Snooker Loopy, Nuts Are We

Before I joined Pilsdon I spent a trial week here in mid-February, much of which I spent working with a nun. She had decided to turn one of the manor’s rooms into The Craft Room, populating it with various looms, spinning wheels, sewing machines and knitting machines that dotted the place, but discovered that several of them were buried amongst an incredible jumble of furniture that had been stacked into the sports hall, completely filling the back half of it. So the task mutated into emptying the sports hall of the entire assortment of heavy items of furniture, and in so doing making it ready for renovation.

So during the course of the week I found myself lugging huge cabinets across the quad to store in one of the Loose Boxes (converted stables), or heavy chests up the manor stairs, or decrepit mattresses to the archway to be carted off to the tip. Any wooden items that we didn’t want to keep we broke up and put on the pile for the wood-fired boiler. We discovered a chest of drawers that last autumn a previous volunteer had filled with apples for storage and subsequently been forgotten - needless to say they were no longer recognisable as apples and had acquired an overpowering pungency. There were hundreds of books, each of which we had to decide whether was destined for the library or the furnace. The nun quickly became known as Pyro-Nun due to her eagerness to send things to the flames.

Eventually the sports hall, a long rectangular low-ceilinged room, became free of everything except a snooker table (in pieces), a pool table, a table tennis table, a chest of sports equipment, a cycling machine and a few church pews for spectators.

Over the following months the room has been completely cleaned and re-painted, with new skirting boards set in place and the two toilets put in working order. We brought in a professional snooker-table-restorer who I helped to wheel the five extraordinarily heavy slates from the other end of the quad to the hall and carefully lift and slide on top of the snooker table. He laid new baize on it and fitted the side cushions, and now it looks an absolute treat despite being about one hundred years old.

With the pool table and table tennis table also set up, there was still some space in the far corner to fit a TV and a couple of sofas for those wanting a non-smoking environment to watch telly in (the main television room permits smoking).  It was all finished just in time for the Olympics, and has become a place where people hang out, enjoying a frame of snooker or a game of ping-pong or just playing canasta in front of the box as four of us were doing last night. 

Bank Holiday weekends here traditionally include a tournament each for pool, snooker, table-tennis and scrabble, and the Bank Holiday just gone was no exception. I was unjustly placed in the first round fixtures against both the best table-tennis player and the best snooker player so was knocked out by both, but did manage to reach the pool semi-finals. As the next UK Bank Holiday isn’t until Christmas I’ve got a few months to brush up my skills with the bat and cue!