Everyone over a certain age can remember the sense of shock that comes when policemen start looking like mere boys. Now I’m in my mid-forties, I get that kind of jolt quite frequently. It seems incredible to me that so many ‘authority’ figures in my life — my boss, my doctor, my lawyer, and so on — are younger than me. But never have I felt this more keenly than I did last week, when I found myself sitting opposite an extremely talented bridge player whom I’d booked to play in a duplicate game. Meet my new teacher: Tom ‘Mini’ Paske, aged 23.
Mini — so called because he has an older bridge-playing brother — is a rising star of the game. I may have been playing since he was born, but there’s no limit to what I can learn from him.
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