A song that I haven't heard in ages - If You Could Read My Mind by Stars On 54 - plays on the video screens of the bowling alley.

Ooooh believe me, you don't want to read my mind here. Somehow I just don't seem to have good dates when I'm bowling. Granted there have been only two such dates (and indeed I've only ever gone bowling twice), the first being a shipwreck and the second merely a (largely anticipated) waste of time. I have to admit, though, the game itself was pretty good (if ridiculously expensive at this place), and the second game of this session saw me get my best score so far. But although I gave the rest of the evening my best effort, there came a point when I just accepted that I'd wasted a month on what was the relationship equivalent of an 80 knot headwind and stopped bothering.

If you could read my mind at that point, you would have seen a Jackie Chan movie playing for entertainment value after I'd switched to dating autopilot.

(A hint for when you're out with someone who's looking for "any excuse, anything, there must be something wrong about him, anything!" so that they don't need to actually proceed with the messiness of getting involved with someone. Tell her (or, for the ladies, him) something that on face value appears to be unusual and "out there" about yourself, and refuse to explain the context of it. Then let her (him) stew on it while Jackie struts his stuff. When someone is desperately searching for something negative anyway (and by the gods they'd find it even if it was George Clooney (Halle Berry) sitting on your side of the table), you may as well serve it up to them so that you can get an early night. Granted I discovered this by accident rather than design but hey, you may as well benefit from it.)
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Edit April 2024: This was a date with the veterinarian who identified the Dusky Moorhens from a few shots back. Lest the wrong impression be obtained from the above, she was a decent person. However she was considerably, shall we say, "damaged" from past life experiences which she had vaguely hinted at but hadn't discussed. When I wrote the above I was just So. Utterly. Over. endless bad dates, which were due in part to me (at that time at least) attracting the wrong type of people for reasons that I have since lived and learned from. I do hope that things eventually worked out for her, even though I no longer remember her name and barely remember what she looked like.

Speaking of things that pass into history (as I was, at least tangentially), imagine all the time and effort that went into creating this bowling alley. The manufacture of the equipment, its installation, the precision laying of the floorboards. None of this now exists, except as photographic memories. At the start of 2023 the entire centre was demolished to allow construction of a new centre and residential tower.

It's Sydney. Who cares how good a building is, if there's a buck to be made tearing it down and building a new one, let's do it!