Skip to main content

Eyes down for Bank Holiday Car Boot Bingo

We certainly got lucky with the weather over the Bank Holiday weekend.

This allowed me to indulge in my emergency game – Car Boot Bingo.

Do any other countries partake of the peculiar ritual that is the Car Boot Sale?

Monday’s one featured a cricket pitch with a circular formation of cars, making it look like some kind of wagon train of affordable hatchbacks attempting to defend themselves from the invading masses with piles of baby clothes and unloved shoes.

Evolution had occurred since my last visit to one, with many of the wares spread out on old bits of plastic sheeting on the carefully mown grass. I can only assume that the nation’s supply of pasting tables were either broken, or had been called into action for a particularly big wallpapering job.

It didn’t affect my chance to play my favourite version of Bingo. If you find yourself forcibly made to visit a car boot sale, this might help you to survive with a shred of sanity, even if you do come away with something you later realise you didn’t actually need.

Simply tick off (in your head – it’s considered rude to point and shout “Ha! Got one!”) from the list any of the following items. Should you be trapped with someone else with a similar level of enforced attendance, play against each other. Eyes down – here we go:
  • Rusting tools – an easy win as there are always lots of these, often lightly rubbed down with oil in a misjudged attempt to disguise the fact that they should actually be in a skip
  • Portable TV (cathode ray variety). Bonus for one with a DVD drive, or in any colour other than silver
  • Hideous pottery from 1976. So. Much. Brown. Make it stop!
  • Two different Roger Whittaker albums. (One is too easy.)
  • A karaoke machine. Usually being sold because junior didn’t like it, the sound quality was bad (even for the enormous £35 it cost new), or junior likes it too much and there’s only so many songs from “Frozen” anyone should be made to listen to.
  • Unidentifiable plants. So mysterious, even the seller often has no idea what they are.
  • Any of Van Der Graf Generator’s albums. On cassette. Tricky, but not impossible.
  • A hideously coloured CD boombox.
  • An old computer monitor. Must be that peculiar yellowy colour all monitors eventually go – its the IT equivalent of a ‘Best Before’ date really.
  • The name of anyone who still thinks they might be able to shift a VHS video, even if they are only asking 10p. It’s a reportable offence, you know.
  • A gauge. Preferably with such a random scale (e.g. fathoms) that you can’t imagine ever needing one, even if you were attempting to build something that might need to leave the planet at some point.
  • Anyone who looks like they actually want to be here.
Of course, you only genuinely win when you get to go home.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 29th of May 2015. You can view the version used by the paper on their website here, which was unchanged, except for dropping 'Bank Holiday' from the title.

If I made it sound like I don't like Car Boot Sales, that was entirely intentional. I'm possibly the world's worst haggler for starters, and unless you needs baby/toddler clothes and toys, almost everything else there looks like a pile of old tat to me.

Still, I do get the idea, and I know people who've made some decent money offloading their old stuff, as well as those who enjoy the experience, like the bartering and bantering, and come away with something useful. Good luck to them - I'm happy to stay in bed to make sure someone else has the opportunity to view the contents of a stranger's loft.

(Still on with the CD singles. Mike Oldfield today, and six different mixes of "The Bell" from 1993.)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...