Awareness days

I have spoken to many non bridge players about my role to promote the game. Many of them view the game as dusty, complicated and too much like hard work! Although teaching bridge at schools and universities has proven to be an excellent method of introducing the game to people, we inevitably miss those who have not been given this opportunity. As such, it was became obvious that one of the best ways in promoting the game to the general public was to give them the chance to "have a go" at a bridge awareness event.

Over the past few years, the English Chess Federation has held events in and around York for local Yorkshire schools to take part and learn the game of Chess. Last year the York Chess Chairman, Peter Cloudsdale, decided that he would like to make this bigger and invited the English Bridge Union to help celebrate the two games at the National Railway Museum, York on 13 April 2008. The museum was an ideal venue to show people the game of bridge, as it is the largest railway museum in the world, responsible for the conservation of the British national collection of historically significant railway vehicles and other artefacts. Each weekend they welcome hundreds of visitors and our exhibition was a great opportunity for visitors to learn something new, whilst having a look at the trains!

It was a very successful day with over a hundred visitors coming to learn the game of MiniBridge We also taught four NRM staff members and a few members of York Chess Club, some bridge! Two additional highlights to the day was the York Bridge Club versus the Junior England International team match and England junior bridge international player, Jennie Marvin teaching England chess international Sabrina Chevannes some bridge!

Many thanks to John Pain, Mike Amos and Phil Godfrey for their help on the day. The EBU and the ECF plan to hold more awareness days across the country, so please contact me if you have any ideas for venues.

Bridging the gap to TV

I joined the English Bridge Union 10 months ago and in that time I have worked on many interesting projects. However, after eight months of organisation and preparation, we put together my most interesting project so far – a bridge television pilot! As such, I thought this blog would be a good opportunity to let you have a peek into the fascinating world of making a television programme...

It all started with an email from one of our members, Matthew Baylis who proposed an idea of how bridge could be introduced to TV in October. My role at the EBU is to promote bridge in whatever way that I can and as such, Matthew and I met and worked on creating a structure for a possible television programme. Matthew's idea was to have a fun and entertaining show with real bridge players and our target audience would be - everyone. At the same time it would be educational, so that people could come into it whenever they liked and still follow the game - whether they were new to bridge or not.

Our thoughts were finalised in March 2008 and we put together a pre-pilot, so that we could see how it would work. We also invited two experts to come along – Andrew Robson and Susan Stockdale to give us their thoughts. It was a great success and we understood immediately what would work and what wouldn’t work – which was extremely important before any money was spent!

Over the following weeks a production team was put together and a studio was booked. By 2 May our team totalled 15 –me; Caz Stuart (our director and producer); John-Martin White (our director of photography and camera man); Amanda Turner (make-up artist); Matthew Baylis (presenter); Andrew Robson (expert); and nine camera/sound crew. We also invited 15 bridge players from London and Aylesbury to take part.

Preparation started at 8am, as the team had to make sure that the right lighting and camera angles would be created for our pilot. We also wanted to try and give it the feel of an actual bridge club. The idea for the studio was to have a main table playing the game, and two bridge tables behind playing bridge – these would be the future players (if it was a series). Meanwhile, our presenter and expert were sat in the "television gallery" watching the games live in another room. This meant that Andrew and Matthew could comment throughout and the commentary could be used over the play with graphics when required.

In the main studio it was decided that there would be three bridge games in total and four players were chosen. A camera was directed on each player so that we could gauge their reactions when they lost/won etc. Importantly the show is about the average bridge player and so interestingly each of the three games failed to go the way Andrew expected – but this of course made even greater TV! Each part of the show was linked by Matthew Baylis (for example at a commercial break, we have a teaser question – answer after the break etc). The end of the show was concluded by Matthew and Andrew who award prizes.

All in all a great day was had by all and the filming moved very swiftly. Our director and team were all absolutely professional and extraordinary.

Our team has now started on the post production and according to our director, "it looks great, the studio shots are lovely." Music and graphics are to be added next and I’ll be visiting the team to view the rough cut and discuss our next steps asap. A good friend Matthew Sharrock has worked on producing our theme music too.

