Tutor Influence 2.

Country dancing was on the school agenda. Not a manly pursuit, for one thing, girls were involved.

Girls very much being a quite separate species and exactly what they were doing on the planet was a puzzle, they were somehow related to your mother but how that worked was unclear.
I was not anti-girl, I sat next to one in class (Rachel) and read her copy of Bunty
(which Wiki informs me is a comic no more, along with an alarming quantity of titles I remember enjoying. They say life is just one long lesson in loss).

Thankfully a kindly teacher had organised an escape route for all sane thinking chaps with an aversion to dancing. Chess club.

This was more like it, hand to hand combat over 64 brown and white squares. A severe beating in a game of chess could scar a chap for life.

I don't really remember much formal tuition, but there must have been some coz I learnt how the pieces moved about the board and in what sort of order they should be moved. Given we were all about 7 that was no mean feat for the teacher.

Eventually I would play top board on school chess teams, right up to Uni.

Cries of "I could have been a contender" but girls/beer/life were catching up with me fast and would eventually turn my head with various siren songs.

That is all in the future, back to the little lad chuckling to himself in the room next to the country dancing hall. I could hear the teacher giving the school piano a healthy workout and the herd of classmates stamping on one another's toes and tying each other in complex knots.

Some of those chess pieces were a bit amorphous having lost various lumps which may or may not be vital to initial identification. The pieces were wooden and lovely to behold.

The one bit of advice I remember the teacher imparting was, "find a move and then look for a better one".

It is as good a bit of advice as you can get in life.