I HAD the good luck last week to be asked to spend a day at the Barbican Centre watching snooker. It's a hard life, I know, but someone has to do it.

I am not exactly qualified to be writing on the subject. It is more than 30 years since I last held a cue.

In my mind snooker has always been a slightly risque, illicit sort of activity. Such is the power of childhood.

Way back when I was ten, my brother and I used to play in a dilapidated shed on the edge of the Gloucester-shire town where I was brought up. It was full of junk - draped in old sheets and covered with a sheen of dust.

Squeezed in at the far end, next to an old blackboard hanging on the wooden wall, was, wonder-of-wonders, a full-sized snooker table.

My brother and I somehow managed to get permission from the owner of this shed to occasionally borrow the keys so we could have a game.

He was a large, bad-tempered man, and we never quite knew whether he would tell us to clear off, or grumpily agree to lend us the keys for half an hour.

When he did, it was a joy.

There wasn't much light in the shed. The window panes were bleary with grime and wreathed in cobwebs, and there was just a single weak bulb overhead.

Beams of thin light from the windows always seemed to be cutting a faint track through dust-motes in the air.

There was a rack of ancient cues under one end of the table, a worn-out piece of chalk sitting on a ledge beneath the blackboard.

There, always half afraid that the grumpy owner would burst in and kick us out, we would play.

My top score, ever, was 16.

Sadly, snooker was tarnished for me as I grew older by TVs inexhaustible appetite for the 'sport' in the Seventies and Eighties, when the likes of Ray Reardon and Hurricane Higgins reigned supreme. Enough to dull the keenest of appetites.

So it was with mounting delight last week that I found myself sitting in the hushed Barbican auditorium, absorbed in a gripping battle between Matthew Stevens and former world champion Steve Davis.

It rekindled all my old love of the game.

Even better was when, during a break, I wandered through to the Barbican's Cue Zone, where Harrogate pro Steve Prest gave me some coaching tips which - only 30 years too late - corrected my stance and bridge hand.

What struck me most, however, was how magnificently the Barbican had come into its own to stage this event. Condemned as a 'white elephant' by some when it was opened, the Barbican has always struck me as having a split identity; never quite sure whether it is supposed to be a sports hall or a concert venue, and never quite right for either.

But it could have been purpose-built for hosting a major international snooker tournament - because let's face it, snooker is a spectacle that's pretty much half-way between theatre and sport.

It seems sad, somehow, that it is at the very time when the Barbican has found its true calling that bosses at City of York Council are preparing to sell it.

The UK Snooker Championship is great for York: it will return here next year and possibly even the year after that.

The Barbican's new-found success as home to the world's second-biggest snooker tournament must surely be weighed in the balance when the council decides its future.

Might there perhaps, even at this late stage, be a case for keeping it?