Being Half-Asleep With the Snooker on and the Resulting Epiphany.

I woke up, showered, brushed my teeth, got dressed, walked down the stairs in a fashion that would be familiar to people who've acquired badly-programmed robotic legs, sat on the sofa, switched on the television and sat there feeling like my skull was filled with foam.

20 minutes later, I discovered I was watching the snooker with a facial expression usually seen at car accidents.

There’s a certain clarity when your brain hasn’t quite switched on - that bleary-eyed moment after your first cup of tea, but before you get punched in the forehead by the lucid prospect of getting on with work or having to speak to another human being. It’s like a regression to when we were five years old and were able to avoid the trappings of political correctness; days when it was perfectly normal to wonder why that person looked like a cabbage-patch doll before it was explained to us that they had Down’s Syndrome.

And with this naive clarity, I looked at the impossible situation on the screen in front of me and thought: ‘?’
I mean, how on earth can we label these people athletes when they move at the same pace as last-night’s sandwich through my colon? I sat there completely bemused at this thought, which then did its usual thing and splayed itself through infinite variables until I could make sense of the whole spectacle. And by ‘making sense’ of it, I mean that I could understand the complete stupidity of it.

Don’t think for a second that I’m dismissing the skill that these ‘athletes’ have in abundance. I’ve played snooker on many occasions, and through the keen understanding of potential/kinetic energy, a fantastic grasp of spatial awareness and beautiful fingertip dexterity, I’ve managed to hit several people in the groin with the cue-ball. I’m as naturally predisposed to snooker as I am getting through a sexual episode without thinking about how long it’ll be before I can audibly fart.
The fact that these people have such skill is precisely what spins-me-out. Because they’ve used their unique – and quite brilliant – skill to whack a ball into another ball with the tip of a beautifully-crafted stick that’s lightly guided by their chin-cleft and strategically placed knuckles, until one ball goes ‘plop’ into a small hole. And that’s it. That’s the point of the whole thing.

And to help provide the best-possible spectacle, the game is played on a table made from perfectly-milled slate that sits under a pre-heated fine-weight cloth that’s produced with such fine tolerances that it makes some silk seem a bit tardy. The balls themselves are made from a particular form of Phenol Formaldehyde Resin that has a chemical composition so complicated that the molecular structure makes the London tube-map look like the front cover of a minimalist coffee-table book. Then there’s the beautifully carved setting / legs and the wooden cues that have been crafted so well that each could quite easily be pushed through your solar plexus without you noticing.

All to make a ball go ‘plop’.

Snooker is therefore my new poster-boy for the wasteful word we live in. It’s a perfect analogy for how we take incredible amounts of knowledge, skill, scientific thought and energy to produce things that are flamboyantly stupid.

And as I look around me at the clutter on my table, flamboyant stupidity is everywhere. Just look at some of the items on your desk / coffee table / mantelpiece and think of the amount of effort, thought and scientific brilliance that has brought you the mundane and relatively useless items before you.

As a hands-on example of this immense ridiculousness, take a look at my cup. My tea-stained and reliable drinking receptacle that has served me countless numbers of brews, quantifiable by the large ‘21^st Birthday’ print slapped on the side (complete with ribbon and confetti).

To make this item, raw materials have to be mined from the earth and transported by people driving around large trucks, who then dump it onto large conveyor belts that whisk it through a number of purifying processes in a factory. Other chemicals are added to make the ceramic strong, at which point chemical dyes are added to produce the required colour. The still malleable ceramic is then shaped via numerous robotic machines and mills, and the handle is manually added by someone with a meticulous attention to detail, before being fired in a computer controlled oven until it hardens. A chemical glaze is then sprayed over the cup, before it is re-fired and left to cool in preparation for the transfers to be added into the side. The transfers themselves are chemical-dyes printed on top of a flexible polymer, which stick to the side of the cup when it’s – again – fired in the oven. At the end of this, the cup is packaged, logistics are sorted and the cup finds its way via rail, sea and air to the shop which it was bought from. Now, if you think that each of the above processes has an immense set of sub-processes (the prospector who went through a particular geological education to find the raw materials, the amount of engineering in the trucks & machines, the computers that control the factory processes, the raw materials used in the computer motherboards, the programming etc etc), the song-and-dance becomes a massive and overcomplicated headfuck. For a cup.

Something that does the same job as half a coconut.

Actually, I take that back. Half a coconut wouldn’t shatter if I dropped it on the floor, nor does it inherently transfer the heat from boiling water to my unsuspecting fingers.

And if you look at each item sat on your desk / table / mantelpiece, you can follow the path of its discovery & manufacture and see just how much better this world would be if we used that brilliance, those resources and the crazy amounts of energy to make the world a better place.

Damn, I just noticed a bottle of shower gel and almost had a panic attack.

But anyway, I sat there looking at the screen, pondering this stupidity with concern on my face. Then I heard the ref say ‘touching ball’. I edged forward on my seat, thinking ‘how the hell is he going to get out of this one?

I was enjoying the game immensely. Mark Williams to win.

Dee.