https://morganboss2026.online/ A personal notebook: openings lost, books reread, and the year's walks. en Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://morganboss2026.online/posts/14-what-the-year-of-walking-taught-me.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/14-what-the-year-of-walking-taught-me.html Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The year of walking is over and the tally is this: a hundred and forty walks, most of them the same valley, a good third of them in weather I would not have called weather at all. The first thing it taught me was that most of my thinking happens at four miles an hour and not at a desk. I used to sit down to write something difficult and produce a first paragraph in an hour. Now I walk, and the paragraph arrives somewhere past the allotments, fully formed and slightly impatient, and I write it down when I get back and it takes eleven minutes. I do not entirely understand this. I know only that the difficulty is not solved but moved, and the moving is the point. The second thing it taught me was about chess, which is where I did not expect to find a lesson. A position on a board and a position in a valley turn out to require the same thing: the willingness to sit with something unpromising without reaching for the move that merely looks decisive. A whole afternoon on a hill teaches you what a bad rook ending feels like from the inside, which is that it is not interesting and it is also the only thing there is. My games are not better, but I am slower to resign, and I have noticed that being slow to resign has cost me nothing. Third, it changed how I read. I went back to books I had not opened since I was twenty, and the ones I finished I found that I had spent thirty years agreeing with a book I did not understand. Reading has become less like finding out and more like measuring, which is duller to say and much better to do. The hill is still there. I am still going up it, in the same order, at the same speed, with the same two questions. Next year I will have more of them, and I expect the answers to be smaller and better. If you want the short version of the whole thing: walk, and the rest of it follows. That is all I have, and it has been enough. https://morganboss2026.online/posts/13-the-second-reading-is-a-different-book.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/13-the-second-reading-is-a-different-book.html Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A second reading is not the same book. The sentences are the same and the page is the same, but the thing you have in your hands has changed, and the change is in you. The mechanics of it are straightforward. The first time through, you do not know what is coming, and you read for the story. The second time through, you know what is coming, and you read for the structure. You are no longer being surprised, so you start noticing how the surprise was built: which detail was put in early and left alone for a hundred pages, which piece of dialogue would mean nothing to a reader who had not seen the last chapter, which of the book's three endings was really its first. It also changes the opinions, and this is the part that took me longest to accept. A book I could not stand at twenty I now think is one of the finest things I have read. A book I was completely in love with at twenty I now find tiresome, and what has changed is not the book but what I want from it. It wanted to be about the weather and the drawing room and the slow unfolding of a marriage, and now I want a book to have a spine, and I cannot help it. Changing your mind about a book turns out to need three things, and the third is not optional: distance, other people, and time. Distance, so that the old reading stops being the only one you can hear. Other people, because an opinion held alone becomes a habit very quickly, and a habit cannot be revised. And time, real time, years of it, not a good weekend. This is why I distrust anyone who says they have never changed their mind about a book. It is also why I keep a list. It is not a list of books I was right about. It is a list of books I was wrong about, with a note beside each one about what I had failed to understand the first time. It is longer than the other list would be, and it is the more useful of the two. https://morganboss2026.online/posts/12-losing-a-game-on-time.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/12-losing-a-game-on-time.html Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I am bad at resigning. For years I would carry a lost position for another twenty moves, against a patient opponent who had already won, purely because the words would not come out. This month I finally got better at it, not through courage but through a piece of bookkeeping. I now keep a small note of what the position actually is, and I resign when the note says so and I have checked the note twice. That is the whole method. It removes the moment of decision by putting the decision somewhere else, in a private room, where nobody is watching me fail. What resignation is for, I think, is honesty and time. The game is over in every sense that matters; the remaining moves are a fiction that both players are politely maintaining. Continuing it wastes the evening of somebody I am supposed to like. There is also a mechanical point: the draw is claimed and the game is recorded as a draw, which is a small lie that gets filed, and I would rather my losses say what they are. I do not know if it is the same for everybody, but resigning feels strange. There is a moment of lightness, an actual physical sensation, as though something being carried in the shoulders has been put down. And then immediately a hollow feeling, which I do not think is grief about the game. Chess has no ceremony for this. In football there is a handshake and a crowd. Here you press the clock, or say the word, and the board is taken away and put in a box, and in a moment you are just two people in a room who have spent two hours on something. I have been trying to do it sooner rather than later in the evening, and the strange thing is that the games I resign quickly are the ones I remember best. The ones I drag out are a grey smear of the last twenty minutes and the fact of the thing. https://morganboss2026.online/posts/11-walking-in-rain-that-does-not-quite-arrive.