Dubliners, Mad For Bingo

It feels like years ago we were at the Gay Bingo. It was only Sunday night, but now we're in Saggart, which is way out in the country. We ate dinner, a very good dinner, in a town of 500 with one pub and one nice restaurant.

Sunday night, after a bento box, we got to The George, around 9.15. Shelley got us Guinness, which tastes the same in Dublin as in Ottawa, strangely and thankfully. I'd hate to have had Guinness ruined for me.

We talked about whether I could get away with the boy bartenders short hair, looked for the cute girls, and tried to figure out how to play Irish bingo. There are no letters across the top, so, I argued, it couldn't really be bingo at all, since there were 9 or 10 columns, not 5 and how were you supposed to know to shout bingo when you were looking at 9 or 10 columns of random numbers with no letters.

One boy got around that by shrieking like a toddler when he'd won. Except that he hadn't won, but he kept shrieking anyway.

The bar got more and more full, more and more drunk, louder too. By 11:30 we were done, it was too much. I'd been to the toilet once, and had to elbow my way through people who didn't want to let me pass once already and I was just ready to go home.

And neither of us had won.