Chess

Chess.

More than just a fabulous musical, and arguably more than just a game.  Well, actually, plainly more than just a game, as mentioned in the previous sentence, it’s also a fabulous musical.  It takes a few minutes to learn the basics of the game, then a few more to learn how the knight moves, then some more to learn about castling and en-passant.  Basically it takes about forty, forty-five minutes to learn the basics of the game, but a lifetime to master.  That’s why chess is so popular in prison.

Chess is a game of strategy.  It’s actually the game of strategy and don’t ever let any tosser with a games console and a strategy-‘em-up tell you differently.  His (it’s always a ‘his’) new game set in a distant magical kingdom does not, despite the guff on the packaging and several hysterical broadsheet reviews filed by sleep deprived nerds, ‘have the complexity of chess’, although I can quite believe it has ‘the epic scope of the finest of fantasy novels’ and ‘female NPCs with really huge boobs’).

Chess requires you to think many moves ahead.  There are a finite number of openings, and established strategies, and end games tend to be relatively simple too, iso t’s in the middle where the drama is.

Chess, unusually for a board game, frequently ends in a draw or, when played between siblings, a fist fight.  As well as mastering the strategy and tactics, you also have to compete with the smug tosser on the other side of the board, smirking every time you make a move, which is exactly the sort of behaviour that will bet you into trouble on ‘C Wing’, by the way.

The other fabulous thing about chess is the variety of chess sets.  Even the simple ones are things of beauty.  I have an old (not antique, not valuable, just ‘old’, c1970s) travel chess set.  The board has little holes in it and the chess pieces slotted into it like pegs.  In the 1980s these sorts of chess sets were replaced with magnetic sets with the different pieces printed on little magnetic tiles.  Now, it’s probably an app.  Pah.

Once you start playing, you start to accumulate chess sets.  Although, oddly, new kit does not improve performance.  You need to get a robust one if children are learning, as the pieces have to be tough enough for handling by kids, but not heavy enough to do any lasting damage when they are used as weapons to augment the aforementioned fist fights that result from use of the word ‘checkmate’ in an enclosed environment.  You also get a really, really nice one that you plan to get out when playing with friends, but actually won’t let anyone else touch.

You even start to tinker with making your own.  This usually happens around seven in the evening on Christmas Day, when you have accumulated enough champagne/cava/prosecco corks to serve as Kings, Queens, Bishops, Rooks and so on, and enough bottletops of various colours to make pawns.  Board?  Back of a Cadbury’s selection box and a sharpie and you are good to go.  Warning, if this set is not assembled, painted and varnished by 27 December, it will be ‘tidied away’.

Oddly, the most charming chess sets tend not to be the ornamental, onyx, marble, ebony and Swarovski affairs that decorate the living rooms of the apartments of oligarchs’ tarts (although given the fate of some oligarchs, a nice chess set would be handy in their cell), but the ones with history.  This includes, let’s be clear, the Lewis chess men, but more often are the modest but beautiful sets one finds in what used to be known as ‘junk’ shops but, thanks to the proliferation of programmes featuring bargain hunting antique experts on daytime telly, we must now refer to as ‘curio emporiums’ or something.

These are objects that are loved.  Battlefields rightly become places of pilgrimage, a square of turf where sacrifices were made, deeds noble and ignoble done, where history was made, heroes crowned, villains vanquished.  The same goes for that small square chequered battlefield.

Also, you can get Star Wars chess sets!  How cool is that?

Postcard from Edinburgh – the Castle

What’s more festival than seeing a show…having one cancelled. With time to spare we visited the castle.

Bloody. Hell.

OK. First off, the battlements. Huge cannons look over the city, ready to blow the hell out of anyone trying to open a Starbucks. They could now be manned by the many tourists who have their pictures taken next to them. But if ancient cannons aren’t your thing…they have the real deal, a functioning artillery piece that’s described as the ‘one o’ clock gun’ but is, when you think about it, a major artillery piece on the highest point in the centre of the city.

Next up, the stairs and ramps. If you managed to fight your way to the top of the castle, you bloody deserve to run the country. And that’s without an opposed attack.

Have to say though, like many castles, the weak point is attack through the gift shop.

The castle also holds the crown jewels, the ‘treasures of Scotland’. There was a little bit of debate about whether they were actually the real things. But, looking at the two huge safe doors that marked the only entrances to the room where they were kept and based on the idea that they are kept in the centre of a room in a castle, with eight foot thick walls, I can think of no better place to keep them.

Want to rip them off? Bring a siege tower. And an army.

Also, it has an audio tour. I bloody love an audio tour. You know what the sign of a good audio tour is? Mood music and sound effects. The section on the one o’clock gun starts with a huge ‘boom!’. Even as I shrieked like a girl, I loved it.

The Scottish national war memorial.


I am not sentimental, alright. It’s just that, like many of the other chaps who were visiting the spotless, dust-free war memorial that day, I have an allergy, that makes my eyes red and my nose runny. Must be allergic to marble.

The war memorial itself is astonishing. A casket containing the battle honours of the regiments sits atop a marble plinth, which is in turn mounted on the bare rock that rises out of a polished marble floor like a rock rising from a still ocean at night. This is the rock of the castle, the living rock of Scotland, the very roots of the country and the memories of the glorious dead, forever remembered, are directly connected to it.

For the record…just about held it together reading the inscription about the war dead being beyond hurt. Lip tremble time when I read the inscription about even the nameless being forever honoured, for their names are written in the book of God.

As I said, allergic to marble.