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/11-walking-in-rain-that-does-not-quite-arrive.html Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The forecast said rain from two o'clock and I went out at one, because the rain did not arrive for three hours and I wanted to be in the valley when it did. There is a particular kind of drizzle that never quite arrives. The sky holds it. You walk out under a grey lid, and every few minutes the light changes a little, and you think: there it is. And then it passes, and the light comes back up, and the pavement stays dry under your feet while the air goes on being damp around your face. For three hours the rain is a promise being made and withdrawn. It is a strange condition to walk in and I found it unexpectedly restful. There is no decision to make about going in. The rain has already decided; you are simply waiting for it to catch up, and waiting is a thing you can do very well on a footpath. Waiting also makes you look at the edges of things. The whole walk I was noticing surfaces that were about to be wet: the leaves on the path, the pale side of a fence, the rims of puddles that had not yet decided to be puddles. Everything was on the threshold of something, and the hour made me look at thresholds. I saw a woman put her hand flat on a wall to feel it and take the hand away again, still deciding. I saw a cyclist ride three feet of grass and get off to push. Everyone was slightly uncertain about the weather, and I found it companionable rather than annoying, which is not how I usually feel about uncertainty. By four o'clock the sky made up its mind and it came down properly, and I was ten minutes from the house with no coat on. I got wet in the way that people who have made a poor decision get wet, which is to say completely, and while still thinking about the hour before. I have had better walks. But I have not had many where the weather was the subject and the walking was only the excuse for it. https://morganboss2026.online/posts/10-books-i-read-for-company.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/10-books-i-read-for-company.html Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 There is a reason to read a book that has nothing to do with learning anything, and I have stopped pretending that it does not. Some books I read for company. Middlemarch is one. The Remains of the Day is another. Persuasion, Austerlitz and The Master and Margarita are on the list, and the list has a rule: these are books I go back to when the house is quiet and I do not want a book that will ask anything of me. A book read for company behaves differently from a book read for instruction. You are not following an argument; you are sitting in a room with people. Some of them are difficult and some of them are foolish and one of them may remind you of yourself in a way that is uncomfortable, and the point of the exercise is that you do not have to say anything. What company books have in common is that their characters hold their shape when you do not. That is the service they offer. The person across the table at a dinner party is interesting for an hour and then they go home; a character in a novel can be exactly as tiresome as they were in chapter three, for eight hundred pages, and remain worth sitting with. There is a kind of steadiness in that which I have never found in a person. I am not saying the other books do not matter. A book that teaches you something is worth the evening it takes. But there is a cost to reading only for the improvement, which is that you end up in a permanent mood of dissatisfaction with yourself, and the afternoons I spend with the company books are the only hours in the week when I am not quietly grading myself. The choice, in the end, is made by the weather and by the state of my head. Some evenings call for a plot. Others call for a room, a fire that is not there, and somebody sensible saying something careful. I have got quite good at telling the difference. https://morganboss2026.online/posts/09-the-blunder-i-could-see-coming.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/09-the-blunder-i-could-see-coming.html Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I lost a game in July to a move I had seen coming for about four minutes and could not stop seeing, because I had already decided what I wanted. The position was this: my king was still out in the middle of the board, which I allow in the middlegame and never in the endgame, and my opponent had a bishop on the long diagonal that was awkward to meet properly. I had won a pawn. There was a square of mine where a piece should have been standing. And there was a capture available, a capture that was simply free, which would have taken the bishop and everything with it. I did not take it. I made a different move, the one my plan asked for, the one that felt like the continuation of a story I had been telling myself since move twelve. Twenty seconds later the bishop was still on the diagonal, my king was still where it should not have been, and my opponent's move came down with a weight I felt in my shoulders. Here is the part I keep returning to. The capture was not difficult. There was no calculation in it, no sacrifice, no subtlety. It was the only move in the position that did not lose on the spot; a beginner would have found it. What defeated me was not blindness. It was a plan. That is what a plan is for, and it is also what it is against. A plan tells you what you are doing, which is a service, until the position stops agreeing with it. At that moment it keeps working like a needle stuck in a groove, and you can no longer see the board, only the line you drew an hour ago. So I went back through the game afterwards with a notebook and found that the mistake was already there three moves earlier, and again five moves earlier. Not in the moves but in the tempo I spent: the half-measure here, the unnecessary move there, the one turn where I chose the safe option in a position where the safe option was not safe. A blunder is not a moment. It is a mood that lasts nine moves and then produces a moment, which is harder to fix but is at least a description of the problem. https://morganboss2026.online/posts/08-a-notebook-of-small-observations.