Under My Umbrella.

Every summer you can count on the temporary emergence of two things; flying ants and the village bowls tournament. Bowls, much like darts and chess, is a sport popular with the infirm, the elderly and the bloated due to the lack of physical assertion required, and that is why it's such a winner around here - it's a nice relaxing sport for the vast number of pensioners around here with bad hips, gout, and other medical complaints that stop them getting involved with the village's other more active sports such as bear baiting, knife throwing and banger racing. Every summer the village green is cordoned off and before you can say cotton jumpers, the village's elders turn out in force to throw some large side-weighted balls at a small ball some way into the distance. This is one of the village's long standing traditions - it's been going on for longer than anyone can remember, it's something the whole family can enjoy and it's transcended generations (much like the incestuous antics up at the farm behind the fields).

That said, it's not all tea and crumpets when bowls season rolls around - I mean, there is tea and crumpets (sandwiches too) but the village, without giving too much away, is on a slight slant; and the village green itself isn't level either. And seeing as the village green is the flattest of all the village's grassy areas (the worst of a bad bunch), the players play against the grain of the slope, hoping their bowls don't roll sideways down, which they almost always do. The result? The infirm, elderly, bloated, sick and inactive that have come out for a relaxing game of bowls find themselves running hell for leather towards the main road after their bowls as they tumble downwards. Fair play though, they're incredibly persistent, most people would have just acknowledged that this place wasn't built for bowls and given up. But you see these pensioners running like the wind as if recreating something out of Logan's Run and you know what time of year it is. It's a wonder nobody's been seriously injured or killed in pursuit of these rogue bowls. Any attempts to put up a barrier results in an argument about the regulation size of the pitch so they no longer bother, choosing to risk life and (undoubtedly plastic) limb with the road rather than argue the toss with Roy.

Roy will come in on Wednesday nights for the quiz, and is a notoriously fierce gentleman - the last person you would ever imagine gently rolling a bowl across a lawn. Every Wednesday he comes in, knocks back a couple of double Scotches on the rocks as if they were going out of fashion, and then plays the quiz, with his freakishly hairy wife, as if his life depended on the outcome. And then, when the answers are called out at the end of the night and he has invariably been wrong more than right, he will slam his glass down, rip his answer paper to shreds and storm out. Roy is such a sour loser that merely watching one of his tantrums in progress is like sucking on a hundred lemons; losing is not an option for Roy, which is unfortunate, because he tends to lose quite a lot. Darts, backgammon, poker, you name it and Roy is terrible at it. As opponent after opponent sinks the double, turns his cards over or gets his bowl closest to the jack, Roy will launch into a tirade of anger and vitriol, a fie on all and sundry before he gets in his car and fucks off home, probably to berate his wife and kids or punch one of his cats, who are rather disturbingly treated like children when Roy isn't raging his way through the village. There are several schools of thought as to why Roy is as angry as he is - some believe it is because somebody obviously swapped his human fiancee for a gorilla at the altar and he failed to notice until the vows were done and dusted, he whipped the vail back and caught a glimpse of King Kong puckering up for a smooch. Others, however, say it is because he himself looks like some sort of manatee, and is actually angry because his relationship with a land mammal flies in the face of Darwinism. However, I belong to the school of thought that believes Roy's innate hatred of anything and everything stems from the absolutely appalling toupee sitting atop his bald, perspiring bonce that looks more like something you would see dead in the road than parked on somebody's scalp.

I myself have never seen the point of wearing a wig; they're never convincing and serve only to make you look like a vain, bald man, as opposed to just a bald man. However, I especially don't see why Roy wears a wig, as he openly acknowledges that it is not his genuine hair - he doesn't go around saying it's a wig, but he seems to treat it the way you would treat a hat. If he has an itch he will actually lift the wig to scratch it, he adjusts it openly and often, and - my personal favourite - when he becomes frustrated (which is often), he pulls it off his head and slams it on the ground in disgust, sometimes even going as far as to stamp on it as if it could somehow rise from the dead (probably as the animal it obviously once was; I reckon it was a squirrel, Eddie thinks it was some sort of otter) and bite his ankles. He then picks it up, beats it (much the same way you would beat the dust out of a rug, which isn't far from the truth) and replaces it on his head a disheveled mess before storming off into the sunset. The strange thing about this is Roy's wife is hairier than some gorillas - a quick shave of his wife's arms would provide ample source material to craft Roy a wig, a beard, a ponytail and a fur coat. The amount of hair that woman has is criminal - I'm waiting for the day Roy forgets to buy razors at their weekly shop, to see if she comes in sporting a five o'clock shadow. Actually, his wife's abundance of hair compared to his critical shortage may be what drives Roy to stamp on his toupee in slapstick disgust every time his life is dealt another crippling defeat.

