45,795,673,964,460,800 to one

IT’S for a different reason entirely, to record how pub ladies’ darts team captain Linda Ithurrallde has at 47 also become BDO World Masters champion, that I amble into the Slake Terrace at West Cornforth last Tuesday evening.

“Have you come about the bingo?”

asks Liz Armin, within 20 seconds of the door edging open.

“No, what bingo?” I say, for old habits die hard.

About 50 of them had been playing on the bus homeward from Blackpool the previous weekend when – “somewhere between Tebay and here, I can’t quite remember” – something unique in the known history of the world took place.

A lady called Doris – “belongs Kelloe,”

says Liz – called a line on 13 numbers and, two numbers later, shouted full house on the 15th. She had, in other words, had every one of the first 15 numbers in a game that embraces 90.

“It’s gospel,” says Liz, “there were 50 witnesses on the bus and not one of them could believe it at first, either.

They checked the card over and over.”

For her achievement, statistically stratospheric and mentally mindblowing, Doris from Kelloe paid 20p for the ticket and won only £20. It is unlikely to change her lifestyle.

The odds against it happening are the sort of thing that astronomers measure in light years. Robert Bacon, an old school friend and the column’s resident mathematician, calculates the answer within 30 minutes.

It’s 45,795,673,964,460,800 – or roughly 46 quadrillion – to one.

Eh? “That’s about 3.3 billion times less likely than winning the jackpot on the National Lottery,” says Robert and goes to have a lie down.

BERNARD Hunt, operations manager of the National Bingo game, is no less incredulous. The lowest he’s ever heard of a full house being called is in the late 20s.

“The mind boggles, especially on a bus. It’s almost unbelievable but clearly it can statistically happen. I was once in a hall when a line was called on five numbers and thought that that was ridiculous, a false call, but it proved to be true.”

Robert Bacon is a regular at Billingham Constitutional Club where, until recently, they offered a £1,000 jackpot to anyone calling on 45 numbers or fewer. “We had two or three people winning every year so we had to reduce it to 43,” he says.

So for Doris from Kelloe, was it simply a case of lucky for some?

“She really should be buying a load of Lottery tickets or catching the next plane to Las Vegas,” says Mr Hunt.

“Just tell her to take a dollar for the machine. The way her luck is, it’s probably all she’ll need to scoop the lot.”

THE game was organised by Shirley Vance, from Coxhoe.

“Doris was really excited, no one could believe it,” she says. “We thought at first that she might have been getting mixed up, with there being more than one card in each book, but it seemed to check out.

“We thought calling a line on 13 was incredible. This is just out of this world.”

So to Kelloe, locally pronounced Keller, and finally – Kelloe instinct – we track down 70-year-old Doris Woodward, self-styled bingo professional and centre of much local attention.

“It was definitely 15, definitely only one card. They checked and better checked,” she says.

“I couldn’t believe it any more than anyone else, but it’s not worth cheating for £20 is it?”

Doris is reluctant to be photographed, or indeed to say much at all. There are, however, some very good images of the splendid Linda Ithurrallde – and dart board or bingo board – she’s a world beater, too.

WEST Cornforth is near Ferryhill, in County Durham – once a thriving colliery and iron works village and with 13 pubs to assuage the lads’ thirst.

Now there are two. None in the Slake Terrace can imagine how it came by its name or, indeed, what a slake may be. Any offers?

VICTORIA Garesfield, it may be recalled, is the evocative name of another former pit village – and, indeed, of the old pit – west of Gateshead. We wrote of its glories a couple of months back.

Irving Newton in Prudhoe now sends an old map of the area on which many pits and seams are identified, many carrying girls’ names. There’s the Emma, the Mary, the Bessie and, of course, dear old Clara Vale.

Almost inevitably, there’s also a Busty. If they’re named after womenfolk, why on earth were so many County Durham collieries called the Busty?

YOU know what the old mince pies are like, but on a crowded Metro to the coast on Saturday afternoon, I could swear that the young lady standing a few feet away was Princess Eugenie, recently arrived at Newcastle University and vowing to be “normal”.

There were two young ladies – round-vowelled, prattling, perfectly pleasant – and a biggish feller who could well have been a minder. (Or “burly” minder, as the tabloids inevitably insist.) Then they talked of their destination, the Royal in Whitley Bay. That proved it, then.

CHECKING the website for Oswald’s hotel and restaurant in Sowerby, near Thirsk, Jan Mazurk in Darlington comes across a fascinating special offer. “Bathe in your free-standing roll-top bath, darn your bathrobes and relax in your French-inspired bedroom.”

Jan doesn’t quite follow the thread. “Just when I wanted to get away from it all,” she says.

Then there’s Gavin Hay, also in Darlington, who amid the many takeaway menus pushed through his door discovers the offer of “inducting chips” with all English dishes at the Shanghai Palace.

“I bet Heston Blumenthal doesn’t offer inducting chips to go with the snail porridge,”

he says. “Darlington truly is on the cutting edge of international cuisine.”

AN email from Peter Sotheran in Redcar. “After your tireless evangelising in support of the sorely abused apostrophe, is it time to turn Gadfly’s attention to the predicament of the lonely only?”

Peter attaches an image of a recently erected sign – “Main school entrance only” – at Marske primary, up the road.

“I have many a time winced in agony at the corkscrewed logic caused by the misplaced ‘only’. It would be clearer, of course, were it to have read “Entrance – main school only.”

Peter warms to his theme. “I have scoured the school perimeter for an exit, but to no avail.

“What do they do when the school is full? How full can you stuff a school with pupils before someone notices? Will parents panic when they cannot extract their offspring?”

Remedial class, he proposes to form SOFROMO – the Society for the Relocation of the Misplaced Only.

“It is my pleasure to invite you to accept the role of president.”