Livin' Middle England

[slowfox]

Just back from manning the tombola stall (with ex) at the boy's school fair. The spoils on offer were, in general, unwanted Christmas presents and other tack of momunmentally undesirable attributes: my unease at asking people to cough up 20p per ticket (special offer: buy 5 for £1!) was assuaged somewhat by the knowledge that the proceeds were going to the school. Nonetheless, I was glad when the table was cleared, and the last bottle of bubble bath had been handed over to its delighted owner.

In addition to the tombola, the school field was given over to a car boot sale. Car boots are, apparently, something of a lifestyle for, shall we say a, uh, certain demographic in this green and pleasant land, and there's something profoundly dispiriting about trudging around a school field on an overcast Sunday, looking at outgrown toys/aged VHS tapes/utter junk whilst, in turn, being watched by the (impossibly optimistic) sellers, all of whom managed to effortlessly confirm any and all of the lazily convenient stereotypes that I had assumed would be appropriate.

Comments

[linaelyn]

This was a fascinating entry. While the sense was clear-enough from context above, I still felt compelled to look up the Wiki for the descriptions of "tombola stall" and "car boot sale." My locale has "charity raffles" and "flea markets" which are similar in nature, respectively. In the USA, raffles are illegal unless the proceeds are donated to a charitable, not-for-profit organization.

More Tea, Vicar?

[slowfox]

There is something quintessentially English about the Village Fete - stainless steel urns of boiled water to make the tea, cupcakes and scones (English scones, wars of the pronounciation of which abound), the sound of leather on willow^*...

Raffles/tombolas seem to be a charity thing over here too. Not that that makes me wholly comfortable with them, still: the stall next to us was a 'Bottle Stall', which was essentially a tombola, but one where all the (unwanted) prizes were bottles. What disturbed me about this was that most of the bottles were alcohol (which is the attraction, nay, verily the point indeed, of such a stall), and yet this was a school fete.




* this is a reference to cricket, and not, lamentably, any kind of BDSM fantasy on my part involving the perpetually delectable Allyson Hannigan Denisov