Up north for a (s)pot of snooker.

I often get asked what’s my favorite sport (along with, of late, which matches I’m planning on watching during the upcoming World Cup).

And my usual answer normally seems to disappoint a little: I don’t really have one, as I don’t like sitting in one spot in a stadium or on the sofa in front of the TV watching sport. I prefer to be doing the sport – rather, active activities – myself. Scaling volcanoes, going off on long expeditions in far-flung corners of the world, or just trekking along the banks of a river down a mountainous valley – that’s my bag.

And besides, I don’t watch TV – at all (dreadful habit:).

(Oops – me telling fibs again; I do watch TV in tiny doses: I watch kiddies’ stuff together with my own kiddies; I sometimes glance at the zombie-panel in the gym between sets; on the treadmill in the gym I switch to the nature/wildlife channels; and I’m not averse to peeking at a screen in business lounges in airports. But that really is it:)

Wait. I also watch Formula 1 races on screens, but that’s not quite ‘TV’. It’s normally in the Ferrari paddock, and there’s technical race info on the screens too. But I don’t watch a Grand Prix of a Sunday afternoon on regular TV.

So, yeah – you get it: I generally don’t watch telly. But there is one exception I make (besides all the other quasi-exceptions mentioned above). There is one thing on the TV that can force me to sit in one place for a long time. And it is a sport. And it is… snooker!

Not pool, not billiards… snooker, with its more refined rules and more tactical gameplay. And, by a strange (!) coincidence, we happen to sponsor one of the stages of the World Snooker Championship – Riga Masters.

And since I was in the UK, and my travel/business schedule permitted it, I got myself up to Sheffield, to watch the semi-final of the World Snooker Championship 2018!

I was expecting Sheffield – the former steel powerhouse – to be a bleak post-industrial affair. Far from it: nice downtown, clearly a lot of redevelopment been going on down the years, and – most importantly – sunny weather (imported by us from the Caribbean and Bahamas).

Kunst installations. I wonder – are they related to snooker? Doesn’t matter – they’re still cool.

Selfie.

The game was held in the Crucible, a venue well-known for showing big snooker games:

And that was where this installment of globetrotting ended. North Pole – Panama – the Caribbean – the Bahamas – England – home. Time for some rest – to build up the energy for the next intercontinental trip )…