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?

Fighting Fantasy, D&D for the socially awkward

Back in the day, which is to say back when I was at school, a period after they had done away with slates but before they introduced tablets, there was a certain cultural kudos to be had from following an obscure band.  Remember, this is before Google came along and ruined obscurity for everyone.  If you wanted to get into obscure music, you had to listen to John Peel like millions of others, or subscribe to fanzines.

The thing was, you could say things like ‘Well, Duran Duran are all very well, but you know they stole the baseline from a single by a Belgian jazz funk crossover band I’ve admired for some years’ and only be beaten up for being an utter arse, rather than an outright liar.  This was an age where the smartphone fact check didn’t exist and one showed one’s allegiance to one’s favourite bands by writing their name in blue biro on your schoolbag.

There was, of course, a difference between liking an obscure band ‘think ‘Kraftwerk’, but with a heavy metal influence’ and shit band.

Back at the start of the ‘80s, Dungeons and Dragons was obscure and back in the 80s, Dungeons and Dragons was cooler than ‘Wham!’

Possibly that assertion may have more, or less, relevance depending upon your perspective, particularly in relation to whether or not you were a teenage girl in the 80’s, and indeed whether your loyalties lay with Wham! or Duran Duran, and indeed with Dungeons & Dragons or RuneQuest.

None of that matters now of course because several things happened that ruined Dungeons & Dragons for everyone, and by ‘everyone’ I mean the guys (and they were all guys) that played it before it got popular, the sort of men (as they are now men) who explain that they were into Dungeons & Dragons before it became popular the same way that some other men (and this is a gender specific thing) will make a point of telling you that they were into R.E.M. before they got famous.

For ‘famous’ read ‘commercial’, for ‘commercial’ read ‘good’.

Mysteriously, Dungeons & Dragons went from a hobby that adolescent boys played in bedrooms and classrooms to spawning a huge games franchise of laughably overpriced books and model figures, inspiring an astonishing number of imitators and then a tee vee programme and then a film.  I remember when I was playing a game so misunderstood that tabloid newspapers linked it with devil worship, which now features on ‘The Big Bang Theory’.

Of course, that was before consoles and then computers and finally smartphones came along and rendered dice throwing and imagination obsolete.

Back in the aforementioned day, me any my adolescent chums would spend our lunchtimes avoiding rough kids, and girls (equally terrifying) by battling orcs and goblins.  I was lucky enough to have a group of friends who enjoyed rolling for initiative as much as I did.  However, just as Dungeons & Dragons really, really took off, somebody had the genius idea of producing a game you could play solo, and the Fighting Fantasy books were born.

They were, to put it mildly, quite successful.  Role playing gamers love books, rule books, monster companions, anything, they devour paper like a shredder in a US Embassy with evacuation helicopters waiting on the roof.  So would they buy a book that will let them play a social game without the encumbrance of friends?  Indeed they did!

The idea of Fighting Fantasy was that you made your way through a non-sequential book.  So you find a fork in the road, do you turn left (go to paragraph 41) or right (go to paragraph 52).  Left.  You die!  Shit, shit, no, I meant right, right.  You see a bunny.  Phew, and so on.

The thing is, this is role playing gamers we’re talking about here, they would never flip forward or back, and they would never cheat.  To do so would be to ignore our inner Dungeon Master and also, you could just tell when somebody was lying about completing a Fighting Fantasy book, shame clung to them more tangibly than a cloud of Lynx.

Fighting Fantasy, the adventure app for the analogue age.

Clubabble Computer Games

Gentleman’s clubs.

Misogynistic bastions of privilege where men retreat from a world they do not understand and which values they do not share, in short, a world with females in positions of authority.

Gentlemen like women in a position of authority in only two circumstances, when they are dealing out either punishment, or pudding.  Imagine a typical Gentleman’s club, such as the Apostrophe Club just off Pell Mell, founded in 1742 by greengrocers, or the Europa Club, universally known as ‘The Green Door’, founded as a retreat where Valets could relax and bitch about their employers (and of course famously fictionalised by P G Wodehouse as the ‘Junior Granymede’).  They conjure an image, do they not, of deep armchairs, blazing fires, dusty libraries, members flaccid beneath The Times or the Pink ‘Un, and the aroma of cabbage and spotted dick emerging from the dining room, although it will never be called the dining room, it will have some preposterous title such as ‘The Restorvation’ or ‘The Games Room’, the latter an excellent example of how clubs like to fuck with strangers by giving each room a title totally unconnected with its purpose, leading to visitors defecating in ‘The Billiards Room’, meaning a lifetime ban for them, and Korky Gussalt winning twenty guineas for pulling off the most impressive, and disturbing, trick shot ever achieved on the brown baize.

