A load of Boules...

I never could see beyond Bunion in terms of Plans for Retirement.
I am singularly lacking in aspirations or intent.
A few wafty ideas about picking up piano lessons where I left off four years ago when a Classical piano teacher tried painfully to turn me into a classical pianist, when all I wanted was to be able to thump out a few party pieces at opportuneless moments.

So this morning an old friend who must surely be in her eighties, rang me, ostensibly, to find out how the operation had gone. She had had both feet done 15 years ago and had spent her time bed-resting for two weeks until her stitches were removed. (Different times, eh?)
I can't wait for our next Show and Tell session. Coffee next week a must.

Anyway, Doreen asked me how I felt about Boules. She has been playing, as a devoted team member for many years. To my flame-cheeked shame I laughed uproariously, then hastily put her right as to why I was laughing.
I have devoted a life-time to avoiding physical jerks (PE to the rest of the world).
I am not proud of this but I was the one in school who chose the most over-subscribed sporting activity (Badmington, if you're curious) so that I could sit in a long queue along the wooden laddered walls of the Gym with my Greek vocabulary book discretely in my lap.

"After you," I'd say as I got nearer to the the front, and I'd quietly and innocuously wind my way to the back of the queue.
It worked. Mainly.
So it was only in later life when I was working as a Literacy support teacher in a secondary school that I have come to realise that PE in its general and particular sense, has benefits for heart, soul and mind in ways that obviously never occurred to me in my youth.

The reason for my hysteria at Doreen's kind and thoughtful suggestion (not totally altrustic, as I'm sure they need young blood- ha!) is my total lack of hand-eye co-ordination.
She had evidently never seen me, years ago, embarrass my young children on a Bowling outing as my balls habitually took the side channel route. (I have grappled with that sentence and failed to improve. Sorry.)
I suspect that  Boules, played on grass, requires similar hand-eye co-ordination and also assume that there is none of the smoking and anise-swilling that goes on during French Boules. (More alluring. Said with French accent.)
However, instead of laughing like a hyena, I should have paused for thought as I looked at this lythe, lively octogenarian and said to myself,
"I'll have what she's having".