A Brief Lapse of Confidence and other stories

 A Brief Lapse of Confidence was the title of my one and only published short story, in a magazine called Fisheye in the 1980's but that's another story. I was distressed a couple of years later when a popular music ensemble called Pink Floyd released an album called A Momentary Lapse of Reason, as if me and them had the least thing in common but I needn't have worried. By then my fiction writing career, and probably Fisheye, were things of the past.

My more recent lapse of confidence was to remove the Racetrack Wiseguy selections from here early on Saturday which was a shame because the best bet, Next Destination, won although none of the others did. I wouldn't remove losing tips after they've lost because that would be somehow (although not) 'post ergo propter hoc' and inadmissable. And glorious failure and the refutation of optimism are poems in themselves.

But I'd like to restore the result for the record as well as the chess finish detailed in the same item to mark the occasion of setting a new personal best rating at 30 minute games at Lichess. It means a lot to me to improve past 1900 - to 1901 last night and then to 1906 by winning again this morning - because, to use an idiom from a more brutal if no more combative sport, I'm 'punching above my weight' and it takes a sustained run of good form to post such figures. I suppose I thought I would eventually but it could have taken a long, long time.

I still really need to go beyond 1917 (my rating for 5 minute games), which is two more wins without losing, before I can go back to shorter games but in a time when every little detail is seen to affect 'mental health', reasons for cheerfulness like that are hugely to be celebrated. On the way to it, I pulled one or two species of animal out of hats, bags and other recepticles. My favourite was when I thought I'd blown it and was facing checkmate or necessary ruinous sacrifice to delay it in this position.

But one has painfully and very gradually learned to have a look and not play quite so impetuously or trusting more to instinct than analysis. I did, after all, have 18 minutes on my clock compared to the 7 on white's. And sacrificing the Queen, it turns out, is not ruinous but sets up the rook to move and across and get checkmate thanks to the help of the brave little pawn working wonders in enemy territory. Thus QxRP, then,

And it's 'Bang, Bang', like something Maradona might have done, I'd like to think and maybe I'll see it as a puzzle somewhere. White mates in two.

It's surely not that clever but it made me feel like Abraham de Lacey Giuseppe Casey Thomas O'Malley, O'Malley the Alley Cat. And I'm very proud of that.

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I do hope that someone among those who come here from time to time to read the latest ramblings will be kind enough to tell me when it finally becomes incoherent. Vaguely connected ramblings come with age and there are touching, if grim, anecdotes of Auden shuffling round to the cafe in Oxford in his last years, repeating himself and possibly not being as interesting to listen to as he once was. But there's no need to feel sorry for him. I bet he felt fine.

The audience figures here suggest that somebody's re-tweeted, cited or otherwise put a link to the Vandini review and they're welcome. It's been top of the playlist and is even better than I said and I said it was great. There is much more to enjoy than is intrusive in the augmentation in the likes of the bassoon part in a way that's a bit like the clarinet flying off to apparently do its own thing in trad jazz trumpet pieces like those of Humph. It's never going to unseat Handel's Nightingale as Best Disc of the Year but it's a wonderful thing and much to be valued in what I'd love to be an awardless world which simply took things at their own worth.

Like Muriel Spark does, who did win her fair share of prizes but who I didn't know very much about until surrendering to the biography I was leant. That led me to order three of her novels and The Ballad of Peckham Rye was well worth the not-very-much time it took to read it and the not-very-much money it cost. If I didn't know better- and I don't- I'd say it might owe something to the great Patrick Hamilton's interpretation of humanity and its sometimes sinister motives. She's an exemplary fiction writer and I'm looking forward to more but I bought the Rembrandt biography a little while ago now and thought I'd have a look, with half a mind to dismiss it as a mistake, it arriving with scant authority to explain why it was 'printed by Amazon'. But maybe it's okay. Interesting enough for me at least.

But I don't want to waste time. Heaven knows how the months since I gave up the day job have slided by. You multiply that up by a factor of no more than you dare to and soon realize that Louis Armstrong was wrong. We do not have all the time in the world. 

It looks increasingly unlikely that I'll be going back very often to the work of Medicine Head or the Sutherland Brothers. On the one hand there's plenty of Muriel's sharp observation with which to try to excuse her adoption of that colossal sin, Catholicism, and there's also all the aimless rambling, the modest levels of chess success and the self-induced challenge of defending myself against bankruptcy by finding horse racing so endlessly unforgiving.

As everybody who ever retired from a day job has always said, I don't know how I ever had time for it.