During the spring and summer I wake every Saturday and Sunday morning and imagine a rainbow outside. Knowing there is gold at the end luring me towards it I set out on my bike to catch hold of the prize. Usually, people with some degree of sanity left intact after their teenage years wouldn’t dream of waking before 8am at the weekend, choosing instead to sleep until midday or later, but my sanity has long since vanished. And that’s why I join all the other reprobates in a field to look through other peoples unwanted shit. Car boots - one of the greatest British institutions ever. They are like poison, I’ve found. Once you get the bug, you’ll soon get the fever.
My first observation at car boots is the crowd. The people who tend to show up are a real varied bunch, a right ragtag, weird and unique crew of characters with the slight hint of a psychotic look in their eyes. There’s always young kids annoying their parents; then the shouting and screaming parents running after them and cursing; pensioner couples, wearing visors, looking for plates; dodgy geezers selling bikes; farmers selling eggs and veg; old rockers selling off their vinyl in small increments and myself; sunglasses on, scouring for books and records, but going home with a pewter tankard and an umbrella. As a buyer you cannot plan for car boots. You cannot expect anything. Do not try to find something, it won’t be there. The very nature of the event is the best exercise of spontaneity I know.
It’s all in the chase. Never knowing what you’re going to come across. Friend’s tales of finding various gems throughout the nineties only encouraged me to get out to more sales. Who would have bought the SCUM Manifesto anyway? And what was it doing at a car boot in the little Midlands village of Crick? And who on earth sold that copy of the Sweet Baby LP Sal picked up?
The stories left untold by the sellers only provide more mystery and intrigue, drawing more lines in our lives which cross in ever-different and untraceable ways. Sometimes I’ll try to inquire as to where an item came from, or whether they’ve read this book they’re selling for 10p, but they tend to be highly evasive when challenged early in the morning, as we all are.
I’ll often pick things up for 25p knowing they are worth much more than that. Then, after getting them home I keep hold of them, adding them to the weight on my brain and then the right collection in the right place. Soon enough I’ll be surrounded. Stuff everywhere – having already lived its past life I’m breathing new blood into it now. It’s rebirth. And recycling. My Mother always encouraged us to be thrifty; to re-use, re-format, re-contextualise and re-animate ‘unusable’ items. I actually made the Thunderbirds Tracey Island following the instructions on Blue Peter word for word. We couldn’t afford the shiny plastic version. Plus, where is the interest in simply buying it off the shelf? There isn’t any! It’s no wonder we are drowning in plastic waste when people are throwing it off at such a rate. And there I am; a stack of plastic CD cases in hand, taking them home for prosperity and archival purposes. Saving them from scrap.
You think that punk is underground? Well think again! Car boot sales are the most underground thing ever. Any fucker can find out about a gig now; type a bands name into the computer and see where they’re playing, or go to the club and look at the flyers. Car boot sales rely almost solely on word-of-mouth and crappy hand-painted signs at the roadside half-obscured by an overgrown hedgerow. And once you’ve heard there’s a sale on you still have to locate the damn thing! I don’t know why it is. Perhaps, with too-much publicity, a car boot would be over attended and crowded? I like to think that car boots consciously keep themselves underground and quiet to keep all the mystery and myth surrounding them safe. Like punk. Like many Great British traditions; scrabble nights on Tuesdays, band practise on Wednesday evening, football on Saturday afternoons or a roast on Sunday afternoon. These things are left unsaid, but are common knowledge anyway.
You cannot pigeon hole car boots like you can punk rock. At gigs people may jump from the rafters and it may look spontaneous but it’s planned, it’s predictable. The mornings I’m talking about are made up of something much, much creepier and fucked than even punk: real, day-to-day people who live next door to you. Some of them, believe me, could benefit from the teachings of punk rock. These people, I’ve found, are just as unique as anyone in their own ways. Human beings really are strange creatures.
Listening to what other people are looking for, or funnier still, what they think the bargains are is always fun. “There’s a job lot of gardening gloves over there for a quid...I’ll get them on ebay,” I overheard one morning. No-one would buy a job lot of gardening gloves on ebay, surely. What was that guy thinking? Where on earth is the profit in that sale? Now, I’m not trying to liken ebay to car boots, the two have their own place. I’ve picked up (what I consider) bargains from both places, but car boots have a genuine face-to-face aspect to them you’ll never find on the internet. You have to talk to someone, for starters. An intrinsic human connection must take place to secure the deal. Ebay has the fault of being, quite literally, faceless.
Taking friends to car boots can be a chore sometimes. I have to be set free, like a bargain-thirsty madman, without anyone even being able to keep up. It’s selfish, I know, but you can cover so much more when you’re not waiting for someone who is waiting on you. Other times friends arrange to meet back at a certain spot, which I prefer. You can all be set loose at once and approach things your own way. It’s a shame it doesn’t happen this way in some aspects of life.
Car boots, like anything, are all about your approach. It’s the way you see it in your mind’s eye. It’s in what you deem perfection to be. Your method to your madness. The thrill of the chase has not worn off on me yet. Everytime it comes on feels just like the first time. I feel it like an urgent, buzzing, immediate feeling that steers you along with eyes for what you are, were, or never have been searching for. Give me anything! In that zone I’d probably even buy a Kanye West or a Metallica shirt if I were to come across one cheap enough, God forbid!
The warm mornings at Holcot Showground have to be the best car boots I’ve ever been to. They were the biggest, most stocked car boots in Northamptonshire. I would fill up with glee when I arrived on Sunday mornings. Walking slowly with my sunglasses on I’d approach each table, each aisle methodically and carefully, searching for the gold dust. And that gold dust seemed to be lined in neat rows – it clung to the edges of wobbly foldaway tables, or sat unorganised in worn cardboard boxes on the grass, just waiting to be found. I suggest you do the same. Go hunting!
