Week 40.
Four-Oh blind forty.
Those of you like me who regularly visit the local Bingo Hall in search of friendship, weak coffee, numbers no greater than two digits and dayglo marker pens, will undoubtedly not have the foggiest idea what the origins of ‘blind forty’ are. Blind forty, one of many colourful phrases bingo callers cry out, such as three and seven, thirty-seven.
Those of you who do know what ‘blind forty’ means will no doubt glow with pride when name-called a nerd, anorak or some other pejorative that implies they possess a vast general knowledge.
Uncertain whether or not I should round off my momentary lapse into all things numerical by declaring ‘That’s Numberwang’, or were I in Wiesbaden, ‘Das ist Nummerwang’ I opted to consult a search engine and was greatly reassured this utterance was not such a foolish notion after all.
Even the German translation of the spoof game show Numberwang yielded 160 hits in 0.57 seconds.

