Around this time of year I find myself strangely addicted to the World Snooker Championships. Having on occasion failed miserably at playing the game on a full size table the ability of these incongruously dressed men never fails to astonish me. Not only that, ever since I read that Ben Nicholson and Paul Nash would skip classes at the Slade to play Billiards (the forerunner to the modern game of snooker) I have also come to appreciate its peculiarly modernist aesthetic.

"Although I was not conscious of it at the time, I think that the billiard-balls, so cleanly geometrical in form and so ringingly clear in colour, against the matt-green of the baize, must have appealed to my aesthetic sense.." Ben Nicholson quoted in Sarah Jane Checkland (2000) Ben Nicholson: the vicious circles of his life and art. John Murray, London, p.21.