Wouldn't you just love to have been at the meeting, probably at the Riccarton, where Currie Curling Club members, David Cunningham of Harlaw, Robert Palmer the local dominie, and Dr Somerville, the minister at Currie Kirk, first got together and said to themselves, "Let's invent a skills-based game to judge who is the best individual curler on a given day!" Out of that meeting came the Points game that we know and love to this day. Hopefully, Dr Somerville cleared a wee path for the other two so that they were looking down and not up on Friday 16th January at the latest iteration of the C&B Points Competition.
Eleven club members gathered at Curl Edinburgh after the Friday night league game, and after having enjoyed excellent refreshment, courtesy of Embo Catering. Eleven, it turns out, is a good number for a points competition on two sheets of ice, as it enabled us to get seven of the ten points disciplines covered. We all had four attempts each at striking, inwicking, drawing, guarding, chap and lie, wick in and raising. By far the most difficult of the disciplines turned out to inwicking where, out of a possible total number of points on offer of 88 (2 points per attempt), the combined group only managed to score 13 points! Conversely, the easiest discipline was striking where the total score was 60/88. We managed to get pass marks at drawing (55/88), and for the rest, the group was middle of the road - high 30s to low 40s.
Individually there were some good scores. In the overall competition, Robin scored 35 points for 3rd place, Andrew 36 points for runner-up spot, but the overall winner with a commendable 37 points was Niall Gunn. The women's competition ended up in a tie with Kerry and Jennifer both scoring 32 points; they agreed to share the trophy this year, rather than have a play-off.
Great fun was had by one and all and there was a sociable gather-up of competitors in the bar afterwards, where Club President Kerry Clark announced the scores and congratulated the winners.
