Let's Play Chess

This post is dedicated to Pratik. Every year we have a chess match. It's the best of three. We have it after exams in the summer. A celebration of our nerdiness in the park with as many Gauloise and emptied lager cans as we can muster. This year will be our fourth.

The first year we pick up Sainsburys Basic Lager. At 88p for a 4 pack each we thought, "How bad can it be?". Well I'll tell you how bad it can be: horse urine bad. It is foul. So we sit in Russell Square playing chess. I win the first game. There are no more cans left by the end of an intense match. We pause to smoke enough cigarettes to fill up said cans and enter the second match. It's a hot day and I've had too much horse urine too quickly.  I have vague memories of hitting on (!?) a very attractive young lady who was very willing to give us her rizla before going back to her friend. When I go to return the Rizla I discover that her friend is a drug dealer. Not one to let the Eastern European Scarface's presence ruin my fun I continue chatting to the Mediterranean stunner until it becomes clear that I either buy drugs or become a special ingredient in Sainsbury's next batch of lager.

I buy some weed. Pratik and I listen to Morcheeba. Pratik wins the second game. I smoke weed. I get the munchies. We go to get food at a cheap Korean shop. And I mean a shop. Upstairs it's a video store and downstairs they've got a few tables and a kitchen. The walls are lined with TVs illegally burning DVDs that haven't been released yet. Thanks to this I have already seen the 34th installment of Rocky. Unfortunately, as the coming lines will demonstrate, I was not in a state to remember much. I order a curried dog and noodle mixture. It looks foul but Im drunk and stoned and need food. I eat it. It comes back up. I'm a good shot. There's none on the table. Curiously it now looks more appetising. I excuse myself and go to the toilet.

Suddenly the world is far more spinny and holy shit I need a poo. I am sick many, many times. I shit. I pass out with my pants down. Pratik enters, observes there's no more toilet paper, and carries me out. I have vague memories of a Korean women shrieking (probably asking how I made such an appetising dish as she shovels it down her throat with those irksome oriental spoons). It's 4 in the afternoon as Pratik carries me down Tottenham Court Road. We stop briefly to allow more of my stomach to find freedom. If the poor woman who was trying to enjoy a Big Mac on the otherside of the window  is reading this, darling, green is so not your colour. And many apologies for marring your view of Warren Street tube station. 

Pratik puts me on a Victoria line tube Southbound and tells someone to make sure I get off at Victoria. Miraculously I do (perhaps it was the sobering prospect of ending up in Brixton should I fail to get off). I get on a train to get to East Croydon. I fail to get off (perhaps it was the sobering prospect of ending up in Croydon...) and find myself being awoken by a ticket inspector in Hayward's Heath. How novel.

I decide Haywards Heath has less to recommend itself to me than Croydon and head back home.

For the Second Annual Chess Match i arrive straight from a houseparty in South London with a Croydon mate. He is in a dress (time obscures the reason: but heck, who needs a reason to wear a dress at midday around campus) and ready to shout obscenities. I am always ready to shout obscenities. We do so. We meet up with Pratik. We play chess. And time prevents us from being able to finish the game. For a second year running it finishes 1-1. I feel ill and Pratik goes to a house party, takes a load of speed, chases deer around the park and never makes it back to his.

The Third Annual Chess Match involves curry, a G&T and loads of bum sex. We purposely dont play the third game because "It's tradition!"

Using sophisticated quantum trend analysis I predict this year will involve copious amounts of pink, hitting each other with rainbows and not daring to win because PEACE NOT WAR.

All this is really on a tangent because i wanted to make a deep point about our approach to humanity. 

Approaching humans, as Marcus Buckingham points out in the Harvard Business Review, is best done by recognising the subtlety of human behaviour. Mediocre communicators/managers play checkers. Excellent communicators/managers play chess. They recognise every piece is different. They do not force a castle to play like a bishop or a queen like a knight. Instead, they accept each piece for what it is and seek to use its powers to maximum efficiency instead of making them do what they cannot naturally do.

We all have natural qualities. Let's make the most of those qualities instead of wishing we were another chess piece.