When I was at school (sometime in the last Century) I was part of the Chess Club. The Meadway School Chess Club was very much at the wrong end of the Coolness Spectrum, languishing somewhere between Recorder Club and English Country Dancing.
Football it was not.
However, on those wet lunch-breaks when the windows steamed up and the rain lashed across the field behind room C25, when the footballers sloshed through the mud in their turned up school-trousers and had to drag soggy rucksacks through the corridors, we band of checkmating brothers, we happy few, knew where we'd rather be.
Mr Whitfield, professional geography teacher and amateur chess-enthusiast, did a great job in inspiring us to learn the game. We had a league, scribbled on a sheet of A4 paper and stuck to his notice board; we had piles of those old plastic sets that Waddington made with the hollow plastic pieces. We had teams and clocks and tournaments and challenges and some of us were even selected to play for the school against other schools. Their names still resound in my memory: Waingels Copse, Sir William Borlase, Leighton Park... all posher than us, and all the sweeter if we, comprehensive to the core, could beat them...
And therein lies the tale. Chess became something of a war, a battle, a clash of intellect; of wits and of concentration. To the victor went the spoils; to the loser went the humiliation of inferiority and self-analysis. These things can have an effect on a young man.
So this week, entering a chess competition, the first after all these years, I was anxious to find a lesson. Chess is after all, not a war. It's very much a board game. It takes a bit more concentration than Monopoly or Buckaroo, but it is essentially just an ancient and cleverly simple game of moving pieces strategically around a board. I wanted to remember that. I wanted to play well and lose.
Eight people entered. I was pitted in Quarter Final 2 against a developer I call Mr Proxy Junior. I imagined Mr PJ to be a strategic mover, a great linear thinker. One foolish move and it would all be over for me. I wasn't going to make a deliberate error, but I thought perhaps it would happen sooner or later. As it turned out, I sneaked in a checkmate almost by accident. The game lasted about twenty minutes. Then Mr PJ disappeared claiming he still had a massive pile of bugs he needed to fix.
I was more surprised than anyone. There wasn't really time to revel in the victory though as Mr Swish had just beaten Mr Legal and was itching to oppose me in the Semi-Final. He does everything in the world as though it's a piece of cake, Mr Swish. Furiously competitive and often super-proud of his great intellect, he swiped up two pawns in a fist with a flourish and made me choose a hand. I chose black. We were off.
I made foolish moves quite quickly - a poor opening left me weak from about the third move I think. He forked a bishop and a knight and I had to think on my feet. My other knight and bishop were locked in by an errant white knight and my own pawns which I could not move for trying. Before long, that pesky white knight was playing havoc with my defences, creating a knotty mess and a fork of two rooks. I castled on the queen side (which I don't like doing) and the king ended up hiding behind a single pawn. It was a shoddy defence. When the clock ticked beyond 1:30 and the kitchen was empty of lunchtimers, I sunk my head into my hands.
"I think maybe I should resign," I said. Mr Swish said nothing. He was thinking about a possible queen-swap (shudder) and I saw his eyes flick over to the pieces he'd captured. A quick tot up revealed that he was one rook up on me and it didn't take much to see that he'd exposed my defence wide open. Defeat was inevitable.
Then, as he moved in for the kill, I spotted something beautiful. There was a possible checkmate, right there, with my name on it. I moved my queen into position when I had the chance. He checked me. I groaned, still thinking that my defeat was almost certainly two moves away. Mr Swish paused for a little while, then drummed his fingers on the table. Had he seen it? Then he moved a rook into an attacking position. It wasn't a check. I slid my queen up to the back row he'd left open. It was checkmate. I had won.
Now, I still don't know how that happened. Furthermore, I genuinely don't think I've learned my lesson! In fact, if anything I've awoken that competitive warrior spirit of Fourteen-Year-Old-Me who swung so wildly between elation and dejection at the hands of plastic pieces in room C25.
The final is next week against either Mr Spain or The Big Cheese. I'm in a curious position of wanting to win and yet somehow recognising that it would be good for me if I didn't: more cognitive dissonance then! I guess the question should be whether I enjoyed it along the way. I suppose I did. I bet you can tell from the way I'm writing about it, throwing the criticisms of Future Me to the wind. Oh well. I guess one thing about being 35 and not 14 is that I've got much more of an idea about what's important... and what isn't... I hope.
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