Peter Ross: Car-boot sales are big business in hard times

Every Sunday without fail, the 63-year-old plasterer, out of work at present, gets up early – often in darkness – and drives from Drumchapel to Blochairn, a district in the north-east of Glasgow, to attend Scotland’s largest car-boot sale.

He is not alone. The sale attracts around 400 traders and anything up to 20,000 punters keen on a bargain. More specifically, George is usually in the company of his fiancée Cathie and their pal Marina. Cathie, when I meet her, has just bought some glue – for carpet tiles, she insists, not for sniffing. Marina has her eyes on a nice scarf which she hopes to secure for a pound.

Marina was in the huff through the week, George explains, because he and Cathie went to the car-boot sale at Polmadie and she couldn’t make it along. “If she doesn’t get to the car boot with us, she gets depressed. She gets withdrawal symptoms.” says George.

George, so far today, has bought a chip-pan and a thick tartan shawl, the latter item which he and Cathie hope to sell at a significant profit on their forthcoming holiday in Ukraine. Wearing a swish cravat, George looks a bit of a dandy, I think. “You can dress yourself to the nineties in here for next to nothing. Designer stuff, too.” He has a wardrobe full of car-boot clothes he has never had a chance to wear. “I hardly ever go up the toon now,” he says. “I’d be no weel if I spent £20 on a shirt.”

He buys so much at the car-boot sale that he has to bring a van. And he bought the van here too.

The Blochairn car-boot sale has been running for almost 20 years, a weekly ritual within the city. It is run by the council, under the umbrella of City Markets Glasgow. It’s some place. Massive. It takes place on the site of the fruit and veg wholesale market which runs through the week. There are pre-booked pitches available in the market halls, many of which are used by professional traders, and mention must be made at this point of the fish man, his stand resplendent with lion rampant and saltire, who goes by the splendid name of Watty Boak.

Casual pitches outside and in can be secured by those willing to turn up early and queue, and these tend to be used by those clearing out cupboards and lofts, keen to make a bob or two. A casual pitch outside costs £15 for a car, £18 for a van; inside is slightly dearer. Demand is high. Would-be traders are queuing, sometimes, from 8pm on the Saturday evening. It is possible to get on the site by midnight and, though the sale does not begin officially until 6am, it is common for informal trading to begin hours earlier, bargain-hunters examining merchandise by the light of miners’ helmets while sellers wrestle trestles out of their boots.

At 6.30am, the market is already busy. It’s a beautiful morning but very cold, a pale, golden light like chilled champagne. Many traders are keeping warm in the traditional Scottish way with a tartan rug and 20 fags. Comments on the weather vary from the interrogative (“Cauld, intit?”) to the declarative (“It’s f***ing Baltic!”). The air is clear and free of fog, but nevertheless certain traders are already hawking their wares – “Therr three perra knickers furra pound! Gaun furra thong!” – in voices which could, if employed by the coastguard, warn shipping away from the Clyde coast.

You see some sights at the car-boot sale: a lanky goth, all cheekbones and piercings, clutching a giant Igglepiggle doll, the exact same shade of blue as his nail polish; a toddler pushing an old petrol mower through the crowds; a Falstaffian Hell’s Angel type, belly jutting through his leather jacket, long grey beard half-obscuring his gold Harley-Davidson necklace, a skull and crossbones bandana keeping off the cold.

This last is Frank Starrs, 68 in years, in height about five feet and change, who comes to Blochairn from 5.30am every Sunday “for a wee nosy aboot”. He is a taxi driver and used to haggling, which comes in handy here. Often, he’s looking for bits for his bike, but when I bump into him he is rifling through packets of biscuits – “dookers for tea” – using hands so bright with golden rings it is a wonder he does not spend his days being pecked by magpies. Frank’s wife says he buys a load of rubbish, but he wouldn’t stop coming here for the world. It’s his routine. Later, this car-boot Sisyphus laden with bling and Bourbons will go to Polmadie and then on to the sale at Lanark.

