Nostalgia for snooker’s glory days
Forty or so years ago, when I was at university, my friends Richard, Terence, Harry and I would often go to the Oxford Union to play snooker. There were two immaculate snooker tables in a large room at the top of the building and almost no one ever went there except for us. Unfortunately, our enthusiasm was not matched by concomitant talent. On one occasion it took us 34 minutes to pot a single ball. At a certain point in that endless non-break, Terence had an easy pot to a distant hole. Saying ‘I was going to pot the ball, but instead I’m going to do this’, he hit the ball with such misapplied force that it leapt in the air, off the table altogether and very nearly out of the door. Our frames would take hours.
