Kasparov

Another one of those things that never made it into Burning Salad happened about this time last year. It was a warm sunny evening and I was making one of my biweekly trips to my karate class. The walk takes about half an hour and it is a walk I normally enjoy. I’ve got a thing for urban walking in general really. Being physically involved in a repetitive activity for a certain amount of time seems to generate mental space and so I always find myself thinking a lot and working out ideas when I’m walking somewhere. Add to this the fact that the scenery changes and you don’t need to turn around every ten metres and and you have a viable alternative to pacing.

So here I was marching along a street in Maryhill, lost in thought. When a strange and unusual thing happened…

I noticed something on the pavement a short distance in front of me. Immediately my train of thought evaporated as I slowed down almost to a halt and considered the fact that I was looking at nothing other than a chess piece. A chess piece? Sitting upright in the middle of the pavement on Maryhill road. (For anyone unfamiliar with Glasgow, it’s probably sufficient to point out that if street chess was growing as an urban phenomenon then Maryhill would almost certainly be the last place enthusiasts would be found alive).

But this wasn’t even an ordinary chess piece. It was outsized for a start- maybe three or four time bigger than standard. And not only that, it seemed to have been hand crafted- fashioned from some kind of teak-like wood by the looks of it.

As I approached I noticed the way it steadily tapered upward from the base before narrowing slightly and gently flaring to an almost perfectly rounded top.

Clearly a bishop.

No sooner had I overcome my astonishment at such an unlikely juxtaposition and started accepting the fact that I had indeed come across an elaborately made, outsized chess piece in the middle of the street (in Maryhill), than I had gotten too close. Within a matter of a few paces the baroque urban mirage was gone forever. And the true horror of the situation settled upon me.

I was not staring at a teak bishop. I was staring at a dog turd.

The fancy chess piece had not in fact been dropped by a highly trained grand-master. It had almost certainly been expelled by a badly trained Alsatian.

Imagine my surprise, mingled with my disgust.

This sounds like an unlikely story, I know. (And I wouldn’t blame you if you smelled a rat. You should just count yourself lucky that’s all you could smell). But here is the part that catapults the story back into the realms of the bizarre (and nudges me back into the realm of the sane)…

The reason I mistook dog dirt for a chess piece was because by some incredible fluke of physics, the dog’s jobby had landed on the pavement end-on and somehow (maybe the baking heat) maintained it’s unlikely, obelisk-like position.

Of course, this last fact only serves to cast aspersions on the authenticity of the whole fiasco. And I seem to remember it being for this reason that it was never recorded in Burning Salad. Oh, how I cursed not having one of those fancy mobile phones with a built-in camera.

Well, Trish has one of those fancy phones. And by an uncanny but no doubt meaningless coincidence, I was on my way to my karate class when I used it to record what to the untrained eye might have appeared at first glance to be a well made ebony rook.