Blank

My mind is.

As Yoda might say.

I feel like a duck: there is a lot going on beneath the surface, but I can't think of anything to write. Part of the problem, to which I have alluded before, is that I am an excessively private sort, and not willing to 'let it all hang out' on a my blog. Which I suppose contributes not a little to the extreme dullness of this place. And begs the question - why blog?

In some ways, on the plus side, this has been a tremendous week. The market last Thursday was absolutely storming: one of those days when I could have sold coal to a Geordie in the height of summer. Its only the third time that my daily take has exceeded £500. If one believes the old lags this would have been an average to low average figure just a few years ago. But I've given up believing the old lags, delightful folk though they are.

If you listen to them you would believe, for example, that August is always a crap month but September is usually the best. Now it turns out that 'September is always awful, but November is usually the best month'. It's been like this since February; as each month arrives the promise of riches moves a month or two further away.

Quite frankly, I think there is no knowing what the great British public wants or when it wants it. All I do know is that they seem to act in a majority way. For example if it is the turn of pictures then several people will buy pictures, but then nothing for weeks, until suddenly several people will buy pictures again. Last Thursday it was furniture. Furniture, mind, that I had been offering for a few weeks, and bang!, it all went.

Anyway, I digress. The joy of this week is that I made enough so that for only the second time since trading began last September I made enough to fund my re-stocking auction visits without having to dip into the meagre savings I have to show for a lifetime of fecklessness. To me that's quite a significant advance. Not the meagre savings, no, the fact that this week has self-financed, and even left me with a little profit: more than I have made in any on day on the market since April.

A step forward. Perhaps. I feel it won't last. But in such small increments do we proceed forward. Inch by inch (and there's a snub to Brussels if ever there was one: why, I bet they are quaking in their boots at the realisation that they can never metrificate us). I must say, I enjoy the feeling of wandering a round with a wallet full of cash, even if does make me nervous: two my steps have been robbed in Oxford in the last month. The boy one lost his whole wallet and £30 which was all he had in the world; the girl one lost her handbag contents including a nice digi camera, wallet, keys etc, more than £250 quids worth. Students, eh? Where do they get the money from?

In my own home life, the other boy step tried to hit me* (failed, thankfully) and now I seem somehow to be the villain. Mothers and sons. What a tangled web that is. And now the family therapist to whom the step has been ushered by the authorities is a "fucking interfering cow".

None so blind ..... etc (sigh).

*If anyone has constructive advice to offer, I'm all ears. Oh, and Ta






.