Snooker. I can't get enough of it. They make it look so easy - I used to play for twenty minutes without ever getting a ball anywhere near a pocket. Positional play? Let's not be silly.

It's causality at its most fundamental or rather, the kind of causality most easily grasped by humans - you hit something, it hits something else which hits something else. You move, stuff happens. It's physics explained to children. And yet the variety of it, the jaw-dropping skill, the almost superhuman perception of angles and space all turn it into a long, soothing meditation on the relationship between mind and matter, creative intelligence and ironclad determinism. In many respects it resembles chess, but where chess favours pure intelligence, snooker gets to grips with the physicality of things. The chess player is a tyrant over his pieces; the snooker player is constantly negotiating with his world, never fully in control, always trying to make up for an inch too long here, an inch too short there.