Chapter 41 — The Death of Pubs

With the advent of the internet, chess, and indeed life for that matter changed.

Take the common pub. There was literally one on every road across the country. In Hunslet and Belle Isle alone there were over twenty pubs and clubs within the radius of a couple of miles. In East End Park, there were even more drinking dens.

Now, there are only six, and by next year there will no doubt be only three, as the early warning signs are already outside the pubs advertising cheap meals and cheap beer. Healthy pubs don't need to drop their prices, but weak and dying ones, in one last desperate act, do. I know about the death of a pub, and I will relate a tale about one later.

I don't regret pubs disappearing, as it is all part of change. It's the poignancy of the pub I miss, the nostalgia. More often than not, now, when I walk into a pub from the daylight and into the dinginess inside, I feel a sort of depressed revulsion and turn around, leaving to seek lighter abodes.

Chess revolved around pubs and clubs for us lot back then. There would always be a pub somewhere frequented day or night, and we played in some dire and wretched haunts. I can't remember the name of the worst, somewhere in the bottom side of Meanwood. It was a club, if you could call it that.

But when the pubs started to disappear, so did the chess players – though that wasn't the only reason. It didn't happen quickly, but it happened with inevitability. The days of being in our twenties, or even early thirties, were soon gone. Back then none of us worked, or if you did, it was either on the side, or on a building site where it didn't matter if you were covering the scaffold with stale draughts of beer each morning and puking over the side.

I've already related how I 'believed' I could be the first grandmaster who took up chess after the age of 16. I did, I really believed in my fancy I could do that. I don't know if anyone has achieved this feat yet, but I doubt it. Grandmasters learn the game early in life, and their brain, I believe, forms differently too. It evolves and learns to adapt to the puzzles the game gives to it constantly.

Unlike a late teenager, whose brain has probably neared its completion, the young mass of pink matter accommodates the demands pressed upon it. Back then, I didn't understand this, and it took at least ten years to fully comprehend it. I was a dreamer back then and probably still am, and any brain, even mine, can still dream.

When I did realise I was never even going to be a FIDE Master, or a 200 grade, for that matter, there was only the inertia of chess, and the camaraderie that went with it. Towards the later years of my twenties, I turned up for chess as a social event only and began to pursue another dream.