Lockdown again, but there are some consolations, thankfully. The new instalment of The Crown is beginning on Sunday- hurray! and of course everyone is going crazy for the excellent Netflix series 'The Queens Gambit'. All those people who never wanted to play chess with me are now taking lessons online...that is of course great news. I have played all my life. It is the game of the Gods!
When my friend Neville came to visit me at Hotel Djenne Djenno in 2008 he brought me the novel 'The Queen's Gambit' by Walter Tevis. as a present because he knew I loved the game. I loved the book too, and read it twice. So I was very pleased that it was turned into a Netflix series.
This new collective chess fever reminded me of a time towards the end of my life in Mali, and I thought it may be worth re-posting what I wrote in August 2016. I called the Blog post
'Chess Psychosis:'
"I am a very mediocre chess player
but that doesn’t stop me from spending hours every day recently playing chess
on my computer (Microsoft Chess Titans:
the reason why I refuse to update my Windows from Windows 7) There is something
here in Mali that is not conducive to reading: I read in England and in Sweden
but here I find myself watching old favourite movies and TV series on DVDs that I bring out from Europe instead.
To counteract this passivity and to give myself some mental stimulation – and frankly
mainly because I find it exciting- I play a lot of chess.
My love affair with this game
started when I was around twelve, thirteen: my next door neighbour and class
mate Britta and I lived a brief moment in search of ‘cultural refinement’ and in our youthful view of things we saw this state as something that could be
achieved through playing chess and listening to classical music. I remember
many happy afternoons at her place playing chess and listening to the
Brandenburg concertos. Then soon after we discovered boys and other
distractions that led us astray from this pure and virtuous road towards refinement
and enlightenment.
I did not forget chess
entirely though, and when I lived in
Islington in London in the eighties and
early nineties I ran a chess club
every Thursday for three years. Anybody could come and I never knew who would
turn up. We did have one or two grand masters
who graced our club once or twice but it was a light-hearted sort of chess club
because alcohol was served and of course alcohol + chess do not mix. But
never mind- there was plenty of laughter and there was drawing going on too and
poetry- making by anyone who had not
found a partner yet: I still have three glorious ‘chess diaries’ from those
happy Thursdays. I also have my friend
Biggles’ (who drew the chess problem above) wonderful chess biscuit cutters
that he made for me which he presented me with when he arrived on the chess
club’s first anniversary: he had made a chocolate and shortbread chess board
with all the chess pieces which were to be eaten as they were taken! It goes perhaps
without saying that most of my friends at this time were artists...One of them ,
dear Stirling, sent me a parcel as Christmas greeting one year. When I opened
it I found three kings from three different Chess sets.
That was Islington. Then in the
nineties I moved to Notting Hill and lo and behold: noone wanted to play chess!
(An opportunity for a study by an
anthroplologist or sociologist perhaps?) So I opened my Tuesday ‘salon’ where
people played all sorts of things but not normally chess.
I am just recovering from a
rather nasty attack of malaria. It sounds more alarming than it is because
there are remedies that are tried and trusted so no one that can afford to pay
should need to be suffering for more than three of four days at the most. But
there is no doubt that the first couple of days are quite rough. Keita’s old
collegue Barry came and gave me injections and they lowered my fever and stopped
my vomiting . But I was clearly not in a state to do anything strenuous and I
needed to rest. So I started to play chess. This turned out to be a big
mistake. Chess should only be played in good health, and even then it should
not be overdone. I remember when I
started my chess club in Islington that I became ‘overheated’- that is I played
too much . That means one gets into a neurotic state when one sees everything around
one as chess pieces and one becomes a chess piece oneself. I mean that if I am
walking down a corridor and someone is walking straight towards me I feel that
I have to decide whether I am a bishop or a rook and therefore whether I should
move out of the way diagonally or crash straight into the oncoming person,
taking it. It never actually got to that point but the temptation was there and
that was annoying enough.
So I played too much chess and I
watched (once more!) too much Downton Abbey yesterday. These two
past times turned out to be an unholy marriage and the result was quite frightening in my malarial
state. When I had finally had enough and decided to go to bed I could not sleep
because I was suffering from chess overheating. The very annoying thing was
that everything had turned into chess pieces again, just like that time in Islington.
I mean that the chairs in Cousin Isabel’s drawing room had started to move like
chess pieces in my mind when I closed my eyes.
When I opened them to escape this I found that the few light sources I leave on
when I sleep here alone now had also become chess pieces. There was no escaping it. I
was tired so I decided to pray for peace to go to sleep but this didn’t work
either; I found myself transported onto a big chess board in the sky where I was kneeling in front of the King with all
sorts of nasty looking enemy bishops and knights looking down on me ready to
pounce! I suppose this King eventually did answer my prayers because I did fall
asleep from utter exhaustion in the end..."
My frequent commentator David then sent a comment drawing my attention to a great little silent film which is available on Youtube: Shakhmati Goryachki (Chess Fever)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RXplN1CJnc&t=13s
It is charming and well worth checking out!
Da