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.