Sunday 29 March 2020
The weekend comes to a close with a family game of Bingo, on Zoom!
Zoom Zoom Zoom, suddenly everybody is talking about Zoom! The video conferencing platform, designed for the world of business, appears to have become the vehicle of choice for people searching for way to keep in contact, without leaving home. My brother arranges for the entire family to hook up to Zoom as a boost for mum. This lovely lady has accepted her corona sentence, of indoor solitude for 12 weeks, but isolation is not her natural state. No, better adjectives for my mum would be outgoing, sparkling, fun -loving and mischievous. In consequence, she finds the prospect of 3 months on her own daunting, to say the least. Let’s hope face time can soften the blow!
Bingo is pencilled in for the weekend. The teens and I experiment by calling mum mid-week for a practice. It’s a good job we do. I am a bit of a luddite anyway, and go round in circles, stuck in a meeting with myself for about 20 minutes! When we finally make contact, there is much excitement, which descends into hilarity as mum cannot figure out how to leave the meeting and, long after she has bid us ‘farewell’ and pottered off to make her tea, can be heard clattering around in the kitchen. I realise that it’s the most laughter we have shared for quite a while. And laughter is great medicine!
As Sunday dawns, we set out on a quest to have all out jobs done by 7 pm, the appointed Bingo -hour. We start with shopping, for us, for mum and for one of her friends. My mother’s list is much more exotic than our staples, with its poached beetroot, ginger tea and ripe avocados. And that probably explains why we waste so much time searching the half empty shelves for her ‘Partridge sachets‘, which eventually turn out to be a predictive text version of ‘Porridge‘! On the eerily quiet roads of a Covid-ruled world, however, we make up time on the drive to mum’s house, where we enact a contactless swap in the porch; groceries for bingo cards! Pausing only to wave through the window, we hasten home to complete the rest of our chores.
By 7pm, the car is cleaned, the house spruced, work emails sent, a roast dinner enjoyed … and it is ‘Eyes Down ! We ‘zoom‘ in from the North, South , East and West of our green and pleasant land. The Bingo set was my Dad’s and I believe dates back to the early 1960s. Bingo is the way we finish our annual family Christmas party every year without fail and so we all know the rules, the calls, the ‘clickety clicks‘, the ‘two little ducks‘! It is the perfect way for us all to launch an era of virtual connection in these strange times. For us Bingo is familiar, Bingo is fun, Bingo is family ….
Smashing Single Parenthood 