OPINION
I have a mystery for you, and who doesn’t love a mystery? Furthermore the mystery involves a fat sum of money, and who doesn’t love a fat sum of money? It also involves a bowls shoe.
The game of bowls requires a little stooping, some gentle walking and a lot of standing around, so why one needs a special shoe to do it in, I cannot tell you. Perhaps it has something to do with the young people who have now hijacked the game and turned it into a professional sport. Before they arrived, bowls was merely the sport you played when you were too old to play a sport. (One of our local clubs is sponsored by a firm of funeral directors.)
When I was a kid, the village bowling green lay just beyond the boundary of the cricket field, and formed a tempting target for big hitters. When a six landed amidst them, the old bowls players would fall to the floor in concentric circles like those pine trees in Siberia when the meteorite struck. But they never seemed to resent the bombardment, perhaps because they too had once been cricketers, and they saw it as turn and turn about, part of the natural order of things.
Anyway, the mystery features a character whom I shall call Dave. Dave worked in a sports shop. One afternoon a customer came in asking after - have you guessed it? - a pair of bowls shoes. “Why yes, of course,” said Dave, and he invited the gentleman to sit while Dave measured his stockinged foot with one of those things like a metal snow shoe. This was a proper shop.