M J M
“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Only the good die young…
Not sure about you but I always preferred the peanut ones.
It’s probably human nature to like someone who seems a bit different, or at the very least, to take an interest in them. It’s true there weren’t many I encountered like that long ago, but some there were. And function as an exemplar at that stage in my life they did -and by that I mean I wanted to be like them in certain respects when I was young.
It’s also commonplace to like someone who shares the same interests as you, especially when you both dress the same way, have a similar background, have the same initials even, and you find them uplifting. This was true of Marcus Misson, who used to captain the Hunts & Peterborough county team in the 90s in the EACU. I took a liking to him for many reasons. Nowadays, I am mostly known as Marcus even though this is not my actual name (Mark is), although I should add this is only so informally, mostly amongst friends and colleagues. Many do like to change their name but he is the original inspiration behind that little namesake shift of mine, partially successful in reducing self-loathing some! 1 He used to have long hair tied back, as I did, he was my age also and a super-friendly guy. Working class like me and very extrovert -not at all your archetypal chess player. He always seemed to have a smile on his face and I liked how organized he was. Whenever I had the opportunity to chat to him I did for he had such great interest in everything and was very approachable. Because of this I looked up to him – as the county team captain- and often watched how he went about things with some admiration – as you do when you like someone, for example -how he would fill in results on the team sheets whilst on the go by standing and leaning on doors or walls for support whilst scribbling and chatting away quietly to team-mates unfussed by anything.
In 1992 I was into grunge and changed how I looked accordingly. I almost always wore either Nirvana T-shirts or cartoon based ones with another T-shirt underneath and some funky hand-me-down cardigan on top -much like Kurt Cobain used to. I also used to wear hairbands of different colours on my forearm and sometimes several of them -Marcus pointed that out once and thought it was cool as it was only us who had long hair that’s for sure (his blonde, mine brown, roughly the same length). We were both much younger than everyone when playing for the county and a bit more colourful than most you could say. My last recollection of him comes from that same year at Bedford Modern School, one Saturday afternoon in April I think it was.
Although long overdue, I recently chased up where he might be now only to find he died long ago and left a young family behind after succumbing to illness. Details of his life and how active he was can be found here: http://www.cambschess.co.uk/Special.php.
He even has a tournament named after him: http://www.adrianelwin.co.uk/EACU/GrandPrix.html
I am sure he is sadly missed by many “A lovely guy. Tragic” -Kevin Williamson. I am inclined to concur with Kevin here: for someone who loved his chess, was perspicacious and so upbeat all the time, that it is yes. 😦
“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
- I should add that my home club also had someone called Marcus, who I was loosely friends with for many years. That’s all it was though. I did not look up to him and want to befriend him like I did with Marcus Misson. Most consider Marcus to be a Roman name, like in Marcus Aurelius for example. I don’t. It’s a chess name for me -positive, inspirational and an easy choice. ↩︎
You may find me on Lichess if you so wish…olc is a Gaelic word.
M J M
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If so, you may find this of interest: https://chesscartoons.wordpress.com/
M J M
Posted in Chess | Leave a Comment »
This is the only picture I have of myself whilst school chess champion.
M J M
Posted in Meme | Leave a Comment »
My opponent, Dennis Pawlek is an IM at draughts and the one able to provide documentation of when I played for England. As you can see, he is in some trouble in this game played on October 3rd 2019.
M J M
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On this day fb throws this up:
M J M
Posted in Moves I could never play | Leave a Comment »
If you know of any females playing chess over there, please provide the following info + picture:
Age:
Elo rating:
Telephone number:
Club she plays for:
Favourite openings:
Disclaimer: this picture was taken when I was at my handsomest. I am not so handsome now, a bit fat, and into Nihilism too much.
Supporting statement: I’ve been away from England in hope of finding a partner good at chess like me for some time but ran aground with those blasted foreign types! I am now waiting for the right moment to set sail and make blighty my home again for the right chess player -this is not some last ditch attempt!
