"And then he said..."

Back in the days, I used to play a bit of chess - not to any great standard, but I entered a few tournaments and didn’t come last. Nearly last, yes, but not actually last.

But that was something like 25 years ago and I’ve barely touched a chess piece in anger since then, until recently when I was persuaded to have another go.

Happily, this coincided with the Kramnik-Anand world championship match and then the chess Olympiad in Dresden that finished just a couple of days ago, so I found myself getting sucked back in.

And, on chess.com I’ve found somewhere to play real live people online.

I’m still no better than respectable, I’ve forgotten almost all the opening theory I ever knew, and I’m prone to horrendous blunders - lost my queen through carelessness in a game against someone in Latvia - but I’ve won a few games, to my surprise and satisfaction.

This game, below, was the tie-breaker in a series of three I played with a chap in Portugal last night. It was genuinely thrilling stuff as the opposite-side castling allowed us both to launch attacks - and I got into serious time trouble at the end, forcing me to play without fully analysing the consequences.

I don’t claim it was a terribly good game and the play is probably riddled with errors on both sides, but it was enormous fun - so much so that I really wouldn’t have minded losing it.

I could get quite into this, you know…

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How perfectly splendid - it appears that an RAF fighter pilot on secondment to an American squadron has been able to wave the Queen’s Regulations in the face of US officers who were trying to get him to shave off his handlebar moustache.

Flight Lieutenant Chris Ball is normally based in Scotland but is currently in Afghansitan on an exchange with a US Air Force unit - and he seems to have chosen to while away the hours not spent in the air by cultivating a truly impressive example of the traditional fliers’ facial decoration.

Photos on BBC Online show his transformation from the very picture of dour Sam Tyleresque modern professionalism to a grinning throwback to the chaps who scrambled from Duxford and Tangmere and Biggin Hill, and who grew moustaches to disguise the fact that they were so horribly, painfully young to be dying.

Is anyone really surprised that his temporary American superiors took offence? No reason has been given, of course - perhaps they feared terrorists were hiding in all that undergrowth, or maybe his commanding officer couldn’t get past the memory of Village People videos.

Whatever the reason, the decree came down from on high - the moustache must go. Goodbye Biggles, hello Top Gun.

Except Flt Lt Ball was having none of it. Perhaps inspired by the Ministry of Defence’s obvious approval of a Royal Marines moustache-growing competition in Afghanistan last Christmas, he reached for his rulebook and fought back.

And the USAF backed down, beaten off by a combination of Queen’s Regulation 209, which dictates that moustaches are fine so long as they confine themselves to the upper lip and no further, and a Memorandum of Understanding between the two countries banning local commanders from instructing exchange officers to breach their own dress regulations.

A small victory in the fight-back against creeping cultural imperialism - but an important one.

And straight in at number one in the ‘brain-numbingly stupid decisions of 2007′ chart is BBC Radio 1, for censoring one of the only decent Christmas songs ever written to avoid offence to listeners.

The essence of a stupid decision is that it achieves exactly the opposite effect to the one intended - and that can certainly be said of this bowdlerisation of the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, where any offence prevented by censorship is surely dwarfed by the offence caused by butchering the soaring vocals of the doomed Kirsty MacColl.

The BBC reportedly said: “We are playing an edited version because some members of the audience might find it offensive.”

Well, bollocks to the BBC.

It’s all a matter of context. Stick a fist under someone’s nose and call them a faggot or a slut and it’s offensive. Script a scene between two characters, one a self-deluding alcoholic and the other a dying junkie, and it can be art.

Doesn’t have to be, of course. Could still be offensive. But not in this case.

The Pogues are said to be amused. MacColl’s mother Jean thinks it’s ridiculous. And, according to BBC Online, Pogues fan Kevin Caswell said: “The lyrics are what make the song and if I were Mr McGowan I would ensure you were never allowed to play this poetic, touching and classic song.”

It’s not a corporation-wide ban. Radio 2, which during my youth was what you found when you looked in the dictionary under ‘bland’ and ‘inoffensive’, is playing the song in full.

