Boccia at the kitchen table

I support four adults with learning disabilities in a shared house in Bristol, and a good part of my job is finding things to do that are genuinely ours and not borrowed off a children's shelf. People outside this work underestimate how much that matters. Adults know when they have been handed a toy, and they are right to mind.

We already play boccia at the club at the leisure centre, but club night is once a fortnight and it is two buses away. What we wanted was the same game, at home, on a wet Thursday in February.

The mini set is thirteen handsewn balls, forty millimetres across and about thirty grams each, in a canvas bag. It plays on the kitchen table once you push the plates back, or on the rug. It looks and feels like the real game, only smaller, and that is the entire reason it works in this house.

The size helped in a way I had not predicted. The balls are light enough that Martin, who has a tremor and gets frustrated with himself quickly, can throw accurately for a whole game without his arm tiring. He wins most weeks now. He has also started explaining the rules to visitors, which he has never done with anything else we own.

We play two or three evenings a week and the bag lives on the shelf by the front door with the keys.

One warning. Forty millimetre balls in dark colours roll under furniture and stay there. We lost a red one for three weeks. If there is a gap under your sofa, count them back into the bag every time.