The Winner Takes It All

A few of us this past week got a little snooker tournament going. Blessed as Pilsdon is with a full-size snooker table, reassembled and a fresh baize put on it just last summer (my limbs ache with the memory of manhandling the huge square slate slabs across the yard), we thought we might as well put it to some use. Helpfully for me my snooker-loopy friend Adam had visited just the weekend before, naturally bringing his own cue, so I had had the benefit of being whooped recently by a far better player and consequently having my own game raised - in fact the last game we played it had been knife-edge the whole way through to the black. Which he potted with aplomb.

Normally when I play snooker I either play extremely badly and lose by a mile, or I play erratically with a random mixture of beautiful shots and shoddy misses, and then lose by a whisker. So when eight of us put our names onto a knock-out chart I really didn’t expect to progress much beyond the first round.  However I hadn’t taken into account that all the decent players have left the community in the last year. It turned out that all my opponents were, incredibly, far poorer players than I!  Each of the three matches I played - quarter-final, semi-final and final - I found myself way out in the lead, often due to the generous number of fouls which my opponent handed to me by way of missing the target ball or simply potting the white, over and over.  It’s fair to say that these were not games of distinction.

Nevertheless, I ended up winning the tournament. I was pleased. It’s rare for me to win a sporting competition, however low-key. Of course I thought that that would be that and we’d pass on to other things, such as a table tennis competition at which I would hope to do pretty well but probably crash out in the semi’s in a manner reminiscent of Tim Henman.  But apparently other people thought differently and kept on congratulating me on my snooker victory, the next day, and even the next, with whole-hearted enthusiasm. “It’s the awards ceremony on Wednesday evening”, they would remark. “Better dress up for it.” It was getting a little embarrassing. I couldn’t play it down too much for fear of offending the other players but equally I didn’t feel all this praise was quite warranted.

Wednesday came along. After a hearty supper of bright orange vegetable goulash, Ben stood up and took upon himself the role of Awards Ceremony Host. The tournament was described in terms usually reserved for epic world-beating sporting achievements. A runners-up prize was presented to my co-finalist, Bill, a small metal trophy cup with his name and the year etched on the wooden base. Then I was hauled up and, pretending to fight back the tears, was handed two prizes - a large tin of Quality Street chocolates and a framed print-out of the fixtures showing how I had fought my way through all three matches to claim the glory that was now mine, decorated with pictures of Pilsdon. It was really a kind of leaving gift; everyone knows I have less than a month left. I was touched by their thoughtfulness.

The evening then turned into Pilsdon’s inaugural Music Night, in which we all brought CD’s to the Common Room and just banged on our favourite songs. It was a great atmosphere, the room was full of people shouting over the music, eating my Snooker Victory chocolates, jigging around to the up-beat numbers, toasting themselves by the open log fire. But the unspoken question was gnawing at all of us. What possible prize can be found for future tournaments that will match the one presented to me today?