The Times was this week introducing its online readers to a dangerous addiction. I mean the game of bridge. It cannot be claimed, though, that this was being done without a full warning.

Bridge expert Andrew Robson, writing in Monday’s newspaper, supplied a harrowing account of his own enslavement to the game. It began for him, aged 15, at Abingdon Bridge Club, soon to be supplemented by further indulgence at Blewbury Bridge Club.

By the time he was at Bristol University, he confessed, the process was complete. “I ate, slept and drank the game. I remember once, after a 28-hour non-stop session without food, leaving the game and walking up the Whiteladies Road. Cars became jacks, people became diamonds.” He then fell asleep while cooking a pizza, prompting a visit from a fire crew.

Later, while focused on the World Junior Championship, he “cycled into a parked lorry on one of the straightest, most traffic-free roads in Oxfordshire”.

All this had a familiar ring to me. I learned bridge in my early teens and soon found that playing it was rather better than doing most other things. I played in the Daily Mail’s school bridge championships (with no conspicuous success) and recall caravan holidays in North Norfolk where all-night bridge sessions often featured.

The different between me and Mr Robson was that I was not very good at the game. Once this fact emerged, I went on to enjoy adult life free of it. One slight addiction remains — to bridge columns. These include Mr Robson’s own in The Times, as well as that in The Spectator, written on alternate weeks by Janet de Botton and Susanna Gross, and, of course, The Oxford Times’s which is written by the well-regarded Nick Smith.