It’s the funniest bridge story I’ve heard in ages. At the recent Lady Milne championship (the women’s Home Internationals), one of the English pairs was fined a point for slow play during their match against Ireland. The pair insisted that they hadn’t been particularly slow — indeed they’d bid to a grand slam rather quickly — and appealed to the Vugraph operator to support them. The operator replied sarcastically: ‘I certainly wouldn’t be proud of the way you bid that slam if I were you.’ To which one of the pair retorted: ‘Well we can hardly expect an Irish operator to be impartial.’
The fact that he turned out to be Scottish was neither here nor there; the tournament director decided to fine the player another point for being ‘racist’. The English captain, on hearing this, went to plead with him.
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