A Beautiful Game

Just watching the final of The Masters snooker on the Beeb. As my late friend John used to say when we were playing down at his dad's workingmen's club: it's an insanely difficult game to play even remotely well. I was taught to play the game - along with the beautiful billiards - by my family: my maternal grandfather in particular. The Southalls had a six-foot slate-bed tabletop snooker table that was always wheeled out at Xmas, when all the men in the family would play all evening after the Christmas lunch and sundry afters were dispensed with, and were replaced with snooker, beer and tobacco for the rest of the night.

I was allowed into that fraternity from about the age of nine or ten, thence to participate into my early teens. I even had my first taste of bitter beer on one such festive evening, which I have to say I loathed at the time: how times and tastes change! My fondest memories of those evenings remain my grandfather introducing me to the elegant subtleties of the game of  billiards: a game so stripped bare of fripperies, so spare in its rules, but oh, so pretty in its apparent simplicity: it is to snooker as the game of go is to chess; subtleties of spatial instinct versus combinatorial analytics. Zen versus the rest.