Young people today, I don't know

The British othello scene has been overrun lately by trendy young people who are better at the game than me. It's quite disturbing - I don't mind losing to old people like most British othello regulars (how's that for an off-hand comment guaranteed to offend no end of people?), they've been playing since the dark ages and have the wisdom that comes with their advanced years. Some of them are over forty, you know. But when I'm being comprehensively thrashed on a regular basis by youthful-looking twenty-somethings who can wear one of those hooded sweaters and get away with it and started playing the game more recently than I did, it makes me think I should start learning how to play properly. It's embarrassing being so bad and so old.

What's even more psychologically disturbing about this horde of new young players is that they're both called David, and I always get confused by their surnames. There's a story behind this, as there is with all of my weirdnesses. You see, as many of my friends know all too well, I automatically file people away in my brain by the name with which they were introduced to me. If for any reason they change their name thereafter, or if they were using a nickname or alias when I first encountered them, I find it impossible to remember to call them by their preferred monicker. Except for Kitty, who seems to have become fixed in my mind as such, even though he was SA when I first met him and seems to be mainly SumerianHaze these days, but that's another story.

So the thing with the Davids started at the nationals last year - I'd heard in advance that a player called David Beck, whom I'd never met, was going to be there, so when a newcomer introduced himself to me as David, I naturally assumed that was him. As it transpired, David Beck wasn't there after all, and this other guy was David Hand. But I didn't realise this for about an hour, and the mental damage was done. So now whenever I see David Hand, my brain automatically calls him David Beck. And when I see David Beck, my brain calls him... David Gray.

No, not David Hand. I know he's not David Hand. I'm not stupid. But I think that since I know, deep down, that he can't be David Beck, my subconscious trawls around for another likely-sounding name to pin on him, and comes up with David Gray. Who I believe is a pop singer of some kind, probably also younger than me and better at pop singing than I am, but who I otherwise don't know anything about.

When I started this post, it was with the intention of describing what I've been doing this weekend, but I think I'll do that tomorrow. This whole Beck/Hand thing has gone on too long already. And it's just this minute occurred to me that "David Beck/Hand" sounds surprisingly like "David Beckham". Maybe they're all related.