30 April

I love the word Jumble. It makes me think of the dog in the ‘Just William’ books, of huge piles of clothes, of a rush of thoughts all vying to tumble out of our mouths as speech. It’s such an onomatopoeic word. I do love a good jumble sale too, but I’m not so keen on manning a stall, which is what I found myself doing on Saturday. I’d grudgingly agreed to help out (it was run by the school PTA, I somehow managed to end up being both on the committee and a parent governor, very surprising since I’m usually so adept at lurking in the background when jobs are handed out). Anyway I turned up with a bad grace (I know, I know, but it’s only a few weeks since the Easter Fair, and it’s always the same old crowd helping out), and was stuck there for the best part of the day. We were due to open at 2.00, and by 1.00 a crowd was milling at the gates. By 1.50 there was a long queue snaking down the lane. There was a stampede when the gate opened; a jostle of bulky canvas bags, a heaving of flesh and a stretching of seams as people lunged towards the tables. I’ve never seen anything like it. We are a tiny village and this was just a few stalls. I know shopping rage is very 2007, but it’s more the kind of thing you associate with Kate Moss’s collection hitting Topshop, or Stella McCartney at Hennes. I didn’t really think we had quite the same cachet, but it seems I was wrong. I’d positioned myself on books, a cunning ruse, I’d thought, since I hadn’t expected it to be terribly busy and had envisaged a peaceful afternoon browsing and reading. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Towards the end of the afternoon, my hair sticking to my face, my eyes hollow, my throat hoarse, I asked one lady who had bought 36 (!) paperbacks, why she had been so desperate to get here. “There’s money in this village”, she confided. “Word gets out”. There is? News to me. Not round my gaffe, I felt like telling her, and frankly I couldn’t see much evidence around me, either, among the polyester blouses and elasticated-waist trousers, the chipped mugs and grimy tea towels.

Still, everyone seemed satisfied by the end of the day, some clearly thrilled with their new grimy tea-towels and sweat-stained shirts (sorry, but they were), and the school is now richer by several hundred pounds, so who’s complaining? Only me, of course. I did get a good haul in myself – 8 books, some toys for the children and a pretty hand-made wooden photo frame with painted roses, all for about £5.00, and I like a bargain as much as the next person - but I was yet again reminded of why customer service really isn’t my forte. The grim determination of some of the jumble Queens was astonishing. R, a connoisseur of car-boot sales, had warned me in advance, but I still wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of people who would haggle over an item marked as 10p. Some were lovely and polite, others rude and surly, tipping things onto the floor in their haste. Annoyance was catching in my throat after about ten minutes; it was seeping from my every pore by the end. I staggered out, my feet screaming to be released from their shoe prisons, to be confronted by an argument in front of the school. All of the left-over clothes and linens were being stored in the school, to be collected by a charity. We were still left with several boxes of toys and books, however, and since everyone was exhausted and clearly keen to get home, no-one was volunteering to take them to a charity shop or store them in their sheds. One of the Dads turned up; the sort of man who dresses head-to-toe in camouflage gear each day, and has a burning desire to have the biggest of everything - jeep, wood-pile, tool-kit – (clearly insecure about something, I wonder what?!) and he offered to take all the books and burn them. His eyes filled with a revolutionary zeal as he told us how he could build the biggest bonfire. Everyone else recoiled at the horrible idea of books being burned, and in the end there was a tussle between several of us trying to load up the books, and the burning zealot Dad. Luckily, we won, but the boot of my car is now several boxes heavier.

Sunday was much more relaxing, filled as it was by repetitive, back-breaking but soothing tasks in the garden. I’ve never been one for over neat and manicured gardens, but that slightly wild, blowsy look that I aim for is hard to get just right. If you’re not careful it slides very quickly into seedy and weedy, even in April. Couch grass, nettles and dandelions are everywhere; on a nicer note, welsh poppies and forget-me nots have self-seeded all over the place. Early roses are breaking out, alongside the hellebores which are only just starting to fade. The tulips and the cherry blossom have been ravaged by the wind, but I have a pot azalea that is showing an early flourish, and the lavender is starting to flower. It’ll be autumn by June, at this rate.