First select a brand of shampoo appropriate to your hair and mouse, more particularly the latter. Does your mouse get lost under piles of paper on your desk? Do its movements become erratic as it picks up pieces of fluff? Do you suffer from dry, lifeless hair? Don’t worry! You can solve all the problems at once with the shampoo-bottle computer mouse-pouch. Like the 800 million people starving to death in the rest of the world.. You still have to decide whether to turn left or right on reaching the middle, but the route back is not so arduous.

“In my game,” Self proudly announced, “the pieces of any one of the players have not the slightest advantage so far as position goes over either of the remaining players.” On the other hand, once you have sent your pieces into battle against one opponent, it’s a very long trip to get them back to fight the other.Rassmussen’s new game gets round that problem with an elegant diamond array serving as crossroads in the centre of the battlefield. On reaching the no-man’s-land in the middle, a player just continues round its edge. Henry J Self, in 1895 (middle diagram), did nothing with it at all. If you like hexagons and don’t want to lose your bishops, there’s a 1964 three-handed hexagonal game, invented by Joe Baxter, played on a 217-hexagon board with 19 men on each side.If you want symmetry, but consider hexagons too outlandish, you can arrange your three sides at 120 angles to each other, but then face the problem of what to do with the space in the middle.

You need either three quasi-bishops to cover the whole board on pseudo- diagonals, or, as Wellisch preferred, to eliminate bishops from the game altogether. Hexagons, however, make life hell for bishops, because there are no real diagonals. You may, as Tesche claimed he had done, produce a game with more of less equal chances for the three players, but they still occupy different terrains at the start.You can get round the problem by using hexagons instead of squares, as Sigmund Wellisch did in his 1912 “Three-Handed Hexagonal Chess”. After the war, with gallery records and stock destroyed by a bomb and insufficient funds to start up again, they settled in Hampstead, where Joan made a new career, adapting literary classics for the BBC, writing scripts and co-authoring a cookery book, Food for Thought (1957), with Cecily Finn (Zimmerman).She continued adapting novels until just short of her 90th birthday when her memory began to fade, but she would still reminisce happily over Sunday lunch about times past in Kent or Rutland, theatricals at Capesthorne Hall in Cheshire or trips to France. She maintained a lively independence, supported CND and at election time proudly covered the windows of her pink cottage with Labour Party posters.Her final years were spent in a home in Lincolnshire, close to her daughter but sadly far from the interests and friends that had been the focus of her life.Peyton SkipwithI first met Joan Osiakowski in 1937 and an instant liking developed based on our mutual inability to understand the rules of bridge, writes Cecily Zimmerman. The war separated our lives until in 1950 we met again by chance on Hampstead Heath, discovered we were neighbours, and had both been writing, so we decided to try our hand at television, which was just becoming popular.To our amazement we sold our first attempt at a series to the BBC, but it was later dropped due to our total ignorance of television techniques.

However, we enjoyed writing so much that for 10 happy and hilarious years we wrote afternoon plays, humorous series, a cookery book and ideas for two films. Osiakowski and Zimmerman seemed unsuitable names for a comedy duo so Joan became O’Connor and I reverted to my maiden name of Finn.After 10 years Joan felt the need to develop on a more serious level and turned her talent to adapting classic novels for BBC radio. She would read a book five times, make notes, and then write her own version with no further reference to the original. Balzac, Mauriac and Rebecca West were among the authors she brought to radio with inimitable flair and honesty.Joan Druce, gallery owner and writer: born 22 March 1899; married Stanislas Osiakowski (deceased; one daughter); died Cherry Willingham, Lincolnshire 30 December 1996.. Obituary: Professor Leslie Kastner

Leslie Kastner was an academic of the old school who pursued his research interests because of their intrinsic worth, in contrast with the present tendency in universities to measure everything in terms of market value. In his 21 years with the Engineering Department at King’s College London, he succeeded in strengthening, considerably, the esteem in which King’s College engineers are held in the outside world.