Car-boot sales are booming. The economic crash is to their advantage. People who can’t afford to shop on the high street, or who consider paying full retail price a mug’s game, are drawn here by free entry and the prospect of a bargain. Shopkeepers who can no longer afford to pay rent on their shops set up stalls instead. But it is far from the case that everyone who comes here is poor – some pay for goods with bulging wallets, but there are also those who keep their eyes on the ground, scanning for dropped coins.

It is reckoned that Britons spend £2.5 million a year at car-boot sales, which is a lot of money when one considers that much of it will have been doled out a pound or fifty pence at a time. There are thousands of sales across the UK, transforming car parks and red blaze football pitches into islands of possibility in which treasure may be found buried deep beneath a pile of scratched Glen Daly LPs.

Well, so goes the secret hope in everyone’s heart. The truth is that genuine precious antiques and undiscovered Caravaggios seem pretty thin on the ground at Blochairn. A ratty fox-fur is more likely. Scuffed brogues, old Vogues; strimmers, zimmers; greasy throttles, ships in bottles. You can buy it all here – furniture, electronics, great rusting lengths of chain. I would say everything but the kitchen sink, but there’s a few of those as well. On one occasion a man in a van tried to set up an ersatz sex shop, but the market officials chased him. He was attempting to flog – if that is the word – a blow-up doll for £459. “At a car-boot!” folk say, more offended by the indecency of the price than the object itself.

Second-hand clothes are big at Blochairn. “They’re ma wife’s troosers, but she left me,” an apple-cheeked trader tells a middle-aged woman. “Check the pockets, there might be money in them.” The woman tries on a hat. “Aye, that looks nice on you,” the trader says. “The wife husnae worn that since she got rid of her nits.”

Some of these guys have the patter. Big Gerry is selling boxes of crisps and sweets out of the back of a van. “It’s all for charity,” he barks. “William Hill, Coral, Ladbrokes.”

There are traders known as spielers whose sales technique is more than merely functional, reaching instead the level of street poetry. Take, for example, Stevie Broon’s meat wagon – a butcher-auctioneer operating from a trailer with a big hatch in the side. “Look at the scales, guys, buy with your eyes,” the butcher tells the crowd. “That’s the equivalent of £65 of gammon there and I’m doing it for £20. Gammon, gammon, gammon. Lovely jubbly. Twenty quid the lot.”

He spots a customer, an enormously fat man with a walking stick. “You want chicken legs?” the butcher asks. “Chicken wings?”

The man puts a hand to his chest and scoops up a moob. “Naw,” he says. “Chicken tits.”

By about half ten, the car-boot sale is peaking. It is due to finish at three, but by then most people have drifted away to the Barras and elsewhere. The air smells of chips and curry sauce. A septuagenarian on a mobility scooter has somehow crammed a big spare wheel between his knees and the steering column. Young Nigerians lift used tellies into the back of a flat-bed trucks. A man in a bunnet consults a 1958 map of Weston-Super-Mare.

Sitting with a cuppa, two putters sticking out of her red shopper, 56-year-old Mary Chambers from Castlemilk explains that she comes here every Sunday despite bad knees and a walk-in press with no remaining room in which to walk. “I met that Anita Manning here once,” she says. “I had just rubbed Ralgex on my knees before we shook hands. She must have wondered what the smell was.”

The attraction of the car-boot sale, according to Mary, is anticipation. You never know what you are going to find. Then there is the pleasure of haggling, far from beloved by all sellers but esteemed by regular customers as an important part of car-boot culture.

“Much is this jaiket?” a punter asks.

“A fiver,” says the trader.

The punter screws up his face. “Can you no come doon a bit?”

The trader squats on his hunkers. “Still a fiver,” he says.

Peter Ross: Car-boot sales are big business in hard times – and the banter is truly priceless