Bingo, its perils and its pitfalls

I noticed that after yesterdays parable about my barking mad Auntie Phyllis that a link appeared from an online Bingo blog, how strange is that, someone who lives for bingo more than my barking mad Auntie Phyllis did.

Let me tell you about bingo.

My father was a devotee of the Working Mans Club Institute, he was a trustee of “his” club and an affiliated member of the National Institute which gave him access to every such club in the country – and he made full use of it.

For several nights through the week he would be at “his” club playing snooker and billiards, during the years when he was “his” club’s Concert Secretary he made it his lifes ambition to watch every club turn in existence by going to all the audition nights and “showcase nights” that all the club turn agents held in seedy little clubs across the county.

And then on a weekend he and my mother would browse the monthly club handbook to find one where they either hadn’t seen the “turn” before, or they wanted to see the “turn” again.

So he went to a lot of clubs, yes ?

Our barking mad Auntie Phyllis and her addiction to bingo

Whilst browsing our very own Yorkshire Post Online yesterday I came across a report that mentions that our Yorkshire resorts are on the verge of a huge boom-time due to folk like me deciding that they didn’t like being treated like Ronnie Biggs at a Metropolitan Police “Class of 63″ Reunion Evening whilst journeying through airports, and are heading for the Yorkshire coast instead.

OK, the cost of holidaying abroad my have something to do with it too.

Anyway, the report is here

But it was this quote that made me sit up and take notice,

Alan Studholme, of Bridlington Hotel and Guest House Association, said: “The season has suddenly burst into life. We usually get a lot of pensioners in May but had very few bookings. So it looked as though they decided to stay at home because they were feeling the squeeze.

“But we are now getting a lot of requests for family rooms – far more than usual. The town is not geared up for a young invasion at the moment but we are getting there with developments such as the marina. The days of the grannies coming here to play bingo are well gone.”

Now I know why you wear a glove

Have you ever wondered why golfers wear a glove, just one glove, left hand glove (if you’re right handed, or vice-versa) ?

Having carried out my own experiment last night I can now reveal the reason why golfers wear the one glove.

You see, I turned up at the driving range last night, not the one that is located a few hundred yards away from my house, oh no, I went to one that is a couple of miles away, why, I can’t explain, there is something in the air that is stopping me from using the one over the road from my house and I don’t know what it is.

How do you hold it again ?

“So” I thought, “its about time I got those golf clubs out of the garage”

They took some finding, they haven’t seen the light of day since we moved into this house 17 months ago and before that it had been, ooh, a year or more since they’d been used in anger on a golf course (and there was always lots of anger around when I played)

26th September 2004, that was the date on the green fee ticket that was tied to the bag, that was the last time I had used them in anger, at Scarborough North Bay club, as fine a course as I’m likely to be let on, on a pay-to-play basis.

They needed cleaning of course.

Forgotten Voices II…

Moving on from the civil defence on the ground, the middle chapters of the book deal with defence in the air and how the RAF held back the might of the German Air Force during their stage of the invasion of Britain by Germany in 1940.

The plan was very simple, the Luftwaffe was to eliminate the threat to an invasion force that was posed by the equally efficient (though in much smaller numbers) Royal Air Force, a seaborne landing of Britain would be much easier if there were no aircraft in the sky, and of course this remains the case today as we saw with the invasion of Iraq.

So Herman Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe made the boast to Adolf Hitler that he could wipe out the RAF in four days and that the rumours of Britain having radar installations along the south coast were bluff and boast, we couldn’t possibly have a radar system up and running because radar had just been invented by the Germans and they hadn’t perfected their systems yet.

Of course he was wrong, we had our own, working, radar installations all along the south coast so that every time a squadron of German aircraft left their shores our fighter command could see them coming and easily predict where they were going and scramble up a handful of fighters to annoy them.

Video Saturday – Joe Cocker

In 2002 HM The Queen had been HM The Queen for 50 years, thats a long time.

