On Snooker

When I was ten my parents bought a dilapidated house for cheap in Normandy, against their own better judgement and the advice of everyone they consulted. The place was a noble ruin, with a huge wild field to the front, an overrun vegetable garden fenced off by rusty chickenwire to the side, a well at the back, a frigid outside toilet, and, in the kitchen, a magnificently vast brick chimney with a fine wooden beam, which the owners had cupboarded off to prevent drafts. There was a basin in the kitchen, a small table and two chairs. My folks moved an old gramophone in, and a Victorian bed, and we played old 78s of Little Richard and Eartha Kitt after dinner and slept on mattresses among the sawdust and tins of paint.

At Christmas my grandparents and uncles came to stay, and we set out deckchairs by the fire in the sitting room, whose curlicued antique wood panels had been massacred bile-green. On Christmas Eve after dinner I retired to bed with my brother and sister while the adults wrapped presents and drank downstairs. Eventually, as we lay there waiting for sleep to fall upon us, a sound reached us from below, of banging around - a clinking and clunking sound - and at one point somebody shouted, "Oh ho ho ho - snooker!" It was clear: the grown-ups had bought us a snooker table, got wrecked, and cracked it out for a pre-Christmas game.

The next day when we crept down, our parents and other relatives in tow, with yesterday's fire turned to ash in the grate, there were gifts scattered around the tree and a not-mysterious table covered in a big sheet. "Don't look at it!", we were cautioned, "it's a surprise!" I dropped some of my breakfast near the table and bent down to pick it up, and upon bending down saw that the table had... pockets - and my mother snapped at me that we had been told not to look at the surprise, what was I doing? Eventually we were allowed to unveil the thing - feigning astonishment when, heavens above!, what a wonderful present!, it turned out to be, would you believe it!, a small pool table with narrow pockets and two gleaming cues, which just about fitted in the room: you had to raise your elbows so as to avoid banging the walls when striking. My father arranged the pool balls in a rough snooker configuration - spots for reds, and stripes for the colour balls - and henceforth we would spend many evenings having a bash at lining up a few pots. On long and boring summer days - my parents had refused to buy a television for the house - we would spend hours at the thing; it's a wonder I never really became much good at it. We played pool, tried trick shots, entertained visiting small children by whizzing the balls about. The table became dusty and torn, the cues blunted by over-use.

As we lived in France we knew nothing about the actual game of snooker, and I only watched a game when I came over to England for university, where I learnt quite quickly how infra dig and tragic the game was deemed to be. I played pool with friends in the union after lectures, perhaps impressing some with my ability to pot two balls in a row. I started watching the game a little after I had moved off campus - Ronnie O'Sullivan won the world championship that year, and I was extraordinarily drawn to his magnetic playing, and to the mythology of the man who, I read in the newspaper, had a murderer for a father. When O'Sullivan won the worlds, if I remember correctly, his father, who wasn't granted television rights in his prison cell, had the other prisoners tap out the match results on the bars of their cells. If that isn't correct I don't wish to look it up.

In my second year of university my grandmother had a fall - another one. She had had one a couple of years before, in my folks' house in Normandy, when she woke up for a pee in the night and, wandering along the darkened corridor in a daze, mistook the full moon beaming through a window in the stairwell for a lightbulb in the bathroom, and stepped out into the void, landing crumpled up three quarters of the way down. This new fall a few years later, as her mind was becoming cobwebbed, was felt by doctors and my family to be a dark event. As my autumn term drew to an end, my grandmother was transferred from A&E to a hospice. I went to visit her for a week when university broke up for Christmas. It was strange staying in her house all on my own, lighting fires with her coal, cooking food for myself in the gas oven in her tiny kitchen - a grown- up now, in the house I had visited almost every weekend as a child. Smoking cigarettes in her sitting-room, and even eating pizza there, felt like minor crimes. I slept on the makeshift bed in her dining-room that she had been sleeping on, as the unused rooms upstairs felt so Miss Havisham, and made a mess of crockery, books and clothes like a junkie. In the day I walked into the town centre and caught a coach to the village where her hospice was, and sat and chatted with her for the better part of the day.