Gentleman’s clubs, it could be argued, by their very intransigence, are preserving our heritage.  Manners, decency, drinking at lunchtime, smoking, racism both institutional and personal, a fear of the underclass, the greatest fear being the realisation we can’t do without them and, of course, the most unfashionable value of all to hold, that as a chap you don’t understand women, that you will never understand them and that, deep down, this is because they don’t want to be understood.

If you doubt me, look to Shakespeare, look to Dickens, look to (Amis, once upon a time your name would have been here, not any more, you arse) Barnes.  Look to any chap who has ever put pen to paper and they will tell you women are unknowable.

It’s not charming, it’s a fucking conspiracy.

And that’s the sort of attitude that allows you to establish a club called ‘The Citadel’, to admit only male members (ooh er!) and then, and this is the genius part, charge £5,000 a year for membership but make it so difficult to get into that people are pathetically grateful to pay to get in, like a shit night club on rainy Thursday in Droitwich.

With all the oak and tweed about the place, not to mention testosterone, gentleman’s clubs are an excellent place for the playing of games.  These include games of chance, such as card games, games of skill, such as backgammon, and games of social exclusion, such as Dungeons and Dragons.  Where chaps gather, a game will soon be in the offing, even if it is ‘club cricket’ played in the Short Room with a bread roll as ball and copy of Wisden as bat.

The only other place where the female presence is this unlikely is the bedroom of a teenage boy.

These too, are environments where the playing of games is indulged in, although in this case ‘backgammon’ is likely to be the name of the level VII war-warg that ‘Acroblaster the Destroyer’ (AKA Simon) rides into battle.

It’s time that the console came into the club.

Men join clubs because they are socially awkward.  If they weren’t, they would be able to make friends without having to be in close confinement with others, with alcohol, that they know generally share their views.  What I am suggesting is that instead of feeling comfortable starting a sentence ‘I’m not racist but…’ they should feel comfortable flopping down in an armchair, picking up a controller and doing unspeakable things to one another during a 72 hour Halo tournament.  Or even better, challenging other clubs, or ‘guilds’ as they will quickly become known.  Gambling may be involved, it’s one thing to play for honour, another to bet your chef.

Naturally, a gaming room would have to be established on the premises.  I suggest ‘The TenBox Room’.

For chutney's sake

This post is about profanity.  Naturally, I have no wish to cause offence unintentionally and so have decided on a simple substitution system to keep things just the right side of filthy.

So, for the ‘F’ word, I shall be using the term ‘chutney’.  For the ‘C’ word, the term ‘pillow’ will be employed.

For the milder profanities, I have come up with something I think is quite ingenious.  ‘Bugger’ will be used for ‘bloody’, ‘bloody’ will be used for ‘bastard’ and ‘bastard’ will be used for ‘wanker’.  Hence, using the term ‘bloody bastarding wanker’ makes it a grammatical nonsense, robs it of its potency and rather neatly defuses the chance of somebody taking offence once the whole profanity substitution thing has been properly explained, probably in court.

The development of profanity has, by and large, been stagnant since the Middle Ages when a short life of miserable toil interspersed by war and plague provided all the inspiration one needed when one needed to find expression through expletive.  Today, an office drone may reach for the swear box when their database crashes, but the word they use was probably coined by some Anglo Saxon type who had just dropped a newly completed cathedral on their toe, or been careless with their scythe.  The latest addition to the lewd lexicon, the ‘M’ word (we’ll use, let’s see…’pantomime horse’), was coined in Viet Nam, I think.  At least, it was certainly used in a lot of films about the Viet Nam war, and as war movies are like documentaries for lazy people, that’s all the authority I require. 

Viet Nam was the right place for a whole new profanity to be coined, because the draft ensured that people who did not want to be there, often from rural communities so having a rich heritage of swearing around cheeky threshing machines, were put into an extreme situation, involving shooting.

