Christmas Fairs

I do like a good rummage, and yesterday Madame and I decided to go into town to discover the delights of fairs, various. The Quality Craft Fair held in a splendid gallery is well worth  a visit even if its just for the coffee that they serve in the gallery café, no Frothy Fucciato here. The craft was as described with jewellery makers, potters, printers and makers of decorative textiles. But unfortunately no blacksmiths, furniture makers, glass blowers or cobblers. This fair does attract  an interesting clientele, quite a number of the browsers were moderately affluent, well scrubbed types, with good clothes, thin verging on the anorexic and with massive buggies for the one or two puppies. They were generally well behaved.

Moving on to the Vintage Fair near by, a far more jolly set up with allsorts of stuff that I grew up with. So perhaps I need to think of myself as vintage. Lots of chintz and frill combined with the Oxo tins, cake stands, Robin starch boxes and the teak G Plan coffee table, made me feel quite nostalgic.
The customers seemed much older and more eccentric than those at the craft fair but then perhaps that is the nature of vintage, green Homburg and a peach and green check suite.

We decided to take a detour on the way back home and visit the Christmas Wonderland and Market which is situated in the middle of the town. Bad mistake! What seemed like thousands of people all going nowhere, a sea of serious faces trying to do there Crimbo (or should that be cram-bo) shopping and not getting very far. Consequently we did not stop long and when the opportunity arose we managed to escape via a gap in the German sausage queue adjacent to the people to see Santa skate the path to grotto land.