That Nice Lady Decorator has her say

The in house entertainment at the hotel of the living dead took on a new dimension last night. Bingo. On previous evenings, we had managed to avoid tributes to the Bee Gees, Elvis (with comedy, do they know something we don’t?), Neil Diamond, and Abba, but last night took the biscuit with Bingo.

The hotel in which we are staying in Tenerife, called the Guayarmina Princess, must have the highest average age of any clientele in the world. I want the Guinness Book Of Hit Records to verify this. I am guessing the low 90’s. That means that bingo finds some resonance with the prisoners, amongst which we are numbered. It also means that there is limited benefit in trawling for new customers for Currencies Direct as they are all too old to understand the meaning of foreign exchange, too infirm to consider the benefits to them or unlikely to be customers for very long on account of most of them being dead very soon.

That Nice Lady Decorator hijacks a mobility scooter at the hotel

Clearly bingo is a cerebral pursuit, requiring an immense level of intellectual power, and the compere spent the evening walking around the audience announcing the numbers which appeared on the TV screen in the centre of the room. It is his job to make the horribly boring event a little more interesting and was clearly on the look out for interesting people with whom to interact. He went from person to person, asking them to announce the number that had just appeared in the screen, and having a little jocular interaction with then, well those that could hear or speak or either. He honed in on That Nice Lady Decorator just as that magic number, 69, appeared in the screen. Slightly less than innocently, using the microphone to broadcast to the enormous graveyard of crusties in the room, he asked her to announce the number. He said “what is the number?” “69” she intoned. “69” he said then “Do you play bingo?” He said. “No, she said, “69?, that was last night”. The microphone was swiftly removed from her grasp, and at least half a dozen of the audience reached for their pace makers.

It is fair to say that I am on the receiving end of a great deal of invective, none of it very complementary, about the hotel and it’s aged inhabitants. I have been trying to deflect these and respond with some positives, like, it is cheap, or it is sunny, or beautiful architecture (it isn’t) or great position by the sea, but I was always in a losing battle, and I take more hits the more the day goes in, and therefore the more alcohol that is consumed. The fact that she studiously ignored all the research that I did to choose the right place was dismissed by her who told me to book whatever I liked was like the evidence, studiously ignored.

Anyway, drinking our way to oblivion, being too exhausted by a 6 mile hike over to. Caletta and back, followed to some fine tapas at a beach restaurant, we got talking to a couple who had witnessed the “69” debacle earlier, but had also, it seemed, been in the audience of the bar on our first night when That Nice Lady Decorator had the glad eye for a pretty guitar playing piece of male eye candy ( I think it is fair to point out here that he did not have the same allure for me). Crucially, they had witnessed her amusing attempts to get the audience to involve themselves in some karaoke, despite it not being a karaoke bar, so they knew what to expect.

Chris France
@Valbonne_News