Fill your boots..

With 2 weeks to go, our efforts could only be described as 'fill your boots'. And in so many ways.

First up, and least important, has to be the good old English car boot sale. I went to one yesterday. Aside from a few friendly well-wishers it was truly depressing. I don't mind selling things that are new (or nearly) for less than 10% of their high street cost. I do mind being told that 5% is a more reasonable price. An antique cupboard for £1.50 did not sell. High quality literature at 25p each, and I came home with a full box. Good films were hard to sell at 50p. A choice of nice suits at £3 each and only one person enquired. Hindley (near Wigan) is an unforgettable experience. I'm usually attracted by the idea of a cultural melting pot, but in this case the mix was deeply unattractive. Eastern European wide-boys with trench coats and heavy gold chains beneath their flattened noses and above their bruised knuckles. Huddles of Asian women with distrusting glances, complaining at even the most friendly offer of a ridiculously low price. Ignorant, racist, local, moustachioed women with no obvious understanding of anything other than how to blame the new arrivals for their woes (yet I get the feeling that the new arrivals had not forced them to leave the house without themselves or their clothes meeting soap). The burger van selling crusty, barely cooked 'sausages' with a neon pink sludgy interior (long queue). South Asian families who communicate via their infant children (a smile crosses the language barrier but was rarely returned). Even the local chap who drove the council van which collected the rubbish at the end of the sale had two black eyes. Security staff at the Tesco opposite stood outside the store entrance like some dodgy nightclub. Most shocking of all (for me) was the 20ish year old local girl, who on a rainy day and accompanied by her mother of around 35, had decided to flaunt her scabby diseased legs in a mini skirt which offered zero dignity, topped off with a neon pink wig and the kind of vocabulary that makes ears bleed. The junky who hung around the stall for half the morning asking the most stupid questions, with his standard issue tattooed illegible writing down the inside of his forearms. The fat guy in the wheelchair, covered in dirt, his whole hands yellow from smoking roll-ups, with a blend of tobacco and dandruff all down his front, who confided that he was able to travel around all the car boot sales rapidly each Sunday (in his state-funded car), able to afford a pile of tat but unable to buy a less filthy coat for 20p. I could go on.

All this is nothing to do with poverty. I was in Central America on a road trip just after the disastrous Hurricane Mitch which laid waste to parts of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. In those countries I witnessed deep poverty, compounded by crime, drugs and corruption, and then slammed by a massive natural disaster. Throughout, even despite having to wash and clean clothes and cook on the muddy river banks, and finding shelter in shanty towns, I found the people there to be impeccably well presented, mostly amiable given the circumstances, and certainly having bucket loads of self respect. My grimy backpacker clothes and dusty 4x4 left me feeling ashamed. I have walked through the 'City of the Dead' in Cairo, where poverty is so severe that families are forced to inhabit the mausoleums of their ancestors - yet even in this no-go-zone for tourists did I ever fell ill at ease (just a bit embarrassed about the cost of my shoes). I've read my Orwell, come from a mining heritage, and even live in an ex-miners house in the shadow of a pit-head relic from the days of 'The Road To Wigan Pier' yet I can't imagine any correlation between the industrious (bit rough maybe) population of days gone by and the current state of affairs just 5 miles from where I live. I've got absolutely no idea what causes a place to decline so rapidly and completely.

Anyhow, back to 'Fill your boots'. Second on the list are possessions. I'm encouraging those people I know to stock up on my stuff. No visitor is safe from being encouraged to take away a memento of their visit to my house. Whether its a TV, a book, a pint pot, a sofa... no-one is safe! It's all part of the mix when it comes to finding new homes for soon to be surplus items. Plus, it's occasionally appreciated! I've got a big box of proper Cuban cigars and they are proving difficult to rehome. I can't put them on eBay, Freecycle, or car boot sale - so it looks like they might get burned (as in smoked at the leaving party).

Third is culture. For the last couple of weeks I've been trying to do and see as much of the things that I love than I would ever consider. I even broke my own rule of paying a ticket tout but I did not want to arrive in Oz having missed an Ian Brown gig. And it was worth it. I've been to many hundreds of gigs all across the musical spectrum, from Don Giovanni to Prodigy, from punk to pop, from Rockworld to the Hacienda. This recent gig in Preston was up there with the best of them, alongside Spear of Destiny in Salford 1988, Orbital at Glastonbury 1994, Radiohead at Glasto 1997, and erm Ian Brown in Llandudno recently. I might go to Creamfields later this week, having been too busy in Hindley to make it to V. Oh well!