The sheer "wondrousness" of the Staunton hand-turned and hand-carved, weighted and felted boxwood and ebony Chessmen lies not just in their elegant, "classic" looks but also in their surprsingly substantial weight.

Laying out and generally handling the pieces is pleasurable in and of itself but, correspondingly, the loss of even a lowly pawn really does hurt!

Interestingly, the seemingly all-powerful Queen was a male Vizier or Advisor to the King when the game first originated in India and remained so when it moved West to Persia. It was only in the early Middle Ages (15th Century) that the name changed to that of a Queen, possibly as there had been some very powerful Queens in Europe by then.

Once the text of the Memories, with all their segues, photos, scanned documents and other images, have been correctly ordered, the whole lot will then be 'exported' from the database to different software that will enable us to set up each and every page exactly as we want it to look.

This will involve us in trying to get the right feel for how the text and the images should all interact with one another.

Whereas many autobiographies have one or two sections of photographs, all lumped together, it can often be far more effective, and very much easier on the reader, to have the text and the relevant images really close to one another, just like the photo of the laid-out chessmen on this page helps us to visualise a layout.

Once we are happy with how everything looks, the time will have come for any last minute additions, modifications or deletions and the final proofreading.

Then - Oh happy day! - it is time to hit the "PRINT" button!