Elderly racist bingo

Hello,

      I think I have spent enough time on the bus and in hospital over the last few years to have become well aware of the phenomena which is the Elderly racist bingo. Times of annoyance (the bus journey) or trauma (the hospital) seem to instill such people with a niggling worm in their heads which gradually unfurls its full rancid glory through their false toothed mouths.

I first started playing this game when I was going every day to hospital to receive intravenous antibiotics for a month, last year. Usually there for two hours, and driven there, its worth pointing out, by persons the elderly moaners would be thinking of in their short sighted espousals, this was the perfect playing field for a game of prejudice rugby. Flailing, stumbling, grunting, pushing and kicking....the boundaries of common sense, high, out of the stadium, with every caustic utterance.

Yesterday, returning from an altogether different visit to the hospital, I was on the bus wanting to get home quickly, since I was feeling a little hypoglycemic, but found I had nothing on me containing sugar. Luckily, the slow panic was tamed slightly by the lilting repeated melodies of the assembled elderly racists, with their symphony of misrepresentation.

To play racist Bingo you of course need to know the rules. This version of bingo does not include numbers, well, apart from those they make up, but cards are instead completed by mentions of themes throughout the expungance. Below, and based partly on the utterances of yesterday, I will list some of the common themes which must feature in order to claim a strike on the card. For information, the lucidity or logic displayed, or lack of, is a subject only for later amusement - no matter how preposterous their ideas, the named theme when mentioned counts. See the guide below to involved themes:

1. Them
e.g: "thi come orrear, claiming to escape from hughgander or hughgosslarbyer or wurrever, an thiv no intention of wukkin, thir ere forran easy ride"

2. Council
e.g: "n carrnsull gee um everyfin f nowt, jus cuss thi foreign, new ome, car, clotes, mobile fone. Ar carnt afford a mobile fone...."
Extra points can be held over to complete "house" if the elderly racist has a mobile phone which goes off at a later time during the symphony.....

3. Bus passes
e.g: "n thiv orl go tbus passes, the gerrum f free fromt Governmunt, cuss thi foreign, but we don't gerr any elp"
You must try and ignore the free travel for the elderly at this point. Its not their fault.

4. Work
e.g: "n thiv got no intention of workin, none of em, therrear ont scrarnge f benefits, cuss thi norr wirra soff touch in this country"

5 Established cultural differences
e.g: "n thi orl goo abart in them masks and flowing garns dunt thi, worra thi call em Bejams, or Hibabobs or summat I dornt chuffin norr...

6. Men
e.g: "n thirrorl unkempt wi massive beards arnt thi. And you rallis see um walking darnt street doin nothin - apart from chatting on thi morbile fones wot council uv ginnum cos thiv escaped from Rubarbistan....."

7. Us
e.g: "we would never av done that, and we would have stayed in bulgaslavia t fight like proper men un all. My Bert, got bles im is bin ded 70 year odd, he would have blown um up rather than go and live in France as a Refugee..."

8. Tax
e.g " arv wukked for 80 year in this country (I exaggerated this figure to blend in with the underlying theme of the piece) and have pait me tax n national insurance from day one. Un woddawar get from the Government, bloody nowt arl tell yer, bloody nowt. An I bet they don't pay any tax for th free ealthcare  ont NHS"

9. Degrading of a once previously beautiful area
e.g: " Ooh Darnull's gon darnt shitter now, it used to be a playground of joy and opportunity before these moved in, nar this kids and dog shit all ort streets"

10. Legislative rights of abode
e.g: "thiv norr right to beere anyway, nonuvum, its ornly cuss wi too soff in this country to kick em art that thirarebl to stay at all...."

11 Et cetera.......

There are of course other themes specific perhaps to certain areas - in Sheffield its also essential to point out that "the foreigns never yust t work int Steel mills, and even if they had still bin oppen when thi came ere, thi never wouldve either." The joy of living in such a large and varied country is that themes of racism are interchangeable and subject to rapid revision, just like the facts that supposedly back up their infernal grumbling.

Luckily, the bus somehow managed to get me home before I slipped into a diabetic coma and so I was able to get home alive to think about how absurd this unending promlugation was, and how I had managed to predict about 7 of the above themes prior to their appearance in the symphony.

Thus far I have never, ever, in listening to such performances, shouted "House!". I fear that may cause actual rational debate which might, worse still, even call into question the accuracy of some of the claims that they have taken directly from la-la land. Its best just to quietly clench your fist and pull a bearing teeth celebratory face, before getting on with whatever else you should have been doing.

Please don't, by the way, think am specifically targeting the elderly, in an oldist way. Its simply that these are the people whose racist drivel I have to endure most often when I venture out of the house. Racism, alas, comes in all manner of different hues. Which is at best ironic...

Yannis