Last weekend was rather nice.
I got to spend my birthday weekend in the company of Gareth, Marion, Terry and Simon, of course!
Gareth took us to the place where the “cool people hang out”, namely “The Twisted Pepper”.
It was pretty groovy inside but was not overly impressed with the coffee. The coffee has fancy names and we were given samples of different ones. I don’t really care for filter coffee, preferring an americano or an espresso. So, maybe that’s why I didn’t like the ones we chose.
After the cafe bar, Simn headed off to some loud, sweaty, warm rock gig which was not our scene at all.
It was his, he got to relive his teenage years, shouting and jumping around.
The rest of us headed off to the IFI, under great protest from Gareth. The food is good there. The films are great. The staff have always been “meh”. They must train them in that way. They act moody and try to get rid of you by giving dirty looks and over charging you.
The film we agreed on was “Bobby Fischer against the world” It was odd that I was watching this and not Simon. He loves chess, playing in the Jewish Olympics for Ireland when he was a young lad. Instead, he was jumping up and down wildly and missing out on a film about the greatest ever chess player in the world.
I knew nothing about Booby Fischer but assumed he had won millions of world championships.
He has only won one. Then, he got all annoyed by the pressure and refused to play anymore, growing a big, mad beard and becoming a pain in the bottom for the US and Japanese government.
I enjoyed the film, I didn’t think I would as chess is not my friend. It made me sad though. Because the film reckoned that chess can cause mental illness. They tried to prove this by getting some chess obsessive to repeat this throughout the film. They also used cunning tactics like showing animations of possible chess positions flying in and out of a man’s brain.
Bobby Fischer had a very disturbed upbringing and showed clear signs of mental illness from a very young age.
It wasn’t the chess.
It was the world.