Henry had never seen the bowls tournament before so Eddie took him along to this year's - well, of course, the first bowl hadn't even been thrown before Henry saw his chance. Henry has been charged by the company to get the pub known around the village which includes whoring it out to every single organization, gang and group in town. If they had branches here, Henry would probably discuss function room rates with the Crips or the Ku Klux Klan (not on the same night, obviously). So in a gang of exhausted pensioners, chasing their bowls as they tumbled towards Henry's feet at the base of the slope, Henry literally saw bags of money running towards him.

"So what did Henry actually say, Eddie?" enquired Frances as we waited for Henry to grace us with his presence at the team meeting.
"He asked if they would consider a more appropriate venue for their proceedings." Which basically means, would they consider it here.
"But what the hell have we got to offer? Our beer garden is just as slanted as the village green, and it's not long enough."
"No, true," sighed Eddie, obviously pained by merely recalling what was said. "But what have we got that's long enough and level?"
"Oh no," I stuttered; surely not. No. Nobody could be so stupid. I know this place has a reputation for bad ideas but surely this kind of thing was the area of professional morons, not just amateur idiots like us.

"Which is why," Henry concluded as we watched with jaws slackened and eyes widened, "our loading bay is the perfect venue for the village bowls tournament." He had prepared a flipchart with a picture of the loading bay, but he needn't have bothered, as we all knew damn well what the loading bay looks like. It looks like crap.

Every Friday we get our deliveries - a gigantic truck pulls up, drops off enough alcohol to sink Noah's ark then fucks off to do the same to every pub in the area. But they can't park out the front (due to the fact that all of the village's roads were built back when people rode around on horses, not gigantic eighteen-wheelers full of booze), it wouldn't be allowed, hence why we cordoned off an area of the car park as the loading bay and had a proper docking area built especially for the purpose, so the deliveries could be made away from the main road. It's essentially a long tunnel with a ramp at the end (it has a wooden roof), we keep all the beer in this before it's brought into the cellar - it's slightly below ground level, and that's why it's completely flat (and therefore immune to the village's natural incline). Apart from it being a fucking tip (as well as the unofficial smoking zone and the place me and Eddie go to play keepie-uppie with a football we found in the car park six months ago) it is, apparently, the perfect length for a regulation match of bowls. I don't know how much you know about bowls, but...

"How do you propose we have a game of bowls on a gigantic concrete runway, Henry? Bowls is typically played on grass."

Yeah, it's a gigantic concrete runway.

"We're going to lay down astroturf." This brought about two questions:

"When is this tournament?" The answer came quickly; the tournament was the next day.
"What do you mean we're going to lay down astroturf?"

That answer also came quickly as Eddie and I put roll after roll of astroturf in a wheelbarrow (Henry had apparently driven his car through an astroturf factory, as he had the stuff in places that I didn't even know cars had - boot, back seat, dashboard, glove compartment, even a few rolls under the seats) and wheeled it over to the runway, ready to turn an outdoor corridor of slops and mess into a competition-standard bowls pitch. Plus, it was raining pretty heavily at the time, and the roof provided paltry cover; it was apparently the last part of the loading bay to be built, and from the looks of it the remaining budget could only stretch for a thousand boxes of matches and some glue. In fact, the only way the "roof" of the runway could have provided less protection from the elements would be if it were simply a sign on the wall that said "imagine a roof over your head". At least my imaginary roof would have been painted.

As Eddie and I made our measurements and cut the astroturf to length, Christine - who is still not really familiar with how things are done around here - had some questions.

"So what, did he just say he'd do this before he knew if we could or not?"
"Yep," we said. Eddie handed me the Stanley knife as I cut more of the horrible astroturf to measure, wondering exactly how many fingers I'd have to lose in order to get the company to pay out big in court.
"But what if this hadn't been suitable?"
"S'best not to think about it."
"What the hell would he have done though? Just fucked them off?"
"Probably not. He would have come up with another bullshit scheme."
"It's absolutely chucking it down, are they going to even be able to play?"
"It doesn't matter to Henry." And it didn't; it's almost as if, by continuing to build this ridiculous pitch, we were engaging in a game of chicken with them, seeing who would back out first. Except the only losers seemed to be Eddie and I, soaked to the skin and hands feeling the burn from laying astroturf.

