I’m hanging outmydirty linen
Let’s start with sorry. In January, I mentioned buying dinner from a streetside caravan in Hokitika run by a husband and wife. The wife was Thai and I described her husband as Russian. I can’t remember why I had that impression, but I was wrong. He is German.
Ordinarily this might not have mattered greatly, but since the Russian invasion of Ukraine it has. The couple’s business has suffered because of my error and I can only apologise. So if any of the good people of Hokitika are in need of some fine Thai food, prepared and served by a hard-working couple, I would urge them to take themselves to the little caravan.
While I’m at it, I may as well make a clean break of everything, get it all off my chest and hang out my dirty linen. (Oh how many phrases we have for guilt. We are awash with it. It is the medium in which we swim.) Here goes: ladies and gentlemen, this week I have been watching snooker on television.
I know, I know. Life is short and to spend any of it watching snooker is to admit inadequacy. Of all the things on which I could have spent my time this week, from hunting pig to holding a garden party (both of which, according to Larkin, advance on death equally slowly) I chose to watch men I don’t know playing a game I don’t play. Yet I have been enthralled. Why?
Well, there’s the skill. Snooker’s hard. These men make it look easy. All they have is a stick, but they make the balls dance. They use the laws of physics to do things that seem physically impossible. They are geometricians on the hoof, surgeons of the table, masters of their art, and anything done with mastery, anything at all from butchery to bricklaying, is always good to watch.
In addition, snooker’s a contest and we men love a contest. We may live long, safe lives these days, but our genes remember that we fought to get here. And in the primitive core of the brain, we still thrill to the fight. Moreover, we remain tribal creatures, so the moment amatch starts I choose one player over the other, we become a tribe of two, his hopes become mine, and I amemotionally engaged. Thus, the contest becomes more than snooker. It becomes theatre.
Theatre arouses feelings in an audience by acting out a story with a beginning, amiddle and an end. The beginning in snooker is the ordered and peaceable arrangement of 21 balls. Then one character disrupts the order and suddenly there is chaos, a unique and complicated plot whose outcome we cannot foretell. It swings this way, and it swings that, until it ends with the restoration of order, the conflict resolved, the table cleared and one character ruling as king.
And it is all done according to a set of rules known to both watchers and watched. Thus, a closed world is created, predictable, ordered and reassuring, like a religious ritual.
And just as in church, the snooker audience sits in silence, dressed for the street, while the priests at the green baize altar go at it in a ritual costume of bow tie, waistcoat, black trousers, and shiny shoes. And they do it all with great seriousness. Here is a ritual that matters. Here is silent religious intensity.
The snooker, then, has echoes of everything from a Stone-Age stoush to mass at St Peter’s, via the theatre of Dionysus and the plays of Shakespeare. The wonder, perhaps, is not that I am transfixed, but that anybody isn’t.