It's late April and the sun, which for most of the month has been beaming down its rays with commendable industry, has temporarily taken its hat off. No better time then to pull up a comfortable chair, pop on the kettle, crack open the biccies and wallow in the long, dreamy saga of prodigious skill, seductive tedium and mental cruelty that is the World Snooker Championship.

I had such fun writing last year's snooker-related posts that I briefly considered creating a dedicated fustar.info offshoot for the competition this time round (along the lines of my World Cup effort). At the moment, however, my time is being greedily consumed by lots of (what might be termed) "adult stuff", so a handful of observations over the course of the next fortnight will have to suffice.

The first round draw has thrown up numerous intriguing battles: John "Lego man head" Parrott vs. Steve "Dead Soulless Eyes" Davis; Former young Turk Ronnie O'Sullivan vs. New Kid on the Baize Ding Junhui; and (of course) Nigel "Mr. Charisma" Bond vs. Peter "I'll grind your bones to make my bread" Ebdon. Cliff Thorburn may once have gained notoriety as snooker's most relentless "grinder", but Ebdon has long since surpassed the old master in terms of ferocious and life-sapping combativeness. Not only does he "grind", he minces, pulverises and purees. At match's end, what's left of his opponent can usually be scooped up and shovelled into a bin bag.

While Ebdon has become synonymous with steely mental resilience, O'Sullivan has become something of a poster-boy for fragile, fractious genius. His 'paranoid' Higgins-esque cries of "Stitch up!" this year have already set the sports journos' pens a-scribbling, but it's a long time since I've read any piece on Ronnie that has gone beyond the established (and tiresome) mad/bad-boy clichés.

Both players have effectively been reduced to polar-opposed caricatures (in the way Davis and Higgins once were), but this reduction does them a disservice. Ebdon can be a fluent and devastating break-builder while O'Sullivan has enough tactical and safety nous to make him a match for anybody (in that, or any, regard). The way the draw's set up an Ebdon vs. Ronnie final could actually be on the cards. What a titanic, tasty and exhausting battle that could turn out to be. Yum.

One last quick note for now. 12 months ago I mentioned that people had been finding their way here after entering the following amusing search terms:

1) peter ebdon + boring snooker

2) Graeme Dott chess (perhaps a forthcoming PS2 game)

3) The lovely Hazel Irvine (I always thought it was 'The Lovely Debbie McGee'? Hazel has big shoes to fill if she wants to win that crown).

While searches one and two have subsequently fallen away, "The Lovely Hazel Irvine" is still putting an alarming number of bums on this blog's seats. Some strange, strange puppies out there…