Hayle is other people

Just when I thought things couldn't get much worse, this morning I found myself gazing across the Sargasso Sea of drifting humanity that is the Hayle Car Boot Sale. A car boot sale is where the dispossessed, repossessed and terminally sad go to trade rubbish between each other. Imagine a refugee camp stripped of its shanties and basic amenities like toilets, and replaced by transit vans and N-registered estate cars with open tailgates surrounded by wallpapering tables, and you have some idea. Basically it makes the market in Eastenders look as exotic as a souk. Compared to the average stallholder at Hayle Car Boot Sale, Stacy Branning, no, even Stacey Branning's daft mum looks as unapproachably glamorous as the perfume counter lady at Leddra's. The more enterprising stallholders rig up improvised rails, from which secondhand clothes hang dejectedly, like scarecrows round-shouldered with poverty. A lot of them just spread out out the flotsam and jetsam of their impoverished lives on candlewick bedspreads laid on the muddy grass. The customers who drift dead eyed between the stalls are straight from the mad, bad and dangerous to know catalogue of whatever casting agency has offices in Krakow and Tallin as well as Camborne. My mum and dad dragged me along because among other things they were selling my old clothes, fake surfing brand T shirts with embarrassing slogans on the front that I would never wear. Mum said that if people saw me there they'd be more likely to buy my old stuff than if it was just her. Some of them spent ages fingering everything on the rail and holding it up against their kids to check the size, and then they'd hold up two or three things and ask mum the prices, and then spend ages deciding which of them to buy, and finally haggle over the price of just one thing. Dad was getting really annoyed, you could see that, like first he was watching really suspiciously in case they were nicking stuff, and then he'd say things like do you want that then or not? and then he insisted with one woman on 50p for a hoodie that said I Surf Overhead on the front, when she wanted to pay 30p, so she walked off without buying anything after wasting at least twenty minutes deciding what she wanted. In the end dad got bored and went off, and to be honest we did a lot better after that, although I did get spotted by a couple of girls from school who no doubt would have spent most of next week ripping the piss out of me if it wasn't half term. Anyway, after about four hours, we'd made £24.60, minus the £6 it had cost us to get in, so that was £18.60 profit.

Dad turned up again just as we were packing up the car. He'd got a carrier bag and a slightly sly look on his face. Look what I got, he said, proper bargain these were. He'd only gone and bought a pair of secondhand binoculars and a boxed set of Wycliffe videos. Videos, not even DVDs. How much did you pay for those? mum asked him. £5 for the binoculars and £18 for the videos, he said. The bloke wanted £20 for them but I bargained him down.