A Pilgrimage To Hastings 2003/4 It's taken me several weeks just to get around to writing this report. Chess wise there's not much for me to brag about, but I still had a reasonable good time trying to drown the patzer within, in lots of pints of Guiness. Unfortunately, he turned out to be quite the swimmer...
So I'll keep it short with this simple travel report, for those considering visiting the Mecca of Chess, i.e. the oldest tournament remaining on the circuit - Hastings.
Let's start in chronological order. Phase one: planning.
I wanted to play there already the year before, but that went down the drain since I waited too long and didn't know that the citizens of Hastings often suffer from bad internet connections. So don't rely too much on help from the organisers, but try to fix your own B&B room.This can be done here
Hastings Online - Accommodation Location Map.The end of October is a good time to do this. I got a good deal at Pisarros, 10 nights for £200 (or 199.75 to be exact). Which was a nice combined pub and B&B, with live music every night at this time of year - which of course is heard in the rooms as well, but I wasn't taking the tournament all that seriously anyway and the round doesn't start until 14:15 everyday (though breakfast is around 8-9 in the morning.)
At The Tournament's Site you'll find out what the starting fee is for you (depending on rating) and other vital stuff, plus some pictures...
Next is getting a flight. I got tempted by Ryan Air's low prices and went to Stansted, scheduled to arrive at 23:00 on the 26th, which, I finally decided, meant that a hotelroom was needed for the night. At www.hotels.com I found a place near Victoria Station, which was excellent as I was planning to take the bus to Hastings the next day.
On the 26th we left Sturup half an hour delayed, which is probably normal for the time of year with the current threat level etc. The plane landed at about 23:30 but it took a long while before you got to get off the plane. An hour later the luggagge line started coughing up the parcels from Malmo, but after a handful of bags it stopped for another 1 1/2 hour, while an italian guidebook to London went around on the conveyor belts, getting more and more torn every time it passed...
At 02:40 the baggagge finally arrived. Luckily, the busses to London turned out to leave every 15th minute and after an hour on the bus I arrived at Victoria Station. Turned down a taxi offer from a creepy black guy in a silver car, asked the driver of a black cab (i.e. the regular taxi in London) for directions and at 04:20 I was ready to go to bed...
By now I knew why the organisers recommend flying to Gatwick and taking the train from there.
The room wasn't big but for one night it was OK, but had I known how late I'd arrive, the room price would've provided me with plenty of beer for those four hours - if I'd been able to find something open all night...
Next morning I was in line for coach tickets (buses are local and coaches are not...), the line below is only half the story, 30 metres later you came into a room where the line started dwindeling like a labyrinth. Anyway, an hour later I found that travelling is rather cheap in England - a two way coach ticket to Hastings was only £15,5 (but more expensive if bought from the driver directly).
I now had about three hours to kill, so a quick cab ride later I arrived to the only place I consider worth visiting in London. Foyle's! Despite plenty of chess books to choose from, I couldn't find any I wanted, so I stocked up on Kinky Friedman novels instead...
The ride to Hastings was uneventful, and an hour quicker than the time table said. Coaches don't seem to stop and pick up passengers and since we were only about twenty people on the bus and the driver made sure to ask everyone where they were going - so we skipped a lot of stops on the way.
About 17:30 the coach reached the Queen's Parade in Hastings. A shopping street in the centre of town, which is also were the bus departed from, on the way back to London ten days later, just outside Mr Bean's café.
Sadly enough it turned out that I actually look like a chessplayer, as a moslim woman on the bus asked me if I was going to play the tournament next day. It turned out that she and her daughter had come all the way from Malaysia so her daughter could play in the tournament!
My room at Pissarros (named after a relative to Camille Pissarro who had lived in Hastings and painted sometime in the early 1900s I guess). The room turned out to be quite OK, but typically british of course. They do have a knack of building houses that are colder inside than outside! This also includes cold water in the rain room, so people with a heart condition should probably prefer the fancier hotels close to the tournament hall, though then the £50 per night might instead cause the old ticker to stop...
Pissarros was easy to find, just get off the bus, take left after Mark's and Spencer's and 2 minutes later you're there.
The room was chilly but it did have a heater (which also worked well as a hair dryer) unfortunately I couldn't get it to work the first night which wasn't very good for my christmas cold, but then again - most people had a cold during the tournament, including the coughing IM I played in round one (though his coughing coincided very precisely with every time I thought more than a couple of minutes, but OK, every tournament have a rotten egg, though these are usually not titled...).
Anyway, I was at least glad I hadn't spent baggage space on a hair dryer, since the sockets looked more like places where you hook up your phone...
