intravenous drip has been yanked from my body and my wonderful world of eBay, Betfair, Authonomy and YouTube - my lifeblood - is slowly trickling away. So what do you do? Reboot the router. Reboot the laptop. Fiddle with everything for two blinkin hours and get absolutely nowhere. Seek discussion boards on the land line connection. Try their remedies and dig yourself deeper into a mess. Finally, in a last desperate measure you pick up the phone and dial BT's helpline. And who are you phoning? Someone in flippin Mumbai. And what's he going to do to help? Well er..... Five minutes later my wireless is up and running. I've had a very nice chat about the weather in India this week and my lifeblood has returned to my veins. So **** BT's Indian call centre. Four star service. Speedy answering, polite and knowledgeable technicians. I think I might try putting an Instanta service line out there. (Mind you Max is irreplaceable)



We went to see Harry Brown last night. It was quite good in a bit of an over the top sort of way. Michael Caine plays a Charles Bronson type vigilante figure in a dystopian vision of life on a London council estate. It's a bit simplistic in its messages but Michael is very good and the film has pretty good pace.There's quite a lot of hoodies around here. Perhaps I should take a leaf out of Harry's book and get myself a gun.



Our cinema has been fitted out with a few rows of fancy new seats. You can sit in these for a premium of £1.50. Now I think that Vue have got that price completely wrong. Who is going to sit in the fancy seats for £1.50. If they were charging £10 a seat then you would be talking. All the flash people would be clamouring to show off to the rest of the audience that they were considerably richer than everyone else. £1.50 doesn't quite cut it. Marion and I tried out the test seats in the foyer. Our verdict? Not as comfy as the cheap seats. It was quite funny watching the ushers trying to enforce the new seating which resulted in what looked like an impromptu game of musical chairs being carried out in the auditorium as all the cheap ticket holders took their rightful places in the plebs' area.




Gavin has just booked our trip to the local Ten Pin Bowl next week. We go once or twice a year and usually have a very good evening. Numbers are down a bit this time. Last year we had 28 players but several of last time's players can't make it. I suppose that will save me and Marion a few pounds but we will miss regular star players Craig Peach and Darren Rodwell who usually put in pretty impressive scores.

The Bowl is right alongside the pier. If we get chance we'll have a got at this when we finish (if the tide is in).