Pictures and the thousand blogs

Recently the guys that have run this excellent blog since 2006 asked if I'd like to contribute the occasional piece from my end of the turf, an invitation so pleasing I promptly forgot what it is that I usually write about when the "chess activity wake-up call" sounds in the brain.

This was a bit worrying. But I reflected that I don't actually play much chess in summer - unless it's got a beer bottle obscuring the colour of the h1 square. Also, the invitation came around the start of the Ashes hunting season, a once four-yearly pantomime cricket opera featuring the cries of the wingeing Pom in hot (or tepid) pursuit of a team of aggressively amiable Antipodeans.

And, though normally failing miserably, the home side won this year in true Tartakover fashion, timing their penultimate error (Headingley, fourth test, day 1) to perfection, leaving the Aussie selectors a mere 11 days to consider how best to drop their spinner from a turning pitch at the Oval.

All of which is to introduce the link below which, aided and abetted by Bob Dylan, casts a backward glance at the blog's pictorial content from 2006-09.