And so is everyone else.

For it is a well-known fact that only five Christmas songs have ever been written which aren’t so toe-curlingly awful that the songwriters should have been taken aside as schoolchildren and advised to go into accountancy.

Of course, not everyone agrees on which five. But here, courtesy of YouTube, are my choices. Plus one bonus winter song from the movies that’s a delight to watch.

Number five

I was tempted to say John Lennon’s Happy Christmas (War is Over) here, but let’s face it - as a song, it’s a bit of a dirge. Very worthy, but in the ‘anti war Xmas song’ stakes I’ll pick Stop the Cavalry by Jona Lewie any year.

Number four

I’m not big with the Christmas carols, but the vocals on this duet between Bing Crosby and David Bowie are to die for. Little Drummer Boy, of course.

Number three

The perfect antidote to over-sentimental Christmas tosh - from 1981, Things Fall Apart, by Cristina.

Number two

A bit more jingly, but still from the early-80s school of sardonic seasonal slices of life, comes Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses.

Number one

Kirsty and the Pogues, naturally. What else? See it here live in all its uncensored glory.

Special winter bonus

Finally, from the movie Neptune’s Daughter, here are Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams performing Baby it’s cold outside. How about that choreography?

“Taking Christ out of Christmas is like serving the Christmas turkey without the stuffing,” says Tory MP Mark Pritchard. As both a pagan and a vegetarian, I’ll have to take his word for it…

If I type this really fast it may just sneak under the wire and count as a March post, thus keeping up my new average of a post a month in 2007. Pretty grim stuff, compared with the several a day I used to manage when writing this thing was fresh and new in late 2002.

It's not like I've been writing nothing at all, though - the anthology with my story in creeps ever closer to becoming reality. That's its cover over there, beside these words. Neat, huh?

Got an email from the publisher today - they've now got a MySpace page, heaven help us all. For those who are into that sort of thing, it's at myspace.com/norecordpress.

In other news there was this, which just felt like one of those things that needed to be done.

So, well, yes, it's been a while since I last posted. Quite a bit's happened, actually.

For starters, we're probably only a month or so away from the publication by a small San Francisco press of an anthology of short stories that includes one of mine. More on that when I have more, but right now I'm tremendously excited, because it's the first time in a very long time that any of my fiction will have been published.

Also taking a lot of my time is MyBathroomFinder.com, the first step in our fledgling business empire. It's starting to find its feet and generate traffic. Not a lot of income yet, but it's early days.

And the other big thing is Perplex City, the £100,000 / $200,000 treasure hunt and alternative reality game that's been running for the last two-and-a-half years. 50,000 players, 92 countries.

We won it.

If you're used to my usual writing style you're probably waiting for me to qualify it and say something like “well, what I actually mean is that 5000 of us were declared 'winners' but only one person got the prize and it wasn't us”.

Well, as it turned out it was us.

It's been a very weird couple of weeks, with a lot of nice messages of congratulations from people (including some of the ones who came closest to winning it themselves) and some emails and phone calls from friends I'd lost touch with and who saw it in the news.

There's an awful lot to say about it, so I built a small website with the story and a link to my Flickr photos. Go explore, Digg it or stick it on del.icio.us or whatever if that's your sort of thing - I'll still be here when you come back. And believe me, no matter how surprised you are at the news it's nothing to how stunned I am, as I look back at it.

Newspaper bills - the posters outside shops with snappy headlines - are supposed to intrigue you into buying the paper by giving you a taster of the story. They're not supposed to leave you so doubled up with laughter that you decide it's safer to pass them by and look the stories up later online.

Which is what these two bills, classics of their kind, did to me today. They are, if the photo doesn't make it clear, on opposite sides of the same noticeboard - which surely counts as too much excitement in one place at one time.

Here are links to the stories, from the Bucks Free Press. One is a complicated tale of unsympathetic parking wardens, the other a jolly romp at a nightclub.

Jan's fined £30 … for being 60 seconds late

One of the 37 Wycombe motorists incorrectly fined by disgraced parking attendants has slammed the way he was treated.

