And after executing a beautifully weighted backhander which, as if with a mind of its own, elegantly traversed the grass and then slid gracefully in to take shot, I thought about what a great game bowls is. As you do.

It is a game for the sportsperson - a pursuit requiring enormous skill. It demands precision and endurance and provides an opportunity to display and appreciate a type of excellence entirely removed from the ordinary, more mundane types of activities that so generally take up so much of your time. Like, say, driving a motor vehicle.

(Yes, we will shortly discuss the Supercars...)

Bowls has not always been the civilised, genteel sport of its present incarnation. Obviously people have been pegging round objects at some form of target since we developed the ability to pick stuff up and throw it, and there are endless ancient forms of the game.

A fairly modern variety involved the plundering Barbarians victoriously playing a leisurely form of the sport in which the severed heads of their opponents were rolled at targets across the corpse-strewn European battlefields.

Which is as good a point as any to get into how bowls at some point deviated from its equivalents such as the Italian Bocce and the French Boules. Those games are played with regular balls on uneven terrain.

Bowls, on the other hand, came to be played on a very flat surface and it is the balls themselves that are wonky.

The story of the origin of the splinter goes that the Duke of Suffolk, playing in 1522, attempted what you'd have to presume was a very early form of 'the drive' which resulted in his wooden bowl being split in two.

Stuck for a replacement, he ordered the sawing off of the knob of his stairway bannister. The flattened part of the globe meant that the new 'bowl' rolled in a curve, which the Duke then utilised to thoroughly demolish his opponent.

Thus, reportedly, 'bias' in bowling began.

Early bias involved somehow injecting something heavy into one side of your (probably wooden) bowl and has evolved from there to our current situation where the bowls are made from hard plastic composites and the bias is created by the shape of the bowl itself.

It has not been an uncontroversial path. Early regulations in modern bowl manufacture required fairly strict conformity as to the degree of bias.

This changed in 1988 with the introduction of the World Biased Bowls Rules. The new rules allowed, for the first time, 'narrow biased bowls' which have since been decried by purists as a blight on the game.

Their complaint is, perhaps, not without foundation. I, for one, much prefer the sweep of an old-school 'classic-biased' bowl sidling in from the wings rather than the arc of these newer, straight-on things.

And the argument can certainly be made that the older 'wider' game was better, but, each to their own I suppose ...

Regardless of bias, lawn bowls has featured in every Commonwealth Games since the first Games in 1930.

You know something that doesn't get a guernsey at the Commonwealth Games?

Driving a car. That's because driving is not a sport.

Supercars ... why?

Maitland's eastern suburb of Newcastle has been copping this event on an annual basis for three years now and the supposed benefits of hosting this thing just don't really seem to stack up for most.

Between the set-up, the race itself and the pull-down, that end of the town is virtually shut down for weeks. It's a right royal pain in the arse for residents and shopkeepers alike - and for what? The promotion of Newcastle?

Watching the coverage on the box it was difficult to discern the location of the race at all, only that this was not Formula 1 and we were definitely not in Monte Carlo.

Visitors to Newcastle would find a city whose infrastructure has been hamstrung by all things Supercar.

Light rail to the beach? Nope, sorry. Hardly Newcastle at its best.

I had a customer this week who'd been and was telling me how great it was.

"Maybe they should hold it in Lorn next year?" I suggested.

She was not at all enthusiastic.

Newcastle Mayor Nuatali Nelmes declared the weekend a "success", in the process cherry-picking a handful of businesses who had reported "favourable business".

"Favourable"?

A situation of general exodus of businesses because the conditions are intolerable and the best, most exciting, zesty, sell-this-event word you can come up with for describing the takings of those that remained is "favourable"?

Says it all really.

Speaking of saying it all - the thing finished with one of the drivers performing an endless, relentless sequence of doughnut burnouts over the "Newcastle" painted in white on the road past the finish line, covering it in burnt rubber.

Pretty much emblematic of the whole thing I thought.

You want a motor race?

Bring back the hill-climb. Now there was an event that was iconically Novocastrian, and it had character.