After the post production work is completed, we will have a slick and well oiled pilot ready to be sent to various production companies.

Thank you to Matthew Baylis, Andrew Robson, Caz Stuart, John-Martin White, the crew and all our players:Tessa Baker, Ian Payn, Shelia Rogers, Nalin Shah, Dilip Mithani, Taruna Mithani, Chris Elliott, Kathie Gill, Jayesh Shah, Surendra Mehta, Mahendra Kothary, Ashwin Sheth, Satish Parekh and Mo Sayer. Thanks also to Matthew Sharrock who has worked on our music.

Fingers crossed for the next stage. More updates soon.

New Bridge Shop Web Pages

Today we launch a new look to our Bridge Shop pages. There are now a lot more images of our products available (click on the thumbnails to open a new window with a larger picture) and we hope it is presented in a clearer and more easy-to-navigate way.

As always, we're pleased to hear constructive feedback on any new website feature so why not leave a comment below or send me an email.

John's great adventure: Chapter 7

What a wonderful final day. Very emotional for me and I think for the course members. We started with the final teacher presentations and they all did very well. As I’ve said before to present in a language which isn’t your preferred one is astonishing to me. We followed up with some more TD work on the revoke, plus I sneaked in some Opening Leads out of turn to see who had learnt it. And of course they had. You set homework – they do it.

I was a bit surprised when I had to go back to the radio studio. Surely someone else could pick up the CD of yesterday’s interview. But, no, they wanted me to record some greetings which they will turn into radio jingles – the start of a promising new career perhaps:

“Hi, this is John Pain from the English Bridge Union in Aylesbury, England. You’re tuned to Chillieboy on Yarona FM. Live the music.”

I had to do three slightly different ones, so when you are next in Gaborone listen out for my radio jingle!

I got back in time for lunch and was shown the article in the local paper.

After lunch we played some more bridge and then we had the finale to the week. Each course member, well they are friends by now, stood up and said their piece. I can become quite emotional these days and they said such wonderful things, right from the heart that I had a bit of difficulty holding back the odd tear. I didn’t realise how much it meant to each and every one.

We take so much for granted at home but the material I brought has really meant so much. Finally we had the final speeches and presentation of the certificates by a very high ranking Botswana National Sports Council Committee Member. The friends were certainly in awe of her and having their photo taken with her seemed to be a great honour.

I was overwhelmed with gifts which I hope I can get home without damaging. After final photos and goodbyes I was whisked back to my digs with just enough to change before a wonderful evening meal at the best restaurant in town.

I’m being picked up at 7.20 for a short safari round the local Mokolodi game reserve, before going to the airport and home.

Had the tour of the game park – saw lots of different types of antelopes, giraffes, ostrich and their two tame cheetahs. After a late breakfast in the local Wimpy and a bit of shopping I was taken to the airport for the long journey home. I got back to Heathrow at 7am on Sunday to torrential rain, which didn’t stop until Tuesday just in time to go back to the office.

I discovered that their currency – the pula –literally means "rain" in Setswana, because rain is very scarce in Botswana - home to much of the Kalahari Desert - and therefore valuable.

I hope my visit will make a difference to these lovely people. I had a wonderful time.

I would like to thank those in Botswana who invited me – Kaeleboga Tangane who made that initial email request, to the Botswana National Sports Council who paid for most of it and also to Barry Capal and the Board at the EBU who had the foresight to say I could go.

Thanks for reading.

Further information on my travels can be found here.

John's great adventure: Chapter 6

This will be the last one until I get home, but I'll do a finishing off over the weekend.

It's strange how 2 days are never the same. Wednesday's presentations were very good and took nearly 3 hours to do. Thursday's were less so.

The two most difficult things were knowing what to pack and send in the advance boxes and what to put on the programme. I was commissioned to run a teacher training course which I did. I was commissioned to run a TD training programme. It's the second one that has proved to be the more challenging. You will recall how I demonstrated a Mitchell movement by having the folks play it out. We have mastered bids out of turn and insufficient bids, but there was quite a bit of difficulty with an opening lead out of turn.

