Bad Day At The Office.

Ugh. I’ve just journeyed into hell and back. 

It was a bright beautiful morning, so feeling unusually perky, I made a scrumptious Brocante breakfast, loaded Finley and all his parphenalia into the back of the car and set off for the massive car boot sale 15 mins away…

One and a half hours later, oh yes, one and a half hellish hours later, after sitting in a traffic jam long enough to make me cry, we arrived ready to kill each other.  Finley fuming because I hadn’t passed him his imaginary batman, and me fuming because he wouldn’t shut up about it. Not happy bunnies.

Still the car boot sale was gigantic. So after bumping the car over miles of fields, I finally found a car park space, got out, fixed Finley up with with some fruit and headed into an ocean of other peoples junk. Oh yes, junk. Absolute stuff and nonsense. With three Tiggers in every square foot, (sending my son ito a Tigger coated frenzy), a copy of Nick Hornbys "How To Be Good" on every stall (where quite frankly it belongs) and too many gruesome old leather jackets to describe, it struck me that the  "treasure tingles" I live for were going to be few and far between.

Three hours and six hundred stalls later, I was fit to drop. Finley had arranged a banana skin rather fetchingly on his head and crushed the banana itself down his T-shirt. My feet were purple red and swollen with a coating of black dust, and I swear I have never felt so minty in my life.   You know, I don’t mind a bit of dirt. I understand that when you buy secondhand things come with a bit of grubby history just begging to be washed off, but today it was almost as if everything was contaminated with other peoples desperation.

Shabby I may be, but grungy I ain’t….

So we gave up. With nothing but a set of childrens encyclopedias from 1932 to show for my efforts (complete with divine full colour illustrations) we headed back up yonder to search for the car…

And we searched. And we searched. And we searched.  By this time the sun had burnt the tops of my shoulders, and poor Finley  was cooking in the heat, but there was no sign of the car. And let me tell you, panic does not become me. But half an hour later, I had to concede that Finleys cries of   "It’s there! It’s there!" were right, and admit to myself that I had been searching for the green Rover, written off three months ago, when we are actually the proud owners of a silver escort (read shed), and at last we were homeward bound.

All I can say is, that I am a silly cow and it is a good job the car boot sale season is drawing to a close.

Excuse me, while I go and lie down?