Are you sitting comfortably?
One of France's main hobbies is its equivalent of car boot sales. It's consistently listed in the top two or three activities and hundreds of thousands of French spend their weekends trawling round sales in different villages.
In fact, each départment publishes a book every year listing which village is hosting a sale, when it's on and how many stalls were there the previous year. Most villages devote one Saturday or Sunday a year, with the whole village becoming a market place. Traffic is diverted and a field becomes a temporary car park. Cormolain's weekend is usually the one closest to Bastille day, 14th July, reflecting the prominent position the village once held in the local area.
Just in case you can't get enough of hunting for bargains every weekend, there are also hundreds of permanent ones. These can be a brocante where the owners buy everything and then sell them for a profit, or they could be a dépot vente where everything for sale has been left there by someone and the owners charge a commission on each sale. You can sometimes haggle at a brocante but there's no point at a dépot because the seller isn't there to do a deal.
In April we spent a week decorating and gardening and - oh joy - visiting as many brocantes as we were able to in the time allowed. They open at odd times on different days, and no two seem to have the same opening times, so it's a bit hit and miss.
On one day we managed to find five that were open when we pulled up at their gate. Some of us revel in wandering around and unearthing bargains, while there are others who prefer to sit in the car after a cursory glance around has proven yet again that there are no bargain guitars or proper, interesting gadgets and whatnot to look at. Worse still, we had our rather large trailer with us, so when not one, but two sofa beds came to light, a deal could be done with no second thoughts.
The bright spot of our visit was that the sitting room (pictured above) looks far more comfortable now we have managed to fill the huge empty spaces with a bit more furniture, including one of the two sofa beds. The study too (pictured left), is looking more homely and is a lot more comfortable to use. With the new windows in both room (see March's news), both rooms are easier to heat when it's cold and windy outside.
The trailer's back in the UK now, my wallet is pleased to hear.
