Pocket billiards, snooker on a full-size table, what difference? And you wonder why players have wet lips and heavy eyelids.As for those of us who watch it in a coloured-ball-induced trance at all hours, starting mid-morning and going on until midnight and beyond, the word addiction catches nothing of the compulsion Torpor is what we seek Annihilation of the will. Partly it’s that oblong of green, set slightly askew like a meadow seen from a lurching helicopter Anything that colour is hypnotic Cricket pitch, grass tennis court, bowling green. Memories of the playing fields of our childhoods, or maybe just anticipations of the plot in which we’ll soon be laid. It feels like death, certainly.The brain atrophied and all the elements usually associated with life ­ excitement, variety, surprise ­ withdrawn as though for ever.

Just self-disgust left, double self-disgust since it’s not even you doing the obsessive chalking Merely a secondary obsessive, you are An onanist’s onanist. And the object of your attention, if you can call it that, a boy a quarter of your age with a silly voice and no vitality in his skin. All bled away into the pockets.Snooker is a sentimental game, too, like everything that men do to murder time. So no world championship ever goes by without our having to recall world championships past The first ever televised 147 The fastest game The slowest game Remember 1982? Alex Higgins’s year.

My year, as well, in a manner of speaking.It was Higgins who gave me the title for my first novel. There he was on the screen again, looking, as always, like someone who had been taken apart by a surgeon who could not remember how to reassemble him, staging yet another of those famous comebacks from the brink of damnation, and there was the commentator with the pool-hall throat, whispering “Alex Higgins, past-master of the art of coming from behind”, and suddenly it all came back to me ­ how I heard the title rattling at the bars of my late-night stupor. Coming From Behind? Did someone just say Coming From Behind? Perfect Thank you Alex. If I hadn’t been such a snob I’d have dedicated the novel to him, instead of to Matthew Arnold or Cardinal Newman or whoever.But Alex was my secret, back then. Some things, when you are young, you don’t want the world to know Such as the company you keep All the worst people rooted for Alex The People’s Champion, for God’s sake.