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/08-a-notebook-of-small-observations.html Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 For about six months I have carried a notebook on walks. Nothing elaborate: a soft-covered exercise book, a pencil, and the small discomfort of an extra thing in your coat. The trouble with a notebook is not carrying it. It is deciding what counts. Almost everything looks worth writing down while it is happening, and almost nothing is by evening. The bird that was unusual, the man who said something funny at the bus stop, the light on a wall, all of it seemed important at the time, and now there is a page of forty-one fragments that read like the diary of a person with nothing else to report. Which is not, I would argue, nothing. What I have settled on is a rule: write the sentence, not the mood. If I can catch the actual words, I write them down, and the mood takes care of itself, because the words carry it. If I only have the mood, I leave the page blank, on the grounds that a page of adjectives is a page that will embarrass me later. Writing also slows the walk, which is the real argument for it. Once I have a pencil in my hand, the street stops being scenery and becomes something to be read. I have found doors I have walked past for a decade, and I have written down three words about a shop window that I would not otherwise have seen at all. The other half of the practice is throwing things away. At the end of the year I put the whole stack on the floor and read it straight through and keep perhaps a tenth. The rest is scaffolding; it was only useful while I was building the thing, which turned out to be the noticing, and not the record. I do keep the notebooks. They are in a drawer, in order, and my wife says she will want to read them after I am gone, which is one way of knowing that they are not really for me. https://morganboss2026.online/posts/07-endgames-are-a-different-sport.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/07-endgames-are-a-different-sport.html Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The endgame is a different sport. Not a different phase of the same sport, a different sport, with different rules, that happens to use the same board. In the opening, everything is about ideas: territory, threats, pieces you do not have yet, the fear of being outnumbered on the wrong wing. Twenty moves later the questions have become arithmetic. Where does the king go, which pawn is the passed one, is the rook behind it or in front of it, and does the other fellow know. The endgame has almost no imagination in it. It has arithmetic, and nerve. I have been studying one long ending all summer. Two rooks and a pawn against a rook, technically winning for years, and the game went on for seventy moves. Both players knew the ending table; both players knew that the win was somewhere in the middle of the position and not at the end of it. What kept the game alive was not the play, which was mostly correct, but the tension of the walk. Every move was a small risk taken for the sake of the next move. What I took from studying it was not a tactic. It was the observation that most endgames are lost before the endgames begin, in the middlegame, by people who have grabbed a pawn and not thought about the square their king was standing on. Every table of endgames is full of wins that were thrown away in the last ten moves of a long game, by a player who had three hours to think about it and did not spend two minutes doing so. The endurance of it is the other lesson. Endgame technique is easy to acquire and requires a kind of calm that is not the same as calculation. You must be willing to be a little worse and then a little worse again, in public, for an hour, while the person across the table thinks the same thing. Chess ends differently from the way it begins, and a player who has only ever played the first part is learning a second language late. So I have taken to playing out whole endings in my head, not the famous ones but mine, and the first thing I have learned is that I resign them too early. https://morganboss2026.online/posts/06-on-rereading.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/06-on-rereading.html Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I reread a book every year now, and the book I have picked this year is one I loved at seventeen and would not have looked at twice since. The first thing that happens on a reread is shock at the sentences. Not at the plot, which I remember, but at the prose itself, which turns out to be a foreign country. The famous opening I quoted at every opportunity is clumsy. The description of the sea that I underlined in pencil is one I would now call purple. There is an entire chapter of weather that I have no memory of and no patience for. And yet the book has not become worse. It has become different, and the difference is entirely in the reader. This is the thing I keep arriving at: a book is not a fixed object with a fixed meaning, it is a fixed set of sentences and a moving set of people reading them. The book does not know that you are forty. It is