We inspected our work, tried rolling the football across it to check for bumps/uneven parts but luckily found none. The rain was coming down thick and fast but we went home certain it wouldn't last, and that it would certainly be OK in time for the game the next morning, an assumption that turned out to be so laughably off the mark that even Michael Fish would have laughed in our meteorologically-mediocre faces.

I don't know whether you've spotted this yourself, but we've had a bit of rain lately round these parts - I'm aware it's a very British thing to talk about the weather but when entire parts of the country are submerged and people are dying of thirst due to a lack of access to drinking water in some areas, I think a brief chat is probably allowed. And not to put it too bluntly, Britain has been fucked this week. Cars submerged, festivals cancelled, houses soaked, lives wrecked, up and down the country the weather has been laying waste to everything. Luckily, thanks to the village's slope, we're never flooded, it just doesn't happen and for that we're all truly grateful; however, if the rain's particularly heavy such as it has been this week, two things - and two things alone - in the village get flooded, and they are:

1. Our cellar.

I unbolted the door on Monday morning and entered the cellar with a splash. As I waded further in, my socks and shoes becoming entirely saturated in the process, I feared the worst; a barrel leak. I checked around before discovering that the pool of liquid on the floor was actually rainwater - it hadn't occurred to me that perhaps we'd been flooded out. Then the penny dropped (with a splash as it landed no less); I threw open the loading bay doors, squelched outside to see Henry, trousers rolled up, standing in the water-logged pit that had once been...

2. Our loading area.

While it may seem like an obvious place to hold a bowls tournament if you're a senile old landlord with both hands up his arse (frantically scrambling for an ounce of common sense but sadly coming up with little but shit), it does not benefit from the village's natural lack of balance when it comes to things such as rainwater. But it's never that bad, because in the middle is a drain - if a barrel goes bad, it doesn't make fiscal sense for the company to take it back so they take our word for it and tell us to dispose of it before returning the barrel on delivery/collection day (they collect the empties on the same day as delivery). So luckily, that drain would take care of - oh, hang on, not it wouldn't, because it was covered by fucking astroturf. Good work Henry. If he had set out with the intention of retaining as much water as was humanly possible then he could have held his head up high because he had successfully negated all the anti-flooding measures put in place when the loading bay was built. Hence why I saw him in about three inches of water, with a vacuum cleaner, trying his absolute damnedest to hoover the water up. Considering the cellar was filling up fast and the rain was still coming down at a rate of knots, I had little faith in the hoover system, especially as I saw Eddie, standing off to a corner under an umbrella as a grim spectator to the whole ordeal, next to a couple of vacuum cleaners that had presumably failed to stand up to the task (one of which was one of those pansy hand-held Dirt Devil things, confirming my suspicions that this pub is actually being run by fucking monkeys).

"You alright Ed?"
"You can stand under my umbrella, ella, ella, eh, eh, eh..." Eddie mumbled, completely oblivious that I had already taken up his offer. For all that Eddie claims popular culture has no effect on him, a combination of a catchy hook and a relevant situation meant that my time under Eddie's umbrella (ella, ella) featured Eddie as an acapella musical accompaniment. Which was great, if the only piece of music you like is the chorus of current chart whirlwind Umbrella (ella, ella), which (eh, eh, eh) can become (you can stand under mah) grating (um-bah-rella) after a while (ella, ella). "...Sorry mate, did you say something?"
"Yeah, you alright?"
"Yeah, yeah.... ella, ella, ella..."

Before Eddie could get to the bridge, the situation went from bad to worse as the bowls crowd turned up - they had been promised a pitch in exchange for their business for the day, and they probably hadn't expected to see some sort of paddling pool waiting for them. Roy took one look at the situation, beckoned Henry into a corner and had a word, his pet gorilla looking on in disgust. The rest of the bowls players decided it'd be best to just get on with it. The jack was thrown, their trousers rolled up, and it was game on in the lake.

I began to wonder what other job puts people in this situation, as I stood next to a six-foot-something, white, male tribute act to Rihanna, watching pensioners attempt to roll weighted balls through seven inches of water towards a moving, floating obstacle. The jack remained at the surface, rendering the whole game completely and utterly fucking useless; something the bowls team were surprisingly slow to notice. I got the feeling they persisted with their entirely pointless game to humour Henry (apart from Roy they're generally a nice bunch), but after several attempts at this ridiculous farce they soon grew weary of it. A game of bowls where the jack moves - when the whole point is to get the bowl as close as you can to the jack, a pointless exercise if the jack's position varies of its own accord - is akin to a game of football where the goalposts move, or a game of ping-pong where a gigantic man grabs the paddle off you mid-game, kicks you to the floor and beats you to death with it (at least that's certainly what it felt like to watch these horrendous matches in progress).

