And so, what would make your perfect day?
I wasn't necessarily expecting today to be perfect but I don't know if I'm going to improve on it for a while. The ingredients are a trip to London with art, poets, chess and wine. One has to use one's time off as best one can, so I'd booked myself cheap train rides to London and back with the Staunton Memorial Chess tournament as the main attraction. Plump up your cushion and let me tell you about it.
I finished The Times crossword just after Petersfield. I do like to mention the station I was closest to when finishing The Times crossword. From Waterloo I slipped through Villers Street with impressive local knowledge to go and see Maggi Hambling's George Melly paintings in the National Portrait Gallery. They aren't all there, it's not the whole George always exhibition as reviewed here a while ago but it's great, if not essential, to see paintings in real life rather than in a book. Passionate, magical, spilling over with love, mystery and ebullience, and booze and wild camp. But that was just me. The paintings were okay, too.
From there I progressed up Charing Cross Road to the church of St. Giles-in-the-fields where Andrew Marvell is buried. It was the least I could do to go and pay some homage as he was the subject of my undergraduate dissertation all those years ago. The tribute there is fulsome, in the style of its day, and makes an interesting compare and contrast with some accounts of Marvell that guess that he might not have been the most attractive personality of his time. But he was a poet so we don't care whether he was nice or not and St. Giles has a special two-for-the-price-of-one offer on poets as they also have George Chapman, whose Homer Keats famously first looked into. So that was all fine and I was soon back on my way to The Strand, to Simpsons in the Strand, posh place, to see some international class chess. And what a blinding experience that was. Certainly a candidate for the best sporting event I've ever been to, not having been to any better chess matches before than ones that I've been in at some lowly level.
There are two separate (discrete) tournaments going on at the same time. UK v Netherlands and a 10 player individual all play all. There were two dozen seats and a standing area for spectators to come and go and ten tables for the matches with several display boards showing the positions from some of them. Having got there ahead of schedule, I thought I might as well help myself to a prime seat with an excellent view of Jan Timman v Victor Korchnoi. Korchnoi is the Soviet dissident defector who challenged Karpov for the World Championship in the 1970's and is now a spritely 78 years old. What a bloke. There was never anything quite as sexy as a Soviet dissident for those of us who were teenagers in the 1970's. A bit like David Bowie except Russian and good at chess and he didn't sing Rebel Rebel. I was no more than yards from him.
Many of the chess players in this rarefied atmosphere of thought and abstraction are young, austere and aloof men, apart from Timman who looks like a regular guy who would gladly buy you a pint, and might himself once have been on the verge of World Championship challenging, and Luke McShane who still looks young enough to be on a sabbatical from the Tinga and Tucker Club, except he is too young to have heard of that. You look at him, Michael Adams, David Howell, Sokolov, Chernaiev and especially Jan Werle and admire their chess rankings and then wonder what else they know about.
A couple of players wandered in 15 or 20 minutes after the 2.30 start. It's their own time they are wasting once the clock has started. I'm watching Timman and Korchnoi but keeping an eye on the display of Nigel Short's game against Jan Smeets. Just after 3 o'clock, Trent and Wiersma get up and leave having agreed a draw. I find out later, asking an official in a toilet break, that the game had lasted 9 moves before they agreed to give each other the afternoon off. Then I make a note to myself to make sure I don't forget to say on the blog that it wasn't the only game that was Short and Smeets just in case I can make a joke out of it.
Timman-Korchnoi is a French Defence but soon becomes a position that is unfamilar to me however many databases might know of it. I notice that Howell-Sokolov is a weird position that almost certainly hasn't been seen before. It gradually dawns on me that Korchnoi is taking longer over his moves than Timman but their clock is facing away from us. When he takes 10 minutes over his castling move I reflect that I would have done it immediately but, then again, I'm not a 78 year old Soviet dissident and I'm not all that good at chess either. I wonder if I could write a poem about the event. For me, it's the highlight of a lifetime to be sitting so close to this action but for them it's another day. The players get up and walk about quite a lot, get another glass of water or some tea or coffee, talk to each other in whispers and glance at the positions on other boards. Timman wanders around the room amiably but as soon as he hears Korchnoi touch the clock, he's back at the table.
Nigel Short finishes at 4.15. Drawn. He walks away and then comes back later. Next time he leaves I follow him out, audacious groupie that I am.
'Nigel, could I trouble you for an autograph?'
'Of course.'
'This is a superb little tournament.'
