Beware Car Boot Sales

Car boot sales are both brilliant and depressing to me.  I went to my first one last summer and was amazed at the acres and acres of stuff and tired, stressed people trying to get rid of it.  I found I could think of things I wanted and would often find them for pence even though it meant looking for a needle in a haystack.  I was usually tempted to buy things I didn't need just because they were interesting/vintage/cheap.  The result was a growing mess throughout the house and the initial symptoms of Boot Sale Disease (house with walk ways scraped between the stuff).  When I looked at all the sellers roasting under the sun, miserable and desperate to be rid of their things and some of them returning week after week, I felt it was a kind of hell.  People get seduced by material goods and eventually suffocated by them and the low end of the market - second hand sellers - is the most dangerous of all.

I think I have used things to fill up holes.  Emotional holes, spiritual holes; the emptiness left behind when my dad died.  Stuff can never fill up these holes though and sooner or later the emptiness has to be faced.