Chess

What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?

I don’t really have a favourite game, but chess has become a way of socialising with a friend.

We only just started playing this week, but I found I enjoyed the challenge, and after ten years of not playing it, it made my brain work overtime! My friend is quite good and I was surprised how evenly matched we are.

I’d like to get better at it, but I don’t have the ability to think several moves ahead, I’m more of an artist, looking for patterns in the next move or so. It also means I can make random moves that surprise ‘real’ players. Is that an advantage? Maybe.

I used to like Scrabble, but the one friend we played against used to make up rules. For instance he would add words to another word to make a sentence! He insisted this was OK and would argue and lose his temper when we disagreed. So those games stopped (he would also sneakily swap tiles if he didn’t have good letters).

The final game I used to play was Monopoly with my sisters, that was very competitive. We used to squabble a lot over who was winning. It got too argumentative at Christmas when we used to play, so I was glad when we stopped playing it. X

Athletics

What Olympic sports do you enjoy watching the most?

I actually like a lot of the sports in the Olympics, and that includes some of the newer sports such as mountain biking and climbing. But I guess my favourites are track and field events (including para athletics). I think that’s because I grew up watching people like Mary Peters and Sebastian Coe among others. So often you would see people beating World and Olympic records. My only regret was when they may have been found to be cheating. Using drugs to enhance their performances. Also I think more modern athletics has too much hype. I know the athletes need to fund their careers, but I liked the simpler times. One of my favourite films is Chariots of Fire. Where athletes were far more moral and honest than some of them appear to be now, or maybe that’s just my perception?