This week was the first
‘BIG Bootsale’ of the year for me, stalls going right to the back of the field
(we’re talking something like 200 more stalls minimum) thanks to a lovely
cloudless summer Saturday, of course Sunday was weird weather but who cares, by
that point everyone was there and set up. it’s genuinely nice to see that the
bootsale can still get this big, and yet I didn’t have much luck early on, I
had to really dig to find anything worth buying. Maybe others just beat me to
it, having come out early thanks to the good weather and the amount of extra
stalls that guarantees or maybe it was just full of shit this week?
Still, hardly a haul to
grumble about, but again proof that size isn’t everything. At least the weather
was acceptable, weird (it was kind of like Dunton had shifted into another
reality, that’s the best I got) but comfortable to walk around in. The cow and
the elephant in the tie were ice cream containers.
Anyway are you sitting
comfortably? Then I’ll begin
Something Someone Nicked From a Building Society!
50p (64¢)
At least I think so, I’m
pretty sure this was one of those donation boxes that used to hang on the walls or sit on the counters.
It’s possible it was a give-a-way, banks and building societies used to love
giving away money boxes (it promotes saving, you see?) and she did have a
couple of others of those on her stall as well (including the Halifax house,
which I still use for loose change after all these years after opening, and
closing, my account, I used it to save up for my first trip to Florida, I was
9) but I guess the main thing is that it makes me THINK of those donation
boxes, because as a kid I wanted them so badly, all of them from little ones
like this to the life-size guide dogs. I couldn’t understand why people would
make big plastic toys and not make them available to the public and by public I
mean kids and by kids I mean me. I could get way more out of a three-foot
plastic Sooty than some supermarket could, if they wanted money for starving
orphans, just get one of those cool boxes where the coin spins down into the
hole and let me have the big plastic bear.
I wasn’t the most giving
child it seems.
Also Anglia Building
Society hasn’t existed as a separate entity since 1987 (I was 1)! Jesus. I
remember it due to the merged Anglia/Nationwide incarnation it had but that
building society went back to just calling itself Nationwide in 1992! Why am I
so old? Why does time keep moving along? Why can’t it all just stop and let me
be happy with my plastic bears?
An Elephant Pencil Sharpener!
25p (32¢)
Someone clearly collected
elephants once upon a time, you’ll notice three elephants in that haul photo
(one day I’ll find a less douchy name for that), they’re all from the same
stall. Anyway this was one of those things that I’d forgotten I’d forgotten
about, something I had as a child that I no longer remembered but as soon as I
saw it I could remember it so vividly you’d think I’d seen it on the way out to
the bootsale, I could remember it’s darling little face, I could remember how
it felt, how it knackered any pencil you tried to sharpen with it (not that I
did that very often, figural erasers and sharpeners are for playing with, not
for using for their intended purposes).
My memory’s pretty spotty,
apparently that’s common for someone with the various issues I have and I’m not
just really thick (I may disagree with assessment), it’s probably why I
keep/buy/rebuy so much old crap, I find it easier to remember things as facts
about something than remember things as memories. For instance I bought my
original EPS at Basildon Zoo, once one of the worst zoos in the country – if
you can think of everything that people criticize a theme park for, and
everything they criticize a zoo for, Basildon was doing them all at the same
time. They famously used to sell animals under the counter but the place was a depressing
unkempt shithole without that, if you went there at night you’d’ve had a
perfect level for a survival horror game - though I seem to remember it was
where I first saw a Zeedonk. I only went 3 or so times before it was left to
rot, I think I heard someone was building/had built houses on it? I dunno, I
avoid Basildon at all costs.
It had this shitty, tiny
little giftshop in this shitty, tiny little free-standing building that could
very easily have been confused with the toilet block had it not been filled
with rubber elephants and inflatable gibbons (all zoos stocked inflatable animals
when I was small, now so few of them do, why is this? Surely inflatable monkeys
can’t have fallen out of favour with children, how could such a thing be
possible?) and that’s where my old one of these came from, a shitty building in
miserable hole for exotic animals and families alike. I had forgotten most of
this before rebuying the elephant, which I can’t believe I ever let it go; It
used to be a little cute sidekick for the bigger toys! It would be like
euthanising Snarf, ok bad example, like euthanising Orko, ok still a
bad example, um… like euthanising R2-D2, and who would do that? I’m glad I have
one again, and doubly glad that I didn’t have to go Basildon Zoo to get it.
Chinasaurus Rex!
25p (32¢)
I found another of my
favourite of the original Chinasaurs, so you’re damn right I’m gonna take a
nice picture of him and post it online somewhere. This one just expresses everything
I like about the Chinasaurs, he’s a random lizard monsters who is loveably
goofy presented to children as a real dinosaur AND he loves hugs!
Fairly Priced Toys!
£4 ($5.10) for both
God it bugs me when people
charge a fair price for something, the nice bastards! See if they want too much
for something and I can’t haggle them down, that’s just fine, I’ll throw it
back on their table, act all righteous and indignant and I don’t have any
regrets because it was overpriced and so fuck ‘em and fuck it. And obviously I
don’t mind when people undercharge for things because I get it cheap, but when
they want a fair price, and know it’s a fair price, but it’s a price that’s a
little expensive (or very expensive) by bootsale standards, god damn them all
to hell. Because I can’t fault them. I put back two different vintage E.T. toys
this week, both were asking for a totally fair price for them but those prices
were £20 and £15, cheap by convention or eBay standards but just too expensive
for a bootsale where I don’t have a lot of money on me for the whole thing. I’m
not rude to them, in fact I go out of my way to be nice to them because they’re
doing nothing wrong but dammit it’s annoying, because I don’t end up with E.T.
toys and I don’t have the moral high ground to sit on for comfort.
