Three Hours In An Oven, Haggling With Allcomers

Three weeks or so ago Charlotte came home from the PTA meeting with the news that we had been asked to run the Bric-a-Brac stall at Frankie's school summer fete.  It seemed like an innocent enough proposition, and I, for one, entertained visions of an afternoon spent largely lolling on a deckchair behind a sparsely-attended trestle table.

The fete was due to start at 2PM, but the briskly-worded letter from the PTA Secretary asked for stallholders to make their presence known in the staffroom 'from 11AM onwards'.   Fair enough, I thought.  Get the stall set up by lunchtime and set the next couple of hours aside for some serious pre-opening time lolling.  A chat with the vicar, maybe.  Over a slice of cake.  It would be like something out of a Just William story.  

The reality which confronted me and Frankie when we ambled into the staffroom at 11:25 or so was more like a scene from the London Blitz.  Nearly every square inch of the room, from floor to ceiling level, was taken up with what looked at first sight like the spewed-out contents of every loft in a five-mile radius.  Scuttling nimbly along the tiny corridors of carpetspace afforded by these teetering piles of ancient jigsaws, VHS Video Cassettes and never-used trouser presses were a dozen or so slightly harassed-looking middle-aged people , many of them trailed by small children, and all of them weighed down by at least half their bodyweight's worth of random household ephemera.  Somewhere at the back, hemmed into a corner by a crate full of battered-looking glassware, a woman named Pat was barking out a succession of staccato-style orders.  A shortlived controversy over whether an ancient Sanyo stereo system with its internal wiring hanging out like a teddy bear's stuffing could legitimately be commandeered for use as a Tombola prize was swiftly resolved by the appearance of a woman in an authoritative-looking blouse, who whisked it off on a trolley.

Quite frankly, the whole scene was making me feel rather in need of a lie-down.  But clearly it was too late to turn back now- there was nothing for it but to launch into this ordered chaos and load our stall with Bric-a-Brac- which, we learned from the stern figure known only at Pat, meant 'anything that isn't a book, a video cassette, or a toy'.  Which turned out to mean 'more or less everything in the room and certainly anything which is either bulky, heavy, or breakable'.  It was still only ten to twelve, but the prospect of deckchairs, not to mention vicars and cakes, was appearing more bleak with every passing moment. 

Thankfully at this crucial juncture Charlotte arrived dressed for the part in a 1950s-esque blouse and beads combination and brandishing a bag containing three Cornish Pasties from Martins the misleadingly named 'Swiss Confectioner' of Stockport Road.  Suddenly everything seemed possible, and the next two hours were spent furiously packing our allotted tables (and all the space behind our alloted tables) with goods ranging wildly in value and usefulness- from a brand new looking acoustic guitar (four pounds to a good home, we decided) to a twenty-strong shoal of small handpainted ornamental wooden fish (twenty pence a piece, or a pound fifty the lot).

No sooner than we had agreed upon this hastily-cobbled-together pricing structure than it was put to the test- by our first stall-load of customers, keen-eyed early arrivals intent on picking up a bargain.  An elegantly dressed Pakistani lady fixed me with a businesslike look:

'How much this bracelet, here?'.

'Er, a pound.  No, er, fifty pence'

'Fifty pence?'

'Sorry, er, is that too much.  Er, Charlotte-'

Without a word, the woman handed me fifty pence, took the piece from my hand, and dissappeared into the throng looking fairly pleased with herself.  We had learnt our first lesson of market-trader lore- it's not so much the price that matters as how confidently you bark it out.  Five seconds later I sold a half-dozen dinner plates, only very slightly cracked, for two pounds fifty the lot.  The acoustic guitar and the shoal of fish each went for the asking price- the latter to a fellow who spent fully five minutes wondering out loud what possible use such items could be to anyone, before suddenly reaching for his wallet.  You get the strangest types at school fetes, sure enough.

By the end of the afternoon we had each lost about six pounds in weight (the bric-a-brac stall had been placed directly under the perspex bike sheds- most welcome if it rained, but in the tropical conditions which in the event prevailed more akin to spending three hours in an oven, haggling with allcomers) but had through our sweat-drenched endeavours boosted the school coffers to the degree of something like fifty pounds.  Which I think means we'll be back, as an unwritten law of school fetes dictates that if you take on a task and manage not to bugger it up completely, then this task is assumed to be your responsibility certainly until your child leaves the school and quite possibly for ever.  Not that I mind, as (owing to another of the unwritten laws of school fetes) we were unable to leave without picking up several items that we really didn't need but on the other hand could not do without- to whit:

--One child's electric organ- preprogrammed to play'Sur Le Pont D'Avignon'- two pounds fifty.

--One revolving 'Chef's Head' Kitchen Timer, fully functional and presettable for up to sixty minutes- fifty pence

--One marine blue ornamental mantelpiece device of uncertain crystal-like material, featuring dolphins at play- twenty-five pence.

Cheap at half the price, wouldn't you say? Oh, we'll be back, allright...

 

Comments

[looby]

A fine example of Comparative Blouse Studies, a neglected area of investigation but one long overdue for analysis.

Our girls' sports day today got cancelled because it was too hot. A bit of a shame for the girls but I was quite pleased that I wasn't sitting outside sneezing my head off for three hours.

[beth]

You're right about it being your job forever now. I only escaped from 'Bric a Brac' (aka 'White Elephants') to 'Craft' by being PTA Secretary for four years.

[lovelevenshulme]

Enjoyed this post heaps...

[jonathan]

Thank you and welcome, Mr Levenshulme. You'll be pleased to learn the chef's head timer is functioning admirably and is even as we speak abetting the manufacture of a spaghetti bolognese.

Actually this spur-of-the-moment purchase has sparked a minor fixation with kitchen timers and I found myself late one night the other week searching through images of the tick-tocky little fellows on Ebay. It took all of my strength to resist putting in a speculative bid of £2.50 for a particularly handsome Italian item.

[Cocktails]

Hello Jonathan, have just been enjoying your fine blog over lunch. Thanks for the link and good luck with the kitchen timers.

[jonathan]

No bother -welcome aboard. I trust you will find Crinklybee to be a fine accompaniment to your lunchtime cocktails...

[Abby]

Eeee, do you think the organising committee knew about your formative years selling sweaty sandwiches at the Miner's picnic, not to mention our family's bric-a-brac stall in Blyth Market? Perhaps they spotted your potential.

[jonathan]

The Miners Picnic of 1981! I had competely forgotten. Mind you my recollection is that the majority of those sweaty sandwiches made the return journey unsold back to Fenham in the selfsame tupperware containers that had transported them so hopefully to the wilds of Ashington in the early hours of a summertime Saturday morning... was there also a failed sideline in 'jumping bean' children's toys, flailing unimpressively across our mam's teatray at 50p a pop? I don't know, maybe I'm imagining the whole thing. The market stall at Blyth, however, I can state with absolute confidence actually took place in real life.. whether we ever sold a single item of bric a brac to the discerning customers of recession-hit Northumberland is another question entirely (I recall a stallfull of Arabic/English pop-up telex directories that proved mysteriously hard to shift to our clientele of newly-redundant-miners' wives, who seemed more interested in the adjoining stall packed high with Charles and Di related ephemera...)