A Winter's Tale . . .

I hate these dark winter mornings. In the summer, if I wake up at 4.30 a.m. and can't sleep, I can quite happily get up and catch up on jobs, but in the winter it is a different matter and when it is wet, overcast and miserable, morning never seems to come. There have been some mornings during the past week when I had to put the headlights on main beam when driving my son down to pick up the school bus in the village - and this was at 8 a.m.

Today seems no exception - wet, overcast and miserable, which is a pity as I was intending to take a stroll around the Car Boot Sale on the Showground. Not that there will be many stalls down there on a wet January morning, nor would there be even if it was dry. After Christmas, it takes a good month before many people start coming out to sell their wares. I do like a bargain, I have to confess, and being a collector - no, a hoarder, of books, I love fossicking around in boxes of books, never knowing what I will find. Sometimes it is a book I have been seeking for years; sometimes it will be a book I never knew I wanted until I saw it!! It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't collect so many different sorts of books: old horse books; cookery books - especially if they have the word country or farmhouse in the title; country living books; literary biographies; social history; archaeology; history; crafts and needlecrafts; the pony books from my childhood - in hardback, as the paperback ones are now falling apart, but still treasured . . .

Sometimes I just find it really depressing - stalls with pathetically few items for sale; quite elderly pensioners selling bits of cheap glassware and china that they have bought off other stalls even more cheaply, just to eke out their pension; stalls with such a pile of absolute rubbish that it would have been a waste of fuel to take it to the tip - yet they seem to think that people will find their rusty old tin baths or bits of chain irresistable! The best stalls of course are the ones where people really have no idea of the value of what they are virtually giving away. These are easy to find as people will be round them, like bees round a honeypot, the dealers at the sharp end, diving into the back of the car and even unwrapping things for the poor bewildered stallholder, who has never sold at a car boot sale before . . . I was brought up to have manners, so I don't dive in with sharp elbows, but watch for my chance!

But today, I think it will just be a trip out for the Sunday newspapers instead and perhaps make a start on clearing out the junk from what was grandly called the Morning Room on the house details when we viewed, more than 20 years ago now. It is now a very large Glory Hole and needs Sorting . . . Just the thing for a wet Sunday.