“LET’S to billiards,” says Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra, and I’ve been following this advice in preparation for next week’s 100th anniversary of the opening of a billiard hall by a world champion in Darlington.

But Shakespeare was talking a lot of billiards. Cleopatra couldn’t possibly have played the game in ancient Egypt because it hadn’t been invented. Even the Bard makes mistakes...

Billiards evolved during the 14th Century from outdoor games which were a cross between golf and croquet and involved a ball being struck by a mallet. When the game came indoors it was still played with a mallet until some French-speaking person had the bright idea of turning the mallet around and using the thin handle.

That’s how the game gets its name. A “bille” or “billot” in old French means a rounded piece of wood, or a stick, and “cue” comes from another French word, “queue”, which means a tail or a handle.

Right on cue, while researching tomorrow’s article about Darlington-born Willie Smith, who was twice world billiards champion during the game’s golden age in the 1920, I came across all kinds of fascinating billiards trivia. For example, billiards was Mozart’s prime form of relaxation, and in the mid 19th Century, 12,000 elephants a year were being killed so their tusks could be turned into piano keys and billiard balls.

Strangest of all, though, was that on February 7, 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots, wrote from her prison at Fotheringay Castle in Northamptonshire to complain that her “table de billiard” had been taken away. Next day, at 8am, she was decapitated by three blows of an axe, and her headless body was wrapped in the cloth from her billiard table.

Billiards has now been eclipsed by snooker, a game that was named in 1875 in the Jabalpur officers mess in India by Colonel Sir Neville Chamberlain. Soldiers had taken to placing coloured balls on the billiards table, which one chap missed completely. The colonel called him “a real snooker”, which was army slang for a raw recruit, but the name caught on.

JUST mention of the Gruffalo brings me out in a cold sweat. It’s not his knobbly knees, his turned-out toes and the poisonous wart at the end of his nose – but it is the fact that his admirers once queued in rows that is the cause of all my woes.

It was a few nights before Christmas in 2005, and a battle of bookshops was stirring in Darlington. Waterstones had set up in Dressers’ shop on High Row; Ottakars was on the low row opposite.

Ottakars tried to entice the book-buying public by piling high a table with my local history books and getting me to sign them for anyone who wanted a copy.

Waterstones, though, engaged comedy legend Eric Sykes to draw in the adults and employed a supersize Gruffalo, with terrible tusks, terrible claws and terrible teeth in his terrible jaws, to excite the children.

The result was that they had a long queue of people tailing out of the door while I sat alone in a draught, cowering behind my huge pile with no one to talk to.

The Gruffalo has now sold more than 10.5m copies worldwide, which is a few more than me. So I’m trying again tomorrow with Darlington in 100 Dates, which I’ll be signing from noon to 1pm in Waterstones in the Cornmill Centre. Please come in to say hello – but not if your eyes are orange, your tongue is black and you’ve got purple prickles all over your back. I’ve had enough of you.