Car Boot Sale, Blarney,. Bank Holiday Monday

Car Boot Sale Blarney, Bank Holiday Monday, the GAA pitch, I had walked the line the night before, from 2.30 onwards into the a.m. so was in no fit state, I could only look for books, or maybe plates and glasses. The complete works of Henry Williamson, for example. I should have bought Tarka the Otter, and The Beautiful Years, I loved them when I was twelve or thirteen. Henry Williamson's daughter cut my hair around then. There were beautiful years if you were this deep in the countryside. There was more than one copy of Akenfield. Plus Urn Burial by Sir Thomas Browne. Which house clearance did this come from, I wondered. Who were these readers?  These owners? I was in no fit state to ask.

I bought Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne, a 1970s Penguin edited by Richard Mabey; as you turn the pages there's a strong smell of mothballs. And a Mason's blue Regency dinner plate. Pete bought a cement White Rabbit in a red and black waistcoat, for his next performance. A girl with false eyelashes held a ruched pale blue satin against her thin body. It's a bit long, she said. It rides up when you walk, said the vendor, the vendeuse.

Gilbert White had the living of Selborne, as they used to say. His house was called The Wakes.You were left alone to be awake, to observe, if you were a parson in an English village in the mid-eighteenth century, you wrote letters full of your observations and queries. The beautiful years, indeed. Giving names to birds and listening to their song, imagining their migration. 

I met Davina the window cleaner in Ballincollig this morning, outside the Quay Coop. She had been at the Car Boot Sale. I told her about the blue silk dress riding up and she liked that. Her brother and sister-in-law had pitches there. Home made cakes and bric-à-brac, old tools, you know. 

George Bourne in Blarney

At the Easter Monday car boot sale on the GAA pitch in Blarney, I bought Change in the village by George Bourne, one of the short-lived Penguin Country Library, 1984-6. There were few books at the car boot, prodigious amounts of plastic and semi-defunct machinery, a few antiques, and a multifarious strolling public.

It's a rare charm to choose a book out of a display of maybe seven, next to ashtrays and old lace.

Change in the village was written in 1912 about a village called Bourne just outside Farnham in Surrey. George Bourne, (né George Strut, he borrowed the village for his pen name), was the son of a wheelwright and well-placed, says the blurb on the back, to recognise the changes that were necessary for the survival of the village, and identified them with a sympathetic view of the inevitable completely lacking in sentimentality. (Oh the blurbs of yesteryear).

It is moot, now, it is meet, to think about inevitable change. To think about anything being inevitable in society, which does exist, after all.

The car boot sale is inevitable, in Blarney, 2019. Discuss.

You walk up and down with maybe something in mind you're looking for, maybe not, maybe something will blow in or you'll have a grá for a 1950s saucer, or a wooden chisel. The stuff is laid out on trestles and tarpaulins, for barter, banter and ball-hopping, for well-being in the company of neighbours and strangers, locals, cousins and blow-ins, Roumanians at ease on a Fair day, Poles establishing their Blarney or Blackpool creds, their children standing alongside, hoicked into their pink flannel shorts, learning. I could see, in my mind's eye, my friend Rafferty, who liked fairs and markets, who liked his commerce tactile.

Take any two things and describe the difference between them. George Bourne's changing village (google it now and you get wall-to-wall real estate) and the car boot sale at Blarney GAA a century later.

Change in the village is a five-act drama.

THE VILLAGE
THE PRESENT TIME
THE ALTERED CIRCUMSTANCES
THE RESULTING NEEDS
THE FORWARD MOVEMENT

There are twenty-one scenes.

The Village, Self-reliance, Man and Wife, Manifold Troubles, Drink, Ways and Means, Good Temper, The Peasant System, The New Thrift, Competition, Humiliation, The Humiliated, Notice to Quit, The Initial Defect, The Opportunity, The Obstacles, The Women's Need, The Want of Book-learning, Emotional Starvation, The Children's Need, The Forward Movement.

Re-write as Blarney, 2019, the GAA pitch on Easter Monday. Not sure about The Forward Movement, but working on that.