When bad bric-a-brac happens to good people

Beat the drums, watch a youth group doing an interpretive dance to their pounding rhythm and buy a slab of dry homemade marble cake with a cat hair in it – fete season is upon us.

And excuse me, but I'm kind of important around here.


There are many gifts a godmother can bestow on her young charge – the benefit of all her life experience, a sound Christian education – but one of the greatest gifts my godmother gives me is the opportunity to help out at various fete-y activities that benefit the hospital where she is a fundraiser. I think. I think that's what she does. We're very close, honestly.

If you know me, you will be aware that my charity work is an integral part of who I am. It is my liver. Good works are my kidneys. Giving runs through my veins which, by the way, I am planning to donate to poor people at some point. However, it does now occur to me that it might have been a more effective charitable endeavour to mention Saturday's fete before it actually happened in order that you could all attend and spend your money there. Still, being compassionate and competent is not as easy as it looks. It's a little-known fact that Mother Teresa couldn't boil an egg.

The stall I was manning was beauty and bric-a-brac. Naturally, I was pushing for cakes. You should always push for cakes. But a group of nurses had already been assigned the cake stall.

Nurses! Like, what have they ever done?

So beauty and bric-a-brac. You may think these categories are stalls apart. Not necessarily. But with two of my wares, the world of bric-a-brac had perhaps never seemed so far away from the notion of beauty.


If you are the person who gave these dolls away, I don't blame you at all but I can't help feeling that from the moment you tossed them into a cardboard box of jumble, along with a terracotta wine cooler, full set of Clarkson books and unused abdominal exerciser, they would put some kind of curse on you for casting them out. Whoever's hands they fell into next would feel inexplicably compelled to do all they could to bring about your emotional, financial and social downfall. Fear would follow you like a big scary wasp after a jam sandwich, and in the black terror of night time, this is the face you would see whenever you closed your eyes:


And if you want to know the scariest thing of all...

Reader, I sold them.

Look at what you could have won

Fete season is upon us and I could not be happier about it.

Today, Brockley's Hilly Fields Fete, and a local primary school's giveaway bonanza – in essence a school boot fair where you paid £1 and could then take away as much of the school's cast-offs and clearings-out as you could carry.

Would you like a set of generic, faded green staff-room cups and saucers? An overhead projector? About 2,000 books remaindered from 20 years of PTA jumble sales? Assorted school chairs and desks? Props from a recent production of Oliver!? Old costumes from school plays (handmade)? Dozens of strip-light bulbs which you may use as imitation lightsabers or perhaps to construct an elaborate Jean-Michel Jarre-style son-et-lumiere in your own home? A rainbow-coloured mountain of ring binders? Various unwieldy language-laboratory-style cassette recorders on which hundreds of pupils were recorded passing or failing French and German GCSEs? Comedically jumbo headphones with curly, curly leads? All for your paltry £1 entrance fee? If you know me at all, you already know my answer is 'Yes, a thousand times yes.'

However, I am a victim of my own circumstances. You can't have everything you want. But if I had either a car, or a flat one could classify as anything more than 'smallish', these would most likely have been coming home with me...

Three books on dachsunds. If I ever had laser treatment on my dog allergy, and subsequently bought a dachshund, I would want a balance of information on how to bring him up responsibly. I would not care for a delinquent dachshund on my hands. Or my carpets.

Imitation lamppost for dancing around at home.

Informatively reassuring, yet at the same time slightly creepy/threatening poster.

Theatrical steps, on which to practise accepting awards, reach high shelves, perform step aerobics.

Woodwork bench, on which to work with wood. Also usual for ritual sacrifices, etc. Handy cubby hole below for storing heavy duty tools/children.

Two dimensional pies and eels barrow. Self-explanatory.

Intriguing, emotive tale of aquatic peril.

Finally, Baby Jesus crib, essential for home nativity or actual second coming etc.

Thank you, I graciously accept your compliments on my self-restraint.

Instead I bought home The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary, which is so good it deserves its own post. And an enormous padlock which I felt inexplicably drawn to. I picked it up and couldn't put it down. Which is weird because it is practically the size of a man. Only regression therapy could tell me if I was once responsible for locking away traitors in towers in a previous life. It may also be able to tell me who I lent my copy of The Sound And The Fury to, because it's totally disappeared. Till then, I present a scientific diagram depicting the vast scale of the enormo lock..