Saturday, December 01, 2007

Geoffrey Scorebook Is Unwell

Unfortunately we will not have any Scorebook Notes this weekend: Geoff informs us that he went down with a nasty cold a couple of days after being caught in the rain and cannot do anything except sit in bed and watch old Foxy Openings videos. Next week, if he recovers, he is off for a short holiday in the sun (or so he says) but we hope to have him back with us in a fortnight.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Geoff,

Sorry to hear you're poorly. I hope your illness is not of the Jeffrey Bernard/Alekhine variety.

John Saunders said...

Has a nasty cold?? That's absurd. Any jobbing GM worth his salt would take the cold to his nearest weekender and deploy it as part of a bacterial assault on first prize. Even if you don't win the money, you've a really good chance of infecting the opposition and putting them out of the running for the next weekend congress. After all, didn't Geoff write the 1985 Batsford book Secrets of GM Germ Warfare - or was that Ray Keene?

No, I think it much more likely that Geoff is suffering from IDS - Islington Deprivation Syndrome. Quite a lot of circuit GMs have recently started to go down with this distressing psychological disorder around the first weekend in December as they pine for what used to be the first (and last) tournament of the Grand Prix. Symptoms are depression and extreme lassitude (admittedly not all that easy to distinguish from their normal state). The only hope for a cure is a massive injection of sponsorship cash into the arm of English chess.