If any sensitive reader of the KCC blog felt I had been a tad unfair to Bernard C, in my report of the recent match v Banbury A, then I hope this article will put your concerns to rest. I bow to no man in my admiration for our much loved and highly revered senior citizen - though I have to admit I do find his paintings rather unsettling! But that is just the worthless reaction of a conservative philistine - Bernard walks an altogether more intense artistic path. After all, he is a man seemingly so charged with creative impulses that, in order to spark his muse to even greater heights, he apparently decided to enact the sentiments of some lines from a song by an equally gifted and tortured artist:-
I'm going to hurl myself against the wall,
Cause I'd rather feel bad than not feel anything at all.
("Ain't That Pretty At All" by Warren Zevon - which I am sure was not in anyway a comment on Bernard's art!)
He said he tripped, but we all know he would never do anything as banal or cliched as that. Thank goodness he didn't follow Van Gogh's even more extreme example and cut off his ear! We were all very relieved and pleased to learn that Bernard suffered no lasting damage from his "domestic accident" - although there was clearly a temporary effect at Banbury the other night.
Anyway, when he is in the zone, Bernard is a very dangerous opponent at the chess board, as I have found to my cost, managing just two grovelling draws from 3 games. In this April Game of the Month we see him at his most inspired, as he performs a brutal hack on an extremely strong (ECF 216) opponent from Warwick University's all conquering A team. Indeed, with a grading gap of 58 points this is the biggest giant killing yet featured on this website. Regrettably, it was achieved on behalf of Coventry rather than any Kenilworth team, but you can't have everything.
Sit back and enjoy a real demolition job - given the date it was played on, I think we can all agree that this is a contemporary Valentine's Day massacre!
A real tour de force by Bernard, and a game anybody would have been delighted to play.
No comments:
Post a Comment