WE’VE just moved house and our domestic situation has all the symmetry of a tossed salad.

There’s boxes everywhere, some of them, shockingly, still taped shut from the last time we moved.

As a result, I haven’t seen much television recently. The only time I sit down with the telly on is when I’m giving my son his bottle at night.

And I’ve been doing that in front of the darts.

I lived and worked in Stoke-on-Trent for seven years and I was in the same room as Phil Taylor on a number of occasions. I’ve drunk in the pub he used to have in Wolstanton, Newcastle-under-Lyme, and, in my professional capacity, I covered the inquest into his father’s death.

I used to drink in Burslem’s famous Sagger Maker’s Bottom Knocker, where he used to practice. And I bumped into him at a Police tribute gig in Baddeley Green, but the less said about that night the better.

I don’t know the man, he wouldn’t know me from Adam. But I have no hesitation in describing him as a genius, the only bona fide genius currently playing professional sport.

Some of you won’t know who he is. Those without Sky television, for example. Others will not have heard of him because he has not had a millionth of the column inches he deserves.

So here’s a brief biography.

Following a short career making ceramic toilet roll handles, he has won 14 world championships and 75 other televised tournaments, more than any other player in the history of the sport.

He has had eight different spells as the world’s number one player, a record 56 months overall. To date, he has won more than 130 professional tournaments, more than twice as many as anyone else in the history of the game.

Last week, he picked up his latest title, the World Matchplay, winning 18-4 in the final, obliterating all the best players in the world along the way.

Taylor won his first world title in 1990, his last in January. He truly spans both eras of the game. Other players in the 1990 championships included household names John Lowe, Jockey Wilson and Cliff Lazarenko. Not to mention Eric Bristow, Taylor’s mentor, the man who gave Taylor £10,000 to get started in the game.

Taylor thumped him 6-1 in the final, amid the smog of cigarette smoke and constant chink of onstage pint pots.

Come forward 20 years and the game is played in air-conditioned arenas and the only sound anywhere near the board is the gentle tinkle of ice in the players’ mineral waters. They even pour each other’s drinks.

The only constant has been Taylor.

The general pattern of his games is as metronomic as his throwing arm. He pulls ahead and establishes a decent lead. Then, he drops a gear and his opponent gets a couple of legs back. Then, he pulls away again, leaving whoever he is playing floundering like a turbot on a pavement. He never sweats, never tires, never wastes a dart.

He doesn’t just beat the opposition – he completely destroys it. At one point, Terry Jenkins, his opponent in last week’s final, looked up to the heavens and shrugged (a common reaction among Taylor’s opponents) knowing he had tried his very best, but his luck was bad enough to find himself playing in the era of his chosen sport’s greatest ever proponent.

The darts commentator Sid Waddell often compares Taylor to Babe Ruth or Don Bradman. But you can’t compare Taylor with those who compete in team sports because to do so would be to ignore the monumental achievement of a man, on his own, doing his job to a ludicrously high standard, with no-one to help him or fall back on. For 20 years.

The (very) rare high-profile spat aside, his opponents tend to keep their own counsel on Phil Taylor. They seem to neither like him nor resent him for his talent. But they do all seem to respect him, while cursing their luck that his success simply grows and grows and grows.

In that respect, he’s the darting equivalent of Sir Alex Ferguson.

My dream for my boy Charlie is that one day he will ring me up and say: “Dad. I’m opening the bowling for Yorkshire.” But, as he guzzled his milk and we watched Phil Taylor (earnings this year to date - £454,000) crush opponent after opponent with clinical speed and swiftness, night after night, I realised that whatever Charlie goes on to do, he’ll retire very early if he does it even a tenth as well as Phil Taylor throws darts into a board.