I have insomnia, so I am going to write a little about chess.

I have started going to a chess club. It meets every Wednesday afternoon/evening in Streatham library. They run an annual(?) round-robin tournament where you play everyone as black and as white. So far I have played 5 won 1 lost 4. But you are ranked by absolute number of games won, not by win percentage or game difference.

I am not used to playing face-to-face. I am not used to playing with clocks, though we get 80mins each, which is effectively forever, but still.

I am used to playing online. I have a rather better win percentage on Facebook. It only occured to me to play chess on Facebook because I saw Colin playing there. Whenever we play on Facebook, I win; whenever we play face-to-face, I lose.

I used to play chess at primary school. No, wait, go back. I used to play chess while at infant school, although they packed me off somewhere else to play it. I think the man running it was my teacher’s husband; he may also have been a teacher at a different school. It was a long time ago; I forget; ow my brane.

So, primary school: There was a chess club after school. I was briefly at the top of the ladder, then I went down to ninth after my ninth-placed opponent conned me halfway through a game that we were playing touch-move, then they introduced a rule saying you couldn’t play anyone who was more than two places above you on the ladder. Bah.

I think we played against other schools. I remember a meeting where everyone came up with a good reason why someone else should be team captain. But I don’t remember any actual matches.

I do remember playing in a couple of tournaments. They were annual, and they were in Islington, which was further than I had ever been on the Victoria line. You played nine(?) games over the course of a day, which doesn’t seem enough; I remember there being hundreds of kids there. Maybe there were age bands.

If you started ranking highly enough, you had to play with a clock. I was not used to playing with a clock. I remember feeling smug that I had more time left than my opponent, right up until the point where I got checkmated.

Debt collectors won the battle of wills, and I authenticated myself over the phone with my address and date of birth. Which, strangely, wasn’t enough for them before, but shush.

The debt relates to an address I moved out from before I ever used Littlewoods, and was incurred after I had stopped using Littlewoods. So apparantly fraud (“identity theft” if you want to get melodramatic about it) and not a cock up. They advise that I report it to the police.

Maybe I should check my credit record as well.

“Hi, Ewan, where are you?”

‘I’m in the pub.’

“Where in the pub?”

‘Up the stairs.’

“Up the stairs with the sign saying ‘staff only’?”

‘Yes, those stairs.’

I’d never been a pub customer in the landlord’s living room before.