It’s even worse when the
fair price is affordable. £2 for a medium Playmobil Dinosaur at a bootsale is
about right, and £2 for that werewolf, which is from Doctor Who (from the less
than stellar episode ‘Tooth and Claw’, the best thing about it is a namedrop
for Ian Dury, well the werewolf’s pretty cool too I guess) is cheap, it’s not
the most sought after or rare Who toy but it’ll still cost you about 7-8 quid
at a convention. I have no choice, I gave him his £4, knowing full well that he
had done nothing amiss but also knowing full well that £4 would go a lot
further on other stalls, damn these fair bastards and their fair prices!
What the Hell! Where Did These Come From!?!
£1 ($1.28) for both
I’m a bit obsessed with the
Thorpe Park Rangers, for my money the best theme park mascots of all time (Figment
hates me), a band of anthropomorphic park rangers led by the burly Chief Ranger
who kept Thorpe Park and the surrounding forest safe and clean by, presumably, Chief
Ranger arm wrestling anything and everything. They were well designed, full of
character, well used throughout the park and its publicity and were treated
(and merchandised) like a big brand, the Ninja Turtles or Power Rangers or something
and I’ve never forgiven that fucking cat, who was so disgusting 90’s extreme
with so little irony or self-awareness he actually looked just like Poochie:
My personal favourite of
all that merchandise was the small rubber figurines, like inflatable animals in
zoos a once omnipresent toy in tourist attractions and Disney Store-style
outlets that has seemingly become extinct (the Taz in the haul photo is one
too, from the Warner Bros Store) but WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK IS THIS? I thought
that there was only one figurine per Ranger – them in their Ranger uniforms – but
now you tell me that there were MORE?!? I found Mr Rabbit first and through excited
I assumed that it was just another old Mr Rabbit toy from when Mr Rabbit being
the park’s mascot by his lonesome and that’s all the park had to merchandise (I
have the regular Mr Rabbit figurine from that era) but then there’s that Chief Ranger,
which made me VERY excited (I’m so saaaad!) and I can only assume that at some
point Thorpe Park put out a wave of Rangers figurines with them in fancy dress,
that means more Thorpe Park Ranger figurines and I am delighted. Aren’t you so
glad I told you about this? well the six Thorpe Park fans my age are, ok? And now
they know to look out for another set of Ranger figurines, this has actually
been the most useful Bootsale Report for ages.
Scraping the Bottle of the Barrel!
50p (64¢) for the lot
And judging by the
condition they were in, that barrel was an oil drum, a used oil drum, that someone
had shat in.
Remember I said I had to
really dig to find something worth buying early on? I did. Despite the huge
amount of extra stalls few had anything remotely exciting, by the point of me
buying these I think I’d bought the Anglia money box and the Lion Annual (which
is damn good – a strip AND a text story each for Robot Archie, Spellbinder and
Adam Eterno, plus an awesome Spider strip too). I usually ignore the ‘toot’
stalls, they’re usually about two to three stalls long, made up of piles or cardboard
boxes full of dirty, random, broken crap all unloaded from a dirty, random, broken
van, but I hadn’t found anything so I was looking everywhere AND I can spot a
Monster in My Pocket from across the O2 so in I went. It was fucking
filthy, the toys were in a little tangled pile, not even on the tarp but just
dumped into some long grass, covered in strange black shit that seems to
naturally form on really dirty second-hand things and Miles Mayhem had something
stuck to his leg that was either a wet leaf or really old bubblegum, gag. But with
some hot water, some Fairy Liquid, a miracle sponge and zero amounts of shame everything
ended up with nice, clean, vintage toys from lines I really like but rarely get
to buy from and a random robot with Megatron’s head.
You might be thinking ‘was
it worth all that, going through that pile of dirty shit, risking tetanus,
cleaning for ages, looking like a bin diving saddo then looking like a saddo
who cleans his old toys that carefully, just to get a small amount of small
toys that most people wouldn’t recognise or remember?’ and to that I reply ‘when
was the last time you paid under 10p for a M.A.S.K. figure?’
The pink thing is the most
noteworthy from a ‘squeezing paragraphs out of bootsale buys’ point-of-view, that’s
Arnold the Elephant from the show Charlie Chalk, a kids show that
occupies a very strange place in my personal history as all through my
childhood my mum INSISTED that I loved it despite the fact that a) I didn’t and
b) I’d never done or said anything to imply I did, she did this with Penguin
bars too, I fucking hate Penguin bars. The show was about a bumbling clown twatting
about on a tropical island that as called Merrytwit with a
duck-man, a pink elephant, the most blatant lesbian couple in children’s television
and Litterbug, who was the best thing in the show:
Arnold was pretty neat
though, he was a clumsy, loveable chap who was bright pink and an elephant, sort
of like Goofy mixed with Cedric Sneer and a posh gay guy. I honestly have no
idea why mum decided that THIS was a show I adored, I only had a couple of episodes
on video, on those children’s TV videos that were a dumping ground for Cosgrove
Hall shows and Welsh shit, and they had Superted on ‘em! That is a teddy bear
who is straight-up Shazam, and yet mum convinced herself it was Not-Charlie
Chaplin I liked. Maybe I was watching the Litterbug episode.
I am genuinely going to
watch the Litterbug episode of Charlie Chalk on the internet now, so see ya,
thanks for readi… I really can’t believe Charlie Chalk was made by the same
person who did Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings, The Wombles, The Magic Roundabout,
The Herbs and fucking Paddington! All that great stuff, all the
success of Postman Pat, and Ivor Wood ended up on Merrytwit. A terrible and
baffling fate, still it could have been worse, he could have ended up working
at Basildon Zoo (or just in Basildon).
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