Happy (Early) New Year

SHORTLY before the start of yesterday afternoon's round, one of the players came up to my board, wished me Happy New Year and presented me with a book.

I say "one of the players" as I was rather taken by surprise and did not pay proper attention as to whom it was, but I think it was the top seed, Fide master Sergej Shilov.

We played four years ago at Olomouc, when I successfully claimed a draw by threefold repetition in an ending of queen versus queen and pawn. Clearly I must have behaved properly while doing so as there appear to be no hard feelings.

Anyway, the book he gave me is Jerome K Jerome's Three Men In A Boat.

I have the book at home, but what makes this edition something of a collectors' item is that it was published in 1955 by the "Foreign Languages Publishing House" of Moscow.

An English-language edition but published in the Soviet Union

The book has endnotes, also in English, including an explanation that Margate is "a sea-side health resort on the Kent coast," and that the expression "don't look half bad" means "look attractive."

It may come in handy as I have only brought two books for reading material on this trip and I am fair shooting through the first of them, Lewen Weldon's Hard Lying - An Intelligence Officer On The Levantine Shore 1914-19 (much more fun than its title might suggest).