waiting there, patient and unchanged, and you have walked in to find the room rearranged. The second shock is stranger. Some sentences I once found embarrassing are now the best lines in the book. A description of a parent's tiredness that I skipped at seventeen because I thought it was showing off now reads as the truest thing in the chapter. A joke that made me laugh has stopped doing anything at all. Rereading is a measurement, then, but not of the book. It is a measurement of the distance between the person you were and the person you became, which is a distance you cannot get any other way. Your old diaries will lie about it; your old taste cannot. So I mark the pages I skip. Not as a judgement on the book, which has survived my changes, but as a map of my own narrowing and widening. Some years I skip a great deal. Some years I find I have skipped a page I used to love, and I go back and read it three times, and that page turns out to be where I have changed. That is also the argument for keeping books: not the story, which is in the story anyway, but the evidence of who you were when you read it. https://morganboss2026.online/posts/05-the-hill-at-the-end-of-the-valley.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/05-the-hill-at-the-end-of-the-valley.html Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 There is a hill at the end of the valley I walk to. Forty minutes from my door along the river, then twenty minutes up. It is not a serious hill. It does not reward you with a view you can name; it rewards you with a bit further than you thought, a wire fence, and a badger path worn into the grass. I have walked it in every kind of weather the year can produce here. In April the whole thing is mud and I arrive making a heavy sound, and the hill is nothing but a long brown slog that takes an hour and ten minutes instead of sixty. In July the grass goes to straw and the wasps find the path and I walk faster than I came to. In autumn the light comes down the slope at four o'clock and everything on the far side is gold for about twenty minutes, which is not long enough and is the best part of the year. In winter the ground is hard, the mud becomes a gift, and the hill is a piece of arithmetic: you know exactly how long it is and it still hurts. Two questions come up there, and they come up every single time, whatever the season. The first is whether the walk is for the body or for the head. This is a real question, not a rhetorical one, because the two are not compatible. Walking for the body is brisk, purposeful, and stops at the top. Walking for the head is slow, meandering, and often does not reach the top at all. I have gone up on a Thursday with a head full of a problem and come down without it, and I have gone up with nothing and come down with three things I did not know I was carrying. The second is what you are carrying. Everyone arrives at the top of something with a load. The hill is good at showing you the shape of it, because it removes every excuse. There is no errand, no message, no shop to stop at. You can hear yourself think, and what you hear is usually much smaller and much more specific than what you feared. I have been going since March. The hill is not going anywhere and neither, at present, am I. https://morganboss2026.online/posts/04-chess-without-a-clock.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/04-chess-without-a-clock.html Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 There are two games I play and they are not the same game, although the pieces are identical and the board is the same size. Blitz is a game of preferences. Almost every move in a blitz game is a selection from a short, bright list: the capture, the check, the square that looks clever. You do not examine the quiet move, the one that takes four moves to say anything and gains nothing at the moment. The clock makes that examination impossible, and so blitz chess is a long series of assertions about where the pieces are going. Slow play is the opposite. With an hour and a half and a flag that will not fall for another half hour, a position can simply be sat with. I have won games by doing nothing for eleven moves, not by passing the time but by waiting for the position to tell me what it was. Sometimes what it tells you is that you are lost, which takes longer to hear than it does to read. This is what speed costs. Not accuracy, exactly. It costs the second look. In blitz I am a person who sees what is happening on the board; in slow play I am a person who sees what the board is about to say. Most players have one of these minds and pretend to have the other. So I keep both, and I keep them for different purposes. Blitz keeps the machinery honest: pattern, calculation, the small alarms that tell you something is wrong before you know what. Slow chess is where the truth of a position comes out, including the truths I would rather not have, and I no longer expect blitz to teach me anything about the middlegame. I will admit that slow chess has ruined me for tournament chess. My club has one long game a week, on a Tuesday, with the clock set to ninety minutes plus half an hour of increment, and the whole room plays as though it were in a library. We get through maybe two games a night. It is my favourite kind of evening and it is also the reason I finish everything late. https://morganboss2026.online/posts/03-reading-someone-elses-letters.