1000 SHARDS

Dare i say... intoxicating.

"Ah, words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away."

- John Clare, "Remembrances", quoted in Christopher Hitchens' recently published memoir, Hitch-22. (Sad to discover that the raffish rogue now has cancer of the oesophagus).

It's no secret that New York is a tourist magnet, and as in many of the world's other tourist honeypots, Noo Yawk locals are often guilty of growing impatient with visitors to their frantic metropolis. (I remember attracting a salvo of artful cursing from a cyclist on the Brooklyn Bridge when I drifted into the bike lane to take photos of downtown Manhattan – this was the moment I decided that it wasn't the day I would propose to my wife.)

Check out this elegant and practical furniture design. The Corner Tree is a corner shelving unit designed to make effective use of space by emulating the aesthetic of a tree's growth. I wanted one the minute I saw it, but was disappointed to discover that the design, by Indian Abhinav Dapke, is just a concept and, as far as I can tell, has never been produced commercially.

Let's hope a canny design house jumps on this. It would surely be a big seller.

I find myself drawn to art and design inspired by the relationship between geometry and everyday life. Here's a great example: a T-shirt design by Phil Jones over at Threadless in which a boat disturbs the tranquil sea of horizontal blue lines. Brilliant.

Many people regard cats as, at best, enigmatic. My theory is that people who say they don't like cats are actually reacting against those traits in cats that they dislike in themselves, for the feline is an unabashedly self-interested animal while we humans often channel an extraordinary amount of energy into demonstrating that our narcissism is firmly bridled.

Here, Guardian illustrator Stephen Appleby reveals that cats are far less mysterious than commonly thought. Who knew it was a simple case of the tail wagging the cat?

When I moved to Melbourne in March 2000, I lived irregular hours while studying postgrad history at Melbourne Uni and working nightshift at the local paper. It meant I missed plenty of big weekend parties, which was a real drag for a newly arrived 20-something. The upside was that I often had weekday afternoons off. I'd wander down the street, through the manicured St Kilda Botanical Gardens, to Acland Street, where I would sit at one of the many cafes and read, sipping coffee or a glass of wine without the weekend crowds.

On one of my first journeys through the St Kilda Botanical Gardens I was delighted to discover a small community of ageing men huddled around an oversized chess board, the knee-high pieces obviously arranged with an intricacy and importance that only they could fathom. Their accents were dense, mostly Russian and Eastern European, and they were there every day of the year, as far as I could tell. I once saw them playing in driving August rain – I'd gone there with the specific intention of establishing just how game they really were – and drew a curt nod from one of the senior gents after our eyes locked through streams of umbrella run-off.

A few of the younger regulars had a whiff of desperation about them, as though this was their few hours break from a grim life of petty crime and graft. I pictured them wandering away as the sun set, peering furtively in the windows of parked cars for potential bounty before arriving home and opening a can of something for dinner then kicking back to plot strategic revenge over the old masters who had wiped the floor with them earlier that day.

That was a decade ago, but the memory is still so fresh. Walking through the gardens a couple of weeks ago I was thrilled to discover that The Check Mates are still at it. Better still, I recognised several of the original crew – still plying their craft, outflanking the enemy, deflating brash newcomers, staying agile and hungry.

They barely looked up as I snapped a few photos. Perhaps they are used to being photographed by tourists, but I prefer to think they were so engrossed in their game, in the urgency of the present, that they were oblivious to the outside world and how it might regard them. The same as it ever was.

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Great quote from the novel I'm reading at the moment:

Here is a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition. Whatever its ills, nothing has created more. Cathedrals, sonatas, encyclopedias: love of God was not behind them, nor love of life. But the love of man to be worshipped by man.

–  Gerda Erzberger in The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman.

Dusk falls upon St Kilda Beach.