Loving those boot sale bargains

WANDERING round the car boot sale at Salisbury fire station on Sunday last week, I overheard an elderly lady at one stall chatting to a buyer.

“In my day everyone used to go to church on Sunday mornings,” she was saying. “Now they’re all at boot sales.” She wasn’t complaining, simply making an observation about how busy it was.

The Bank Holiday weekend sunshine had brought the crowds out like flies, buzzing around the leftovers of other people’s lives.

I got there too late, incidentally, and all the best bargains were long gone. The advert in the Journal said it opened at 9am but one seller told me customers had started turning up at seven.

This, in double-or-triple-dip-recession world, is how many of us are making our money go further.

Not in town centre stores that have to factor in hefty rents and business rates when setting their prices, but in fields the length and breadth of Britain, sifting through mounds of outgrown clothing, stocking up on 20p paperbacks, and haggling to get 50p off a £1 computer game, a cushion, or a frying pan. You name, it, it’s all out there.

Even, on one memorable occasion at the cattle market, a beautiful handmade patchwork quilt which now adorns my spare bed, snapped up for £7. Embroidered on the underside are the maker’s name and the words “Won at Ringwood Quilters Christmas Party”. It will become a family heirloom.

I love boot sales, even if they do start horribly early. I like talking to people, and you never know what’s going to turn up next – just like journalism.

Some folk I know feel genuinely uncomfortable in that environment, having other people grubbing about in their stuff, and arguing over a few pence.

But everybody loves to get something for next to nothing.

Once upon a time, we all wanted the latest ‘designer’ gear. Most of it wasn’t really ‘designer’. Not like the stuff the seriously rich buy.

It was ‘designer’ for the masses – trainers, jogging bottoms and handbags awash with tacky logos, produced in Third World sweatshops and marketed at hugely inflated prices via ad campaigns suggesting an entirely bogus exclusivity.

Now, I think we’ve seen the hollowness of all that, and we’re no longer beguiled by it. Getting up at crack of dawn to bag a real bargain is far more satisfying.

Where it leaves the churches, I’m not sure.