If you have even played Medal of Honour on your console with the ‘team talk’ option enabled, you will know that nothing gets young men more excited in a sweary way than combat, and that’s just sofa combat, where the worst thing that will happen to you is picking up a DVT from all the sitting your backside is doing.  Still, it allows people from all over the world to scream obscenities at one another and indulge in the sort of homophobic abuse rarely seen outside the Premiership.

Why do people swear?  Chutney knows.  English is the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Churchill. There are, and I went on Wikipedia so I’m fairly sure about this, well over a thousand words in the English language, so why is it that when reacting to pressure we reach not for the magnificent cathedral of expression to express our emotions, but simply reach into the shed of profanity for something juicy kept on a metaphorical high shelf out of the reach of children?

Possibly it’s because of the importance of the right tool for the right job and sometimes that tool is a blunt, simple one.  Want to stir paint before decorating?  You don’t reach for your blender, you reach for a stick.  If you are a bloke, this will be a stick you have kept, in your shed, for this specific purpose.  It is simple, it is blunt and it does the job, a bit like an F bomb.

I have recently graduated from swearing at the television whenever the news or ‘Antiques Roadshow’ (chutnying how much?’) is on to swearing at the radio.  In my defence, I was being sorely provoked, as the Jeremy Vine show was on.  This is a show that somehow manages to contrive to be more offensive than me, even though I am the one screaming ‘you chutnying pantomimehorse’ at an innocent little box with sound coming out of it.

F Bombing is called F Bombing for a reason.  Profanities, like munitions, should only be used by a responsible adult who knows what they are doing and who has had training, or an over-excited X Box wielding teen, crazed on Red Bull, Haribo, or occasionally by over-excited X Box wielding adults.

Bloomin' marvellous

Well, Valentine's day has come and gone for another year. A forest of trees has been felled to provide the cards while the pollen count in supermarkets has gone through the roof thanks to the amount of cut flowers for sale.

An anonymous message of love sent to somebody you have amorous feelings for! On the fourteenth of February, this is considered romantic; any other time of the year and it's stalking.

This weekend was also marked with a trip to my local megamart, a shop so vast that it has its own tribe, called shoppers or, to give them their common name, Chavs. They even have their own language - the snarl. Such as 'yer, well, like, that's what I'm looking for innit, follow-on crisps for toddlers'.

I was taking the opportunity to purchase some flowers and, for reasons to far-fetched to explain, was paying for them at the 'Digital Counter'. This is not, as one might expect, a huge clock but is instead where you might, for instance, purchase 'Medal of Honour' while also indulging in some blooms.

The chap behind the counter expressed shock at the cost of the flowers and suggested that I could get a value bouquet for a couple of quid.

Looking at a bloke who works behind the computer games counter at the supermarket, advising a customer who was spending thirty quid on a console game to go with a cheap bouquet, one had the feeling that cupid really has his work cut out sometimes.

12 days of Christmas - time well spent

Have taken full advantage of not being at work by investing hours finishing ‘Resident Evil 4’.

The game is fantastic fun, if blowing away zombies with an increasingly exotic amount of weaponry is your idea of a good time (and why wouldn’t it be?). One criticism though – it starts really well but then sort of drops off.

Maybe it’s because it just starts so well, or maybe it’s because I’m a bit long in the tooth. But I really feel as though I’ve run along every corridor known to man shooting at alien, zombies and critters from dimension Y.

That was why the start of the game was so good, you’re in a village in Europe (Spain, I think), and the locals turn on you. Basically, this is brown-trouser stuff – great because it’s a fabulous premise that is recognisable from many movies (especially the excellent ‘Dagon’) but mostly because this is the base-level fear of any tourist who has ever driven though the sort of village where there are more goats than people about where you start to wish that the three-door sub-compact you rented came with a shotgun as well as collision damage waiver.

It’s all very well done and brings on a sense of creeping dread rather than shock and jumps. Then, of course, as soon as you pot a bloke and an alien sprouts from his decapitated torso, it’s business as usual.

Most terrifying of all – the game keeps track of how long you have played it for. Took me 22 hours to get through. Time enough to make a start on learning the guitar, dig the garden, write that slim volume of poetry or go to the gym 22 times (actually 21 times, first visit would be to join a gym) but let’s be honest – it’s actually simply saved me 22 hours of watching crap on telly.