Discover your inner nerd

There’s a curious thing about the bowling green in my Suffolk village. The footpath running alongside it is on a slope, meaning that as you descend, the wall gradually rises and hides the players from view. What’s strange is that the older I get, the more I find myself slowing down to see what happens to the wood that’s just been delivered. Not knowing whether it reached the jack, or managed to nudge the opponent’s wood to one side, simply isn’t an option. It would be like going to see a whodunit and not staying to the end.

This book gave me the same feeling. Crown green bowls is one of those things you don’t want any personal contact with; you’re just glad it’s still there. A bit like penicillin, or Ken Dodd. And emphatically not like morris dancing. That’s for weirdos, whereas bowls is for normal people, the normal people that you or I could become if we happened to grow old in a slightly different way.

Reading about the game, it seems, is much like watching it: relaxing, perhaps even a touch hypnotic, a cosy way of discovering your inner nerd. Learning that woods can be made from lignum vitae, I enjoyed the familiar warm sensation those words always produce in their cricketing context (it’s the wood used to make heavy bails that stay on in windy weather). Another cricket connection is W.G. Grace — after hanging up his bat he became a big thing (in every sense) at the London County Bowling Club.

Only a book like this could make turf interesting. For the best surface you have to lay the sea-washed variety (Wembley Stadium did likewise, apparently). At Lord Hereford’s Park in Ipswich, according to a 1714 report, the green was ‘rolled by Asses in Boots, that their Feet may make no Impression’.