'Well it's not very good today I'm afraid,' he says and waves his hand, 'Sorry.' Genuinely not a happy man, having only drawn after some earlier wins, but kind enough to know it's not my fault. What a great bloke.
So, just after 5 o'clock Timman and Korchnoi make some moves, material is exchanged in the centre and suddenly I fancy Timman's Queen, 2 Rooks and 6 pawns against Korchnoi's Queen, Rook, 2 Bishops and 4 pawns. I nudge the elderly man next to me and pass him a note saying 'Do you think Timman can win this' and he says no. It's nearly time to go and meet Fatty Rimmer in the wine bar but I hang on because suddenly it's absolutely crucial on the chess board. The prospect of a few glasses of crisp white wine is soon more gripping than one or two more moves in the chess so I make a move myself but the old boy next to me follows me out to ask my opinion. As if I'd know. He actually wants to know what I think. I think Timman is better. He's not so sure, he likes the two bishops of Korchnoi. We enthuse about having seen Korchnoi and Timman at close quarters and then I'm back in The Strand.
I mean I saw Reference Point win The Derby, I went to two Cheltenham Gold Cups and saw Nashwan beat Warning in The Eclipse. On 1/1/84 I saw Fulham come back from 4-0 down at half time to draw 4-4 at Fratton Park. I lost 2-3 to Gillian Rimmer in the best pool match ever played in Portsmouth about 5 years ago. I've seen Botham, Flintoff, Sobers, Malcolm Marshall and Derek Randall. Indurain, Lemond and Boardman. I'm not the world's biggest sport's fan by any means but that chess match could have been the best sport event I've ever been to.
The wine bar was lovely. The textures and citrus flavours of several white wines frankly beyond my caring. It's funny how your London friends are suddenly all pesto and skinny latte and yet still finer by far than coming back to Portsmouth and having to negotiate a war zone walking from Fratton Station back to my house. I knew it would be like that and that is, in fact, why one has to get out of it and go somewhere else sometimes.
There still is a better world out there and a perfect day will once in a while insist on happening to you if you give it a chance.
---
And then, having written the above, you find that the Staunton Memorial website has updated with today's results and Korchnoi won. So what did I know.
I'm glad they don't have bookies at chess matches.
I wasn't necessarily expecting today to be perfect but I don't know if I'm going to improve on it for a while. The ingredients are a trip to London with art, poets, chess and wine. One has to use one's time off as best one can, so I'd booked myself cheap train rides to London and back with the Staunton Memorial Chess tournament as the main attraction. Plump up your cushion and let me tell you about it.
I finished The Times crossword just after Petersfield. I do like to mention the station I was closest to when finishing The Times crossword. From Waterloo I slipped through Villers Street with impressive local knowledge to go and see Maggi Hambling's George Melly paintings in the National Portrait Gallery. They aren't all there, it's not the whole George always exhibition as reviewed here a while ago but it's great, if not essential, to see paintings in real life rather than in a book. Passionate, magical, spilling over with love, mystery and ebullience, and booze and wild camp. But that was just me. The paintings were okay, too.
From there I progressed up Charing Cross Road to the church of St. Giles-in-the-fields where Andrew Marvell is buried. It was the least I could do to go and pay some homage as he was the subject of my undergraduate dissertation all those years ago. The tribute there is fulsome, in the style of its day, and makes an interesting compare and contrast with some accounts of Marvell that guess that he might not have been the most attractive personality of his time. But he was a poet so we don't care whether he was nice or not and St. Giles has a special two-for-the-price-of-one offer on poets as they also have George Chapman, whose Homer Keats famously first looked into. So that was all fine and I was soon back on my way to The Strand, to Simpsons in the Strand, posh place, to see some international class chess. And what a blinding experience that was. Certainly a candidate for the best sporting event I've ever been to, not having been to any better chess matches before than ones that I've been in at some lowly level.
There are two separate (discrete) tournaments going on at the same time. UK v Netherlands and a 10 player individual all play all. There were two dozen seats and a standing area for spectators to come and go and ten tables for the matches with several display boards showing the positions from some of them. Having got there ahead of schedule, I thought I might as well help myself to a prime seat with an excellent view of Jan Timman v Victor Korchnoi. Korchnoi is the Soviet dissident defector who challenged Karpov for the World Championship in the 1970's and is now a spritely 78 years old. What a bloke. There was never anything quite as sexy as a Soviet dissident for those of us who were teenagers in the 1970's. A bit like David Bowie except Russian and good at chess and he didn't sing Rebel Rebel. I was no more than yards from him.
