A load of old junk!

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This weeks prompt at Sunday Scribblings is Junk

I’m thinking of getting rid of a load of things that I no longer need. Old sets of crockery, empty picture frames, dust covered LPs and faded books. I’ll probably take them to a car boot sale. I doubt I’ll make much money but I need the space and if I can raise enough for a couple of bottles of decent wine it’ll be well worth the effort.


Did I tell you about the time I helped my friend Rosey with a car boot sale? When she moved out of her parent’s house they insisted she took all her bits and pieces with her. Unfortunately she didn’t have much storage space at her new apartment so I offered to help her to get rid of the things she didn’t want.


We piled loads of stuff into my car – her Smart was far too small to carry everything, and at the ungodly hour of 5.45 am we set off to a muddy field in the middle of nowhere and joined a queue of fellow traders jostling for the most prominent position. We found a space between a large fellow with a shaved head and a liking for tattoos on our left, and a timid little lady and gentleman on the right who were sporting matching green and blue anoraks and wellie boots.
Tattoo man set up his sturdy table and began to load it with beer glasses and pub ashtrays. He had a couple of pub signs and stacks of beer mats. I couldn’t help but wonder how he came upon all this stuff! The little couple laid a white cloth on their table and began to create little piles of knitted jumpers, scarves and lace doilies.


Rosey had borrowed a very wobbly wallpaper pasting table from her dad. We opened it out then began to get her boxes of bits and pieces from the boot of my car. Oh dear! How on earth she was expecting to sell that load of junk I had no idea!


She had a chipped teapot and selection of mismatched cups and saucers. There was a collection of Barbie dolls, some missing arms and others without heads! There was a pile of kid’s books some without covers, and a stack of cassette tapes. Then out came a ghetto blaster followed by several pairs of shoes and boots in pretty poor condition. It took both of us to lift the doll’s house onto to the table, and several minutes to try and reattach the doors and the chimney pot. How she thought she’d sell a rather dirty and rotten rabbit hutch I don’t know but up on the table it went.


By now the table was beginning to bow in the middle, and on one side the legs were sinking into the mud causing several of the items to slide off the end! Undaunted Rosey continued to stack her stock higher and higher. On went a clock with one hand, and wok with no handle. There was one of those jewellery boxes with a pirouetting plastic ballet dancer and a dented riding helmet. By now the table resembled a letter M but undaunted Rosey carried on dumping more and more things on the pile. When the last item had been balanced on top she decided to leave me in charge and set off around the field to see what her competitors were up to.


Surprisingly I did manage to find a few buyers for some of the stuff - only a few pieces but better than nothing. And then the inevitable happened. There was a creek and a crack and with that the table collapsed onto the ground under a heap of Rosey’s unsold treasures!


I tried my best to recreate her display on the grass, but down there it simply didn’t have the impact that it had when it was a tottering tower on the table. I was dreading her reaction when she returned, but needn’t have because she burst into laughter! I started laughing too, but I soon stopped when I noticed that she was carrying a whole pile of junk which she’d bought from some of the other booters. And that wasn’t all. A man appeared pushing a wheelbarrow full of stuff which Rosey had bought for her allotment. There were worn out spades and bent buckets, gappy rakes and odd rubber gloves.


How we managed to get everything back into my car at the end of the day I’ll never know. We took home twice as much junk as we arrived with and most of it ended up in my garage, in fact the majority of it still sits there a year later!


I was going through it the other day in the hope that I could add a few of her bits to mine when I do my garage sale, but apart from the doll’s house and some of the books I fear the rest is as unsalable as it was the first time it went on offer!


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Our Carry On Tuesday prompt for the 20th is ready and waiting for you HERE! I hope you join in with us this week.
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