Mercian Bridge asked me if I’d direct 2 weeks of their Bridge Holidays in Malta and as I’d lived there as a lad I thought it would be nice to go back, so I said yes. Getting up at 5 in the morning is not my idea of fun (going to bed at that time is more usual) but we managed to board the correct magic carpet, transferred to the Maltese Chariot (which has triangular wheels rather than square ones because it means one less bump) and were deposited at the Travellers Inn.

The funniest incident was when a player tried to make a sputnik double of her partner’s overcall.

I struggled with this one for a while and decided that the double was an inadmissible call which means that West can’t condone it and so it has to be cancelled. The bidding reverted to East who passed. South can now repeat the previously made call without penalty. "Double" she said. I told her that it still wasn’t allowed and cancelled it for the second time. South now bid 1NT. Now in most cases changing a call silences partner for the rest of the auction and even when the original call is inadmissible it still applies. West passed and North reduced us all to rolling on the floor laughing when she said "I bet you’d take a dim view if I bid 2 NOW". I told her the punishment was being thrown from the battlements into the moat. As it was she had a clearcut pass and the hand played out with no more problems.

The full auction was

WEST			NORTH			EAST			SOUTH
										pass
	1			1			-			double	1
							pass	2		double	3
										1NT	4
	pass			pass			pass
1. out of turn and cancelled 2. now in turn 3. repeating previous call without penalty! cancelled again! 4. finally getting to make a legal call and silencing partner

I hadn’t run across this bit of law in use before. But South got a lot of bids for her money.