Ron McKay's Diary: I confess to not knowing what a mindfulness session is, but special flowers have made me feel blooming wonderful

A year later, another swab and the punters’ stress levels had dropped by six per cent, the equivalent of those eight sessions. I don’t know how they can ascribe this better mental health simply to a few bunches of petunias or glads but they do. There’s no mention in the study of back gardens but apparently a few pot plants around the house have a similar effect, although I don’t know if this works with an imitation yucca.

I can confirm that this really does affect stress levels. Without being conscious of this important research, last spring I put two handsomely-planted terracotta flowerpots outside my house. They were gone in the morning.

Date for destiny for Diego, Castro & Best

Also gone is the great and revered Diego Maradona. His obituary in The Telegraph was predictably bitter, mean and trite, stating “... in a career never lacking in drama, he also proved himself a liar, a cheat and an egomaniac”. And that was just the first paragraph. This churlishness was, of course, about the “hand of God” goal Maradona scored at the 1986 World Cup against England, before he scored “the goal of the century” just to make it even sweeter.

This was in the wake of the Falklands War. In his autobiography Yo Soy El Diego (I Am The Diego), Maradona wrote: “Somehow we blamed the English players for everything that had happened, for everything that the Argentinian people had suffered. I know that it sounds crazy but that’s the way we felt. The feeling was stronger than us: we were defending our flag, the dead kids, the survivors.”

We felt that way around 300 years ago, after Culloden.

I was privileged enough to see the 18-year-old Maradona score his first international goal for Argentina against Scotland in 1979. A few weeks back I was in Naples and saw how the man who, virtually single-handedly, won Napoli their only two Serie A titles is deified. You couldn’t walk down a street or go into a bar (those were the days) without seeing a memento. I now have a fridge magnet of him in his pomp.

He was born in a shanty town on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and never forgot his roots or where he came from, despite his well-publicised and repeated falls from grace. He was also highly political, and supported a Palestinian homeland. He spent four years in Cuba being treated for drug addiction and he described Fidel Castro as a second father to him.

I was also fortunate to see another of football’s greats, George Best, several times (forgetting his Hibs outings) – one of the few who could even be mentioned in the same breath as Diego, if not about politics. He, of course, also had addiction problems. I talked to him a few times in the Phene pub in Chelsea which was almost a second home to him.

In one of those spooky coincidences of fate, Best, Castro and Maradona all died on the same day, November 25.

When life is more than just a board game

The Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit creates the unlikely achievement of making a game of chess look interesting. And it makes Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays prodigy Beth Harmon, an international star. It’s fiction, of course, because women have never reached the very top of the game, probably because they have more interesting and compelling things to do.

That’s certainly the view of the top woman player, a real-life prodigy, grandmaster (grandperson?) and four-times women’s world champion Hou Yifan. She became a grandmaster at 14, the youngest in the world at that time, and at 16 became the youngest women’s world champion.

But she had an outside life and interest in other studies, not just the obsessional, monomaniacal compulsion of the top male players. She said in 2018: “I want to be the best, but you also have to have a life.”

That life involved semi-retirement while she studied, latterly as a Rhodes scholar completing a masters in public policy. In July, Hou became the youngest-ever professor at Shenzhen University at the age 26. She is now rated 89th in the chess world, male and female.

The Queen’s Gambit is Netflix’s most-watched scripted series. It’s about chess. Who would have thought it. I have an idea for a compelling drama about dominoes. Don’t knock it.

Read all about it

THE columnist Suzanne Moore was waxing lengthily during the week about the way she was ostracised and forced out at The Guardian for refusing to go along with the house line that your sex at birth doesn’t define you and you can switch your sexuality later. It all ended in a crescendo of nastiness when 338 staff members signed a condemnatory letter and sent it to management. It was a cowardly thing to do. But who knew the paper had 338 employees?

People before profits

WITH three Covid vaccines passed for administering to the public – well, almost there for the Oxford University one – the prospect of controlling the spread of the virus is in sight, at least for those of us in rich countries. The developing world may have to wait longer, until after we are serviced. Good news for us then and congratulations to the scientists who developed them.

Oxford is partnered by the drug company AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical company. The other two, from Pfizer and Moderna, require to be kept at considerably lower temperatures than the Oxford vaccine, which can be stored in your fridge. The other two are also considerably more expensive – Pfizer’s at $19.50 a shot, $39 a full treatment, while Moderna is even more expensive at $50 a patient. The Oxford tab is $3 a jag.

All three drug companies are listed on stock markets. Two of these, Pfizer and Moderna, have seen their share prices shoot up since announcing the efficacy of their products while AstraZeneca’s has fallen rather dramatically. This can only be because investors are ploughing in for the prospects of the profits to be made, while the deal that Oxford struck with AstraZeneca was that the vaccine should be sold at cost. Another reason to applaud the team at Oxford University.