On the starting blocks
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 ...