Filling our home with treasures (or is it tat?)
The joy of shopping for Brocante or shopping for broken old rubbish - your decide?
This is a timely post as in about two weeks time I am doing my very first market stall. I will be unleashing my inner Cindy Beale/Lovejoy and setting up at the Quirky Dovetail Market in Balham on June 12 should you be passing! It is in Balham Library and I am essentially selling off my excess french brocante or rather some of the stuff I detail in this blog post from 2013 (the fish plates WILL be in Balham).
One of the great joys of having a home in France is the ability to buy stuff and not worry about getting it home in your hand luggage. In the years we have had our house we have accumulated a LOT of things. I often wonder if we were to sell our french home what on earth would we do with all the furniture and pointless glasswear we have there? Well selling some of it in Balham is a start I suppose….
But of course there are many things in the house that I could never sell as their worth goes far beyond the five euros I probably paid for it. Or the one euro one of my kids paid for it as I discuss in the blog post below. We have had so many happy times as a family driving around the french countryside on a Sunday morning in search of Vide Greniers - literally translated as Empty Attic but essentially brocante markets or glorified car boot sales. And in reality the actual things we buy is not the point - the action of buying them was really the fun. Invariably followed up by a Sunday lunch of steak frites somewhere and then home to rifle through the treasures we have all found that morning. Sadly these days the allure of a vintage Mastermind game or some one centime Pokemon cards doesn’t have quite the allure it once did - I think Seb is happy to accompany us on Sunday morning trips just for tradition’s sake. I like to think so.
La Vida Vide - first published in 2013
My husband loves old stuff. I hope this will be a good thing when I am in my 80s. He will have his very own living, breathing ‘relic’. What he really loves, is broken, old, stuff. When we first met, he lived in a wooden house with a porch in west Hollywood. You could sit on the veranda like a 1950s American prom girl waiting for her date. He’d rented the house when it was falling down and no one else would touch it. And then, he’d fixed it up. As a result, while most of our friends lived in small apartments in West Hollywood or Venice Beach, Peter had an enormous house just off Sunset Blvd. It was the perfect place for us all to throw parties and he could listen to his Motörhead vinyl so loudly that once, some nearby dwelling Hells Angels came by to ask him to turn it down.
And so buying a house in France is Peter’s dream. And one of the best things about trying to furnish this house are our weekly visits to vide greniers. Like car boot sales only much much better as each one holds the prospect of hidden gems. Held on Sunday mornings and publicised in the local areas as if Justin Beiber was playing a one off gig - with posters EVERYWHERE in the weeks beforehand. Or you can visit http://www.vide-greniers.org to find out where they will be held each weekend. And there are often several in each area - we’ve been known to do three in a day.
And our kids LOVE them. Maybe in the way some boys inherit their father’s sporting prowess or love of a particular football team, Peters legacy to his sons will be a love of broken, old tat.
Each Sunday we give them five euros each and some basic French ( enough to bargain someone down for old Pokemon cards – far more useful than A-level French right?) and send them off. Meanwhile, Peter and I trawl these Aladdin’s caves of wonder hoping to find stuff to fill our home that isn’t from Ikea!
We’ve introduced all our friends who come and stay to the joy of the vide grenier (some more impressed than others – my friend Lorraine remains thrilled with her olive server complete with toothpick holder shaped like lily pad, her husband James, less thrilled with the fourteen pony club trophies their kids bought)
We have over the years bought everything from our dining chairs to tennis racquets. Plates shaped like fish (never used) to fire irons to hold our logs (used every day). Vintage finds or other people’s rubbish? Tat or treasure? To us, always the latter.