Jan Lada, 52, from Cressex, was given the fine in September for being just 60 seconds late getting back to his car.

Rugby player takes pole dance title

Five hopefuls shimmied their way through the bar final of a national pole dancing competition on Thursday night - although a male student bucked the trend by taking the crown.

Crowds packed out the dance floor of Butlers in Frogmoor to cheer on the finalists who had spun, slid and shook their way through four heats to reach the bar final of the annual Polecats competition.

Monday was the first anniversary of the death by heart failure of the wrestler Eddie Guerrero - and, to judge from the fresh set of comments that have appeared on YouTube tribute videos, his memory has lost none of its power to affect people.

On one level, pro wrestling is undoubtedly rather silly - but on another it's a form of storytelling and, like all stories, when it's told well by a skilled practitioner it has the power to touch people's hearts. Eddie had that skill.

Back when he died, I created a graphic captioned 'gone to soon', with Eddie's photo and those of four other people who left before they ought to have - Kirsty MacColl, Screaming Lord Sutch, Glenn Quinn and Stuart Adamson. According to my referrer stats, it gets hit again and again from Google image searches, and most of the people are looking for Eddie.

Nor is it just online that you can see evidence of how he connected with people. From time to time I wear my tribute t-shirt, the one sold by the WWE to raise money for Eddie's widow Vickie, and more often than not someone comments on it. They didn't yesterday, as it happened, but then I hardly spoke to anyone during the day.

I wore it while delivering leaflets during May's council elections and on three occasions found myself deep in conversation about his legacy and his greatest matches - twice with the sort of groups of teenage boys that usually give me the wiggins, once with a pleasant young man who I met in the street outside a friend's house and who turned out to be a fellow candidate.

Then there was the time down the gym, when I was talking to a fitness instructor and he literally faltered to a stop mid-sentence as he read the “1967 - 2005″ caption - his eyes bulged in appalled surprise and he blurted out “Eddie Guerrero's dead?” I had to tell him the whole sad story as he shook his head in disbelief.

But most bizarre of all was at the check-out in Tesco one lunchtime, when the woman behind the till broke off without warning from swiping my shopping to start talking about how terrible his death was and how she and her daughter had been such fans of his - just launched into it as if we'd been chatting away every day for weeks. As unlikely a wrestling fan as you could imagine, but that was Eddie for you - he touched everyone who saw him.

A while ago I got an email from San Francisco - a very small publisher planning a very low budget anthology had seen a brief snippet of my writing and wanted me to submit more for inclusion. Money would be involved - and, unexpectedly, it would be coming in my direction.

I ignored the email for a while, then thought 'what the hell' and replied. He was still keen. I was worried - lots of questions about rights and suchlike.

So I joined the Writers' Guild, the trade union for inky-fingered fictioneers.

The membership pack came in this morning's post. They got my surname wrong.

The letter began “Dear Mr Darcy”. There was a membership card in the same name.

I'll just go and jump in a lake, shall I?

Perplex City, the £100,000 game to find a valuable cube buried somewhere on the planet, is building up to a climax - and they've set us a particularly tough task as part of it. One strand of the game involves solving puzzlecards, 256 puzzles ranging from the easy and the familiar right through to the all-but impossible.

Card #256 is one of the last wave of puzzles to be released, and it seems to be a test of whether it's possible to track down one individual with no details about them other than a photo. It's a real-life test of six degrees of separation.

Check out the photo below. This is the guy we need to find - he could be anyone, anywhere on earth. We've been given a hint that his name is Satoshi. The location he was in when he took the photo of himself has been identified by players as Kayserberg in Alsace, near where there used to be a training college for a couple of Japanese multinationals. Progress, but still not a lot to go on, since he could be on the other side of the world by now - and probably is.

Perplex City card #256, Billion to One
The text down the side translates as “find me” - can you help do that?

The chances are you won't know who it is, but maybe you know someone you could ask and take us one step further down the six degrees?

And if you can help at all, go here to the website we've set up.