You’re eight shots ahead, your opponent is clearly demoralised. Yet within four ends they’ve caught up, are 17-16 ahead and get a four on the next end to win.

What happened?

What happened was that you empathised so much with their feelings of demoralisation that you eased up and let your empathy for their despair offer them the human gift of comfort.

In other words, you didn’t want to see them suffer.

Well, not all of you. The bowler in you still wanted to win the match. But the human being couldn’t bear the guilt of deliberately inflicting suffering on another human being.

Now imagine this: as the owner of an online bowls store, you see a competitor going out of business and running a closing down sale. He’s offering 20% off everything in his web store until all his stock is sold.

Yet you know that even after applying the 20%, customers would get a better deal if they bought the same gear from your web shop – which isn’t closing down!  So do you go out there and press home Bush Hill Bowls’ advantage, flooding social media and your mailing lists with the facts of the matter?

Or does your humanity get the better of your business instinct, and you end up making your point in an obscure blog somewhere where no-one will read it?

A doting father was watching his daughter in a County match. She was bowling beautifully, her concentration was full-on and she was putting bowl after bowl on the jack.

One of the spectators asked the father: “She’s amazing: what size bowls does she bowl with – I thought she used bigger ones?”

“They’re a size 2 now”, said Dad “though at the start of the season, before all her competition rounds, they were a size 7!”

(This is a true eavesdropping. If you’ve got one to share from rinkside or bar, let us know: there’s a £10 shop voucher for every one we publish.)