Bingo crazy

A long time ago, when we British were all fun-loving human beings, able to enjoy ourselves in a very simple way, bingo had a language of its own which is now dying out. I don’t know why, but I am finding myself becoming very Bingo-istic. We need to use it or lose it.

We have witnessed so many minority languages driven to extinction. Welsh, is one example. OK so it’s not the sexiest of languages, I admit, but in my youth I was a sucker for a young Blodwyn and a Welsh lamb dinner. If she enjoyed a stick of rock for pudding so much the better.

Wales is where the original ‘rock chicks’ came from. If you Google, which I do often, you will find there is no Welsh equivalent of chicken tikka masala or donner kebab.

How can the language survive when it won’t embrace the future? How will the Welsh eat if they can’t ask for their supper? Would you believe that slate mine and coal mine don’t translate into Welsh either. What has this got to do with bingo? Nothing, I digress as usual.

There is so much money in bingo now that no one dare breathe heavily in case some poor soul misses the big prize. Just imagine you are waiting for one number and you don’t hear it called because someone whistles at those ‘legs eleven’. Your ‘lucky seven’ won’t seem so lucky after all.

The shock of losing could put you on ‘number nine doctors orders’ which is right next door to the ‘Prime Ministers door Number 10’ which by a strange coincidence is-you guessed it-over the garden wall from ‘those legs eleven’.

Ma and Pa Nomates played bingo when I was their ‘Kelly’s eye number one’ but they stopped taking me because I was always ‘Baby’s done it number two’ and it put the others off their ‘Christmas cake thirty eight’.

Decimalisation put an end to ‘seven and six, was she worth it’ and it changed to ‘seventy-six trombones’ but which band can afford so many and where would one squeeze in a trumpet?

Last time Ms Nomates and I played, the caller shouted out ‘unlucky for some’. Up went her hand and Ms Nomates could be heard as far away as Crewe ‘House!’ only to hear ‘ask for more thirty-four’. ‘That’s not unlucky for some!’ she argued. ‘Have you got it’ asked the caller. ‘No.’ ‘then it’s unlucky for you’. He thought it was funny until she laid one on him? He was ‘on the floor number four’.

‘Dirty Girty’ found his pain hilarious but she’s only young. In fact she’s 30 and she had just got married to a Chinaman, ‘Jimmy Choo who is thirty- two’. It was a love of straw that burned out quickly so maybe he should have taken my advice when he was ‘thirty-one to get up and run’.

When I look back I feel as though I’ve lived my life on a bingo card. I have been ‘sweet sixteen’. OK if you insist,‘sickly sixteen’. I was ‘coming of age’ when I was eighteen.

When I reached twenty-one I got the ‘key of the door’. Up until then I was a latch key kid. They say ‘life begins at 40’ and by 45 I was already ‘half way there’.

I have been ‘blind fifty’ but I didn’t need glasses then. At fifty-two I dressed up as ‘Danny La Rue’. That was a good night out.

Some bloke gave me a ‘bunch of fives at fifty-five’ despite me wearing the same dress and glasses.

Some men have no respect for women. I looked better than his wife who was ‘up to her tricks at forty- six’. She liked all kinds of men apparently, all ‘fifty-seven Heinz varieties’. Needless to say hubby left her, taking the ‘five and nine on the Brighton Line’ to start a new life with ‘all the fours, Droopy Drawers’. Some men never learn do they?

If I were to pick one number I have to say I would have to be on the same card as Ms Nomates and we’d be ‘two little ducks’, as both of us are quackers.