One of my fondest memories of my late Nan is her love of the bingo. She was never one to go to one of the big bingo halls that you get nowadays (in fairness I’m not even sure they had those near where she lived when she was alive) but she loved playing the game down at her various drop in clubs and day care centres over the years.
Whenever my sister and I went to spend a day with her were always allowed to go and explore the cupboard of toys that she kept for us in her spare bedroom. There, amongst various toy dolls and a Kermit the frog space hopper (that I so wish we still had!), was a bingo set and I know that the pair of us used to spend hours running bingo games for my Nan and giving her various homemade prizes whenever she got a line or a house. Such innocent fun, but it gave me the bingo bug that I still have today.
In my experience, some of the older generations don’t always believe just how much us “youngsters” love bingo, but I know that the evening of it that we had at Tea and Tents last year was such fantastic fun. Ever since we got back we keep saying that we should organise a WI night out at the bingo and hopefully we will actually get round to doing so one day. It was such good fun and we all had such a laugh whilst trying to win.
I sometimes wonder what my Nan would make of the idea of people playing bingo online these days. She was always suspicious of technology (when my Dad first met my Mum and went round her house he found my Nan had plugs with nothing connected in all the plug sockets in the house – to stop the electricity running out!) and so the idea of her following an instruction to click here to play bingo online genuinely makes me laugh out loud. She loved nothing more than a win at the bingo and we used to get some cracking answering machine messages from her telling us about her wins – although none as good at the message to my mum which simply said “Marie love, I’ve won the lottery!”. She would simply have loved the ability to play from home online – if only she had a spot of help in understanding what the internet actually was!
Bingo image from Shutterctock.
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