The Anastasia Question

The Anastasia question is a concept I have been thinking about for many years.
Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Russian Tsar, you’ll remember, was executed with her family by the Bolshevik secret police in 1918. Persistent speculation arose, after her death, as to whether she might have survived leading to several women falsely claiming to be Anastasia, of whom Anna Anderson is the best known. Conclusive proof finally confirmed that she was not Anastasia when DNA testing in 1994 on available pieces of Anderson’s tissue and hair showed no relation to the DNA of the imperial family.

This is my question, it’s my game if you like!
What is the one question or fact about yourself that would convince the most incredulous scrutineers that you are in fact who you claim to be. Now you wouldn’t believe how stringent my rules are for this profound secret. In my testing of this ‘Rosebud’ I think of myself as a secret agent being trained over many months to penetrate the network of a fiendishly suspicious and sceptical enemy. Their questioning of who I am is based on them holding every piece of detail of my life and knowing that professional fraudsters can be trained to be completely convincing replicates. This question easily transcends DNA testing. It is absolute. There was and never can be any seepage of this fact between you and the questioner. The Anastasia game of mental solitaire is actually the search for the fact, the question never gets asked! In short, it is what question is the very key to your soul?

Let me give you an example of a near miss for me, lest you think well that’s easily done – just think of something that happened in your childhood.

We have in our kitchen a ramshackle excuse for a crockery set that we everyday try to home on a three-tier small wall shelf system. The cereal bowls, dinner and side plates are all different sizes and colours. The sort of miscellaneous collection you get when you break a piece or two from a set, renew but don’t throw away the existing members. It’s difficult to place each member onto the shelves because there are certain O.C.D. rules to observe. You can’t, for instance,  put a bigger plate onto a smaller one or have our favourite mugs, the thin rimmed ones, on the top shelf where you would have to momentarily exert wasteful energy and go on ‘tippy-toes’ to retrieve! Anyway, it works for us and like doing a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, I enjoy the swapping and repositioning of the pieces to get them so they fit. The singularly important point in this ‘invisible’ mundane action that nobody else would discern, let alone record, is that the same word always pops into my thoughts when I am in the process of doing it and that is ‘Cravat’. This is interesting solely for me in that there is only one person, (I think!) in the whole universe who would know what the significance of me saying that word in that situation and that is my brother Richard even though we have not uttered this word together for what must be nearly 50 years.

Does this qualify for an Anastasia question? Well since the advent of the internet which makes it clear to us all how individual how unique we are so not, no not necessarily. Thinking in computer-speak, the password security strength of Cravat is compromised by the assumption that nobody else remembers playing Cravat, a card game for two players in which you strive to re-position cards in an array in the minimum number of moves, to which your opponent challenges you with a cry of ‘Cravat’ if he sees a way of doing it with fewer.
– It’s good mind but nowhere near 100% impervious and spy proof.

Happy searching!!

The Anastasia Question