We went bowling today. It was the kids’ first time bowling, and I can’t say I’m an expert either – I think I’ve tried bowling maybe 5 times in my life.

I would have thought that Ingrid is too young for this (not to mention Adrian). But Ingrid mentioned at some point that one of her classmates had had his birthday party at a bowling alley. It turns out that many bowling alleys do kids’ birthday parties. The thing that makes it work is a technical fix: the kids get bumpers that make sure the ball doesn’t end up in the gutter.

So we tried bowling, and it worked out quite well. Adrian of course didn’t really understand any of it but was just happy to be on the show. He liked the balls with all their pretty colours, and wearing shoes that looked just like mine.

But he did try some bowling too. First with a ramp, but then he chose to play like us, with muscle power only. But his muscle power is pretty limited, especially when it comes to explosive strength… Once his ball actually ran out of speed completely and got stuck, close to the end of the lane, and a staff member had to go and poke it out. The best technique we came up with for him had him standing with his feet wide apart, with the ball on the floor in front of him, and then pushing the ball sort of kind of roughly straight ahead. Maybe.

Ingrid managed quite well and enjoyed it. She couldn’t roll the ball straight, so after a while she gave up and just planned her zig-zags. “If I zig to the left then it will probably bounce twice against the bumpers and end up at the left again,” that kind of calculations. It worked surprisingly well.

In the end we were all quite evenly matched, actually. Eric and I are both beginners with pretty unpredictable results: anything from total misses to the occasional strike. Ingrid had the bumpers to help her out. Adrian also had the bumpers and got very random results to begin with. But when he tired, Eric and I took turns bowling for him as well, when his turn came up, which further evened out the results.