Boot sales bring out some intriguing aspects of human behaviour. I am a hoary old veteran of car boot sales, despite never having owned a car for longer than two weeks. That car was custard yellow; like the vehicle belonging to the Banana Splits. A friend gave it to me, out of the goodness of her heart, and the desire, I think, to see what I did with it. I was living in a delightfully dull leafy suburb at the time. Nothing happened in my street, ever. If the milkman arrived late, people talked about it for weeks. So the arrival of Noddy's Car outside my house caused comment. I had been having driving lessons again; reasoning that as twenty years had passed since the last time I tried, most of Liverpool's driving instructors would have had time to forget me. And thus I found Lovely Brian, father to seven male children. This meant that he had nerves of steel and an understandable desire to stay in his car giving driving lessons to mad people. After weeks had passed, money changed hands, and Brian had started on Prozac, he told me that it might be better if I got an old banger and played going "brum brum" in it, thus perhaps discovering that the accelerater was not the brake and vice versa, in a safer environment. And far from him. Hence the Noddy Car. When the Giant Boy was three, he had promised me a "lellow car", and also vouchsafed to drive me around in it. Even as a toddler, he had noticed that his co-ordination was better than mine,and he would have been the safer driver by far. Let's face it , my mother's blind cat would have made a better driver than I was. So the neighbours, who had previously been diverted that day by the sight (and sound) of a bellowing Frenchman in a tree waving a chainsaw about , now had to deal with the spectacle of a rusting buttercup-coloured vehicle being pointlessly revved up by an anxious-looking redhead in clearly inadequate spectacles.
So that is why I do not have a car boot.But nevertheless, I turn up in strange school car parks and benighted bits of wasteland at daft o'clock, with bursting carrier bags trailing shoes and machines for making bubbles,old crime novels,items of school uniform grown out of in days by the G.B, redundant phone chargers, frankincense, and cheap tin trays. Taxidrivers curse me, as they are inveigled into helping me dismantle clothes rails ,and carrying sodden cardboard boxes shedding damp paperbacks up and down stairs. Sometimes, my angelic friends help me. This happened yesterday. Having moved flats on Friday, I somehow felt that my life was insufficiently difficult, and so had elected to do a boot sale at 6am on Sunday morning. The Giant Boy assisted me, refraining from very much swearing, and uncomplainingly going back to the house when it was discovered that we had forgotten the vital clothes rail, without which no sale is a possibility. The rail was new, and of an Escher-like complexity. When he brought it back (in the third mini-cab of the day , which had already eaten up any possible profit), we found that the pack of 30 tiny screws which GB had sensibly taped to the box that the rail came in, had gone. Oh dear. So we hung clothes from bits of pole, dangled them from dripping hedges (yes, of course it had been raining), and draped them on the larger Wolverine and Batman figures. Until a charming woman next to me offered to share her rail with us,and we set about collapsing it for her. Now, I have a great many pairs of new shoes. Most were bought to sell on E-Bay (before they banned me for life,or possibly longer..other story),to ladies with large feet. Or gentlemen who dressed as ladies for personal or professional reasons. Particularly successful were my sales to Germany, where feet are broad and shoes cost a fortune.
I am always interested in shopping behaviour.Boot sales are a rich loamy source of peculiar antics in this regard. Yesterday, for some reason, we had three punters buying ladies shoes. They were all gentlemen, all black, and all drawn to very high-heeled trotters. One of them asked me if he could swop a beige pair he had just bought from me, for a similar style in black."Yes, of course" I said, adding helpfully; "but they are different sizes"." Size doesn't matter."he replied, effecting the swop. We were musing on this. "Perhaps.."suggested my friend "he is buying them for his girlfriend?" "And perhaps" added G.B "she has adjustable feet?"
My pal was selling a stunt kite, and bongo drums. An irresistable combination, I would have thought. She had a nice time chatting to our next-stall-neighbour, and as ever in Liverpool, we all discovered that we had people in common. Several of whom turned up later in the day, to poke about in the books and old music boxes, and to give their children the opportunity to purchase properly lethal toys. Burlesque performers often pop along to snap up unconsidered peacock feathers, sequinned garments and retro underclothes. The "Food and Drink Festival" was happening in Sefton Park at the same time, but most of the people I know are too busy sleeping off the latter to be interested in the former. It was fun to see at a distance, foodies grazing peacefully , blissfully wandering about buying organic sausages ( I thought all sausages were made out of organs but anyway...) and hand-crafted pies. And the wasps had a ball. This was their last opportunity to sting people who had sunburn, and hide themselves in lemon curd,waiting gleefully to cause anaphylactic shock in the unwary scoffer of alfresco tarts. They know that the Grim Reaper is coming round in a bit,and want to have their last hurrazzzz..
In a similiar spirit, I have decided to devote my remaining ambulant years to the pursuit of hedonism,on a scale only previously witnessed by close watchers of the Empress Messalina. I shall start , \I think, on Tuesday. No enterprise of decadence should ever commence on Monday.
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