Gen Z: phone, keys, bingo dauber…
Boomer: nipping round to Grandma’s?
At 7:30pm on a Wednesday? What do you think?
She’ll be annoyed if you interrupt EastEnders.
Very funny, but I’m off for a night out.
It’s only 6:30pm! The clubs won’t open for hours. And what’s with the bingo dauber? Marking off the cheapest place to get a Shandy Bass?
Nobody cool goes clubbing nowadays. This month’s Vogue cover star, 21-year-old actor Bella Ramsey says they’ve ‘never been drunk’, never had more than ‘half a pint of Guinness’ and have only been to a club ‘once… and I don’t need to do it again’.
She sounds like a barrel of laughs.
Boomers in the room: Heaven in 1988
Bella identifies as they/them, actually.
By the time I was 21 it was the Blitz on Tuesdays, Heaven on Thursdays and the Wag Club on a Saturday. We spent about 24 hours a week dancing, which is probably why none of us needed a gym membership.
Blitz? Like, the Second World War? How old are you?
Blitz Club, you heathen. You know, Steve Strange. You must have seen the pictures of him in The Face exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery?
Let me look for #Blitz on TikTok.
It closed in 1981. And whatever came after it will have closed thanks to you puritanical Gen Zs. You know 37 per cent of clubs have shut in the past five years. At this rate there’ll be none left by 2030.
We still know how to have fun. I’m going to Hijingo bingo club – regular games with electronic music, dance breaks and neon strobe lights in between. The top prize tonight is one of those robot vacuum cleaners.
Maybe you should take Grandma with you, after all.
I’m not taking Grandma to an East London warehouse with strobe lights and Fred Again playing.
Get her a Pernod and black and she’ll be shouting ‘two fat ladies’ before the numbers are called.
Fatphobic. Alcohol-dependent. Not a slay.
You know what’s not a slay? Going clubbing in a bingo hall. What’s next? Pigeon racing at Camden Palace? Dominoes at the Mud Club?
A full house: gen Z has gone crazy for bingo
Don’t be ridiculous. Thursdays are jazz and poetry nights at Spit, in London’s Borough: mellow live music and people performing their best slam poems. They’ve got 42k Instagram followers – you can barely get a ticket.
I read about this and agreed with the commenter who deemed it ‘uncool Britannia’. You’d need to get the Bacardis in thick and fast to get through it.
I think they only sell natural wine. Anyway I have a two-drink limit on a Friday because Saturday mornings are for reformer pilates and hot girl walks.
Blimey, we’d be lucky if we got home from the Wag Club before 3am on a Sunday. We’d be drenched in sweat with swollen toes from dancing eight hours straight in our stilettos.
No thanks. When I turned 18 I went clubbing at Pryzm and was home by midnight, my limited-edition Adidas Sambas ruined and a terrible picture of me tagged on Instagram.
They should never have banned smoking indoors – the Benson & Hedges cloud was so thick in clubs that if anyone took a picture, you were just a silhouette.
Surely a health violation.
The real health violation was the doner kebab on the way home.
I’m a vegan and like to be home by ten in time for my holy trinity ritual of peppermint tea, TikTok and my five-step skincare regime.
Pah! Sleeping in your make-up and touching it up before work the next morning is much more fun. Talking of which, I’ve got a new suggestion for your bingo caller.
Go on…
You’re 23 and dull as can be. Bingo!