GG Al-Suwaidi

Mariam Al-Suwaidi stabilises manuscripts for a heritage foundation, where a careless touch destroys what survived several empires, and she studied in Florence and in Istanbul before that. She lectures without notes. She also plays at her desk, silently, through the long stretches when a page is drying and cannot be moved, and has been asked twice by colleagues to do it somewhere else. She apologised on both occasions and continued. The tapping, apparently, is the problem. She maintains that she has never tapped. A checker gets one contact. She settles the whole sequence before her hand goes near the board and then plays it in one movement, and in six seasons has not lifted a piece and put it down again.