Testimony from ex-girlfriend: He can be a good laugh sometimes, and I suppose he is alright, but he gets drunk a lot and when he does he just goes on and on about chess all the time -you can’t shut him up! It did my head in, so I booted him out. Loads of women have, so I’m not surprised he’s after someone who’s more into chess than me now -I don’t think anyone else could put up with him! He woke me up in the middle of the night completely off his head once. Then put loud heavy metal music on and asked if I wanted to play some bullet chess! But when sober, I suppose he is alright yeah -he’s just kinda a bit lost! With the right woman he’d probably be alright tbh.
Testimony from English chess player: Mark would make a good husband if he found the right chess player, and he does need to go home yes. His main weakness is he always panics because he thinks his time is running out, grabs hold of whatever he can, then messes everything up. The same is true of his chess -that’s just him. His heart is in the right place but his head is messed up. Whenever you go round his to play chess he always puts mad music on and gets plastered. Many girls he’s been with didn’t like that, it drove some of them up the wall because he goes berserk sometimes! He never causes anyone any harm though. He’d probably be a good catch if he stopped playing that mad music all the time! Other than that, yes he’s a decent enough fellow.
Recent Opponent: Mark is a very polite English guy and a good chess player but at the tournament we played in, he kept listening to music and went all crazy. It scared some of the people playing and even me. He’s completely normal at the table when he plays but when he goes outside whilst waiting for you to move, he always plays music and acts all crazy. It’s like a bomb’s gone off in his head or something! He asked me if I knew of any girls that played chess. I actually know one who does and who likes him. She thinks he’s dead funny. She also said when he puts music on, it’s like a bomb gone off in his head. She likes how he tries to get his opponents drunk. He tried that with me too but I said no.
Former Landlord: He is a good guy but I had to ask him to find somewhere else. What on earth happens to him when he listens to that music of his I don’t know -I’ve never seen or heard anything like it! He be like a Jekyll and Hyde character. He’d sit in his room studying chess all day and not make a peep, then suddenly you’d get the most dreadful music I’ve ever heard played full blast for hours and he’d go mental -trying to fly around the room and jump all over the place -all this throwing his head about stuff, falling over furniture and smashing bottles of cider against the walls! When he turn it off, he be alright again and go back to studying the chess. It put the fear of god into the neighbours downstairs, so we had to ask him to find somewhere else. I heard he’s looking for an English chess player to settle down with yeah. I think he’d be alright but she’d have to tell him not to play that music of his.
Final remarks by McCready: yes okay, I’m not saying any of that isn’t true but all of this stuff happened whilst abroad. Like they say ‘What happens on tour stays on tour’. I’m talking about returning home and living my life out with an English woman who is well into her chess like me -it’s not the same. Things would be different. I would stop listening to music. I would not drink alcohol anymore either. I would stop chasing women as well. All that would be a thing of the past.
Response by Webmaster: we have received numerous complaints about this post already and have removed naughty photographs of Mr. McCready as they violate the terms of our policy.
Former Bangkok chess club member: Hello, my name is Patrick, and I was the pianist for the Bangkok Philharmonic Orchestra when I lived in Thailand. When Bangkok Chess Club was based at the Roadhouse Bar about 10 years ago, there was a jukebox you could use. Mark always made it play mad music that annoyed everyone. One band was called Alice in Chains, they were a grunge band he said. But he didn’t just play one song, it was always lots of them. It was absolute rubbish. We asked the owner to turn it off once. I don’t think it’s a good idea for English women to marry him unless they have some good earplugs -dreadful.
Luton Chess Club Member: Hello, I am Mr. Mirza a member of Luton chess club. I used to drive Mark to county matches in the 90s before he left England and became a ladies man. He always talked about music in my car and made me play some once -Danzig it was called. It was mad stuff and nearly caused me to crash my car, so I turned it off. Mark, though, is not the only one to play chess for Luton who liked mad music. There was another called Nick something who did, he liked The Sparks. Another called Paul something, he liked the same sort of stuff as Mark, and John something also, he used to go dancing in the woods at night -it’s more of a Luton thing than a Mark thing I would say. We don’t think we could help Mark find a suitable partner. He always used to say Philosophy graduates were the best not chess players, then it was heavy metal maidens, then rock chicks, then goth girls. What will it be next I wonder -what a ladies man!
