pumpkinstrokemarrow

To borrow Louis XVI's account of the day's hunt in the Imperial & Royal Hunt Leger on the day, I seem to recall, of the storming of the Bastille. That is to say that he had been out hunting as usual but came back with an empty bag, so the account was just the one word.

In my case, the rien refers to my not buying anything at today's car booter at Hook Road Arena (see http://www.hookcarbootsale.com/). A rather quiet affair compared with the last one I attended, with quite a high standard of goods on offer, but nothing that I actually bought. For a change I went round starting at the far end, working back towards the beginning, giving one a rather different take, given that the sellers at the beginning are the ones that get up at the crack of dawn and have rather a different tone from the more relaxed and amateurish sellers who like a decent breakfast before kicking off.

So I might have paid £10 for a facsimile edition of a set of maps of Surrey originally made in 1739 - but the facsimile was a bit old and tatty and the maps themselves were not very pretty. Not a good year for making maps. I might have paid £2.50 for a 1,500 piece jigsaw which appeared to be Nelson's 'Victory' in full dress for some kind of water gala - but 1,500 pieces was too much of a challenge, particularly since the table in the jigsaurium in nowhere near big enough for a jigsaw of that size. I nearly asked the price of an oriental copper or brass tray, circular and about 10 inches in  diameter, incised with a rather engaging pattern - but we have quite enough lower grade ornaments of that sort already. We are supposed to be slimming them down to reduce the dusting load. And then there were some very good value oranges at 8 for £1 - but I had only the day before stocked up at Costcutter and more than double the price, which to be fair to Costcutter is still very reasonable. And so it went on; the first car booter that I can remember at which I went no further than the 50p entrance money. Not even a lady in full shador to liven up the proceedings. But there were some glossy women's magazines - 'Elle', 'Marie Claire' or something like that - from somewhere eastern to judge by the script in which it was printed, which led me to wonder how Muslims stood on such magazines with all those pictures of ladies advertising make up and clothes. With some of the ladies not wearing too many of these last. Are ladies in Saudi Arabia allowed such things in the privacy of their own homes?

Exited by the path which runs down the no-man's land between one older bog standard estate and one new build bog standard estate, this last taking over most of the grounds of what used to be an asylum. I am pleased to say that they have left at least some of the fine specimen trees planted by some tree loving asylum superintendent. No-man's land not too salubrious, probably not a place for a dark night, with the remains of no less than three fences running down the asylum side (see above, the middle fence being hard to pick out in this snap. New build to the left). The inhabitants of the new build, quite apart from not being too impressed by this no-mans land, are probably even less impressed that a road has now been punched through it, connecting the old and new estates. Will the drug fuelled fiends from the old be spilling over into the new?

Back with the report into the Hillborough disaster, I have now got to page 20 of 395. The terms of reference of the panel are rather odd, being focused on the orderly placing of every last bit of documentation about the disaster and its aftermath in the public domain, with help, as appropriate, from the Keeper of Public Records. This oddness is presumably routed in the circumstances in which the panel was empanelled. It also seems that the disaster was a compound of ignorance (of the possibilities for disaster inherent in this particular football match in this particular stadium, despite various warnings and incidents over the years) and organisational failure (break down even) in the police and ambulance services and in the football club concerned; not the fault of any particular individual (although in the olden days heads of services were expected to take responsibility for what happened on their watch). All this was known before the panel started its work, so I can only suppose a lot of the rest of the report is about the various efforts made by interested parties to pass the buck and to cover their tracks. As I said yesterday, all very sad that the disaster of the disaster itself has been compounded by nonsense of this sort.