As tempers escalated around the corner, Eddie and I decided to go and see how Henry was fairing against Roy and his missus, if only to protect Henry from being torn apart by Slaphead McGee and his silverback spouse.

"This is absolutely out of order, Ginn."
"What? I offered you something better than the village green, and here it is. Just because it's a bit waterlogged..." Henry has several bad habits, but by far his worst is his absolute inability to admit fault. Even when it's three inches deep and he's standing in it.
"A bit waterlogged!?" interjected Kong, beating her chest and snorting. "The village green is wet but it's nothing compared to this."
"We provided a solution." Henry was absolutely intent on digging himself a particularly watery grave on this one. As we stood in the runway - which due to the cover of darkness and smell of stale water had all the appeal of a sewer.
"What solution?" began Roy, scratching his wig. "What solution have you provided Henry? Where can we play? We lost the village green to a bunch of fucking hippies and we can't play here." By 'hippies', he means some of the Women's Institute had decided to set up a gazebo and have a picnic. Fucking hippies indeed.
"Of course you can." And here comes another of Henry's faults; his insistence that everything is fine and dandy when the evidence to the contrary is both abundant and soaking through his shoes. "The car park -"
"It's slanted and covered in gravel. This is bowls."
"Alright," bellowed Henry, at this point greatly angered by the insolence of the bowls players, "well how about the fucking roof then?" How dare those people come down here, demanding a service we said we'd provide! The bloody cheek of it! Infuriated by the apparently absurd demands laid down by the bowls players, Henry began to do something extremely silly; he put his cigarette out on the sole of his shoe, put the butt in his shirt pocket (this is another one of his habits that drives me absolutely berserk) and began to scale the roof of the runway, Roy and his wife looking on in shock (with a hint of melancholy in Roy's wife's eyes, presumably as she reminisced about her trip to New York all those years ago).

"Henry," called Eddie, attempting to coax him down from the roof as if he were about to jump into a small watery heap at any minute. "This is silly, get down from there."
"No, they can play up here - we've provided a solution. That's what you wanted, isn't it Roy?" cackled Henry with more than a hint of madness in his eye. I felt bad for Henry, who had obviously been driven so completely round the twist by the bad weather and lack of sleep (due to his seemingly week-long mission to find all the training grounds in the UK and rob them of their astroturf).
"Get down from there, you silly bastard," shouted Roy.
"No. You can quite easily play up here. I'll go and get a ladder, and -" Snap. Henry didn't actually say "snap", that was just the sound his leg made as the roof split like a bit of wet newspaper and he came tumbling to the floor with a sickening thud, his shin sending out an absolutely appalling "crack" sound, barely muffled by the thin layer of skin and flesh, like somebody snapping a branch wrapped in beef.

Eddie ran inside and called the emergency services as I got to work propping Henry's head above the the water with a crate. I looked down to see his left leg with two bends in it where there had previously only been one (we often forget that Henry isn't a young man anymore, and as such is particularly vulnerable to eight-foot drops onto concrete, even with a thin layer of astroturf and a few inches of water to break his fall). The bowls players slowly filed out of the runway, seemingly disappointed by the fact our landlord isn't the Iron Man; Roy turned to look at us with such inexpressible rage in him that he did the only thing he could in such a situation; removed his wig, stamped the living shit out of it, and then topped it all off by kicking it into our lake, turning his back on it as what little sunlight made it through the clouds bounced off his gleaming cranium. The lifeless lump of lanky brown nylon began drifting calmly like a dead yeti in a lake as Eddie came running back out.

"Ambulance'll be here in a - what the fuck, is that a rat?"

As the ambulance was summoned, we all had to wait for it as Henry suffered his final indignity. His clothing soaked, his leg evidently in a tremendous amount of pain, and having just suffered a severe embarrassment for both himself personally, the pub and the company, Henry was left with his one remaining arm (the other holding his leg) to bat off the advances of Roy's wig, which was floating very close to his face. I saw what appeared to be some sort of ogreish beaverskin make its advances on my manager as he lay writhing in a flooded, underground, makeshift bowls pitch (after he had just fallen through the roof and broken his leg) with Eddie still humming a few bars of Umbrella in the background, I soon realized the next few weeks would perhaps be a little out of sorts. Even by our standards.