April Without Bowls

In 1922 T. S. Eliot wrote in his poem The Waste Land, “APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.” April is certainly the cruelest month for Canadian lawn bowlers, such as myself, who have returned from someplace warmer where they could bowl, only to find that again winter is prolonged, the snow has not gone, and temperatures persist around zero Centigrade. My wife Tish and I spent January, February and March in the Algarve (southern Portugal) but had to leave because our landlord there wanted to make use of the condo at Easter and thereafter. The day we got back to Canada was reasonable weather and there was no trace of snow in Toronto but subsequent days have reversed that. If the temperature would only rise another ten degrees, the snow would be melted and the air temperature would be such that I could practice on the synthetic surface at James Gardens. My wife is giving me new bowls this year. I am getting Aeros: 3.5 Heavy Solar Flare Sonics with the Z scoop grip. These are perfected for  rougher, heavier grass greens like we so often encounter in Canada. I will continue to use my black 4.0 Heavy Taylor Vector VS bowls for fast synthetic surfaces like James Gardens and perhaps when leading. I was asked to play skip quite a bit at both Valverde and Vilamoura LBCs over the winter. In Portugal many fewer players have coloured bowls which makes it much slower to read the head in triples and fours. These Solar Flare bowls are yellow with red flecks so I won’t be contributing to the problem at least here in Canada.