A Wet Week

Not really too much to report this week. We've been doing our own thing for the most part - school, work, and normal everyday life. It has been raining a lot, though, so much so that it is already flooding up in Gloucestershire.

Yesterday (Saturday) wasn't quite as wet, so I determined to walk into Redhill, as we're having a kind of quiet, restful weekend. I went in, and bought some necessities (milk, bread, etc.), but while I was there perusing the weekend papers, I noticed that one of them had an article on the front page declaring the death of Bobby Fischer.

This struck me in a rather odd sort of way. For those of you who don't know, Bobby Fischer is widely considered to be the best American chess player ever, and if he isn't the best chess player ever, period, he's probably in the top two or three. I have muddled about with chess for a number of years, sometimes more, sometimes less, but it has always been a fascinating game to me. To understand the overwhelming impact that Bobby Fischer had on chess, particularly US chess, one has to consider the history. In a list of world chess champions, from 1948 to 2000, the list is entirely comprised of persons from the USSR/Russia, save one: Bobby Fischer. In the middle of the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union and the US were fighting each other in every possible way except for physically, Bobby Fischer came to the top of the chess world, took the title from the reigning champion in the most spectacular way, and then vanished, almost as spectacularly. His life afterwards appears to have been an absolute mess, but there's no doubt he left his mark on the game. It's only been about a decade or so ago that the film "Searching for Bobby Fischer" was released, which chronicles the search for someone to take the place of the iconic Fischer.

I didn't quite mean to ramble about that for so long, but there it is. I wish I could augment it with some stories about our life in England, but as I've already said, it's been pretty quiet this week, although Michelle did rearrange our dining room yesterday. (That should tell you enough - the most exciting thing I can come up with is that our dining room was rearranged.)