Street Chess

Dear Reader.

I was in the square outside the Huddersfield library today, waiting for my parents to return from doing boring shopping and I was sitting on a bench and there was one of those plastic giant garden chess sets and suddenly this group of big gruff skin headed tattooed "working class, salt of the earth" types of men walked into the square and almost silently laid the pieces out to play and two of them played and the rest watched and ate their lunch.

And at no point did these men start talking or joking around these two giant men moved silently moved the pieces around the board and the other men watched and it was very strange because it began to take on the feeling of some of street performance. Infact it did draw a bit of a crowd of people eating their lunch, living under the ruling that staring at anything is more interesting that staring at nothing but something about the whole experience kind of made me feel better about humanity for some reason. Maybe its because chess just represents the appreciation of the human brain rather than its muscles or its bravado.

If nothing else the sheer fact that even though the chess set is left there every day for anyone to play with, none of the pieces have been stolen which I think shows something.