From 1 April 2011 Gordon will be Assistant Chief Tournament Director - working for Max.

I was born in Kenya in 1960, where all my immediate family still live - in fact I'm the only one who's not a Kenyan citizen. I first played rubber bridge at home with my family when I was a teenager, and remember supplementing my pocket-money playing with my grand-mother against her friends. I also used to play at the Visa Oshwal community centre in Mombasa, where they played "Stern" - a variant of the Vienna system using the 7-5-3-1 point count! Then I played at school for a few years, and we used to play in the Daily Mail Schools competition.

The first game of duplicate I played was at Stamford Bridge Club, where they made us schoolboys very welcome and offered us much-reduced table money. We were often the standby pair when there was a Simultaneous Pairs or other important event for which they wanted to avoid a half table. When I left school I came to London with the intention of becoming an accountant, but quickly changed my mind and took a degree in Sociology at the LSE. Later I worked in catering for a while before becoming a freelance photographer for twenty years. After school I didn't play bridge for fifteen years, knowing that when I started again it would be bound to take over my life - which indeed it did!

I live in West London just near to Portobello Road market with Arnaud, my (non-bridge-playing) partner of fourteen years, who is a video director and editor. We travel quite a lot: in the last few years we've been to South Africa (stopping off in Kenya to see my family), Cambodia, Thailand, Morocco, Istanbul and Rome, with frequent visits to the South of France where Arnaud is from. Our most recent big trip was to the south of India, where we travelled several thousand kilometres through four states on the railways. Future trips in mind include Peru and Japan. I read a lot when I'm on holiday - while I was in India I read "Shantaram", and then Rohan Mistry's "A Fine Balance", two cult books that get passed around by travellers in India. I usually read a few books at a time, though after work I'm often too tired to read more than a few pages at night before I fall asleep. At the moment I have several books from around the world on my bedside table, both fiction and travel writing - Japan, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Laos & Malaysia are all there!

My highlights as a bridge player were winning the Guardian Trophy with Paul Martin, and winning the Premier Life Masters Pairs three times in a row with Dom Goodwin. They are my two main regular partners, though nowadays far more of my bridge is played filling in with irregular partners to make up the numbers in the duplicates at the Young Chelsea Bridge Club, where I have been the manager for the last five years and where I direct about five sessions a week. Serious bridge has taken a back seat of late, and it could well be many years before I move up to the next rank of Grand Master.

Like most directors, I started by accident out of necessity, because in small clubs someone needs to make sure the games happen. Later I planned that being a TD would make a nice little retirement job for the future, but I soon discovered how much more hard work was involved than I had realised, and I was advised to make a start on it sooner rather than waiting. From there things have progressed faster and further than I anticipated, and I'm now about to start my new role as Assistant Chief TD of the EBU. I would find this a more daunting prospect were it not for the support and advice I can rely on from my senior colleagues, all of whom are extremely helpful and knowledgeable. It's an exciting time to be joining the EBU and I'm looking forward to playing my part, which I expect to  be as rewarding as it will be challenging.