LIKE MADMEN!:

Grandmaster flak over the message in a yoghurt (Harry Pearson, October 6, 2006, The Guardian)

"Like madmen they were," my friend's mother said. It was the late 70s and she was explaining why she had banned chess grandmasters from her house.

They were an emigré family from the Eastern bloc, the father was a talented chess player and for years the house had been a port of call for visiting checkmate greats. But not any more.

"Like madmen!" My friend nodded. According to his reports a chess grandmaster could wreck a house faster than a drug-crazed Keith Moon. The destruction was not wilful but absent-minded. So focused were they on their profession that their peripheral vision was non-existent. They were domestically purblind. Crockery was smashed, drinks spilled, taps left running until baths overflowed. The mother's patience had finally snapped when a grandmaster from the banks of the Danube had set light to the living room curtains with a cigar while reading the chess reports. His hostess was cooking lunch and had only been alerted to the conflagration when the grandmaster, still immersed in "Bc4 Bd7" and the like, wandered into the kitchen with flames leaping from his shirt. She saved him by throwing a saucepan of water over his head.

Chess has been in the headlines this week, thanks to the Bulgarian challenger Veselin Topalov, who raised the alarm because the world champion, Vladimir Kramnik of Russia, went to the toilet 200 times during their first four games. Topalov was worried that Kramnik was visiting the toilet to receive messages. What messages he would have got in a toilet beyond the usual ones - "Be here 12 Sunday if U want sex" - was not stated, but when I read the reports I could clearly hear "Like madmen they were!" echoing across the decades.