Bridge | 17 October 2019

I’m just back from Beijing, where I’ve been playing in the Hua Yuan Cup, an invitational tournament for the eight top-ranked women’s teams in the world. It’s a wonderful event, with generous prize money, and I got lucky: a member of the England team, Gillian Fawcett, couldn’t come, so I subbed.
 
To say it was intense is to put it mildly. At one point, after our match against the Netherlands, I mentioned to the formidable Nicola Smith that I’d lent one of the Dutch women my scarf as she was cold. Nicola looked at me aghast: ‘You mustn’t do that — she’s the enemy!’ She went on to tell me that the great Rixi Markus had once refused to let her partner Dorothy Shanahan give smelling salts to an opponent who’d fainted at the table.
 
We ended up coming just fractionally behind Sweden and Poland to win Bronze. It was a good result, thanks largely to outstanding performances from two members of the team: Fiona Brown and Catherine Draper.