Who am I?   Well I’m Gill Pain and work in Tournament Services. 
In fact I am tournament services.

Want some boards – Gill will do them, Spilt coffee on the table cloth – Gill will wash it.  Movement for an individual – Gill will have one. Broken duplimate – Gill’ll fix it.

I’ve been with the EBU for eleven years, starting with Christine Duckworth in education with special responsibility for TD training courses.  Five years on and the vacancy arose in tournaments.  My job has certainly evolved and increased since I started with the introduction of duplmated boards.  We used to own about 40 sets of old style Flemings, we now have 350 sets of Duplimate boards, and bridgemates are changing life again. Max Bavin is my manager and luckily shares my taste in music; it’s not unusual to see us sitting in a pub playing Name That Tune in three.

My role includes booking and liaising with venues, organising equipment, transport and TDs. As well as working in the office during the week, I am also a senior tournament director in my own right, although these days I mostly work ‘off the floor’ and do scoring and background organisation.  You may occasionally see me keeping my hand in on TD training courses as well.

I do of course play bridge but rather more gently than I did when younger.  I have now heard of discipline but never quite sure how to apply it!  The midnight speedball events at Brighton are exactly my favourite style of bridge and really how the game should be played.  Who wants to sit and think when you KNOW what MUST be the right action. My system includes the famous “Gill Pain Slam Try’s” where the auction goes 1heart, 3 hearts, 6 hearts.  I bid the slam and partner tries to make it.

I’m married to John, who you may have noticed does not share my taste in music and has been known to spend a lot of time upstairs with headphones on when I’m cooking and enjoying the ‘Stones and Darkness’ in the kitchen.

In my spare time, I am involved a local beginners club which meets 3 nights a week, and guess what, I bake the biscuits. (One of the members suggested I had a “Calendar Girls” type photo as my mug shot with a tray of biscuits!)

To help compose these bios, we have a set of questions to help us start. The first is, “Who would you like to be stranded on a desert island with and why? “  Why waste being on a desert island by having someone else there.  A dog might be nice.
In fact my answer to Q4 (what is your ideal holiday if you didn't have to worry about cost?)is a holiday on the Isle of Skye

Which four famous people dead or alive would you like to have to a dinner party?  Well I suggest you don’t have bridge players and a long meal because they only write the bridge hands on the table cloth when they run out of space on the napkins.  It was only a paper one, a posh paper one though. (Leonardo de Vinci, Hugh Laurie, David Bowie and Eric Morecombe.)