Let's hear it for me!

Yippee skippee! I won! Well, not won as such, but I came second, and that's considered in modern fashionable circles to be even better than winning. Seven of us at the Oadby Regional, which is a nice number for a seven-round tournament because you can do all-play-all. Eight is even better, obviously, because then you can do all-play-all without someone having a bye each round, but I shouldn't complain. I got off to a flying start, in fact, beating Steve, Roy and Geoff to be in the lead at lunch, then lost not too horribly to Jeremy and Phil before rounding the day off with a win over David... hang on, I can get this right... Beck. There were a lot of close games and interesting results all round, it was a superb advertisement for the game. Although the only people who would have seen this advertisement would be the seven players and the occasional elderly churchgoer who wandered in during the competition (which took place in the lobby of the Baptist church).

Phil won, with 5½ wins, me second with 5, then Steve on 4½, David on 4 and the others on other scores that I can't remember. I don't know why I'm quoting the full results like this when I can't even be certain that I'm right about them - look them up on the yahoo group when somebody who thought to write them down gets home and posts them, if you're that interested. The important thing is that those wins over David and Geoff will give my rating a boost - it's been in freefall for ages, so maybe this is a good omen for the 2007 season. I might even start to entertain thoughts of having a chance at the British Grand Prix title, although that would just be silly - I might occasionally get a good result like today, through luck rather than skill, but I'm fairly certain I can't do it at all five regionals. Still, I'm happy. I've never won one before, and I've only finished second a couple of times - I'm trying to decide whether this second place (by a mere half a point) is cooler than that time in London when I beat everyone except Graham (who's so much better than me that it hardly counts as a loss when I inevitably lose to him). I think I'll arbitrarily say that it is, so that I'll feel good about myself.

At the train station on the way home, I saw a notice appealing for information about an incident on a train recently. What kind of incident, I don't know, because all the notice said was that there was "an incident involving a white male" and that "the male at one point was spoken to by a member of staff". Passengers who might have been on the train are asked to come forward if they noticed "unusual behaviour from a male between Leicester and Kettering". Is that really all the detail they can give us here? I mean, trains from Leicester to London are generally packed full of white males, and most of them are spoken to by train staff at some point, unless it's one of those trains where nobody bothers to check the tickets. Clearly the incident was so memorable that people who witnessed it will understand what the poster meant, and such a transgression of the boundaries of British decency that they couldn't bring themselves to describe it, but that's hardly fair on the members of the public who weren't on the train and are now trying to imagine exactly what might have happened, based on this minimal information.