Many of the chess players in this rarefied atmosphere of thought and abstraction are young, austere and aloof men, apart from Timman who looks like a regular guy who would gladly buy you a pint, and might himself once have been on the verge of World Championship challenging, and Luke McShane who still looks young enough to be on a sabbatical from the Tinga and Tucker Club, except he is too young to have heard of that. You look at him, Michael Adams, David Howell, Sokolov, Chernaiev and especially Jan Werle and admire their chess rankings and then wonder what else they know about.
A couple of players wandered in 15 or 20 minutes after the 2.30 start. It's their own time they are wasting once the clock has started. I'm watching Timman and Korchnoi but keeping an eye on the display of Nigel Short's game against Jan Smeets. Just after 3 o'clock, Trent and Wiersma get up and leave having agreed a draw. I find out later, asking an official in a toilet break, that the game had lasted 9 moves before they agreed to give each other the afternoon off. Then I make a note to myself to make sure I don't forget to say on the blog that it wasn't the only game that was Short and Smeets just in case I can make a joke out of it.
Timman-Korchnoi is a French Defence but soon becomes a position that is unfamilar to me however many databases might know of it. I notice that Howell-Sokolov is a weird position that almost certainly hasn't been seen before. It gradually dawns on me that Korchnoi is taking longer over his moves than Timman but their clock is facing away from us. When he takes 10 minutes over his castling move I reflect that I would have done it immediately but, then again, I'm not a 78 year old Soviet dissident and I'm not all that good at chess either. I wonder if I could write a poem about the event. For me, it's the highlight of a lifetime to be sitting so close to this action but for them it's another day. The players get up and walk about quite a lot, get another glass of water or some tea or coffee, talk to each other in whispers and glance at the positions on other boards. Timman wanders around the room amiably but as soon as he hears Korchnoi touch the clock, he's back at the table.
Nigel Short finishes at 4.15. Drawn. He walks away and then comes back later. Next time he leaves I follow him out, audacious groupie that I am.
'Nigel, could I trouble you for an autograph?'
'Of course.'
'This is a superb little tournament.'
'Well it's not very good today I'm afraid,' he says and waves his hand, 'Sorry.' Genuinely not a happy man, having only drawn after some earlier wins, but kind enough to know it's not my fault. What a great bloke.
So, just after 5 o'clock Timman and Korchnoi make some moves, material is exchanged in the centre and suddenly I fancy Timman's Queen, 2 Rooks and 6 pawns against Korchnoi's Queen, Rook, 2 Bishops and 4 pawns. I nudge the elderly man next to me and pass him a note saying 'Do you think Timman can win this' and he says no. It's nearly time to go and meet Fatty Rimmer in the wine bar but I hang on because suddenly it's absolutely crucial on the chess board. The prospect of a few glasses of crisp white wine is soon more gripping than one or two more moves in the chess so I make a move myself but the old boy next to me follows me out to ask my opinion. As if I'd know. He actually wants to know what I think. I think Timman is better. He's not so sure, he likes the two bishops of Korchnoi. We enthuse about having seen Korchnoi and Timman at close quarters and then I'm back in The Strand.
I mean I saw Reference Point win The Derby, I went to two Cheltenham Gold Cups and saw Nashwan beat Warning in The Eclipse. On 1/1/84 I saw Fulham come back from 4-0 down at half time to draw 4-4 at Fratton Park. I lost 2-3 to Gillian Rimmer in the best pool match ever played in Portsmouth about 5 years ago. I've seen Botham, Flintoff, Sobers, Malcolm Marshall and Derek Randall. Indurain, Lemond and Boardman. I'm not the world's biggest sport's fan by any means but that chess match could have been the best sport event I've ever been to.
The wine bar was lovely. The textures and citrus flavours of several white wines frankly beyond my caring. It's funny how your London friends are suddenly all pesto and skinny latte and yet still finer by far than coming back to Portsmouth and having to negotiate a war zone walking from Fratton Station back to my house. I knew it would be like that and that is, in fact, why one has to get out of it and go somewhere else sometimes.
There still is a better world out there and a perfect day will once in a while insist on happening to you if you give it a chance.
---
And then, having written the above, you find that the Staunton Memorial website has updated with today's results and Korchnoi won. So what did I know.
I'm glad they don't have bookies at chess matches.
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