Playing Pool in Gibraltar

Photo: "Skills Definition Magnifier" by Stuart Miles courtesy of www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net The only way to develop skills in anything, from potter to pianist to pool player, is to practise.  Stephen King, whose work I admire greatly, memorably said: "Talent is cheaper than table salt.  What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work." Okay, so I'm not sure how to quantify talent, and I'm not sure if as I've grown older I can regain that youthful confidence in my own talent I once had, but since pool is something I enjoy playing so much, I'm more than happy to put in the practise.  I've yet to take that quantum leap from practise matches to hard work, but as I reorganise my life - and we can't get away from the fact that if you are committed to something you have to make your life work round that thing and not the other way around - I am beginning to make time for more practise.  This week I played i...

Photo: "Pool Game" by Serge Bertasius Photography from www.freedigitalphotos.net   Thirty-five years is a long time.  Too long for keeping up with skills learnt in my mid-teens.  Still, I loved the sport and in the depths of the stress of family life and work, home and finance and all that modern, rat-race stuff, I needed to get back to something I loved doing. At the age of 14 or 15, a friend of mine invited me up to the local snooker hall where I lived in Medway.  It was the snooker hall upstairs from Burtons on Gillingham High Street - not the most salubrious place in town - but the place where I was introduced to a sport I was to grow to love.  For a fairly quiet lad, it was a bit of a venture out to me, but I quickly warmed to the place and found that snooker came easily.  That's not a boast, being good at snooker was very tough, but I got the hang of the game pretty quickly, and pretty quickly I was beating my mates.  I had the ability to ...