We see them all around. Immaculately dressed in pristine white, adorned with coloured badges, full of purpose and zeal.
No, they're not the Ku Klux Klan or acolytes of the Lord High Panjandrum of the Mystic Lodge of the East. They are lawn bowlers.
In everyday clothes, they are perfectly normal people - friends and neighbours. But put them into bowls gear and they become the greatest collection of assorted fruit cakes you'd be ever likely to meet.
Picture a typical bowls club. Beautifully manicured greens in a garden setting - a scene of tranquillity. Is it coincidence, do you think, that cemeteries are laid out like that nowadays?
Lots of cars parked by the clubhouse, but hardly a soul to be seen. Then a bell rings. Someonespeaks into a microphone, and out from the clubhouse pours what looks like a rabble of disoriented ice-cream vendors.
They mill around like lost sheep before settling into groups around the green. The scene becomes as animated as a seance.
Prayer mats are reverently laid out and little white balls roll out across the green to their individual attendants. Then the others take turns hurling large black or brown bowls at them by a most circuitous route. Like, you need to go North, so you head out west. And when everyone has had a go at this, mostly without success, they realise that their prayers are not being answered, so they take out their frustration by kicking all the bowls into a heap, and the whole thing starts all over again. And again, until another bell rings and a great sigh of relief is heard.
Then they all pack up and troop back to the clubhouse where they proceed to bore each other witless with embroidered accounts of events long gone and what might have been.
And they complain about the weather, the green, their bowls, their luck and especially the selectors. Ah yes, those selectors. Well to be fair, they really can't be held wholly accountable. Who in his right mind would even consider taking on such an obvious recipe for disaster?
Then they drink to obliterate their frustrations and finally wend their unsteady way home to dream of that illusive perfect bowl and the ultimate accolade of success - a forlorn, headless frozen chook. Now I ask you? Is this really living?
There is absolutely no doubt about it. Lawn bowls is a very peculiar game played by most peculiar people.
Roll on Saturday. I just can't wait to get back there and have another crack at it. Maybe, just maybe, next time I might get it right.
Jack Dandie, Cleveland.