My Number's Up!

It's not been the easiest of weeks.

On Thursday morning I found out that I am to be killed off in "Coronation Street" without making any further appearances. This is not the place to go on about it, but suffice it to say I'm angry about it. Mainly with myself.

There was no guarantee of further appearances but there was hope, and when you take away hope, in any situation, that is when it hits hardest.

The rest of the week has been pretty laid back. A couple of nice lunches, and an afternoons training work. A mysterious leaky boiler on Saturday morning caused  disruption to the start of a relaxing weekend, but when Mr Howle created a Heath Robinson like device with a metal funnel and some cable ties to channel the leak into a bucket, it equally mysteriously dried up and has now gone back to functioning properly. Time for a boiler service methinks.

A lucky win of £200 at bingo on Thursday afternoon with my friend Andy Spiegel. Andy, or Jewish as I call him for reasons too complicated to expound here, have been going to bingo together for the last ten or eleven years. Our preferred palace of joy is the Gala Club Tooting, a fabulous temple of a listed building with gothic interiors, and a diverse slug of humanity getting their fix of 'the numbers'. It used to be a fag and a tea and a moist dabber for the afternoon, but now in the new smoke free post Blair Britain, it's a computer keypad called a Wizz and a £30 stake for the afternoon.

When I was a bingo caller at Crystal Palace gala club in the late 1990's to earn some pin money, I was aghast at the number of women who visited the club for every session, afternoon and evening throughout the week. Even though cards etc were considerably cheaper then, it was a habit that would have easily taken a weeks benefit to support, and across the country was probably a far more serious addiction than some more sophisticated medications. Some women would do a cleaning job in the morning, bring their earnings to the club and spend them on the afternoon session between one and three, go out and do another cleaning job and be back at their tables in the club by 7pm for an evening session. Depressing and frightening though it could seem, there was an enormous sense of camaraderie at the place, but being the caller was no easy feat. You had to call all the games within a specific time so you could link up with the National game at 8.30pm each evening. Woe betide you if you failed to hear someone's call of "House". I say call, though some of the pensioner squeaks that passed for calls would have been missed by a fruit bat, and one only noticed them by the change from silence to chatter within the hall as the rest of the players complained how close they had been.

Andy and I share and share alike all our winnings. We sit in silent companionship tapping our Wizz keyboards and hoping for a little of what Mr Spiegel calls RHB (rapid heart beat) as our chance of winning increases. It's one of the great tests of true friendships that silence between you is comfortable and we love it.  Interspersing the games with comments about our fellow players, and, like them, complaints about just how close we had come to the win, is what fills our time.

That's how I felt with Corrie - Close to a win. Just a shame they've stopped calling my number.