I was born in Kenya in 1943 where my father was an Agricultural Officer with the Government.  I went to kindergarten exactly on the equator which ran through the main road and later to primary school in Nyeri where we then lived.  My prep school was Kenton College in Nairobi.  At 11 I went to The King's School, Canterbury in Kent.  At 17 I got a scholarship to study maths in Pembroke College, Cambridge.

I started playing Bridge in Cambridge with friends.  We played very badly and I found poker more to my taste (and pocket!).  After leaving University I spent a year in South Africa at the height of the apartheid regime.  There I learned to write programs in Assembler for the IBM 1440 (does anyone remember that machine now?) and played occasional rubber bridge at a small private rubber bridge club run by Mrs. Katz.  I must have been improving because, although not a winner, I don't remember losing much.

I left South Africa in 1965 by mutual agreement.  It is a measure of my naivety that the brutality of the Vervoerd Government surprised me.  It is a beautiful country but I could never accept the prevailing attitude to native Africans with whom I had been brought up in Kenya.  While I was in Cape Town, Nelson Mandela was starting his imprisonment in Robben Island.

In London I joined the London School of Bridge, owned and managed by Nico Gardener.  There I played with better players and learned the hard way.  Nico was an excellent tutor and analyst as well as a top class player.  Later I played in Stefan's Bridge Circle, in Edgware Road near Marble Arch.  There were many fine players there at the £1 and £2 tables but I played the 2/6 game, only occasionally moving to 5/-.  Andrew Wolfeld was the big winner in that game and, over a drink or five, was always happy to tell me afterwards about my mistakes.  The drinks were a great investment!

In 1969 I travelled to South America and arrived in Bogotá, Colombia where I worked as programmer analyst in a small consultancy and later on my own as independent consultant.  I joined the Club de Bridge de Bogotá, based in an elegant house and made many good friends.  There were some excellent players and the club was efficiently run in an extremely friendly atmosphere.  It was (and still is) one of the best in the world and has moved to even better premises.  Duplicates were played during the week and rubber bridge at weekends.  There were also regular monthly tournaments run in the other clubs in Bogotá as well as regional tournaments of which Medellin was the most enjoyable.

In 1974 I was privileged to represent Colombia in the South American Championship which took place that year in Bogotá.  My partner, Javier Restrepo, and I played a very simple system with no gadgets at all except Stayman and Blackwood.  The Brazilian team (Chagas, Assumpçao, the Branco brothers, Cintra and Fonseca) were playing Precision and their system ran to 30 pages, nothing by today's standards but a lot before the age of word processors.   I played regularly with several good players including Jean Haicault, the Director of the Alliance Française and Ramond Savdié with whom I played Blue Club.  Of all the systems I have played it seems to me to be the most complete with many of its features (weak twos, cue bids) incorporated into modern bidding theory.  Some aspects (the opening 1NT in particular) are too cumbersome for modern use but the 1§ strong opener resolves so many problems which Acol creates.

In 1978 I returned to England and played very little Bridge for several years except occasional outings to The Eccentric Club (the bridge was run by Irving Rose) and later to the Sesame and Devonshire clubs where the loyal group of rubber bridge players migrated after the Eccentric was closed down.  After another period away from bridge I then joined TGR's where we passed many happy hours.  The premises were never much to write home about but the friendly group of players made up for any deficiencies in the decor.  Many of the world's great and good players have visited at some time and some (Zia, Halberg, Malinowski, Phil King, Unal Durmus, David Price) are or were regulars.

While in Bristol I joined the Bristol Bridge Club which I can recommend to anyone in the city.  While there I started the project which has ended in producing the series of books.  It began as a set of lessons as an introduction to squeezes but grew like Topsy in the year I was there.  More recently I have played in Richmond Bridge Club (see "useful links"), another well run and friendly club.  Although duplicate does sharpen up one's technique in some areas (in particular fighting for overtricks) I cannot get the enthusiasm for it that I have for teams and rubber bridge.  The pursuit of good slams and avoiding bad ones seems to me to be one of the high spots in the game.

In the last six years I have occasionally been teaching bridge and have developed a set of short lessons as the basis to building and improving players' confidence and ability.  Also, since 2001, I have been writing the books on bridge squeezes which are now being published.