Thirty-four per-cent! Thirty-four ****** per-cent!! How is my bridge career come to this? After 34 years in the game and never a score below 40%, even playing with Great Aunt Florence, how could I possibly achieve a score of 34% in a Tuesday night field as weak as a Steve McClaren England team? Does poorbridge get us all in the end?

Senile dementia? Surely not. A useless partner? No, my esteemed confrère was (he tells me) the county's top performer this season. He's a lifelong Acol player but recently he came across an ancient scroll called Precision Bidding and Precision Play and thought he'd cadge some free lessons from a Zen master of the art (such as myself), brought up at the knee of C.C. Wei. Oh dearie dear...

Let's start with a simple exhibit to show how good the field is in God's waiting room. Your opponents have a combined age of 180. Game All, you pick up as dealer:

16 or more points? That's easy — 1! Partner responds 3. Four to six points with a seven-card heart suit, you dimly remember. What do you rebid? 4? What, and let partner play it? No, it's Pairs — 3NT of course! Partner grits his teeth and passes. A small club is led and you begin to see this may not have been a good idea. Indeed this is the full deal:

You win the club lead and advance a cunning J. The octogenarian on your left pounces with the King and is mortified to see his partner's Ace come crashing down. But a club duly comes through and 3NT is an inevitable one off. This is worth one match-point. Not a good start.

On the next board you let through a no-play game. On the third and final board, you find yourself with this princely collection at favourable vulnerability:

The idiot sitting opposite deals and opens 2, a "standard" weak two, i.e. it could be any old pile of ordure first in hand at green. RHO passes. Do you:

a) Pass smoothly
b) Raise your eyes to heaven, wriggle around for a while and pass, or
c) Bid a forcing 3?

Well, (c) of course, at least if you're my partner. You hear 3 opposite — well, what did you expect? Do you:

a) Pass smoothly and apologetically
b) Raise your eyes to heaven, wriggle around for a while and pass, or
c) Bid a forcing but highly ambiguous 4?

I think you are getting the idea by now. Over 4 partner, in a little discomfort perhaps, perseveres with 4. Do you now:

a) pass smoothly and shamefacedly, etc and so on...

Do you heck! You press on to 5 to complete the picture of your magnificent two-suiter. Partner gets the message at last and raises to 6. The nonagenarian on your left wakes up at last and doubles for this is the complete deal:

6 doubled drifts quietly four off. You suspect this would be a world bottom in an EBU Sim but here it is a simple zero.

After those two fine efforts in uncontested auctions, let's shift seats and try a contested auction. At green, I picked up:

in fourth seat. Partner opens 1NT (14-16) and you are a little surprised to see the centenarian on your right coming in with 2, alerted and described as showing the majors. As 2 now would probably be construed as some kind of cue-bid, you decide to pass. Lefty duly bids 2 and the bidding comes back round to you. What now?

3 seems safe enough, doesn't it? Surely partner will see that if you wanted to cue-bid, then 3 is available, so 3 must be natural? You can hardly ignore your nine-card fit just because opponents have forgotten their system, can you?

Partner alerts. Uh-oh. But lefty comes to the rescue with 3. Clearly he would not do that unless he was very short in hearts himself, so partner will surely reconsider his options. Indeed he does. He asks what length in the majors 2 shows. Five/five, he is told.

"Five diamonds," says partner. No, I kid you not.

Suspecting that the 5-2 fit may not be optimal, you decide to run to 5. Opponents respectfully decline to double and after a club lead, you are briefly hopeful. If trumps are no worse than 3-1, then maybe, just maybe...

But no, trumps are 4-0 and, even with the diamond finesse working, you are unable to establish a diamond in time to avoid a club loser, so it is two off. Astonishingly, this is worth 5 MPs out of 14, better than your average score on the night.

Enough? No? OK, I will finish with one of our many genuine zeros, one for which I alone must take at least 100% of the blame. Love all, as dealer, I held:

When things have been going catastrophically, do you open this lot 3? Well, dear reader, I did not. Mindful of the extreme quality of the opposition (Sandra Landy and Chris Cooper), I passed. Chris, on my left, opened 3 and this was passed smoothly round to me.

Sadly, having resisted temptation once, I could not resist it a second time. Yes, I bid 3. Partner found his green card (for once) and nobody doubled. Surely, even if dummy is wildly unsuitable I can get out for two off and -100 will score better than 110 their way?

In fact, dummy was far from wildly unsuitable because this was the full deal:

Doubleton support! What riches! Chris led 6 and Sandra won perforce with her Ace. Two top spades were cashed. Chris ruffed the third round of spades with Q and returned 9 for Sandra to ruff. Chris was now able to ruff the fourth round of spades with the King and exit with a heart to my singleton Ace. Gallingly, I cannot get to dummy to take the marked trump finesse and I now have to concede a third undertrick to J. Minus 150 and another zero safely notched up.

"Good save over the non-making 3, pard," observes partner.

Famous for my cheery response in adversity, all I could do was smile and reflect that one of the most underrated skills in bridge is to get all your idiocies out of the way on a single inconsequential night. We certainly achieved that objective in the finest poorbridge syle.