If you've read Simon's journal you'll know that he took a couple of days off to go an watch the Kisei go tournament in London. And so did I, after all, it's not every day you get the opportunity to watch two men playing a board game for prize money of around 250,000 GBP (it's a best of seven thing, so this match wasn't really worth that much...)
And Simon's right, if you play go, it was utterly compelling. I'm only a fairly weak (7kyu) player so I didn't come close to understanding an awful lot of the moves (though I did have some appreciation of the meaning behind several of them. But neither did may of the UK's strongest amateurs. We spent a large part of the time sat around a go board playing out some of the variations that we thought the players might be thinking through, working out the implications of why moves did or didn't get played or why they were played when they were.
As Simon says, afterwards we went to the Gonbei (note spelling Simon...) for a very fine meal including some of the finest o toro sashimi I've had for a while and talked about go, Japanese food, and perl 6. As you do.
What Simon didn't mention was the splendidly brash American lawyer who was sat behind us being loud, ignorant and patronizing; generally living up to the very worst stereotypes we Brits have of both Americans and lawyers. I couldn't help but interrupt when he compared his dining partner to a King's Cross hooker (the restaurant is in King's Cross) and seemed to mean it as a compliment. He was so far over the top it was wonderful, telling us all how fabulous LA was (I'm with Bill Hicks on this one; Arizona Bay can't happen fast enough) and how he'd set up a really early internet company with Richard Bartle (of co author of the original MUD) and a bunch of other stuff. Apparently he'd been a reasonably grand fromage at AOL too...
Oh yes, and he assumed that Simon and I were a couple, which was funny, and wanted to put us on television, which was also funny.
But it was when he told us how he thought that the DMCA was a good thing and that his main area of business that Simon's lips went very thin indeed and we had to leave before we suffered sense of humour failures.
The food was really good though. It always is.
