2023 has been a year, hasn’t it? I’m going to be posting some of these reminiscing blog things up until Christmas, maybe after, depending on how good/bad my memory is.
Christmas meant a lot to me back then. A lot more than it does now. Maybe for the social element where I met parts of my family I would never normally see. Maybe because I got stuff? Maybe because I finally managed to meet the actual genuine Santa Claus himself…
Let’s go back to 1985, and one of the first Christmases I have memory of. I was, and still am, a big fan of snooker. I watch it whenever it’s on the box, and even back then, I remembered some of the names, and I must have been capitaved by that year’s World Championship where Dennis Taylor narrowly beat Steve Davis on the black ball. Possibly
It would come as no surprise that I’d eventually want a snooker table of my own. Imagine my delight when Santa somehow managed to squeeze an entire table down the chimney without managing to disturb the gas fire. He even took the time to spot the balls and rack the reds up! Christmases were so magical back then.
This was the first major present I remember. There was the Fisher Price record player the year before, but getting a blog out of that would have been a struggle, seeing as I was 5.
There are many photos of me playing on this snooker table. I loved it. There’s even more than one embarrassing photo where I’m actually wearing a waistcoat thing, just like a snooker player. I don’t think this has even been scanned in, thankfully. Now, for those of you paying attention to the above photo, the cushions were simple strips of black foam.
One day, I broke it. I wanted it to be like the snooker tables on the telly. In my infinite wisdom, I peeled the cushions off off, to reveal the lovely green, fully solid, plastic cushions. Instead of the ball bouncing cleanly, it just made a “thunk” sound and stopped there. A makeshift solution was found by Daddykins – he rushed out and bought some foam draught excluder from the nearby hardware shop. Sadly, the adhesive would weaken over time, cause it to droop, or come off entirely.
Due to its size, I was only allowed it in the centre of the front room during “snooker season”, whatever that was, meaning it lived behind the sofa, making it impossible to play.
Over the years, the cloth had started to degrade, the plasic balls went missing or got chipped, and although I do remember it getting set up in the kitchen for a short amount of time. as I remember programming a pretty crude scoring system for it on my ZX Spectrum. Ahhh, happy days!