So in a stylee befitting a Queen she threw a big gig party in the grounds of her small council house called Buckingham Palace.

And one of her guest singers was Joe Cocker, such a shame that most of the freeloading audience were too young to even recognise his name, but still, compare this performance to the one of his at Woodstock in 1969 and you’ll see that he has lost none of the talent that persuaded him to give up the day job as a gas fitter in the 60’s, his lucky break being that Ringo made such a gash job of this excellent Beatles song on Sgt Peppers that it was just gagging for someone to come along and sing it properly.

I haven’t posted anything today

I’ve just realised, I haven’t posted anything today.
I wrote something early this morning, but clicked “Save” instead of “Publish”
Its too late now.
Never mind eh.

It’s been warm today, too warm to be walking fifteen miles
Its all uphill today as well, in the most beautiful part of the Dales
Never mind eh.

Don’t forget to keep checking Dans blog over at All The Comes With It as he keeps up to date with their weary progress through the Yorkshire Dales and beyond, today is the sort of day that you’ll start off thinking is ideal for walking in, a bit misty still even up to lunchtime, but warm, and the sun is starting to break through now, and the humidity is rising – its going to be hell for walking this afternoon

The Dales Walk from Dan at All that Comes With It

This July ten friends will be walking the the 78 mile long Dales Way footpath. Yes, 78 miles. In six days. And what’s more it was our own idea. Many are predicting it will be the end of us.

We are doing the walk in aid of The Joseph Salmon Trust, a charity set up by our close friends Neil and Rachel in memorial of their three year old son Joseph who in April of 2005 died suddenly in his sleep.

The Joseph Salmon Trust supports parents who have lost a child by providing financial assistance to those who need it most. This may be to help with funeral costs or to allow the self employed a break from work while they come to terms with their loss. Grieving families have enough to deal with without worries about where they will find the money to say goodbye to their child or pay the next electricity bill. Nothing we can do can make their situation better, but we can do something to stop it getting worse.

All the participants are paying for their own food, accommodation, and equipment, and so any donation goes directly to the charity itself.

Any amount you give, no matter how small, will go towards making a big difference to somebody in the darkest hours of their torment.

Forgotten Voices…

Have been reading another in the excellent series of books “Forgotten Voices” this week, this one focussing on the experiences of ordinary folk in this country in 1940 during “The Battle For Britain” and “The Blitz”.

Some years ago The Imperial War Museum with the aid of lots of lottery cash decided that the best way to record history was to sack all of the stuffy old researchers who’s idea of the subject was to draw lots of little maps with arrows on and study Mr Hitler’s telegrams to his generals ad nauseum and then write 1000 page essays on each one – and instead ask everyone who was there what it was like.

The resultant tapes of interviews with tens of thousands of folk who lived through the period are slowly being transcribed and published in books that are so easy to read and so absorbing and so much more informative than the efforts of countless historians over the years, that I am already 250 pages into it with just a few hours reading.

Shopping up the hill

So we lived in rows and rows of back-to-back houses, rows and rows of them climbing horizontally across the hill from Burley bottom to Headingley with the occasional street at right angles climbing vertically up the hill dissecting the street ends, and on each of those street ends was a corner shop just like this one in fact.

Lumley Avenue was one such dissecting vertically climbing street and as it ascended the hill it provided at twenty yard intervals a street end shop and as if such a thing had been provided with deliberation, nay even properly planned, none of the street end shops contradicted each other, none competed with the others.

At the end of our street was a general grocer, a miserable bas’tad who sold biscuits from bright steel tubs with glass lids from the front of his counter, always a challenge to young boys if he left the lid off any, and who on bonfire night would provide a sackfull of old and green potatoes for roasting, then when they were all eaten and stomachs threatening trouble for the morning he’d ask for a collection to pay for them, which was quickly counteracted by threats to throw him on the fire – it happened that way every year.