St Albans Doc is on board with new book

IT sounds, as the name suggests, like a recipe book but the only thing being cooked up by former GP in his new publication is board games. Michael Jameson, 75, who lives in Marlborough Gate, St Albans, has spent years working on Rose Board Recipes which w

IT sounds, as the name suggests, like a recipe book but the only thing being cooked up by former GP in his new publication is board games.

Michael Jameson, 75, who lives in Marlborough Gate, St Albans, has spent years working on Rose Board Recipes which will shortly be available from the Abbey Bookstall to raise funds for the building.

It stems from Michael's fascination with chess and the book - which has already been published in pdf form on the internet - champions chess variants on the rose board design while slating the chess variant world for not adopting a notation system like ours which is known as rose notation.

He wants to see a worldwide unifying notation system and admits the whole subject has been, "a life's niggle."

It is particularly apt that Michael is selling Rose Board Recipes to raise money for the Abbey because some of the first books were printed in English at the ancient building by an unknown school master at St Albans School over 500 years ago.

The history of Michael's fascination with chess goes back to his school days in 1949 when a Polish colleague did a major launch of hexagonal chess. He hopes the book will reconcile not only the orthodox chess world with the fairy chess world - chess problems that differ from classical - as well as reconcile the warring parties within the world of hexagonal board games.

But Rose Book Recipes is not just to rectify what Michael sees as a wrong but how people can invent their own board games.

It has a foreword by the Dean of St Albans, Jeffrey John, who praises the way it reveals fascinating facts about the history and science of board games in different cultures and introduces the reader to games which many would not have known existed as well as encouraging them to create their own.

Rose Board Recipes is in two parts - the first a summary of the kinds of round board games that have been introduced worldwide in the past three centuries and the second the main "recipe" book which offers an endless variety of games that readers can design.

The book will sell for �5 with at least �1 going to the Friends of St Albans Cathedral.