A curious blend

General election day in the UK and Mike Basman has been setting out his views on the NHS: apparently it represents "a culture which pushes drugs relentlessly onto the populace", whatever he may think that means. Don't worry Mike, if the Tories win the NHS will be doing a lot less of that and everything else in the future.

Mike will have gained a boost from being the subject of Ray's widely-read Spectator column for June 3:

Given that Ray's political associates are normally titled members of the barking right, Mike Basman might be an improvement.

There's a game of course. It's a fifty-year-old game featuring Ray himself and the subject of his column. Of course.

Now I'm all in favour of contemporary reassessments of the classics, but this particular set of notes is not as contemporary as it might be, being familiar to anybody who's looked at this Chessgames.com page during the last thirteen years.

Obviously there's nothing in the Spectator to say "once again you are reading notes that are years old and can be read for free somewhere else" but who cares, it wouldn't surprise anybody if Ray never wrote an original set of notes for that periodical again.

However, what actually interests me about the notes is that - a little bird tells me - they may not be original to Chessgames.com either, but may have been written for the British Chess Magazine shortly after the game was played, half a century ago.

Regrettably, although I personally am more than half a century old, my BCM collection is not, and I have no copies prior to 1970. Do any readers have this game, or will everybody have to take my word for it?

It's a day for deciding whose promises you believe.