We took an early holiday this year, finishing on the Friday instead of the Sunday like the rest of China, I don’t know about you but there’s something just wrong about working on a Saturday and Sunday.

Anyway, I arranged to meet some of my colleagues at Orden Billiards Centre on Hengshan Lu (close to Yongjia Lu, in the same building as Club MT) for an afternoon of pool.

The place was fine, a combination of pool tables, snooker tables, bowling alleys and videogame arcade. The staff were attentive, coming over and setting up the balls for us for the next game every time a game finished, the food was prettty dreadful though (same as these places in the UK I guess). Oh, and of course, being China, there were knock-offs, in this case a copy of the painting of dogs playing pool (a poor copy at that), Leonardo Da Vinci would turn in his grave if he knew his masterpiece had been so viciously assaulted!

Despite my colleague’s claims that one of the guys was “semi-professional” I did pretty well and won about 8 of the 10 games I played in, only losing at the end because I was bored and had spotted them selling ice creams over at the main counter. For reasons I’ll never understand the “semi-professional” guy insisted on playing with a snooker queue from the other side of the hall instead of the perfectly good pool queues around our table and promptly lost every game.

It was a good do, the first time I’ve really done anything with my colleagues outside of work (except for major teambuilding trips), we ended up back at mine for a few beers, a few games on the Wii (I can barely move my arms this morning after Sonic and Mario at the Olympics) and finished off watching the Singapore F1, we’ll have to make it a regular thing I think

When we left the pool hall, I spotted this tent outside promoting the 2008 Fashion Darts Open, this is quite intriguing, fashion and darts are not something normally associated with each other and I think that, done correctly, this could really boost the sport in a similar way to rugby league when they made the names all fancy (Wigan Warriors, Widnes Vikings etc).

I’m not quite sure how it’s going to work but I can envisage Phil “The Power” Taylor emerging from the dressing room wearing Gucci from head to toe and carrying a Louis Vitton darts pouch, he struts confidently down the catwalk, spinning at the end (revealing his Burberry tartan cape). He then struts back up the catwalk to the ockey, throws his three darts and disappears back into the dressing room to change into a new outfit.

Sign me up for two dozen ringside seats!!