I was in Cork alone (!) recently. As I sat in to my seat on the train back to Dublin with my newspaper in my sweaty little paw, I was distressed to see that every other seat in the carriage was reserved for school boys. As it happened, 13 year old school boys from my husband’s old school. I felt that my quiet reading would be disturbed.
But I had nothing to fear. Mr. Waffle had always assured me that his old school was full of nerds but I didn’t really believe him until the moment I saw the young men pull out their chess boards and timers and start playing while singing Ave Maria. Unless Ave Maria is sitting high in the charts at the moment, I find this detail particularly baffling.
Choir trip, perhaps? Though any choir I was ever in would have been loud and raucous and awful (though still singing Ave Maria).
Surely not – feel it must be chess with the boards and the electronic timers. Some kind of overlap?
Gerry Murphy (with whom I was in the UCD Music Society choir in early antiquity) teaches music in Gonzaga and is famous/notorious for composing operas in which chess features. So maybe it was a well-planned flash mob performance?
Or maybe Jesuit boys are still well-behaved on public transport, in which case they are even further removed from the contemporary mainstream than I would have thought possible.
Hmmm. Just googled “Gonzaga opera chess” and found this
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eclipsechaser/2144573171/in/photostream/
and this
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eclipsechaser/2116275446/in/photostream/
… but also this
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eclipsechaser/2146069299/in/photostream/
So maybe the young men aren’t quite as nerditudinous as we think.
I think Mr. Waffle starred in the alpha chemicals/beta chemicals cycle from Mr. Murphy’s output.
I don’t think it was a flash mob.