Gentleman’s Journal presents: Coronavirus Cliché Bingo!
First person to get a full house wins an empty house
Words: Joseph Bullmore
You’ve learned all the answers to Articulate (it’s usually ‘fennel’ or ‘Tim Henman’, in my experience), and the last time you played Scrabble your housemate’s girlfriend claimed that vowels were a patriarchal construct, actually, which sort of killed the mood right there.
But fear not. Gentleman’s Journal has developed a brand new interactive game that you can play without even leaving your (second) home: Coronavirus Cliché Bingo. Call it the Lockdown Lottery — except there’s no prize money and for some reason everyone has a terrible haircut. First person to get a full house wins an empty house.
Zoom ‘party’ screenshots posted on Facebook by a guy you haven’t seen since freshers’ week where someone called Gemma is having a big glass of wine. At 4.30pm! On a Thursday! Gemma!
A WhatsApp quiz forwarded to you by a chap from your old rugby club. EG: Guess the Home Counties Boarding School — Emoji Edition! Or: Can you name these Sixties cricketers based only on photographs of their shoes?
A comment piece from a lifestyle magazine with the title: “I’m isolating with my ex boyfriend/one night stand/a haunted houseplant that speaks backwards to me in my dreams. Here’s what it’s taught me about self care.”,
Your father talking ominously about “uncharted waters” when he has never, you’re pretty bloody sure, charted any body of water at all in his life and wouldn’t even know where to begin if he tried.
Two middle-aged women having a cheerful conversation about both lasagne and their own mortality while standing on opposite sides of a suburban road.
A fun couple in chunky knits and activewear dancing together to fun songs on their Instagram story and just being really fun.
A work email that says “hope you’re enjoying the new normal!”, which makes it sound like The New Normal is a mid-eighties San Francisco Yacht Rock band and you’ve just, finally, got your hands on their Greatest Hits CD and actually those guys had some pretty good tunes.
An old school friend suggesting that you all start a virtual book club because he’s just finished reading Sapiens and also some longreads about Sapiens and it would be nice to talk about all these new things he now thinks about Sapiens to a group of people who are pretending to have read Sapiens.
A guy who works in fin-tech posting his WFH set up at his parents’ spectacular modernist Cornwall home. Three monitors, two poached eggs — and a furlough before lunch.
A global brand very cleverly separating the letters in their logo to raise ‘awareness’ for social distancing, even though nobody — absolutely nobody — is unaware of that convention at this point. See also: “O P P O R T U N I S M.”
All your friends with really great bone structure shaving their heads and looking like Fight Club-era Brad Pitt, which makes you decide to do it, too, and now you look like a really adorable potato.
Your housemate saying “yes, sure, no, sure — great stuff” six times during every single incredibly loud work call he takes on his AirPod Pros.
An email from an e-commerce site you haven’t visited since 2013 — and even then it was just to buy some high tops you’ve never really had the confidence to wear outside after your mother said “well, they’re fun!” — telling you to “stay safe”.
Piers Morgan calling a 12-year-old girl a “bigger traitor than Guy Fawkes” for scooting near a park.
Your housemate’s girlfriend saying “surely drug dealers are key workers, right guys?” in a sort-of joking-but-also-sort-of-not way at 9.30pm on a Friday night.
Your sister-in-law thinking that watching two episodes of Tiger King and wearing her pyjamas past 11am (once) makes her fun.
The slowly dawning realisation that you don’t, in fact, have a great script inside you, and that “Hercule Poirot at Uni” is not, as it turns out, “the next Fleabag.”
A metric tonne of banana bread.
Next up: discover what your headphones say about you.
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