Rupert's Cottage

Mum on a Monday

Monday is always Mum's day and we'll do one of two things, we'll either go to the Golden Oldies afternoon presentation at the cinema, and there armed with our free tea and biscuits, we'll sit through The Red Shoes, Brief Encounter or something with Gene Kelly camping it up. The alternative is bingo and Mum prefers that. She has to be met at 12 midday, anything either side can get things off to a very bad start which will also include a withering look from my sister at the gate, it's a pitying look too as if I have a genuine problem kicking  cripples...Today it's bingo.
I'm late but the sun is out and the ride along the seafront into Brighton is so glorious that today, unsaid we make a pact to skirt over inflammatory subjects...my mother is one of the only two people on this planet who can cause me to lose my rag in a disgraceful manner. I know Mum is old now and that one day I'll miss these days, one day I'll sit at home with nowhere to be at twelve...but I still react to her. I can't ride some of the things she says, she can still provoke at 89! I also tell myself that my lack of understanding is a kind of preparation for what I dread, when in truth I know that's crap and that as far as being ready goes...I never will be. How can you be ready for a gap that never gets filled?

The bingo is a huge Godless expanse of garish tables and chairs on quality carpet, all in headache primary colours. There are no clocks and you instantly forget the value of money. You can lose the price of a weekly shop and view it with the blithe disregard of a late library book. Mum loves it, it's in her blood...and consequently it's in mine. When I was seven in 1959 and Mum was struggling to bring up four kids on her own, she won £80 at the Rose Hill bingo. It was all new in those days and 80 quid was a fortune. Family legend has it that she was shaking so much that she couldn't get on the bus and instead ran all the way home holding the money in her hand...and that year we had school uniforms, a dancette record player and learnt that dreams do come true...at the bingo.  

She's great to be out with because we rarely speak, we just gamble and lap up the strangely addictive atmosphere...and we always look superior. Our dreams are just the same as everyone elses there, it's just that ours include a sunset. We're snobs.

I win £21 and you'd think I'd got through to the next round of X Factor, it's all that daft. Mum doesn't win and so it's almost impossible to get her out of the building. Her slot machines beckon, the ideal foil for someone who's got a masters in control. Eventually, complaining of how black her hands have become we makes our way past a thousand flashing lights and walk out into the late afternoon light...the one that costs nothing.

Sometimes in the bingo, when the chavs have to stop and listen to the numbers being called...a wonderful feeling comes over me and I fancy that I hear voices from the past...it's like that feeling I have in church sometimes, the feeling of going back in time to who I once was...I get it in the cinema too...I get it with Mum on a Monday.