Seriously now. This addiction to chess is getting ridiculous. I don’t know if it’s the recession at large or my impending unemployment. Chess beckons daily like an alternate universe where absolute order prevails, even though I make a mess of it every time. I can’t win for shit, which makes me the definition of insanity, since I keep, like Oliver, going back for more. “Those linked central pawns of his,” Martin Amis once wrote of the time he played the world’s Number 3 (Nigel Short), “oh, what they could do to me. They weren’t pawns in the normal sense; they had grown, fattened; they were more like bishops, or rooks. No, they were like queens, I thought, as they worked their way into the very crux of my defence.” I don’t have to play the world’s Number 3 to feel that way. Just my brother on the other side of the world (you can see our latest game, my latest humiliation, here. The guy is merciless. Just like when we were young tykes angling for sibling supremacy. Never had a chance then, still don’t now. Still, may I have some more?