After a while I went out to see the town, and soon bumped into the Malaysians again, (who I got to know during the tournament, especially since they also grew tired of the spiceless british food, so we tried the Chinese and Indian restaurant in town. - the Thai place was closed until Jan 7...) as they were still waiting for a taxi to take them to Millicent's. Which I later found out wasn't more than 5-10 minutes away by foot. Just straight down the Queen's Parade (away from Marks and Spencers), take a right to Yates's and another right at the post office (if you continue hundred metres more you'll bump into Hastings Chess Club).
After Yates's you just follow the road uphill, it swings slightly to the right pass a museum and some hotels then just after the police station you turn right and then just go up to the mansion on the hill.
If you turn left (instead of right to Yates's), you'll end up in the Old Town, Woolworths, a short pedestrian tunnel with some drawings of knights from Normandie, an internet place, some pubs of course, an Indian restaurant, (and a thai place which was closed for the holidays), George Street with the Dalek and then High Street with the book shop and then some old buildings, like castles you know...
The playing hall was much brighter than my pictures let on, and were quite good for chess. Though one has to deduct some points for the analysis rooms, one in a cold locker room next to the hall and the other upstairs in a darker and much warmer room.
There was also a commentating room combined with a book shop with plenty of chess books (at least twice the number of chess books there were at Foyles!). Chris Ward was supposed to comment on all five games in the Premium Group, but I actually only caught him commenting on one of the days, (and most of my games didn't take more than 3-4 hours) and that time it was just the moves more or less... Something that made me realise how spoiled we've been over the years at the Sigeman tournament here in Malmoe, where Brynell always puts on a good show as commentator - with some help from the audience of course! Perhaps it was the audience that was lacking, since there were seldom more than five people seated...
Hastings Chess Club was closed during the tournament, but Pam Thomas of the organisers managed to find someone, Mr Rendle - father of one of the players in the tournament, who could let me have a peek into the holiest of holy in the chess club world (well, OK, Manhattan Chess Club may be more sacred if it's still at it's original address, but I don't think it is).
One of the notes is an invitation to a pair blitz at the Pig In Paradise. The other is an official note letting you know that you lose the game if your phone rings... A silly rule in my opinion, since there are 49 other ways of intentionally disturbing your opponent that won't lose the game for you. Besides, what if someone who practises the other 49, decides to take advantage of the 50th, for example by hiding his own cell phone in his opponent's jacket and then having someone call him?? This could easily turn into a circus...
One evening BBC showed a documentary about one of their own series, Doctor Who. The next day I mentioned it at breakfast, and one of the guests told me that there was a shop in George Street that had a Dalek for sale in their window.
A Dalek is a breed of space monsters in an english sf-series for children called Doctor Who. I just though it was one series from the 1970s feauturing a hero with a very loooong scarf, a pretty girl asking questions so the good doctor can explain to the audience about reversing the polarity of the neutronfield, and of course, she'd also do some screaming and require some rescuing by the doctor...
Amazingly, it turned out to have been aired since the 50s into the 80s, with at least 5-7 different actors playing the doctor. And all had their own idea and style, one was actually doing him like he was a Shakespearian James Bond, if that makes any sense to you. Even the pretty girl had different interpretations - when women's lib came, she actually got played quite similar to the current Warrior Princess Xena! Which increased the number of adult men watching the series... But usually it seemed to have been a quite good series, terrifying the children, while the adults could snicker at the cheap effects...
Back to the Daleks, as I remembered them, they kind of looked like white and blue garbage cans with some small sticks sticking out from where they would shoot out laser rays, but the one in Hastings, built according to BBC's official specifications, was about 5-6 feet high and all black (I seem to vaguely remember both kinds, so maybe different season's had different daleks...).
Their catch phrases were: (when saying the following you should bite down and speak without unclenching your teeth, to get that metallic flavour of sound) 'We are superior beings' 'Exterminate! Exterminate!'
On the first day of the year I went out as usual but most places were closed. However, I did find a small bunch of interesting chess books, in a 2nd hand bookstore connecting to George Street. One of them, was 'Coincidences' by James Plaskett (who used to live in Hastings btw). The book is more or less just a collection of different kinds of coincidences that he'd noted in his life (some chess related, some not). The others were two books on chess problems printed in the early 1930s and one book about Aikido.
I thought there would be many 2nd hand book stores, but except for one on Bohemia Road, next to the ugly statues, which was closed for lunch when I went there, I didn't see any.
Guess what? I arrived safe and reasonably sound, just in time to wade through a snow storm in good ol' f-ing Malmo... Naturally, the snow was gone the next day.
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