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My daughter is approaching a month old, so it was time for her to learn about her destiny. This morning I took her down to the basement to find out about the family business and the secrets of it that will be passed down to her when I am gone. It was time for her to find out about self-playing snooker. It’s important, in order for to be a pure player of this game when the time comes, that she is not made aware of the blasphemy that is two-player snooker, so I wanted to acquaint her with what I was doing as soon as possible. She can’t really distinguish colours or move her body with any actual intent or understand angles or mathematics or hold a cue or stand up or reach the snooker board. But I expect Mozart was sat at a piano at a month old and even if he wasn’t, self-playing snooker is a lot harder than writing operas and stuff.
Yes there was a risk that an errant shot might send a snooker ball flying off the table and injure my baby, but we have to take risks in this life and anyway I hid her behind the sofa where she was probably safe. Sure she couldn’t see from there, but that’s the whole point of self-playing snooker. It’s an audio adventure and one that is made all the better if you don’t understand snooker or language.
And Phoebe, I suppose, is the battle between the two players made human. Me1 and Me2 are the two sides of me struggling between their different natures and fighting for predominance. Me1 the smug family man, Me2 the renegade party animal, but ultimately slightly tragic loner. They are fighting for supremacy and perhaps Phoebe’s existence will cause the destruction of Me2. Or will it sap Me1’s powers as a player? This eternal battle against our self will continue for as long as humanity exists. though maybe not always in self-playing snooker form.
You can get a taste of how the new development is going to affect the play in Frame 56. It’s been very hard to justify the time to play snooker against myself in the last month, but I am glad that some of Me2 survives, if only on the green board, and I can still act irresponsibly.
I was a bit tired today. In the old days I could sleep in a bit after a tour show and also relax when I got home, but I now have to come back and help with the baby (to make up for several hours absence) and there’s usually one or two disturbances in the night. I accidentally shaved off both my sideburns. They’d got a bit bushy and I was meaning to trim them with my shaver, but I didn’t put the guard down properly and by the time I realised both side burns were gone (though even if I had noticed on the first one, I’d have been forced to make the other one match - I’ve had enough comedy from weird facial hair). Absolutely no one noticed the change though, not even my wife, though she has other more pressing concerns these days than looking at the side part of my face (she used to love doing that). Phoebe was unperturbed by the difference too. I remembered when I was 5 or 6 and my mum had come to pick me up from school having just had quite a radical hairdo and I ran into the toilets and hid, crying. I was 28 years old. I know I said I was 5 or 6 at the start of the sentence, but that was just to make the fact I was actually 28 more of a surprise. Poor my mum. She had to go back to her old hairdo because of my fear and disapproval. How our parents suffer. But we will suffer in turn with our kids, so it all comes out in the wash and blow dry.
Tonight I was in Crawley and wondered if the tour list had been put together by a poet, Salford and Chorley, then Brighton and Crawley. Perhaps there is a tour in rhyming couplets of gigs. As much as it was fun to have an incident in this town’s rhyme-sake I still prefer it if the show runs smoothly, which it did tonight (although a man on the front row spilled his pint just before the first half began which delayed things slightly). And I was glad to say that the people of Crawley were unimpressed by my story because the first Iguanadon had been discovered in their town and Daley Thompson had trained for 2 Olympics there. For the first time since the baby was born I felt tired on stage and felt there was a very minor slurring delay on some of the routines. It’s great when they come out crisp and sharp, but some days your mouth and brain don’t play ball. Not that I think anyone else but me would have noticed the difference. It was an OK show in spite of this, though glad to have Giles there to drive me home, even though this is a relatively local gig.
