Bridge | 5 May 2016

I’ve been practising bidding online with my friend Guy Hart in preparation for the Spring Fours in Stratford (we’ll know our fate by the time you read this). We’ve not played together much before, and frankly the field is so strong — a roll-call of the greats — that our team has about a zero chance of getting to the final. Still, we can only do our best — and I must do better than I did during our practice game last week. Towards the end of the evening, I played a hand sloppily and went down. I asked Guy how I might have made the contract. ‘You’d have made it if you were a Republican, and not a Monarchist,’ he replied. ‘What?’ I spluttered. He explained that two of my honour cards, a queen and a jack, were of no use to me — but I’d gone about the hand as though they had an important role to play.