This weekend it’s the start of the World Snooker Championships & for the next two weeks I’ll be glued to the television watching at every opportunity because I’m a massive snooker fan.

Anytime people find out that I’m a massive snooker fan people often look at me with a very bemused look on their face & ask me in a very quizzical tone “you don’t like snooker do you?” With some people I’ve revealed I’m a snooker fan to, I’ve found myself apologising for being a fan of snooker. I’ve often found myself apologising for being a snooker fan because people have often equated snooker to be as boring as golf or horseracing, & in the past I remember people who were into golf use have to make the same kind of apology for liking golf as people like myself have often had to make for liking snooker. It use to be the case that people might be embarrassed around certain groups of people for liking golf, but I’ve noticed with the likes of Tiger Woods & more recently Rory McIlroy & that wild rockers like Iggy Pop have become keen golfers, golf is seen by people in general to have a bit more ‘attitude’ these days rather then the snooty & misogynistic image of the local golf club that use to be associated with the sport. Whereas golf has become to be seen as having a bit more ‘attitude’ people generally still seem to view snooker as pretty lame & boring.

Never mind me having to apologise for slumping in front of the television this weekend to watch the snooker maybe the people who should be apologising for watching the Bahrain Grand Prix. Okay I’m not a fan of formula1; it might seem ironic to some that I prefer NASCAR as its motor racing rather then a motor procession, because unlike in Formula1 NASCAR has something called ‘over taking’. Okay some F1 fans will say to me I don’t get F1 or I don’t understand F1, blah, blah, blah; whether or not I get F1 isn’t actually the point as to why disapprove of a F! Grand Prix taking place in Bahrain.

I’m in agreement with Amnesty International that the grand prix in Bahrain should be cancelled but I kind of think that there shouldn’t of been a grand prix as there was in china last weekend. I definitely agree that holding a high profile sporting event in a country like Bahrain which has an appalling human rights record could be seen as endorsing the regime which is responsible for such an appalling human rights record, but neither should there any high profile sporting event held in China for the same reasons & yet in 2008 China staged the Olympic Games the biggest sporting event of them all.

Bernie Ecclestone the head of F1 is of course putting concern for profit before concerns for human rights & I do think he is an asshole for so blatantly doing so; but aren’t we all now putting concerns for money above concerns for human rights? The inexpensive laptop I use to write this was likely made in China, the inexpensive knee boots I’m wearing whilst writing this were made in China, snooker’s biggest emerging market is China; we often make the excuse for the state of Chinese government & human rights that China is a ‘developing economy’, but really we are just making excuses to manipulate ourselves out of our own guilt. We tell ourselves that the state of human rights in China is due to the excuse that it’s a developing country when in fact it’s just an excuse to offset our guilt for enjoying cheap consumables produced by oppressed people. Of course its hoped that the richer China gets the richer its people will get richer & the richer the people get the more freedom they will demand. It remains to be seen whether the Chinese will demand greater the more wealthier they become, it seems to me that the wealthier people have got in western nations the more apathetic they’ve become to any notion of freedom.

Some of will remember 1989 & the Tiananmen Square massacre for the rest of our lives & right now something to those events of 1989 are happening in Bahrain; so its somewhat stomach churning for the likes of me seeing the whole Formula1 carnival living it up at the behest of a regime which is trying to violently stamp out dissent. Having to business with dodgy regimes is one thing, publically living it up at the behest of a dodgy regime is another.