Boston Utd beat Alfreton on penalties last night in the first round of the play-offs! 5-4, with one crucial and impressive save from our goalie and five perfectly scored spot-kicks. And so, like all people who technically support a football team but only remember it when something good happens, I'm all about the Pilgrims right now! Semi-final away at Scunthorpe on Saturday!
Ahh, Scunthorpe. A Lincolnshire derby that can only ever remind me of the time I went there for a memorable match of my own, back in my schooldays. Incidentally, if you want another reason why I so identify with Simon the Chipmunk, there's one great episode that reveals that Simon (as everyone would expect) loves chess and enthusiastically forms a chess club when he gets the opportunity... but actually isn't very good at the game. Jeanette always beats him easily.
Incidentally, this episode was clearly written by someone who knows the basics of chess, but animated by a studio that didn't. You can see in the first picture above that the board is the wrong way around. Other scenes have the board correctly oriented, but the king and queen in the wrong place, and black making the first move. It's the basics, people - get it right!
I also have always had a reputation for being good at chess, just because I'm that kind of person, but am actually not terribly good at it. This even goes back to my schooldays, when on the rare occasion anyone outside of our chess-club clique heard that I was on the school chess team, they'd probably just nod and think that made sense, since I was the kind of person who would be. Nobody really knew just how unsuccessful our chess team was, but suffice to say there'd never be an announcement in assembly or anything to say we'd won something.
As an aside, the one person who didn't assume I was good at chess was my dad. He had an annoying unshakeable belief that I was a really terrible player, to the extent of barely knowing how the pieces moved. He'd picked this up from playing me at the age of five or so, and never updated his mental image. I wasn't as bad as he thought, at least.
But our chess-club gang was me, Noddy, Slosh and Jimmy, and we were extremely cool in our own way. There were other people at the school who were actually better chess players, the kind who had won competitions and things, but they had better things to do than play in the chess club by the time of our golden era, so the four-man school chess team, which travelled around to other schools in regular competition was me and Noddy, Slosh if he could make it that night (Jimmy never wanted to), plus one or both of Keith and Damian, two younger kids who were about as good as my dad thought I was. We seldom won a game, but some of our opponents were on about our level, so there were some fun and exciting nights!
And then there was the trip to Scunthorpe. It wasn't part of the regular chess tournament circuit, it was a strange one-off thing. I can't remember any details about why it happened, but we had a team of six for this event. Slosh, Noddy, me, Keith, Damian and a friend of theirs who I don't think knew anything about chess at all. We went to the match, as always, in the school minibus, driven by Dr Chambers. The Doc, who was the only teacher at the school with a doctorate to his name, was the chemistry teacher and in charge of the chess club. If challenged on the point he said he did know how to play chess, but he could never be persuaded to prove it. His participation consisted of being in the general lab at lunchtimes and allowing the chess club to happen there, plus driving the team to and from matches.
Scunthorpe is a whole forty miles from Horncastle, outside of our usual range, and should have been about an hour's drive. We somehow got lost along the way and the journey took more than three hours. We were all comprehensively thrashed in our games - if memory serves, Noddy's was a longer and closer contest, lasting about twenty minutes, and the rest of us were all polished off in nothing flat. Then we went back home again. It was a great night!
So that was my only previous visit to the town you can't say on Facebook because it's got a rude word in it. In honour of that previous triumph, I'm expecting a 6-0 win for someone in the play-off semi-final on Saturday. Hopefully Boston!
