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Things I'm glad I tried (after years of not knowing about)


BaaLocks

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I love olives. But I remember stealing one when I was a kid at a wedding and feeling very pukey afterwards. 

Natural yoghurt. I’ve always eaten the fruity stuff but now I’ve discovered Fage 0% yoghurt I’m converted. The sweet fruit stuff tastes like nasty sweetener to me now. 

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2 hours ago, Ewe Ram said:

I love olives. But I remember stealing one when I was a kid at a wedding and feeling very pukey afterwards. 

Natural yoghurt. I’ve always eaten the fruity stuff but now I’ve discovered Fage 0% yoghurt I’m converted. The sweet fruit stuff tastes like nasty sweetener to me now. 

With you on that one. Full fat Total and a blob of honey. Makes you realise why “the land of milk an honey” means something.

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Belgian beer, and tenpin bowling.

It all started back in 1989 or so when I was in Great Yarmouth with my family. We were walking up the high street and a sudden dounpour forced us to take shelter - in Regent Bowl. My kids had a game (with the bumper cushions) but I just watched and had a beer. I was itching to have a go but for some reason I didn't. I probably didn't want the embarrassment of being beaten by my kids, I suppose.

A couple of weeks later I started work in Nottingham and after I had been there a while, I recounted the Yarmouth story, plucked up courage and asked a colleague about the works tenpin bowling league. I scored 99 in my first game - easy to remember - it was the only time I ever scored less than 100 from then until the end of my 'career'. After a few weeks I was averaging around 140, which put me in the top 10 in the company, so I joined a league at Ilkeston - thoroughly enjoyed it and gradually started to improve with a little coaching, buying a book about technique and investing in my own equipment.

In the early 1990s I had taken it a bit further, had some top quality coaching and started bowling at a representative level (representing my county, national championships, international championships etc) but I still maintained a contact with 'social' bowling with my wife in an inter-centre league representing Nottingham. Each year, Nottingham ICSL used to have a 'long weekend' in Holland and I got roped in to play a match in Volendam, near Amsterdam.

Anyway, enough about bowling - I'm sure you're interested in how I am going to turn this story around to beer. Well, the trip to Volendam is quite long - M1, M25, Channel Tunnel then up through France and Belgium to Holland - and we stopped for an evening meal in Belgium. No idea where - just a cafe/restaurant alongside the motorway. I had the Flemish stew, I seem to recall, and bought a couple of bottles of beer to 'help' with the rest of the journey. One was Leffe Brune which I thought was ok, but the other was Trappistes Rochefort 10, and I was instantly hooked.

If it hadn't been for that rainstorm, I probably would never have been inside a bowling centre, never bowled, never been to Belgium and never sampled the greatest beers in the world.

The moral of the story is - never complain about the weather. You never know when it might work in your favour.

I was sad to see, a couple of years ago, that Regent Bowl had been destroyed by fire. I won my first 'major' tournament victory there, about 20 years ago when with my best mate (the late Ray Henson) we won the East Anglian Doubles championship.

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