Chess is easy, it's the quizzes which are difficult...

My answering machine took a phone call from Geoff last night. I can't tell you exactly what he said, not because it's confidential but because there was so much crackle on the line it sounded like the radio communication in the boat towards the end of Apocalypse Now. In between the static I caught some phrases which - once I'd listened to the recording several times - sounded a bit like this:

.....sorry....column this week.....gone into .....village in the Black Mountains.....mobile coverage....publisher can't get hold of me here.....Coulsdon International....out of the prizes again....after Hastings....see Peter Sowray at Wokefield Park.....

and after that the phone went dead. So either he has had his head cut off or he will, we hope, be back early in the New Year. The meaning of the last reference escapes me.

Anyway, this leaves us looking for a space filler for our last Saturday column of the year. And what better item with which to fill the space than the annual Chess Café Holiday Quiz with its traditional lorryload of prizes - none of which I shall be winning, as the number of questions I am sure I know the answer to is precisely two. (One hopes, by the way, that the questions are more accurate than the descriptions of the prizes, or at least the designation of James Rizzitano's Queen's Gambit Declined as a "classic".)

Nevertheless, in a repeat of the exercise that was so spectacularly unsuccessful last year, readers are invited to pool their resources and provide answers in the comments box below. We have about three weeks.