Life, Comrade, Is Just a Jolly Game of Chess

Authored by V. L. K. Djokoto

Permit me, if you will, a brief meditation — scribbled somewhere between a disgracefully tepid cappuccino and what I can only describe as a mild existential crisis of the sort that afflicts one at three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon — on this proposition: that life, my dear reader, is nothing more nor less than an absolutely colossal game of chess.

And I don't mean the serene, contemplative, rather monkish variety one observes in private salons reeking of tobacco and profundity. No, no. I mean the full-blooded, white-knuckled, seat-of-your-pants sort — all blunders and betrayals and the occasional deus ex machina comeback that makes absolutely no sense but leaves everyone cheering nonetheless. It's all there, the whole catastrophe: strategy, vanity, ambition, hubris, and the grim inevitability of getting absolutely walloped just when you think you've got the upper hand.

Consider, if you will, the dramatis personae. The pawns — brave little blighters, hopelessly expendable — lumber forward with the touching optimism of parliamentary interns on their first day, convinced they're about to change the world. The knights career about in those preposterous L-shaped convulsions, behaving for all the world like excitable newspaper columnists (speaking from experience here) with no sense of direction whatsoever. The bishops glide diagonally across the board, suffused with moral conviction but heading toward no discernible destination.

The rooks, bless them, are your bureaucrats: solid, unimaginative, utterly reliable, and capable of crushing you with nothing more than sheer procedural inertia and a well-placed memorandum.

And then — harrumph — there's the King. Poor old chap. Bloated, hesitant, wobbling about the place, perpetually protected by everyone else while contributing precious little to the general effort. It's leadership as pure performance art, res gestae without the res. The Queen, on the other hand — ah, now there's the thing — is the true engine of the enterprise: decisive, unstoppable, terrifyingly competent, capable of appearing simultaneously in seventeen places and fixing every cock-up you've made. Every office, every Cabinet, every family has one. You know the type.

Right. The game begins, as these things do, with boundless optimism. You've studied the openings — Ruy López, Sicilian Defence, what have you. You've got a plan. You're going to be absolutely brilliant. Kasparov himself would weep with envy.

Then, roughly three moves in — catastrophe. Your clever gambit, which seemed so dashed ingenious over breakfast, turns out to be an act of quite spectacular suicidal idiocy. You sacrifice a rook, then a bishop, possibly your self-respect, perhaps even your peace of mind, all while insisting with increasingly hollow conviction: "No, no, it's entirely tactical. Trust me. I know exactly what I'm doing."

Welcome, dear reader, to the middle game—that messy, magnificent, utterly exhausting stretch where ambition collides headlong with reality and explodes in a shower of broken dreams and overdue invoices. You're juggling bills, jobs, relationships, emotions, that business with the dry-cleaning, while your opponent (often life itself, occasionally Ghana Revenue Authority) gleefully dismantles your carefully constructed position. Somewhere along the line you lose a key piece — a friend, a job, a hairline, one's youthful conviction that carbohydrates don't count — and soldier on regardless, muttering Nkrumahist platitudes to keep one's spirits up.

Eventually —invita Minerva, as Cicero would have it — the endgame arrives. Fewer pieces. Less room for bluffing. Every move suddenly matters with agonizing clarity. You glimpse your opponent's knowing smirk across the board and realise the awful, inevitable truth: checkmate. You've been comprehensively outmanoeuvred by fate. Again.

And yet — and this, my friends, is the absolutely delicious bit — the losing is half the fun. Because chess, like life, rewards not the flawless but the flamboyant. Not the cautious but the cavalier. It celebrates those magnificent fools who try something utterly mad, who lunge into the fray with more enthusiasm than sense, who grin broadly in defeat and mutter, "Splendid move, old sport. Didn't see that coming. Same time next week?"

So, I say to you: go on. Advance your pawn into that obviously doomed position. Risk your queen on a hunch. Make the move that will almost certainly backfire in spectacular and possibly hilarious fashion.

For that, in the end — when the pieces are packed away and the board is folded and we're all shuffling off toward whatever lies beyond the final square — is what makes this whole ridiculous, magnificent, utterly bonkers game worth playing.