“I have a bad feeling about this.”

It isn’t so much the actual cock that I remember. It’s more the greasy outline it left on the polished wood that sticks in my memory. Tim Cox’s ‘cock-out’ was just one of his classic non-championship snooker moves. Had he shared this one with the pro-circuit, a drug-free Bill Werbeniuk could have extended his career by a good five years.

A frame of snooker, between one of us and Tim, would often reach a tense, hushed, finale – perhaps just one more pot in it. A game that could go either way might be swung only by a minute cuing error. Or by Tim whapping his cock out and onto the table surround opposite your last vital shot.

So, that’s what those glasses were for…

Wednesday afternoon snooker ranks among my top school moments. Not because of Tim Cox’s cock, although that was a non-musical theatre highlight. It wasn’t because of the two pints of Skol that we’d each sneak-up from the bar downstairs to the snooker hall above either (God bless 15 year old John Donkin’s permanent five-a-clock shadow and his convincing manner). And it certainly wasn’t because of the snooker. Not for me at least. I play snooker like Ray Charles after his seeing-eye dog has shit on his spats. I’m sort of like Terry, of Terry & June infamy - I look like I’m being deliberately slapstick and I’m not. And it isn’t funny.

What actually put Wednesday afternoon snooker up into my personal school hit-parade - just one place below ‘fingering Jenny x, on the school playing field actually during sports day’, and two places off the coveted number one spot held, for 21 consecutive years, by Miss Middleton’s excellent tits—was that: a) snooker was offered instead of doing actual proper PE, and b) the school paid for our session, and even patted our heads, before shooing us off school property and out onto the number 42 bus (Arnolds Way – Botley – The Station – Oxford, Cornmarket Street).

Look Miss! No hands!

Yep, you heard right: our Wednesday afternoons, spent graffiting bus-seats, hanging around in a snooker hall, and getting spinny-headed on past it’s vomit-before-date beer (spinny-headed isn’t really true – Christ, at 15, it took a whole bottle of Taboo, six Malibu & oranges, and a half-of-meths, to get any of us even near to pissed) were, not just encouraged by, but actually paid for by, and in the lesson time of – Matthew Arnold Comprehensive Secondary Modern, Oxford.

Some utter genius had realised that the school could both fulfil its lawful duty to teach Physical Education* and get rid of the class monkey-boys, misfits, and fat kids, in but a single stroke: by sending us all off into Oxford Town to play snooker. The Home Economics department came up with something similar – certain girls with buns-in-the-oven were allowed to leave early and avoid failing their CSEs.

I’m glad that I was rubbish at snooker. I’m glad because it meant that I would accidentally unearth my personal Arcade Game Nirvana. But that’s a couple more links down the chain in this story. I would usually only play one frame, and then feel humiliated/bored/disturbed-by-Tim’s-genitalia enough, to decide to then go off and ‘hang around town.’ That usually meant: having some chips (fries – fucksake) in Burgerland, and then shoplifting badges off jackets in Chelsea Guy.

Then one day, pockets stuffed full of badges, and the pins out of the pathetic security tags, I decided to hunt for some proper English fat chips. In a cone. I wanted vinegar, I wanted more salt, I wanted a can of Quatro** to wash them down with, and I wanted to neck the lot under the distrusting eye of a serial-killer-suspect Greek café proprietor. There was but one option: the, now long-since demolished, Gloucester Green Bus Station Café. To call it a café was stretching things a bit – this was really no more than a corridor, squeezed between the leaky station bogs and the weird room-o-mystery where all the sweaty bus drivers lived and smoked.

I needed a picture of a battered sausage, you'll see why in a minute, but the interweb doesn't
have any. Not fucking one. So here's some breaded vegetables instead. Pathetic.
UPDATE! Kind reader tOne completes the interweb with this picture. Fucking ace.

As fate would have it I chose, that portentous day, to have a jumbo battered sausage as well as chips and fizzy. There must have been a rush on as there weren’t any sitting ready in the orange-lit, dead-air, sparkly-grease-faceted, fryer top display case. I ordered one anyway. Stavros looked up from his current task, of battering strips of flesh off his most recent victim, bristled his spud-flecked moustache and said “Five minutes. You wait.”

In the tiny confines of the café, there was only one place to stand – or at least, only one place where you wouldn’t get touched on the arse by the resident piss-smelly, one-cup-of-tea-pusher café tramp. That was right up next to the one arcade cabinet in there. I shuffled over, ready to wait. For the first time since I’d walked in, I could hear the bleeps and crackles coming out of its chippy-clogged speakers. “I have a bad feeling about this.” Fuck-me-solid! Han-fucking-solo. ‘I’m playing this’, I decided. In went a 10p piece, I hit start and Return of the Jedi’s attract-mode jumped instantly to a page of simple instructions.

I immersed. I felt the room around, and behind, me warp away fast, and then snap-back to include just me and the machine. The whole world, Tim’s cock, the piss-tramp and Stavros included, had gone and in its place were Death Star Millennium Falcon runs, walker take-downs, and Endor Forest twitch races. I was utterly lost to it. To an electronic world that has been home ever since.

Koworld, January 2004.

* Until right-up to the mid 1990s, schools in England and Wales were legally bound to teach just two subjects: Physical Education (running around) and Religious Education (faking tolerance). Maths, English, Science – all these were, hilariously, discretionary subjects for teaching.

** As a poster, ged.m, at www.lazystuff.com so rightly described it: “a real 80s can - and I used to have one every lunch - and a cabana - but that’s elsewhere - awesome drink - made Lilt taste like piss!”

Comment Here. (Its working again).

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Things to 'Make' and 'Do'.

Reminisce about Quatro drink.

Tribute to ‘Big Bill’ Werbeniuk – much missed.

‘Return of the Jedi’ at the Killer List of Videogames.

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