Those who have followed the Club TD courses at home will remember that the OLOOT cannot easily be read from the law book, but it proved quite a challenge to get over the five options.

The T-shirts arrived today nicely printed with the EBU and BBF logos but they started to argue about the different sizes. Mine was okay.

This afternoon we had a media drop-in session. I was a bit shocked when two reporters from local radio stations arrived. And I was even more shocked when I was told I would be broadcasting live at 4.50pm. So at 4.25 we set off for Yarona FM 106.6 and sure enough there was a small radio station hidden away in a top corner of a shopping mall. I was whisked into the studio with Tangane — the BBF President and we did our slot that lasted for about 7 minutes — just long enough not to crash into the news. I'm promised a CD of the broadcast, which would be great to bring home.

Last day tomorrow.

There are still 6 presentations to do and I need to finish off the Book Rulings course — still got penalty cards and revokes to do. But I think I also need to do a teaching lesson as some of the play could do with some boosting and some of them will be off to China in the autumn for the U28 Championships. With one of the topics tomorrow being take-out double I think I'll elaborate on that and make a longer lesson than the 20 minute presentation.

I've been promised a brief trip to the local game reserve on Saturday before I leave.

One of them said to me today "What did I like about Botswana?"

Well I could answer the people, the countryside, and the game reserves (if I get to see one). I think my answer has to be the fact that I can just be here; of all the countries in southern Africa this is a hidden treasure. It is a stable, friendly country, that just gets on with its life and its business and for that reason goes largely unnoticed.

Before I left home someone said to me that Botswana was 'Africa for beginners' — perhaps a bit like bridge for beginners. I don't know whether I shall pass this way again but it would be nice to come back as an improver.

Further information on my travels can be found here.

John's great adventure: Chapter 5

I thought today I’d talk a bit about the country of Botswana. I haven’t seen a great deal of it as my day consists of being taken from my digs to the National Stadium at 7.45 and then taken back again in the evening. It gets dark early – 5.30pm as we are moving towards their winter, so there isn’t much chance to get out.

However, the journey to and from the centre is interesting. Gaborone is a typical city –lots of traffic, traffic jams, people walking. What is unusual is the large number of street traders at the side of the road. They set up anywhere selling all sorts of things, undercutting the legitimate traders.

Traffic is not exactly chaotic – they drive on the left, but you certainly need your wits about you with people cutting in quite often. Whilst you do see taxis much more popular is the 6-8 people carrier; these you see all over the place. Also very popular is what looks like a covered pickup.

I’ve learned my first few words of Setswan – the local dialect. It’s quite strange – the official language is English so all the posters, notices etc, etc are in English but they all gabble on the local lingo. They learn both languages at school, but Setswan is clearly preferred for conversation. I’m very impressed with my group who are able to present a lesson in English and they spent the afternoon getting their heads round the laws of bridge. Now that does impress me!

The language must have some basis but I don’t know what it is.

Dumela – hello, good morning
Kealeboga – thank you
Tsweetswee – please
Goskime – good bye

6.20 we have a power cut for an hour. Common occurrence I understand. And the one BBC TV channel has gone down.

Then we had another power cut for 30mins.

Met some of the ladies from the Ladies Bridge Club. I think it is largely ex-pats. They have promised me a good night out on Friday. And I think I’m being taken to the nearby game reserve on Saturday morning before I come home.

More news tomorrow…

Further information on my travels can be found here.

John's great adventure: Chapter 4

Wednesday May 21st, Gaborone, Botswana

I really enjoyed teaching today. We started with the first six presentations by the course students. The theme today was opening 1NT or 1 of a suit with various different responses. They coped well using material geared for one system (12-14 and 4-card majors) adapting it for strong NT (15-17) and 5-card spade suit. It’s very difficult to keep to a micro-lesson lasting only 20 minutes but they all performed satisfactorily. Another six tomorrow where we move on to responding and rebidding.

After the break we moved on to the second phase of the course – the introduction to club tournament directing. Many of the course members are hoping to set up clubs within schools or else to set up ‘community clubs’ in different parts of the country. I’m very conscious that some of the things we take for granted at home are by no means so here.

