JOE’S PRIZE BINGO AND THE LOCKOUT

Whenever my wife and I are travelling by train on the wonderful East Coast Main Line to Edinburgh, we start to feel a moment of excitement as we approach Berwick; this isn’t just because we love that old Janus-faced straddler of a town, but because we know if Berwick is in the middle distance then Spittal is just ahead and we’ll soon be seeing Joe’s Prize Bingo. If we’re lucky, the sun will be mining gold from the deep seams of the water. If we’re really lucky the trolley will just have gone by and we’ll be able to toast Joe’s Prize Bingo with a cup of tea.

Every family has a portfolio of sacred sites, places that probably mean nothing to anybody else but to the people involved are as important as the attractions that get recommended in tourist guides. These locations, which are often unglamorous points in the folds in a map, get talked about at get-togethers, and during the pandemic and the lockdowns it was places like Joe’s that we promised we’d go back to ‘when it’s all over’ to sweat on the bottom line before we got a full house. JPB was (the building’s still there, but it’s not Joe’s any more, which is a bit like renaming the Eiffel Tower, as far as I’m concerned) an unassuming place hunched by the North Sea, the sea that never forgets and never forgives. To us it’s a combination of art gallery and theatre and dreamcatcher.

So that is why, as the train slows down towards Berwick, we stand and gaze at Joe’s, and the time machine that squats in all our hearts whizzes us straight back to that summer in the early 1990s when Joe’s really was the place to be. Well, for us it was.

We decided on Spittal on a whim, I think, that summer; we’d been to Berwick a few times and liked it, but we settled on a cottage in Spittal just a couple of hundred yards from the beach. If I examine my reasons for wanting to book that cottage, though, the glory of saying the word ‘Spittal’ out loud would come near the top of the list; my dad, a genial and gentle Scotsman, would love to say the phrase ‘the Spittal of Glenshee’ over and over again when he was planning an itinerary around The Auld Country. The Spittal of Glenshee is a tiny village in the Highlands not too far from Perth but he would repeat the phrase as often as he could even if we were only planning a trip to Jedburgh. He would sometimes say it in tandem with his other favourite place, ‘the Ballachulish Ferry’, and when put together it sounded like he was about to give us a lost Andy Stewart song. Maybe the pull that places have on us is to do with language as much as space; perhaps the names we give them are their not-so-secret portals. Spittal. Spittal. Spittal. Like father, like son.

The cottage was a huge stone-built edifice that faced the sea’s whims and arguments with the kind of solidity you associate with a bloke propping up the bar at a country pub; in other words, solidity with a pocketful of stories. We unpacked and then walked down to the sea and the kids paddled; out on the horizon’s hinterland rain grew in confidence but we didn’t notice because, hey, we were all so much younger then.

The rain arrived at our party and sent us scuttling into the waiting arms of Joe’s Prize Bingo. ‘Eyes down for a full house’ somebody, perhaps Joe himself, said. We obeyed and took our seats or rather took our high stools (the smaller kids being helped on) and listened as the numbers were read out. Any bingo game is a kind of performance and this was no exception; there weren’t any histrionics or proto-rap rhythms here, however. It was a bit like listening to a calculator sing. It was like Samuel Beckett had written a play set in a seaside bingo hall. I found it gorgeous, and hypnotic, and beautiful like the sound of bicycle tyres in rain. We enjoyed shouting ‘House!’ too, and we were amused when a posh family sat near us and shouted ‘Bingo!’

And of course we won things. Tiny plastic trinkets that shone like jewels. Toys that were so fragile they broke before you got them back to the cottage. Things that glowed and things that made tiny music. So Joe’s Prize Bingo became our go-to place that holiday, and although we can’t have gone there twice a day it feels in my memory that we went there twice a day. We didn’t go ironically either; we weren’t hipsters slumming it or arty types dipping our high toes in low culture. We loved it.

And then one day, towards the end of the holiday, we locked ourselves out of the cottage; I can’t remember exactly how it happened, although it was probably my fault. One moment we could get into the cottage and the next minute we couldn’t, like Adam and Eve and the kids being barred from Eden. These were the days before mobile phones, of course, so I couldn’t ring the owner and anyway I didn’t know their number. I went to a garage; I’m not sure why, because the cottage wasn’t on wheels and didn’t have an engine. The man looked at me with pity and then said he’d come and have a look later when he’d closed up but maybe the best bet would be if we smashed a window and then reached in and got the key, which we by now had determined was on the kitchen worktop.

And then we did a beautiful thing because there was nothing else to do; we went to Joe’s Prize Bingo and got a couple of full houses and some winnings and we walked back to the cottage in the afternoon sun and somehow I knew that everything would be OK.

And it was. We all stood looking at the door as I tried to open it through the power of my mind. The man next door was in his yard, watering some tubs of plants. ‘Are you locked out?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘It happens all the time,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a spare one’, and he passed it to me and we got in.

And we were winners. And we had a Full House. And that is why I stand up to salute Joe’s Prize Bingo every time I pass.