As a teenager, my reward for helping Mum with the boot sale was five crisp English pounds. Five pounds to spend days packing stuff in boxes, only to wake up at the crack of dawn and fight with the car boot in a game of Ford Fiesta Tetris.
My abiding memories are of blue-grey skies between night and day, naps in the back seat and brusque East End market traders who made even the campest fruit sound threatening (“Get your blueberries!”).
But £5! You could get a polystyrene cup of nuclear-hot tea (40p), and an egg bap with red sauce and onions (£1.60), and still have £3 left. Three quid! Which, when spent on paperbacks (10p) and old CDs (20p), made quite the haul. At prices this low, you could afford to take risks. And it paid off: a mix CD that just had “Gaz’s Wedding” scrawled across in marker was how I first heard Buddy Holly. A DVD with the wrong disc was how I saw my first John Carpenter horror (that DVD was Free Willy – truly a child-scarring episode waiting to happen).
I’ve never enjoyed a shopping experience as much. I thought for a while that I had simply grown too old to be enthralled by physical objects. But recently I drove past a cardboard sign reading “Boot sale this way” and ventured in. It was just as I remembered: a collision of sounds, smells and (probably) stolen goods. I passed a pile of dainty old dresses next to a Thighmaster, and wondered if the owner had hoped they might fit her again some day. I realised it’s not just the prices or the thrill of the rummage that I love, but people’s stories and the human closeness that comes from buying secondhand. I thought of Gaz, hoping he’s still married, and bought a dress to hang up alongside my own.