(note to self: stop bloody reading about Pathos in Rhetoric by Aristotle before you come up with these memes of yours!)
M J M
Posted in Meme, My own warped humour | Leave a Comment »
Abject poverty -being frozen out
1Imagine the chess club is a good 50 minute walk away, more when the weather is bleak. Imagine it is the winter of 91, England. The snow has been on the ground for weeks, the evenings long, cold and dark. You have no money for transport, no money to buy winter clothes and have to walk in something worse than this.
I had to use an elastic band to hold it together, I mean the trainer on my right foot, but often it snapped and the sole just flapped as I trudged through the snow on the pavement and slipped on the ice crossing roads. Always I had to stop somewhere and sit on a low garden wall where the stone was bare and snow left untouched. It made my bottom wet as I bent down to dislodge the snow in my trainer with my index finger. To make matters worse, I only had rechargeable batteries in my walkman and they died in no time at all.2
When I arrived at the chess club, I had to defrost my foot. Usually my sock would have a big hole in it. I always went to the bathroom to attend to that: best case scenario was I had to spend the entire evening playing chess with a wet bottom, a wet sock on, and with my level of concentration affected. On the walk back home, the only solace came when I would tell myself it wasn’t important that I lost again, ‘I have been been beaten by so many -one more loss doesn’t matter. Even if I had the money to buy new trainers, it won’t make any difference’, I said to soften the blow, that helped abate hunger also, myself too poor to buy chips on the way home. Then, at the end of the evening, I would just lie on my bed and look through the window at the starry sky above, succumb to solitude, feel nothing about how my play went, slide into some reverie about the summer slowly, and sleep. A month or more passed, each week the same… .
- Picture taken Kuwait 2008, yes thats moi. ↩︎
- That winter the main band I listened to was Queensryche. I should explain further that I was studying at a college and had no money all year long. ↩︎
M J M
Posted in Reflections | Leave a Comment »
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A side note on how to read old Tom Sweby's columns
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Not perhaps, but quintessentially, Old Tom Sweby is best thought of as a passionate devotee to the newspapers he wrote for. He was well read and knowledgeable of the Bedfordshire chess scene and well beyond, given that he was the president of the S.C.C.U. once upon a time. He was generally well-respected and rubbed shoulders with many, if not all, of those eminent within British chess circles. It would, however, be a critical mistake to see his column is primary source material entirely. That it is not. You will also find secondary source material quoted too, and the reliability of that is not quite as Tom hoped. Given that he wrote for decades, this is to some degree inevitable, and after all we are all prone to error whether we realize it or not. Thankfully, with regards to old Tom Sweby, they are infrequent and for the most part old Tom continued to document events and developments in the Bedfordshire league from the get go as best he could but, of course, everything lies open to interpretation. Despite this, and generally speaking. this does indeed make him informative and thus worth reading. Dare I say his columns constitute a narrative describing the latest developments, match reports and changing nature of the Beds league...he knew his audience and wrote according. This manifested itself over decades but brevity was always in play courtesy of the restictions imposed by writing a column. Should you wish to read a in instrumental figure of the Beds' league post WW2, you are quite welcome to peruse what has been posted here... . :-) I should, however, point out that as the decades wore on he gradually moved on away from narratives concerning the Bedfordshire league towards affairs both historical and international. The reasons for this are multifarous, old age was a predominante factor presumably, however, the bottom line is with regards to how the Bedfordshire chess scene developed post WW2: old Tom Sweby is your go to guy. He wrote more about chess in Bedforshire than anyone else did but given he was a Lutonian and writing for a Luton newspaper there is both bias and greater coverage of his hometown than the rest of the county.
Gallery
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- I’m either 10 or 11 here
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- 1982, myself versus Brian from Sunderland.
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- At the Thai Junior chess championships. My daughter of course.
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