At home it’s easy – we want to start a new club, what do we do? We ring up the EBU to order tables, cloths, boards, cards, bidding boxes etc, etc and everything is easy. The BBF does not have easy access to all the equipment we use. So making the assumption that we can find venues and get equipment how do we proceed to run an event?

Movements and scoring took up most of the afternoon. Question: how do you explain a 7 table Mitchell movement? The following seemed to work!

Stand 7 people in a circle and give them each a board numbered 1 to 7. These represent the 7 NS pairs. Stand another 7 people, one each in front of the first 7 – these represent the 7 EW pairs. Now move the EW people one place clockwise and tell the NS people to pass the boards to the next person anticlockwise. Now you have the basics of a 7 table Mitchell. Keep moving the pairs up and the boards down until it is complete.

Next we tried an 8 table movement by putting in an extra pair of people to represent table 8 and an extra board and we were able to show why we needed a skip or a relay-and-share to make it work. (it may sound complicated here, but it really worked like a charm!)

Further information on my travels can be found here.

Introduction to Feeds

WARNING! Moderately technical computer stuff follows!

You may have noticed that the EBU has gone a little blog happy lately. There are more to come, too, and it might become harder to effortlessly keep up with everything. A lot of the items that appear in the blogs will be highlighted on the EBU front page of course, but not everything, and if you don't check in for a few days you might miss something. You can keep up by visiting every blog on a regular basis but that would soon become boring.

The solution is to make use of the automatic feeds that come from the blogs and which get updated whenever a new post gets made. A feed is just a stream of information and a feed reader can keep tabs on these streams and let you know when any of them change. This is not as complicated as it might sound and in fact you all probably have feed reader functionality in your browser right now. For instance, if you're using Internet Explorer 7 you can click on the orange feed icon to subscribe to a feed:

The feed will then appear in your list of favourites and will be highlighted when something new is available. Similar things can be done for Firefox, Opera, Safari and lots of other browsers. Alternatively, you can use a feed reader program to do this outside of your browser and there are lots of good ones out there. This Wikipedia article tells you all you need to know. In this way you can keep up to date with the blogs you're interested in without having to check back every day yourself.

Feeds are very useful and we intend to use them a lot more in the future so this is something that is worth discovering, if you haven't done so already.

John's great adventure: Chapter 3

Tuesday May 20th, Gaborone, Botswana

So far I haven’t managed to spend a single Pula. Regular readers will remember that the Pula is the local currency. Everyone has been so friendly.

The driver of the Yarona Country Lodge met me at the airport, which is where I’m staying. Well, they seem to have apartments in at least two places in the city, so after lunch at the Lodge it was another tour of the Gaborone suburbs to find where I was actually staying.

My driver was here at 7.45 to take me to the National Sports Stadium where the teaching course is being held – so I witnessed the delights of the Gaborone rush hour.

Fortunately my 6 boxes of equipment that left the UK 6 weeks ago had safely arrived. The BBF had the usual trouble with the tax people who wanted to charge them import duty. Once they were convinced it was a gift it was allowed through without charge.

The first day of the course went well, with any number from 20 to 24 attending. Some people were only able to attend for part of the time, with jobs to go to, exams to sit etc. However, we covered all I wanted to cover.

They start tomorrow each doing a short presentation of a sample lesson – but I’ve spread that over the rest of the week so we don’t do them all in one day. So 6 presentations tomorrow and then we start some TD training.

No chance yet to see anything of the wildlife but perhaps later in the week.

Further information on my travels can be found here.

John's great adventure: Chapter 2

Sunday May 18th, Gaborone, Botswana

(And by the way, it is pronounced Haboronay)

When was the last time you did something for the first time? I’ve flown as far south as Tunisia before, but never to the southern hemisphere so I arrived at Terminal 3 (not T5 – how lucky was that?) in good time. Virgin check-in was easy and I was in the departure lounge with hours to spare. A not very good hot chocolate from Starbucks and a very acceptable glass of wine at O’Brien’s later and it was time to board. Straight on – great this is easy. Two minutes to 2030 departure time and there’s a commotion at the front – a passenger has had a ‘medical situation’. Unfortunately for the passenger he/she had to be seen by paramedics and was taken off the plane. Finally at 2115 we are ready to go.

