Why Mecca Bingo closing down is a tragedy, and other everyday losses

I had the most perfect evening. Determined to make the most of the beautiful evening sunshine, and with Reprobate Kate in need of a night off duty, we decided to venture slightly out of our Victoria Park comfort zone, and further afield from my Shoreditch work base radius, and spend the night exercising our bingo wings at the Mecca Bingo on Hackney Road.

We met at Hackney City Farm, a charming bit of rural escapism on the Hackney Road, popular with pram pushers and inner city welly wearers, after Kate had negotiated the rush hour traffic down (night)Mare street to get the kids to their piano lessons, and failing to get Jonah back home on time to his guitar lesson with a rock star famous enough not to want to piss off with a no show.

Having attempted to mediate the situation via the medium of text from my office desk, I was in a mood to let my hair down, as was Kate when she finally turned up, looking as though she’d been wrestling kittens, which, in fact she had,  picking up a mother and baby cat she is fostering from Battersea, earlier that day. We sat on a pavement by a pub tucked away on the cobbled streets of Colombia Road as the sun fell behind the buildings and kids ran about squirting punters with water pistols, while we sank much needed G and Ts on ice. 

Deciding we’d eat out if we won, we wandered across the road, me with my faithful Pashley, Prudence, which has recently had a facelift to the bingo hall on Hackney Road. Taping my bike to the railings outside with a flimsy combination lock, feeling confident the career smokers outside the would raise the alarm if anyone tried to nick anything, I asked the guy on the door, like a watchman at a veteran stripclub, to keep an eye out. It’s a friendly crowd, the geriatrics and the emphysemiacs, the granorexics and the bionic hipsters. I’ve been before and seen the over 70s occasionally broken up by a youthful crowd of retro wannabes, making a nuisance of themselves by giggling and calling out at the wrong moment; but tonight, the only person not quite pensionable was the barman Waren, who made a beeline for Kate and I, having served us a faintly illegal triple gin when I only paid for singles. Well, I guess it’s in their interests if we’re a bit wobbly with our dobbers, but Waren seemed keen to help us out as much as possible, giving us black marker pens to censor the numbers called to avoid confusion in the speedy numeral search.

We won not a jot, though Kate mistakenly thought she’d got a line, when she actually needed a full house, but it didn’t matter. It was a jolly, though sadly never to be repeated experience that we’d have been mad to miss. They are pulling it down, the old bingo hall, which was once a theatre, according to Waren, and no doubt hosted tea dances in the war. A lot of its wartime regulars are still among its most fervent participants, weaving their way down corridors with a zimmer frame and a determined expression. Yes, it might smell like an old people’s home, but by golly, those women (and it does seem to be an overwhelmingly female activity,) have gumption even where they lack their own teeth (or in some cases, hair).  And there’s nowhere else in trendy Hackney where you will find such a coterie of wrinkled faces – and yes, bingo wings which, I might add, is no mean expression. Those dobbers go nineteen to the dozen – it’s serious mental exertion finding one number a second, and is about as physical as you can get whilst seated and concurrently sipping a triple gin. I take my hat off to the flapping bingo birds whose coop is about to be closed for good, sold off so that Foxtons and their rabid ilk can get in and take their spoils. The lure of unaffordable housing has signed the place’s death warrant, and no doubt the demise of its aged regulars will follow apace.

Waren, however, seemed nonplussed about his impending job loss. He has his fingers in other pies, it appeared, and where Mecca Bingo is now moving largely online, he, it seemed was moving away from the business of serving illegal gin measures, and into the business of household maintenance in Plaistow.

We moved on in high spirits, and headed back to Colombia Road’s cobbles, giving me an unnatural thrill on my now-rickety bicycle, to dine out at the rustically charming Campania Gastronomia on Ezra Street, where we ordered Amaretto cocktails which were deliciously marzipanny. And while I just about managed to resist the bread, I enjoyed a simple sea bass and green salad that had all the crunch and flavour of a good bacon sarnie,  treating Kate to green ravioli, feeling all the while like a lavish butch taking her lady friend on a date. It felt worryingly good.

I followed her home on the number 8 bus along Bethnal Green Road, where we drank wine, while I showed off my Sia Elastic Heart dance routine which was a bit made up since I was drunk, skipping round on the floodlit astroturf in bare feed, and smoked rollies and bitched till it was finally time for bed. Life felt good, even after I woke up, but I knew that given time, the ravages of too much fun would play out as inevitably as the second law of thermodynamics. And when I looked at my phone, it seemed the night had played out its own small tragedy, all the while.

Image via: spitalfieldslife.com