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/03-reading-someone-elses-letters.html Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 I read a volume of collected letters this spring, the letters of one person to another across about thirty years, and it changed the way I think about time on the page. A novel tells you that a year passed. A letter cannot do that. Every letter is dated, and the date is not decoration; it is the whole instrument. You are given Friday the ninth, and you are told what the weather was, what the writer had eaten, whom they had seen that afternoon. Then you turn the page and it is the Monday after, and there is no way to hurry the two of them together. Somebody has to have written all those Mondays. That is the effect I have never been able to get from fiction. Reading them in order is the important part. Over the volume the writer changes and the change is not announced; you find it in the punctuation. The early letters are full of exclamation marks and jokes at their own expense. Somewhere in the middle the jokes dry up, not because the writer has been hurt but because there is simply less time, and by the end a letter to the same person is four lines long and the four lines are entirely about a garden. Then there is the outside world leaking in. A new job, a death, an election the letters mention once, in a parenthesis, and that we now know was enormous. Nothing in the letters marks it. That is the strange part. They are written by someone having a Tuesday, and we read them forty years later and can see the whole shape of the decade pressing down on one person's ordinary days. What it does to a reader is to make time feel hand-made and local. A novel gives you atmosphere; letters give you the day. I have caught myself since then doing something I did not used to do: reading my own notebook as if it were mail, and being startled that the person who wrote it had no idea what was coming. There is a practical habit I have taken from it too. I read a letter before I write one, even a note to a tradesman, and try to put in it the one true detail that would make it worth reading later. Almost never, but the attempt changes the writing. https://morganboss2026.online/posts/02-the-opening-i-keep-losing-to.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/02-the-opening-i-keep-losing-to.html Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Every player has an opening they lose to. Mine is the Sicilian, and I have been losing to it in roughly the same way for six years, which is a fairly useless sentence but an honest one. The pattern is this. We reach the position where the pawns are half open, the knight is on its usual square, and my opponent does the sensible aggressive thing. And I play my sensible reply, the one I have played a hundred times, the one I was taught when I was young and slightly frightened and wanted the position to close. Then twenty moves later I am sitting there with a bad bishop and a vague sense that the game went wrong somewhere I did not look. The way you find out is written records, not memory. I went back through my old score books and found the same game, more or less, four times in two years: my own pawn move in the sixth, a familiar trade, and then the same slow slide. There is a particular position, which I will not insult anyone by naming since somebody can look it up, that used to make my stomach drop when I saw it on the board. Now it makes my stomach drop and I can write down the next three moves of my own disaster. That is the second thing I learned, and it is the less convenient one. The move I repeat is a memory, not a decision. It was the move that felt safe at fifteen, when safety was the whole ambition, and I have been playing it ever since without ever asking whether it is any good. Most of my worst chess is this: a nine-year-old's plan, executed with a thirty-year-old's vocabulary. So I have stopped trying to beat people at the opening. I play the same thing. What I have added is one extra moment before the sixth move, a moment in which I try to state, in words, what my opponent wants. It has not fixed anything. But the games are shorter, my losses are less mysterious, and I no longer blame the opening for what happens twelve moves after it. https://morganboss2026.online/posts/01-a-long-walk-with-no-destination.html https://morganboss2026.online/posts/01-a-long-walk-with-no-destination.html Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 For years I walked the same loop every evening: out past the allotments, along the canal, in through the gate with the broken latch, and home by the row of sycamores. It was a good walk and I could have drawn it blindfolded. It was also, I now think, a walk with all the thinking already done, and I had started to suspect that it was keeping me in the shape of my own thoughts instead of letting them move. So this spring I began going out with no destination at all, which is much harder than it sounds. Without a route the mind has nothing to hold, and for the first ten minutes it complains. You turn left out of the door and it wants a reason. You pass a turning and it asks where the turning is going. The ordinary question, what do you actually want, arrives about four times a mile. Then something loosens. A walk without a route is not a walk without attention; it is attention with the leash off. You notice which gate needs painting, that the hedge by the allotments has gone over into blackberry, that somebody is walking a greyhound and the dog is tired and the man is not. A route, I have come to believe, is a promise to your future self that you will arrive somewhere, and a promise like that quietly puts an end to noticing. The route is the excuse. Without it there is nothing to prove, and what is left over is the walk itself: the weather on one side of the street, the way the light lies across the tarmac at four in the afternoon, the two people outside the cafe arguing cheerfully and both looking as though they are enjoying it. That is what the wandering is for. Not inspiration, which is a promise no walk can keep. It is the removal of the small daily machinery by which we tell ourselves we are busy. An hour with no destination is an hour in which nobody needs anything from you, and I find that I come home with the day's sentences rearranged, as though the walk had quietly put them in a better order while my back was turned.