Living the Dream: A Coincidence Diary

On April 29th 2020 I was giving a chess lesson via Skype to a Mancunian girl, Bryony Eccleston. Her mother had requested I teach something about endings so, over the previous couple of lessons, I had been working with her on pawn endings. On April 29th 2020 I tried to teach her about a rarely encountered tricky breakthrough in a pawn ending of the answering of...g5? with g4! by showing an example of it in a game from a tournament in Kiev 1978 between GM Hans Ree and IM Lyubomir Ftacnik. (Although, since I did not have my signed copy of Ree´s The Human Comedy of Chess in front of me, I had not arranged the pawns on the queenside precisely as they were in the actual game.)  Ftacnik thought he was winning and had played 56...g6-g5?? But he was stunned by the response of 57 g4!.  All other moves lost for white. But 57 g4! won.  After an hour´s thought, Ftacnik continued 57...hxg4 58 h5 Ke6 59 Kf2 Kf7 60 Kg3 Kg7 61 Kxg4 Kh6 62 Kf5 Kxh5 63 Kxf6 g4 64 e5 g3 65 e6 g2 66 e7 g1=Q 67 e8=Q

On the morning of January 23rd 2020 I was running a couple of kilometres along the sea front near my house. This was a part of my training for several things and specifically for my health. I had decided, in the days still left, to hone my concerns down to just eight or so. e.g. Spanish, keyboard skills, etc, and several of these were far from "all or nothing" commitments but just "trimming" things to a level of respectability. The eighth and least important was getting my formal ELO rating back to 2500. It had peaked, in 2000, at 2529. I myself had won the British Championship in 1990 ahead of a world class field, achieved a world ranking of 100th in the 1980s and had plus scores against two players who had been ranked in the world top ten and against two others who played matches for the world championship. I had even received accolades of "genius" for one of my games: a victory over Miles. https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1097818&kpa