How To Walk In High Heels: The Girl's Guide To Everything (15 page)

Daily double:
Type of wager where you select the winners of two consecutive races.

Dam:
Mother of the horse.

Dead heat:
A tie, two horses finishing at the exact same time.

Favourite:
The most popular horse in the race.

Filly:
Female horse four years old or younger.

Fixed odds:
Your return and odds are fixed when you place the bet.

Green:
An inexperienced horse.

Handful:
Slang for odds of 5 to 1.

Heinz:
Consists of fifty-seven bets – six selections in different events.

In the frame:
This is when your horse finishes in the top three.

Late double:
A second daily double offered during the latter part of the programme.

Lay:
To take a bet on.

Maiden:
A horse or rider that has not won a race or a female that has never bred.

Mare:
Female horse five or more years old.

Monkey rider:
A rider who is great at the money races.

Morning glory:
A horse that performs well in the morning.

Nailed on:
The selection that is considered to be a certainty.

Odds:
The chance or likelihood of a horse winning.

Odds-against:
The stakes against it winning.

Odds-on:
Odds of less than even money, where you have to put down more than you win. Seems daft.

On the nose:
Betting a horse to win only – forget second and third.

Paddock:
The area where horses are saddled and kept before the race.

Punter:
Investor or the better.

Rag:
Outsider of the field.

Single:
Most common and simplest form of betting. One wager, one bet.

Tips:
What the experts tell you to go for.

Underdog:
The horse bookies think has the least chance of being the winner.

Wager:
A bet.

How to play chess

Chess is like the game of life.

Each move you take has to be carefully considered and thought through. Grown men agonise for hours over what direction their next move should be – while the young just play, and to hell with the consequences.

A brief history

Voltaire said that chess was ‘the game that reflects most honour on human wit’. The game evolved in the fifth century
AD
in North West India. Despite the rumour that it was played in Ancient Egypt no proof or pieces have yet been found.

In the sixth century it spread from India to Persia and later the Arabs took up the game. Chess entered Europe around the tenth century, probably picked up on a crusade.

The first English chess-playing monarch was Edward I (1239–1307).

The first book on chess in English was Caxton’s
The Game and Playe of the Chesse
, published in 1474.

Today’s rules date back to the seventeenth century.

Learning the basics

If you are a good chess player, people will respect you and think that you’re smart. Great chess players are seen as being among the intellectual giants of the planet, along with nuclear physicists and brain surgeons. This status has been awarded because chess involves concentration, simultaneous use of strategy, mathematics and risk-analysis, and because the game itself has so many rules it’s really, really complicated to learn, let alone play.

Essentially it’s black versus white. Ebony and Ivory. One-on-one combat.

The general idea is that you have two battlelines pitted one side against the other and the object of the game is to get the opponent’s king. First you send out the cavalry (the pawns) to start the attack. Crank up the drama by using the knights, bishops and the castles/rooks, the latter being best employed to slide up and down and protect the monarchs. Then when it’s all hands on deck, royalty get involved for the final skirmish.

The pieces

8 pawns, 2 rooks, 2 knights, 2 bishops, 1 queen and 1 king.

The pawns are the smallest pieces, the cavalry.

The rooks look like castles with jagged edges along the top.

The knights look like horse heads.

The bishops are the things with balls on the top of their bishop hats.

The queen wears a crown.

The king is the tallest piece and has a cross on top of his crown.

Laying out the board

No chic dwelling should be without a chess set. What the game involves is two people sitting on opposite sides of a chessboard. One side has black pieces, one side white, or a trendy variant depending on the type of board you pick.

1
   First select the colour/team/side you are going to be.

2
   Put your rooks on the two outside corners of the first row.

3
   Next to each rook, put a knight.

4
   Next to each knight, a bishop.

5
   The queen goes on the first row on the same colour box as the colour of your pieces. (In English, if you are the black pieces, put the queen on the remaining black, on the first row, and put the king on the remaining white square. If you are the white pieces, put the queen on the remaining white square and the king on black.)

6
   Line up all your pawns on the second row.

Confused? It sounds worse than it is. Basically, the pieces get taller as you move inwards, and the queen goes on her own colour. Your queen will always face your opponent’s queen, just as the king will face the king.

The moves and the grooves

Every piece has different rules about how it can move. Only one piece can ever be in a square at a time. If you want to put your piece in a square that already has a piece in it, you have two options:

1
   If the piece in the square is yours, first you have to move it out of the way before your new piece can go there.

2
   If the piece in the square is your opponent’s, then you can ‘capture’ his piece. That piece is now out of play for ever.

