Bridge | 25 June 2022

At a bridge tournament about 15 years ago, I started chatting to a friendly, eccentric woman in her mid-sixties, wearing a sequined baseball cap. I had no idea who she was, but when she told me her name, I knew at once: the well-regarded bridge columnist of the Independent. What I hadn’t realised was that Maureen Hiron, who died last week, led such a fascinating life outside of bridge. She started her career as a teacher at a London comprehensive, but was pensioned off at 32 when an air-conditioner fell on her head. The accident, she believed, somehow unshackled her creativity, and soon after, she invented Continuo, an abstract strategy game played with coloured tiles. It rapidly became the bestselling game in England. She went on to invent 70 more games which sold across the world, and co-authored several trivia quiz books with her husband. As if that wasn’t enough, she wrote songs, and for a while was manager of the pop group Boney M.,