Tales Of The Country: Snookered for Christmas

Our first Herefordshire Christmas beckons, and to celebrate I have treated myself to the fulfillment of a lifetime's ambition: a full-size snooker table. It is, admittedly, a slightly contentious purchase. Jane, although in no other way like Hyacinth Bucket, thinks it's decidedly "Footballers' Wives" to have a snooker table, a concern not exactly allayed by the nice man at A&D Billiards in Birmingham, who proudly told me he had also fitted tables for Gary Lineker, Mark Lawrenson and Jasper Carrott. "At least Jasper Carrott's not a footballer," I said to Jane, weakly.

In fairness, we have a big, shabby room of ideal proportions for a snooker table, and since the children had spent five months using the room as a skateboarding park, I feel it is now time for me to indulge myself. My schoolfriend Bill Birtles had a half-size snooker table, and among the highlights of my teenage years were long weekday afternoons round at his house, somewhat at the expense of my O-levels, it has to be said, although it certainly didn'tfeel like a misspent youth.

But until we moved to Docklow I had never lived anywhere remotely big enough for even a half-size table. If ever I felt like a frame or two when we lived in London, I had to venture along to a dodgy snooker hall in Finsbury Park where you paid your entrance money to a Desperate Dan-lookalike behind reinforced glass. Hilda, I think her name was.

So when we started looking round houses out in the country, while Jane checked out the dimensions of the kitchen, I concerned myself with the more pressing matter of finding a room with space to use an extendable spider rest. Which is easier said than done. But when we first set eyes on this house, in February, I recognised its potential immediately. There was a room with roughly the floor space of a small village hall which our predecessors, Mr and Mrs O, used as a dining-room. When I later told Mr O that I was thinking of sticking a dining-table in their sitting-room and a snooker-table in their dining-room, he looked at me as if I'd suggested stone-cladding his 1850s exterior. Like Jane, he plainly belongs to the "Footballers' Wives" persuasion.

But I was not to be dissuaded. I phoned Clive Everton, who edits Snooker Scene magazine and so knows about these things, and asked where I might buy a second-hand table. He directed me to Andy Williams, not the one from Los Angeles who sang "Solitaire" but the one from Liverpool who has been selling and fitting snooker tables since 1963, and is now based in Birmingham.

I went to his shop last Wednesday. It is in Bournville, home of Cadbury's, which is apt, because I wandered around his workshops in a state of happy bewilderment, much like Charlie in the chocolate factory. Did I want a newer table, its cloth laid on Italian slate, or an older one on Welsh slate? Fully reconditioned or part reconditioned? Turned legs or square legs? Oak or mahogany? West of England cloth or Hainsworth cloth?

Every time I made a decision, with the help of Andy's expert advice, there was another one to make. It reminded me of that Two Ronnies sketch in which one of them orders a glass of milk in a café, and is offered more and more choices until eventually he has to choose between Daisy and Mildred.

Anyway, I finally chose a handsome table, made circa 1910 by the highly reputable company of Burroughs & Watts. It has turned mahogany legs, if you're interested, and is due to arrive next Monday, just in time for Christmas. If Andy had told me that it would be hitched to a red-nosed reindeer and delivered by a guy with a white beard, I could not be more excited. All I need now is someone to play with.

The name game

While I yield to nobody in my admiration for the literary skills of my colleague John Walsh, and in particular his matchless ability to find the mot juste, in his description of lot 24 in The Independent's charity auction, he fluffed his lines slightly.

The auction, as you surely know by now, offers 30 lots, each associated with this newspaper and its staff, proceeds to go to the Hope for Africa appeal. You can bid for a power lunch at The Ivy with Simon Kelner, our esteemed editor, or to be the opinionated "companion" of restaurant critic Tracey MacLeod. Or, in the case of lot 24, you can come to Docklow for the weekend, be wined and dined, get an honourable mention in this column, and stay in one of our cottages.

This is where John unwittingly got it wrong, describing them – pardon me while I wince – as "chalets". It might strike you as a trivial matter, but one gets very sensitive to words in the hospitality business. Rightly or wrongly, the world "cottage" evokes long, cosy nights in, logs on the fire, ducks waddling by, muddy walks to a country pub. "Chalet", on the other hand, evokes Hi-de-Hi!.

It was not always thus. There was a time when all words ending in -et yet pronounced -ay positively reeked of European chic. There was a moment, sometime in the mid-Seventies, when everyone in Britain below the age of 40 took to sleeping beneath a so-called continental quilt. It sounded much more stylish, however, when we started calling them duvets. I imagine the same was true when the holiday camp pre-fab became a chalet. But the word has now become devalued, doubtless through over-use. It has lost, if you like, its former cachet. So I don't want anyone to think that what we have here are chalets, not even with all the jokes I have to suffer about being in the cottaging business.

Winged terrors

Maurice O'Grady of Leo Pest Control in Leominster made his debut in this column last week, and I have a feeling he might become a regular. He came back last Friday to see whether the mice have been taking the poisoned bait, and apparently they have been tucking in with relish -– perhaps literally, if the chewed top of a jar of Safeway mango pickle is anything to go by. But Maurice also came to address the fly situation. Until the weather started getting colder, living here was like living a couple of miles from a motor-racing circuit staging a never-ending Formula One grand prix; there was a constant drone, now loud, now soft, but always there.

According to Maurice our tormentors are cluster flies, which lay eggs in the soil and live on worms, rather than blow flies which live on the carcasses of dead animals. That was welcome news indeed, but it would still be nice to get rid of them, which, so far as it is possible to get rid of flies in a big old house in the country, Maurice plans to do by smoking them out. However, like Montgomery with Rommel, he has a predator's respect for his prey. He might even, as Montgomery did of Rommel, have a huge picture of a fly pasted on to his bedroom wall. He fixed me with a look that suggested I was not aware of the enemy's firepower. "They know this property much better than you do," he said.