I had a conversation with an extremely lateral-thinking human being today.

He is quick-witted, talented, bright and full of promise. He has an endearing dose of idiosyncrasy. And he is eight years old.

“Mrs Shrewsday, I have a new Sky box! It came on Friday!” He exploded enthusiastically as we sat down to lunch.

Sky is one of the great corporations dominating telecommunications across this sceptered isle. Its set-top box resembles Pandora’s: if one but opens it, myriad channels sport every shade of opinion and emotion, desirable and undesirable, gratuitous and responsible, from channels for newborns to those in the third age. I have yet to find whether, lurking at the back of the flat black box, is a small shred of hope.

I wondered which channel my friend was interested in.

“Ah!” I conjectured: “Did you get it ready for the Christmas films?

“No!” he explained delightedly, “I did not. I am very much looking forward to watching the Snooker backwards.”

My mind stopped in its tracks like a deer in the headlights. It was not a conventional pastime.

Snooker is a game rather like pool. It originated in India in the nineteenth century, where it was developed by British army officers.  It  necessitated the addition of coloured balls to the classic red and black ones of pyramid pool.

While I would rather dine on toad’s feet than watch more than five minutes of the game, Felix loves it. And his great-grandmother used to sit transfixed for hours by the click-roll-click of ball after ball across the expanse of green baize on her screen.

I have a feeling I could be persuaded to watch it happen backwards. Reverse film of any kind has a comic fascination, but watching those little coloured spheres emerge from their little green nets back onto the table: that could be interesting.

So I asked: “How long do you watch it backwards for? Is it just a quick snatch, or do you watch a whole game?”

It transpires my young friend watches whole games, played backwards, at a time. He can eat a whole meal on the sofa, watching balls travel backwards through time. An odd preoccupation, certainly. But is there not one tiny part of you, Reader, who itches to desert this empire of the binary, and snatch up a remote control, to try it, just once?

I am reliably informed that my little friend has not the slightest interest in our national sport, football: except, of course, when played backwards, from finish to start.

My son had less time than usual today, to indulge in his passion for forwards football.

His classroom, like those billiard balls, had gone into reverse: this time by 150 years; and become, for one day only, a Victorian classroom.

Which meant, of course, that all the children had to go dressed as Victorian children. At great expense, a crisp white shirt was purchased, along with a waistcoat and a flat cap worthy of a child experiencing the age which marked the very beginning of compulsory education for children in Britain.

They have spent the day drilling, practicing handwriting, learning reams by rote and playing parlour games, Because parlour, Felix told me solemnly as if speaking to one who knows very little about such things, means lounge or sitting room.

They have had a whale of a time learning precisely how children learnt, often in classes of 40 or 50. And now Felix is tired but happy, having travelled backwards. He kept that flat cap on his head from dawn till dusk, and by bedtime he was finally ready to rejoin the 21st century.

As we sat at dinner talking about our days, the conversation waxing lyrical about the Victorians and snooker, a story popped into my head.

It is by Rudyard Kipling, who was born in Bombay. He never dazzled as a youth: he was not thought to be clever enough for Oxford, and returned home from a British schooling to take up the deputy editorship of The Civil and Military Gazette, a newspaper local to Lahore, now Pakistan.

This humble beginning belies the Nobel Prize for literature he was awarded in 1907. He was an intriguing character: so bound up with the strident empire which had its fingers in so many pies at the time. He was ever the controversial figure, standing as he did for so much that was built on the backs of others.

Henry James said of him: “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.”

The story which preoccupies me shows that genius.It is called: ‘My Own True Ghost Story”. And it manages to make those little coloured balls on a billiard table deeply sinister.

He tells of the occasion he is compelled to stay for a couple of nights in a particular dak-bungalow: a dank one-storey building, common on the edge of the Grand Trunk Road, as it wound its way through Pakistan.

The atmosphere to the bungalow is uneasy and run-down and sleep does not come easy: but as he begins to drift off, the door of the next bungalow is heard to be flung open: followed by an inhuman silence, and finally, the unmistakable sound of a game of billiards being played.

He is a fabulous storyteller, with such pace and such a sense of drama. He sums up the unease he feels thus: “Beyond any sort of doubt, people were playing billiards in the next room. And the next room was not big enough to hold a billiard table!”

He identifies that pitch of fear one can reach when one simply cannot see the source of something perplexingly unexplained. The dingy dak-bungalows are so cleverly sketched, and the relentless rain so vivid that one can see and hear them oneself: and above them, that unearthly click-roll-click which cannot possibly be made by human hand.

So: we have spent a post travelling in a backwards direction, preoccupied with balls.

My young friend is only eight, and backwards for him is a short-term game of snooker; but Felix has begun to look further back, more than a century, eschewing his football for a day to dedicate himself to his travels.

And we have travelled across half the world and oceans of time, to listen to an exotic tale: a game of billiards, played forwards, by no-one at all.

I am no fan of ball games: but seen from the right perspective, they can be compelling.