Continuing my efforts to understand the negative waves you get from friends, relatives and strangers when you tell them you play bingo, and try to get them to give it a whirl.

After people have passed the initial "Oh do I even have to give you a reason??" phase, I try to winkle out of them what it is that gives them such a no-no initial reaction.

"Have you ever played Bingo?"

A surprising number will say "no" and then attempt to defend their position by saying that they’ve either seen part of a game once at the other end of the church hall, or know someone who got roped into a game and said it was boring. One person I know was dragged along to Bingo by his parents, told to shut up and not move beside the table, and given only an orange juice and a Milky Bar (the white chocolate bar- made famous by the weedy kid with HS glasses shouting at the end "the milky bars are on me!"). That put him off Bingo for life. I said that that was strange- I had had a similar experience, although it was a lemonade and a Crunchie bar. And instead it had fired my imagination and planted the first Bingo seed. The quiet tension, the hushed awe, the strange names being given to Bingo numbers as they were being called- what a mysterious world for an 8 year old...

The other main planks of attack against Bingo were that it was "gambling without skill", "only for Grannies", "was fixed" and even "for the lower classes" !! I shall deal with each of these in turn, in part three, but before that, there was someone who regaled against playing online Bingo, because it was too easy to get sucked in to.

I said that that was the whole point, to make it easy and convenient for those who couldn’t or didn’t want to go out to a Bingo Hall. I trotted out all the usual (and valid) reasons why online Bingo had taken off big-time across the world in the last few years. But my friend had some kind of mental block that linked "easy to do anything online" with bad!  You could slip into a gambling addiction easier online than going out gambling. I said there was no evidence to support that, and in any case any genuine gambling addicts were unlikely to be able to use a debit/credit card online and would beg steal or borrow cash and go out to a Poker game, not Bingo.

So that was the sort of level of riposte I was given to my invitation to agree that Bingo was a good game and worth a try. Frustrating, my friends!!

Final part next.