I was alarmed when I first arrived. Nobody had brushed her hair, her toenails were jaundiced and overgrown, and as I came in she awoke in confusion, propped up on a wall of hospital pillows, looking quite demented and unlike herself. Eventually her normal spirits returned - in her later years my grandmother stopped giving a shit of any sort, and became all the more entertaining for it - but it was a blow to see her so ravaged then. I was aware of how frail and creaking she was; could feel the bones in her skinny wrist as I bent to kiss her; perhaps no-one had ever seemed so bodily to me. She had a bed right by a window giving out on countryside views, and every day that week the light in the sky right before sunset was of a quality to make you catch your breath - pallid, weak and strong at once, piercing through branches with a kind of bleak vigour.

As I sat with my grandmother she would drift in and out of sleep, waking for meals or to ask me how I was, what my favourite roast meal was, could I drive yet, did I have any girlfriends. A woman in the bed opposite her, looking like Liz Smith, would sometimes perk up and wave in our general direction; I would wave back politely, while my grandmother frowned at her and loudly stage-whispered to me, "Who's he?" Sometimes the old woman fell asleep, and my grandmother would point at her with a forkful of hospital chicken and ask a nurse, "Is he dead?"

When my grandmother fell asleep for long naps, I got fed up of reading my book in a hard chair at her side, and eventually adventured around the hospice, where I finally found the telly room - which was turned to the UK Snooker Championship, with some old sweetheart sitting there watching it in his dressing gown and pyjamas. I could let nurses know to fetch me when she woke up, and in any case had adjusted to her sleeping patterns - and so I spent a few hours every day watching the games there. The room was bare save for a small Christmas tree in a corner, decked with two or three pieces of gaudy tinsel, and there were one or two armchairs lined up against the walls, perhaps a beanbag. In between frames I would go and smoke a cigarette on the porch - I was trying to become a smoker back then, but it never really caught on with me.

The snooker caught the right balance for me - it was beautiful and enigmatic; there was a magic to the shot-making, the alternation of spin and stun; the rules and conventions were comforting. The culture of the game seemed completely alien but warm and inviting somehow. I loved the players' boring names: John Higgins, Mark Williams, Peter Ebdon. Ken Doherty. And then there was the brilliance of the play - watching someone like O'Sullivan compute the lay-out of the balls in a frame and set about picking them off, running his own white ball backwards and forwards at will, bidding it stop here and there, veritably stroking the coloured balls in with a slickness and grace that was mesmerising. I loved how snooker seemed to be a kind of chess puzzle for one, with added skill - with the right play you could keep your opponent away from the table almost forever, just standing at it yourself and working out the various combinations of shots required to clear all the balls away. A well-built snooker break was like a dizzying tennis rally except without an opponent hitting the ball back to you, and with pauses - no, that's not quite it.

The snooker felt like the right sort of communal viewing, too, for the sick and infirm and the visiting young. As I watched, various old geezers would dodder in and out, pushing their intravenous drip stands in front of them, and nod me a terse hello. They would sit there and fall asleep, or watch a few frames with glassy eyes before deciding, on lord knows what imperative - likely the panicky twitch of an impending bowel movement - to stand up and wander off again.

My grandmother was there for a few days after that. I can't remember where she or I spent Christmas that year. In the new year she was moved to an old people's home, protesting all the while that we should throw her body over a hedge instead. She died three years later.

It feels like an absurdity for someone like me to enjoy watching the snooker, and I recognise that - but my love for the game originally stemmed from childlike wonder, and the boredom of long summer days spent with my siblings; and at this time of the year when the white ball on my screen careens from the baize into a pack of reds with a smack while outside the December sky gathers itself for a courageous last display of lambent light before night falls like a blind - at these times I think back to my grandmother, rousing herself from a heavy sleep that took her back to 1953, murmuring wearily as she fights off the weight of her drowse, and I get up from my seat by the snooker to sit with her, hold her hand in mine, and snap a Rich Tea biscuit in half for her to dunk with trembling fingers.