Skittles: more than delicious colored candies

In our ongoing quest of culture-rustlin’ we joined a group of Nick’s co-workers to participate in the time-honored British pub game of skittles. This game has been played here as long as toothless pub-keeps have been pulling pints. Skittles is a precursor to 10-pin bowling, and involves rolling heavy, medium-sized wooden balls towards 9 wooden pins at the end of an alley. Only a few pubs around still have skittles alleys, because they take up a lot of space, they’re loud, and one can only imagine the liability of people hurling heavy wooden balls as the pints keep emptying.

By the end of the evening, after playing for 3 hours and getting to bowl 4 times, we understood why skittles was a dying game. You have to get your own balls, set the pins back up yourself, and keep score, and there’s just the one lane for a room that holds over 50 people. It quickly became clear that “playing” skittles is more about standing around with a pint talking than actually doing anything. It worked well when most of England’s pubs were quiet places where the neighborhood gathered to socialize and have a pint or two. Unfortunately, in today’s fast-paced, dog-eat-dog world of instant gratification, consumer-driven cell-phone relationships, the olde towne skittles lane(e) is going the way of the neighborhood milkman.

Let the record show that this blog does include actual cultural commentary.

Despite the thrilling competition, the night’s highlight was the ride home with Matt (a lifetime Brum resident) and a co-worker from India named Suds. Matt and Lauren both met Suds about a minute before getting into the car, where Suds’ first words were:

Suds (to us): “you are American, yes?”

Us: “yes”

Suds: “So, what do you find to be the biggest difference between people in America and people here?”

Us: “[Awkward silence] Oh, uh…well…I guess people are more formal here and slower to talk to strangers.”

Suds: “Yes! This is so true. In my country you can walk up to anyone at a train station and talk about the cricket scores. Here they look at you like you are crazy. What else?”

Us: “Hm…..well, people seem to be closer to their families. I think because they still live close to them, really, wherever they move in the country, so they can see them more often.”

Suds: “This is interesting what you say! Matt, is this true? Are you closer to your family and less friendly?”

Matt: “(laughing)…I don’t know, I’ve never been to America.”

Suds: “humm, yes, (back to us) Have you found that people don’t like you for being American? Personally, I really like America because we just signed a great nuclear treaty with them, but I wonder what others think.”
…

He just kept going - it was like being grilled on the Larry King Show! Suds was really digging deep for a near-stranger, and we were squirming under interrogation. He lives down the street so we are going to try to have him over for dinner sometime for more of his hard-hitting cultural dialogue!