What if ...

Writing in his blog recently SuperDude42 wondered what it would be like to be a chess piece. He wondered if, when faced with the warring army from the other side of the board, you would accept death as your duty, or whether you would do a hasty side-step off the board to save your life.

That started me thinking and I realised that I am already a chess piece—and an easily identifiable chess piece at that. For the past 70-odd years I've been shunted around life's chessboard every time anybody with even a smidgen of authority chose to do so. In their turn, parents, teachers, politicians, and a whole gaggle of bosses all made decisions for me. So I know what I am: I'm a pawn!

Ah, but what but if I could change that and become something else? What if life had a mystical, magical eighth rank, something like Superman's telephone booth, where I could throw off my limitations and become more dynamic. What would I choose to be? Maybe that's what SuperDude really wanted to know.

I wouldn't want to be a bishop, because I'm not religious. Even worse, when bishops walk the straight and narrow they have to do it diagonally. Appalling!

I couldn't be a knight either because the last time I rode a horse it tried to kill me. Besides, I'm too old to jump. So that's out.

If I was a castle my dog would probably think I was a convenience and pee on me. She hasn't done that yet and I want to keep it that way, so I wouldn't promote to a rook.

So that leaves the Queen. I know the Queen sounds attractive to a lot of people because she's big and strong and muscles everybody else out of her way. But I once had this awful experience with a guy in a pub who thought I was one already. I mean, he was awfully nice about it, even offered to buy me a meal, but I beat a hasty retreat. Nope, being a queen ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Unfortunately I've run out of possibilities so until I get the option of becoming one of Simon Webb's heffalumps I guess I'll just have to stay a pawn.

I've already written about pawns and their vindictive nature in Through the needle's eye so I thought that today I'd look for some pawns that, unlike me, have ambition. What I needed was a passed pawn.

I found a couple in this game from the 2007 Rooty Hill Club Championship played against my good friend, Henry Rara. It's not the classiest game you'll ever see—we were both rated about 1600—but it was certainly entertaining. This was the last round of the championship and Henry needed only a draw to win the title but he wasted time trying to get his Sicilian onto familiar ground while I was busily manoeuvring it into a King's Indian Attack.

He allowed me to pinch a pawn with an apparently unprotected piece on move 19, but the threat of 20.Rc8+ winning the queen made it safe.

With one of my cloned a-pawns strolling down the board at will, he was forced to give up a rook when it reached a7 and would probably have resigned if the tournament hadn't hung on that game. When the second pawn reached a7 he did resign.

And whaddayaknow! My pawns turned out to be just like me. Neither reached the eighth rank. Neither was promoted.