All The Fools Sailed Away

I am so bloody bad at chess it actually hurts. Every time one of their little men takes one of my little men I am consumed by an impotent maddening rage that threatens my ever-slimming sanity. I hate being a chess doofer.

My problem is the glass ceiling between beginner and progressor. I keep smacking my calloused head against it, and the only results are a hollow bonging sound and the dull pain of another angry headache. I want to be good at chess. President Bartlett was good at chess. Stephen Fry probably plays blindfold chess against massed armies of brains, winning with the regularity of an atomic clock. Even Freddie Frigging Flintoff, a man who thinks spaghetti is complicated, is a fair player of the second-oldest game in town.

I, on the other hand, am increasingly shit at chess.

I am the statistic in the other players' win columns. I am the pleasing sight on their horizon. I am their meat and drink, their sluttishly easy conquest. Over a glass of wine or a fast-food fix I can be bent over and buggered in twenty measured moves, my shrivelled King twitchingly exposed when badly-deployed defences are predictably swept asunder with girlish ease.

I am embarrassingly, hopelessly, infinitely, bad at chess.

I just postponed all my Gameknot games for a month, with the message "FED UP OF BEING CRAP AT CHESS" attached for all my opponents to see. They were probably wondering when I was going to figure it out....