Monday 20 April 2020

A Surprise in the Post

Last week I was surprised to receive a copy of this new book from the BCPS:
It consists of a selection of the best problems published in The Problemist over the years, together with history of the Society and biographical notes on prominent members. This will be well worth close study over the coming weeks or months of shutdown.

I was very pleased to find two of my own problems presented. One is my Grasshopper Retro, which is certainly by far my best composition. The other is a Serieshelpmate in 17 with Neutralising King that I composed for the New Ideas Tourney while on the train to the Bournemouth meeting in 1989. To be honest, I had entirely forgotten about this, and never followed it up with other examples.

Being currently in lockdown because of the virus I have started to update some of the neglected pages on my website. These include the History Timeline where many of the links had vanished into the ether. So far I have eliminated the dead links and rearranged the material into 400-year Ages (instead of 500) but there are still many obvious omissions. I'm also putting up more of the 7-man compositions in my Grasshopper Chess Problem Collection.