Welcome
Club Information:
CHESS Minister!:
CCCC Championship:
The Club publishes a magazine entitled ‘CHESS minister!’ 3 times a year to keep members in touch.
If you are interested in joining us, please contact the Secretary:
The Club publishes a magazine entitled ‘CHESS minister!’ 3 times a year to keep members in touch.
If you are interested in joining us, please contact the Secretary:
While I have always thought it valuable to ‘put a face to a name’ I must say a big thank you to the CCCC for teaching me how good it is to ‘put a name to a place’.
Since moving to Cheltenham I have enjoyed the warmth of welcome given to me by the community at Prinknash Abbey. It has been good to spend a day with them from time to time and more frequently to meet with one of the community. This year, however, the unity service on the Thursday of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity was tinged with sadness. It was the last occasion we would meet in the crypt chapel of the monastery. The community has diminished in number and will be moving out of the monastery they built in the sixties back to St Peter’s Grange their original home half a mile away across a beautiful valley.
Enjoying refreshments in the refectory after the service I found myself in conversation with a guest from Mount St Bernard Abbey. Having grown up in Leicester I knew the Abbey Grounds well, often visiting in my childhood while exploring Charnwood Forest . However, that was not the only connection I was able to make in the course of our conversation. It was thanks to the CCCC that I was able to ‘put a name to the place’! As soon as I mentioned chess my new friend knew exactly who I was going to speak of next: Fr Hilary Costello.
I owe a big debt of gratitude to Fr Hilary Costello. It was in my first season with the CCCC that I found myself playing against him. The game did not go well. I don’t think I got as far as move 10. In a kindly note he suggested that I ought to get hold of a good book of Chess Openings to guide me through the opening stages of my game. I followed his advice, made a bee line for Waterstone’s and acquired a copy of Garry Kasparov and Raymond Keene, Batsford Chess Openings 2.
It is, however, a weakness of the book that in the explanation of the symbols on page iv it does not explain whose is the ‘slight advantage’ – white or black! This I discovered to my cost only this year when in my game against Bruce Carlin I followed through the whole of one opening line in the Ruy Lopez. By the time we had reached move 16 my copy of BCO 2 informed me that we had replicated a game played in Rejkjavik in 1987 between Anrasson and Timman. [BCO 2 page 393 footnote 15] To my horror, however, on looking at the board I came to the conclusion that I had misread the meaning of the symbol. The slight advantage in position now seemed to lie not with White as I had supposed but with Bruce’s Black!
Thank you to Fr Hilary Costello for advising me to acquire a book of
chess openings … and thank you to CCCC for enabling me to ‘put a name
to a place’.