Balham Bowling Club

It may be way down south, miles from anywhere but the Balham Bowling Club is a great pub. It’s pouring with rain and I had to cut an epic breakfast at Little Georgia on Broadway Market with N.I.C.N.M* short as the night before I had the stupid idea that Sunday lunch at the B.B.C was a good idea even though it meant trekking down from Bethnal Green in monumentally shit weather. And just as I get there I get a call saying that my friends are all still at home eating gluten free pancakes, that’s bloody great. So out of 8 people I’m the only one here, what a loser! Not to worry though this place is just great, there’s nowhere quite like it. It’s decorated in a theme somewhere between an old school and a sports club, like a set from the History Boys with gaudy furniture and tapestries, basically one giant junk shop neatly arranged. There are billiard tables and Chesterfield couches and big rooms with lots of nooks and crannies to sit in. Only thing is it’s not very cosy but at least it’s not crowded.

*N.I.C.N.M (Name I Can Not Mention) was like my best friend for about 6 months. After knowing him for 2 months I moved into a spare room in his house, this turned out to be a mistake. It came to light that N.I.C.N.M is a hybrid between the character in American Psycho and Julia Roberts’ husband in Sleeping with the Enemy. You get the idea. Freakishly anal he would label all the shelves in the kitchen with a dynamo, things like “small cups” plates and bowls” cereal bowls”, large plates” I always thought at the very least plates and large plates and bowls and cereal bowls should be in the same cupboards, anyway N.I.C.N.M thought otherwise. There was one shelf marked “glasses” which was always empty so I put mugs in there as there wasn’t enough room in the “mugs” shelf. He came up to me one day saying that ‘Adam (our other housemate) was fucking with his head putting things in the wrong places’, when I confessed it was me he (in all seriousness) told me how disappointed he was in me so I pointed out we didn’t own any glasses. The next day he bought one single glass and put it on the shelf. He had turned the garage into his personal gym decorated with pictures of Cindy Crawford in a bathing suit in the early 90′s and listened to Mariah Carey really loud whilst lifting weights and then obsessively recorded his reps on a board on the wall. He had bizarrely neat hand writing. He also used to collect anything with a rainbow pattern this included spending £7 on a rainbow shaped eraser he bought of ebay. He would keep all his shirts in the order of the rainbow on coathangers in various shades, again following the colours of the rainbow. Nothing got N.I.C.N.M more excited than a new shade to add to his collection. He also loved Usher and had a gay pet parrot (which like N.I.C.N.M hated girls) which was the most pointless pet in the world as all it did was shreak and shit everywhere.