Hopefully it is more often option 2 as there is no point destroying your defence in the attack.

The first line of defence. You have an army of eight, but an individual pawn is relatively worthless. They can move only one space forward. That’s it. Three exceptions to this rule:

1
   As the game begins, when the pawn is coming out of its box for the first time, you have the option to move it either one or two spaces forward.

2
   When a pawn captures another piece, it can capture it ONLY by moving one box forward in a diagonal. It can’t capture a piece head-on.

3
   If your pawn makes it to the opposite end of the board, it gets a ‘promotion’. This means that it can become any piece it wants to be, getting that piece’s rules and powers. A word to the wise: promote your pawn into a queen, don’t mess around with any other option.

Moves up and down, or side to side.

Moves in a diagonal line for as many spaces as it likes until something blocks it.

Note: they’ll always stay on the same colour square that they started on.

The complex one. The knight can only move in an L-shape. This means that it moves a total of three boxes: 2 straight 1 sideways, or 1 straight 2 sideways. It can go left or right as desired. But an advantage of mastering his moves is that the knight is the only piece that is allowed to jump over other pieces to land in an empty square.

The queen: Once her royal highness gets going she charges around, and can move as much, or as little, as she likes. She is a combination of the rook and the bishop, moving as many spaces as she likes along a rank, file or diagonal. She is the most powerful and useful piece in the game. A real catastrophe if she is beheaded. BUT typically it’s the bumbling king – who can only move one step at a time – who has the final say. He can move in any direction, but only one box a go.

This is when a piece lands on the square facing the opposing king. Nightmare. Game over if the king is taken.

Learn your tactics well; to quote Tammy Wynette, always ‘stand by your man’, and don’t let any other hussy come along and take him.

Chess etiquette

You are not meant to refer to the rows and columns on a chessboard as a ‘row’ and a ‘column’, that’s baby talk. You must refer to them as a ‘rank’ and a ‘file’. And just in case things weren’t complicated enough, each rank has a number and each file has a letter, so that everybody can follow what’s going on. For example, your knight is in box b1 (you have another one in h1). But, frankly, avoid theorising as this is an added headache; you just want to play, not revisit a mathematics exam.

How to be Filled with the Sound of Music

‘Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.’
Noël Coward

How to choose the correct music

Music is a great scene setter, seducer and room warmer. BUT you have to know WHAT music is appropriate WHEN. Make sure that you have a wide repertoire of CDs – classical through to pop trash – at your well-manicured fingertips. Know just what to reach for in any given situation.

To stop yourself having a crisis when you can’t find the right tune for the moment have this list of moods pinned to the lid of your CD player, and fill in your favourites. For example:

How to sing and know all the words

One of life’s mysteries is how some people hear a song for the first time, and, by the end of the first phrase, can be singing along as if they had known it all their life.

But with practice you can too.

Keep up to date with who is who. Know who is number one, as the popular songs are the ones you are most likely to have to join in with. Listen to the radio, have it on while you have your breakfast, tea, or are driving. Get acquainted with what is ‘in’.

Always have a repertoire of songs you DO know and which will come on the radio at some point in the day. Likewise refresh seasonal songs as appropriate.

If you are tone deaf – know it. Don’t sing, don’t hum, don’t try. You must have other gifts. It is recommended that you include whistling, crooning and everything other than talking on the list of don’ts. There is a lot to be said for being a mute backing singer – look at the Alaia-clad foxy ladies in Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’ video. Do something like this.

If you don’t know the words sing ‘hmmmm’ or ‘lala’ in a kind of carefree tra-la-la way. Meanwhile LEARN the words (having downloaded the lyrics from the internet).

How to enjoy karaoke

Either you love it or hate it, but karaoke is bound to happen to you sooner or later, so it’s best to be prepared.

A brief history

The word comes from two Japanese words, ‘kara’ meaning empty (a karate empty hand) and ‘oke’ (short for okesutora) meaning orchestra. So the orchestra is your personal backing, albeit on tape; grab a mic and you’re on.

The origin of actual karaoke is less defined. It is believed to have started in the 1970s in Kobe, Japan. The best story is that a performer for a small snack bar fell ill, so the owner of the establishment prepared tapes of the backing music and got his guests to sing along instead. Others argue that it started in the 1950s and 1960s in America with the sing-alongs, using lyrics that bounced along the bottom of the screen.