Low life | 24 November 2016

Six months ago I bought a garden chair on eBay. When I went to the address to pick it up, the bloke drew thoughtfully on his fag and said did I want a child’s folding snooker table, balls, cues and a little brush for a tenner. At the time, my six-year-old grandson was watching a snooker championship on the television and keeping me up to date with the progress of Ronnie ‘the Rocket’ O’Sullivan, for whose lightning skill and slightly raffish persona he had developed an appreciation. ‘Absolutely,’ I said to the bloke, and we chucked the table in the back of the car as well.

The table measured four feet by two feet. The balls were half-size. When I leant over the table to cue, everything was in miniature. The geometry was the same, however. And the lightness of the balls and the shortness of the cue and the wobbliness of the table quickly became familiar. But I prefer pool to snooker. Pool is my game. I once worked as a care assistant in a halfway house for schizophrenics. Apart from tobacco and occasionally cider, all life and interest in the house revolved around a pool table in the carpeted sitting room. The fascination of cause and effect, of shifting geometry, and of the incredible vagaries in an individual’s luck, illustrated by a floodlit oblong of blue baize, sharpened these halfway people’s focus on reality better than anything else. For some, pool was their only form of communication or self-expression. I’d turn up for work, play pool for eight hours, then go home again. And I’d do the same the next day. In their sedated state, they were thoughtful and infinitely relaxed opponents. In time, playing against these largely silent, high-calibre players improved my game beyond all recognition. Pool became an obsession.