Categories: uncategorized
Tags: local
Date: 27 November 2006 03:35:15
I've changed ends at the local. For years I've tended to sit on the left side of the bar as you go in, in what used to be the old Saloon Bar before they knocked down the partition between them. I was usually about half way along that side of the bar, with a view over the other side of the horse-shoe shaped bar, near where the landlady sat to get a view of both doors onto the street. A good place to have a conversation with the staff or the darts players. But the pub's changed hands, and I don't go there quite so often these days, and when I'm there I've spent more time on the other side, near the pool table.
On Saturday someone I don't know called Tony with a quiet West Indian accent who seemed to be smiling all the time was beating all comers at pool. He beat Simon the captain of the pool team. He beat the Scottish bloke whose name I didn't catch. His last game was against one of our regulars who fancies himself at pool. and Simon agreed with me that the although the other player was playing good shots and taking risks, every shot he tried was predictable. We always managed to guess what he was about to try to do. We could never guess what Tony was going to try to do. He saw shots we couldn't see. But once he'd taken them they looked obvious.
Ricky seemed to know him. I hadn't seen Ricky since he moved to Hastings (to get his head back together, he said) a few weeks after Zim Jim had split his face open (allegedly - I didn't see the supposed fight, although I'd been sitting next to them talking only a minute or two before) over an argument about who had or had not eaten the most exotic kind of meat. (Jim won easily with elephant) And now he was rather vaguely telling me how he had all this respect for me because I had once or twice managed to calm things down when a fight was about to start (I never know what exactly the word "respect" means in these contexts) but he had even more respect for Tony the pool player who had taken him under his wing years ago and taught him all he knew about pool (how much that is I couldn't tell you for sure) But that Tony was worried he had lost his touch.
He hadn't. The last shot of the game against the bloke who fancied himself was the best pool shot I've ever seen. He needed to sink the black but it was all but snookered near the centre of the table, he could only get a very glancing impact on it. And there was another one of his opponents balls just next to the black blocking the direction it would go in if hit on the side. Tony measured it out, walking round the table, looking at things from different angles, holding the cue parallel to the intended direction of the shot. Then he pointed out three places on the side cushions and took the shot. The cue ball clipped the black on the side, the black spun off in an unlikely direction, made an anti-clockwise loop across the table bouncing off three cushions in succession and passing near the place it had started but moving in a different direction, and then went straight into a middle pocket without even clipping the jaws.
That's the last time I blame the table surface when I miss.
Just seeing it made us feel happy. It was a thing of beauty. We were grinning. A couple of people went up and shook his hand. The shot was a topic of discussion for, oh, at least ten minutes. The wonderful thing wasn't just that it was a flash shot - I'm crap at pool but even I have made the occasional jammy shot - but that he predicted it. It was deliberate. An act of intelligence. People were saying things like "he's got a good eye for the ball" or a "feel" for the table or even that its "instinct". But it isn't eyes, its brains. In the end its brains that win at most sports. Well, maybe not weightlifting. Premiership footballers may be fit, but they aren't the fittest people it the world. They aren't the fastest runners, or the strongest. They probably aren't even the best kickers of balls - if football was about nothing but target practice they wouldn't necessarily win. They have to be fit and fast and accurate but that's assumed at that level. On top of that they have to be able to read the game, to integrate in their minds in some way the behaviour of moving players and a moving ball. Its brains that do that. Wayne Rooney may not be about to give lectures on statics and dynamics but in some sense he has to be intelligent. Its just that his intelligence expresses itself in different ways from most people's.
Tony and the other guy left with Ricky soon after that, and I played some pool myself against Simon and Stretch (so called because of being seven foot tall). I lost each time. I'm pretty crap at pool. I can sometimes win by playing only teenage girls (though not all of them) or by waiting till very late at night when some of the other players are a bit too pissed to play well.
There was an altercation in the gents. We realised that the Scottish bloke was having some sort of high-level discussion in the toilets with a small group of young men. This worried Simon a little, but there wasn't much that seemed worth doing. After a while Scottish bloke stormed out of the pub. Then half an hour later stormed back in again. Well, not particularly stormed but walked in looking rather cross and bought a drink and sat down next to us. "I'm not the bloody Old Bill! Why did they say I was the fucking Bill? I've been working in a casino for twenty years! That's what I do!"
The social temperature in the pub was raised a little then and there was some shouting and posing and pointing and waving of arms. In the end the landlady asked him to leave and some others followed him gathering in a little crowd in the street. Though Stephen, Ricky's brother, refused all attempts to get him out into the street but went behind the bar where he had no reason to be and played the clown, flirting outrageously with the barmaids. A very clever man. I've no idea if there was a fight or not, If they had attacked him it would have been total stupidity of course. If he was a policeman then beating him up in the street a few hundred metres from the largest police station in Western Europe would be an act of monumental stupidity. And if he wasn't a policeman, why would they have wanted to do it?
It seems there are still places in London where being called a police spy can get you into trouble.
And then my daughter arrived, with her Mum's new husband, and we talked about the Council's plans to turn our local primary school into a secondary school, and who on the Council and in the LEA we needed to talk to. I'm one of the governors of the school, he works for a charity funded by the Council, my ex-wife works at the school, and one of the Council officers who is pushing the plans was her next-door neighbour when they we both children. She was at our wedding, we were at hers. Small world, innit.
If you've got a local, you don't need to watch East Enders