The Guardian Weekly (2022-01-14)

The Guardian Weekly 14 January 2022

62 Diversions

The Guardian Weekly The Guardian Weekly 14 January 202214 January 2022

COUNTRY DIARY

THE ROACHES

Staf fordshire , England

EMOJI SPEAK

Killian Fox

CHESS
Leonard Barden

David Howell scored a
rare English victory in
high-class international
competition last week
when the three-time
British champion won
chess.com ’s weekly
Titled Tuesday.
Titled Tuesday is free
to enter for all Fide titled
players, right down to
2,200-rated Candidate
Masters, and regularly
attracts hundreds of
entries, who play an
11-round Swiss with a
three-minutes-per-game
time limit plus a one-
second increment.
Howell’s shrewdest

1 Which singer/songwriter
is known as the “mother of
the MP3”?
2 What is the largest
arboreal mammal?
3 Sandra Mason is the
fi rst president of which
country?
4 Which UK charity
is named after a New
York bar?
5 In global investment,
what is an SWF?
6 Which monarch had
a 325-volume stamp
collection?
7 Which Lloyd Webber
musical borrowed a

1 Jack and Jill set out from
home at noon and pull
their sledge at 3mph to
the bottom of the hill.
They pull it up to the top
at 2mph, and then zoom
down to the bottom at
6mph. They then pull their
sledge home at 3mph by a
slightly diff erent route. All
in all they cover 4 miles.

move last Tuesday turned

out to be his unintentional

third -round loss to

an outsider, creating

for himself a “Swiss

gambit ” where a player

is behind the pack but

gets the benefi t of weaker

opponents while his rivals

are paired together.

The crunch came in

the fi nal round where

Howell met the No 5 seed,

Jeff ery Xiong , in a sharp

Scotch Game where Black

chose the ambitious 12...

Qg6? instead of the safe

12...f6. The queen looked

active but the h pawn and

a white rook trapped it in

just six moves and Howell

soon wrapped up the

game. H e is believed to be

the fi rst English winner

in all the years of Titled

Tuesday, which began as a

monthly event in 2014 and

has since become weekly.

A

moist airstream surging

through the cold massif

of the Peak District

deposited ground fog over

mid-Derbyshire. Just to the west,

however, at the county boundary

with Staf fordshire, and before the

world fell away to mist-enshrouded

fl atlands about Leek, there was

a band of high country held in

piercing sunlight. The air around the

Roaches actually felt hot.

Perhaps it was these conditions,

in a context of otherwise absolute

winter stillness, that gave rise to

the day’s wildlife drama. For in the

fi elds, and in an eddy of slow-rising

warmth drifting toward the hill

known as Hen Cloud , there unfolded

a remarkable abundance of spiders.

Initially I noticed it as strands of

wafting thread, wound around gates

and fence posts. Then I began to feel

strands of cottony stuff in my eyes.

Looking down, I could see a million

silvery pixels glistening in wavy

lines among the fi elds.

There were spiders everywhere.

On one post I counted 15. But the

deepest insight into overall numbers

came when I ran binoculars from the

ground into the middle sky. The air

was made almost liquid by snaking,

lifting lengths of silk. I’ve never seen

anything like it. There must have

been millions of money spiders,

probably in the family Linyphiidae ,

dispersing in a technique known

as “ballooning”.

The drag of air through the silk is

greater than the weight of its maker,

and the spider is carried aloft to

pastures new. Who knows where it

might settle? Silk strands have been

recorded at elevations of 6,000m.

When Krakatoa erupted in 1883 and

punished the world with ashy skies

and plunging temperatures, the fi rst

to plant a fl ag for life on that dead

volcano was a spider on its magical

silk carpet. Mark Cocker



On the website

Notes and Queries

theguardian.com/notes-and-queries

Answers

 Suzanne Vega (Tom’s Diner Quiz 1

 Orangut an. 2 was used in testing).

 Sovereign 5  Stonewall. 4  Barbados. 3

 St arlight 7  George V. 6 wealth fund.

 Wel sh 9  Tour de France. 8 Express.

names for Welsh cities: Swansea;

Cardiff; Newport; St Asaph; St

 Fic tional butler s: Upst air s, 10 Davids.

Downstairs; Admirable Crichton;

 Anagrams: 11 Batman; Downton Abbey.

 Ar tificial 12 star; tsar; rats; arts.

 Galleries in Madrid’s 13 sweeteners.

 Par t s of a fl ag. 14 “art triangle”.

 Famous (or infamous) psychological 15

experiments.

1.20pm. [Their average Maslanka 1

2EPU speed overall is 3mph.] ;

ESPIONAGE; 3 Dropouts SCREENSHOT;

BITTERN (BIT + TERN) 4 Cryptic

3 Fences 2 The Crucible Emoji 1

The Goat, or Who Is 4 Angels in America

Glengarry Glen Ross 5 Sylvia?

ab

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

cde f gh Kd3 (stops Bd4)^2 Nxf4! Kxf4^13797

4 g3+! Bxg3 3 Bh4 (planning Bf2)

Kf1! (stops 5 Ke2 (stops Bf2) Bh2

Bg1) and the a5 pawn queens.

3797 White to move and win. Black

seems to be winning this 1914

endgame composed by Vassily and

Mikhail Platov, but there are hidden

resources.

1

2

3

4

5

QUIZ
Thomas Eaton

PUZZLES
Chris Maslanka

title from Elgar?

8 The sports paper L’Auto

founded which race?

What links:

9 Abertawe; Caerdydd;

Casnewydd; Llanelwy;

Tyddewi?

10 Hudson; Crichton;

Pennyworth; Carson?

11 Betelgeuse; Peter the

Great; plague rodents;

music, dance, etc?

12 Aspartame; isomalt;

lactitol; steviol glycoside?

13 Thyssen-Bornemisza;

Reina Sofi a; Prado?

14 Canton; charge; fi eld;

fi mbriation; fl y, hoist?

15 Little Albert; Asch

Conformity; Stanford

Prison; Milgram?

Wh en do they get home?

2 E pluribus unum

Rearrange the letters of

THE CENSORS to make a

single word.

3 Dropouts

Replace each asterisk with

a letter to make a word:

*S*I*N*G*

4 Cryptic

One bird nipped another (7)

© CMM2022

Guess the notable American play from

the emoji symbols.