Hoots & Havers with James Irvine Robertson April 2005

It may be that they feared that donors to the fund might suspect they’d pocketed some of the dosh and so the clock and side ornaments were listed to show that the money had been properly spent. More likely is that they they wished to advertise their generosity - to the minister and everyone else. This was not a congregation to hide its light under a bushel. But some very wee minds must have been round that table - and their descendants are still on too many committees.

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Sex is rearing its lovely head all over the place at the moment. Everything’s at it and most things have done it - lots of times. I am still mildly obsessed by the harlequin blackbird that’s taken up residence here, and there seems to be a lesson to be learned from its progress. Birds rely upon their vision for most things and they don’t have much brain to go with it. I once stuck a scrap of red carpet in a tree and watched a robin go bonkers trying to beat the the daylights out of what it perceived to be a rival. So I know it was not that smart.
Yet the local blackbirds have no difficulty in recognising the harlequin jobbie as one of their own. In fact it has now become one of the two top cocks in our backyard. This proves that blackbirds are morally superior to ourselves since they have no difficulty with travellers or illegal immigrants - this one flew from the Continent in December and bypassed all immigration controls - nor can they be racist because none of the colour variations of the human species which seem to cause such angst to so many are quite so florid as this creature’s.

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I used to play chess. My opponent, who lived closer to the centre of the metropolis than I, used to leave the board on his doorstep at the bottom of the Birks. Whenever I passed en route to the shops, I’d pause to examine the state of play and make a move. He was a hopeless player, but so was I. Games could take a week or two and, at the very beginning, I was the regular winner. Then I started to lose and I went on loosing.
My degeneration began over one autumn and continued into the winter. I put it down to the difficulty of hanging around by his front door and chilling my brain before making a move. You don’t take much time to think if it’s literally freezing and the board is under an inch of snow. But as my humiliations continued it dawned on me that I employed a maximum of a minute’s consideration before the impatience of the dog, or myself, forced a move so that we could continue on to do the messages. He, on the other hand, had all day to counter my ploy. So I duplicated the board at home which allowed time for considered thought before I went down town.
The game which followed this innovation was magnificent, the finest I’ve ever enjoyed. I took to passing twice a day to increase the number of moves I could make and, over the course of a couple of weeks, I built myself into a position which was unbeatable. My army would make a majestic march down the board which must end up in my opponent’s complete humiliation.
But it was not to be. Always somewhat volatile, he lost his rag about something completely irrelevant, kicked the board all over the bottom of the Birks and declared that the game was cancelled since some pieces got lost. He declined to continue the game based on my template - even when the postman backed me up - and left the area. So my great victory never happened.
I met him again a couple of weeks ago. He claimed to have forgotten how close he had come to losing in our last match. But, the swine, he confessed that he had our games on his computer and tested each move he made against his chess program. Which leads me to conclude that in the final encounter he either messed up his electronic grand master’s instructions or my play was so bemusingly bad that it was beyond the parameters put in by the programmer.