I didn’t sleep much on the 10½ hour flight to Johannesburg but we arrived in good time for the transfer flight to Gaborone. Transfer completed easily – time for a coffee. No Rand! I gingerly reached for the credit card having watched the Watchdog programme the other day, which said credit card companies had a habit of stopping ‘unusual’ transactions – and a sale at Jo’burg airport, would certainly come into that category!

Older readers or younger readers who know a good thing may remember that wonderful monologue by Michael Flanders from ‘At the Drop of a Hat’ (or it might have been ‘Another Hat’ – I forget) in which he outlines the potential perils of boarding a plane. ‘Off we go on the mystery bus tour to the middle of the field’, ‘a nice lady tells you what to do if you come down in the water’ and ‘when it’s time to go and its chocks away, the whole plane starts to shake – it’s like a cat after a pigeon’. Well that all describes perfectly the small plane that completed the final leg from Jo’burg to Gaborone.

Gaborone isn’t the busiest airport in the world – in fact we were the only plane on the tarmac. Getting through immigration was easy and my 3 minders were there to meet me. The minibus arrived and it was time for lunch – very pleasant. We talked about the state of the game in Botswana at various levels – young, club and national but unlike the EBU the Botswana Bridge Federation (BBF) does get some state funding – not enough to fund everything but at least they get something.

I’m staying in a very nice apartment with two double beds and a double Jacuzzi/corner bath. The weather is fine today – about 20 degrees.

Answers to my quiz.
1 Gaborone is the capital
2. The currency is the pula (BWP) made up of 100 thebe. 100 BWP is about £11/
3. The President is Seretse Khama Ian Khama – the son of the first president Sir Seretse Khama.
4 They drive on the left.
5. I need 3 pin round plugs to make my computer work.

Further information on my travels can be found here.

John's great adventure: Chapter 1

Well here’s a pretty how-de-do! To quote Gilbert and Sullivan.

I had a good time when I was teaching. I managed to work my passage on numerous school trips – Moscow and Leningrad, skiing in Northern Italy and several weeks cruising the canals of England but nothing can prepare me for this one. Working at the EBU has taken me to a variety of places I probably would not have visited – Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey are possibilities I suppose, Portugal and Tunisia less so, but this invite came out of the blue.

Where am I off to? Gaborone in Botswana. Before you scurry off to find a globe or the atlas I can tell you it’s the large country north west of South Africa and south west of Zimbabwe. It is sparsely populated (about 1.9M) and famous for the Kalahari Desert. It is rarely in the news unlike its nearest neighbours. Many people will know of Botswana through Alexander McCall Smith's, The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency but probably not for much else.

It all came about because of a chance email last autumn. As part of my EBU job I offer advice on how to set up bridge teacher training courses so I answered an email telling them how to go about things. I always say that I am willing to come and do the course for them. It wasn’t until I got the return reply saying ‘that’s all very interesting, but we are in Botswana. Do you want to come?’

So the Botswana Bridge Federation invited me at their expense to go over to run a Teacher Training Course for 25 of their members. I’ve added in some TD training to make it a full week and I’m nearly ready to go.

The EBU kindly donated course materials (which left about a month ago) and my time. We start at 8am on Monday morning.

For more details of my trip, please click here.

Little quiz:

What’s the capital of Botswana?
What’s the currency?
Who is the president?
What are the main languages?
Which side of the road do they drive on?
What type of plug adaptors do I need for my computer?

Answers on Monday!

Welcome to the EBU Staff Blog!

Welcome, all, to the latest EBU Blog — the fourth (and there are at least two more imminent)!

This one will focus on the goings on at Aylesbury and what the EBU's staff get up to. For instance, Matt will talk about how the TV Pilot is going and other projects, John will update us all on his forthcoming trip to Botswana and I'll dispense some information on website changes. We hope that this will supplement the usual announcements you see on the website and give you a glimpse of life at the EBU.