Sundays - car boot sales and just watching the world go by.

Sundays- car boot sales and just watching the world go by.

Sundays were meant for doing nothing at all. Sundays were the days of rest, reflection, religion, playing football with your mates, fishing by a lazy river bank, smelling the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding wafting from your kitchen, for putting the world to rights in your local pub, washing the car, smothering it with water and shampoo and then trying hard to remember where you put the car keys, amusingly realising that they were next to the phone in your hall and then popping into the garden centre or furniture store before looking for tins of paint because the living room had to be done.

There was a time of course when every single shop apart, from your newsagents, was firmly shut and completely off limits. This of course was deeply frustrating because if you'd run out of jam, bread and butter or fruits and vegetables the chances were that you'd have to wait until Sainsbury's opened on Monday morning before splashing out on your shopping necessities.

 You could still invest in the News of the World, Sunday People, the Observer and the Sunday Times because they were always widely available newspapers and besides we do love to find out the salacious gossip about our D- List celebrities. We spot them deliberately embarrassing themselves in socially awkward situations, circumstances that are both compromising and faintly ludicrous. We see them dropping out of nightclubs, staggering and stumbling into the early morning Sunday air, faces pinched and twisted in a drunken stupor, a state of wild eyed intoxication that somehow invites comment.

Years and years ago Sundays were all about Family Favourites with Cliff Michelmore and Jean Challis glowing radiantly from our transistor radios - or in the case of my parents- a wonderful turquoise coloured radio dripping with fondly ancient memories. Family Favourites was unashamedly nostalgic re-uniting as it did British families with sons and daughters in the armed forces and playing their favourite records by Slim Whitman, Jim Reeves, the Everly Brothers and of course the Glen Miller Band because this was the central theme of BBC Radio 2 on a Sunday morning. Nothing but those lovely old songs that brought the whole of Britain, Germany and Cyprus together on behalf of Family Favourites.

This morning though my wife and daughter decided to do a car boot sale in a local school. Now car boot sales have been around for quite some time and across the nation's parks, schools and recreation grounds the car boot sale can be both financially successful and lucrative. It is sadly dependent on the moods and whims of the great British public because you can never be sure whether your stock of goodies can be so visually attractive that by the end of the day you'll be laughing all the way to the bank. But the public are great and you can always rely on them.

For most car boot sale enthusiasts, the sheer thrill of being out in the open air and the invigorating air of a Sunday market can generate the most enormous satisfaction. If a healthy profit can be made on all of your old 78 records or those thoroughly washed jeans that you used to wear during the 1960s and 70s then maybe this is the most perfect bonus. But when the 20 quid notes and pound coins are counted most of us are tempted to sigh with a kind of relief born of genuine perseverance and pride in the moment.

This morning though a whole school playground was completely overtaken by cars with open boots, tables groaning with old ornaments, bric a brac, jewellery, rails of clothing neatly attached to loyal hangers, books, records and pretty items, things that seemed to be spilling out onto the ground happily and indiscriminately. There were, quite possibly, ageing kettles that had brewed thousands of cups of tea in its lifetime, clocks that had probably stopped working on VE Day and a mass of candlesticks and dolls. Then there were the magazines from the 1940s and 50s, decades old photo frames and valuable family heirlooms that would probably have told a thousand stories.

Our car boot sale this morning yielded a reasonable amount of money. We sold some of the stock we'd already bought at auction and the general conclusion was that the day had been positively profitable rather than a total disaster. A tidy sum had been accumulated and we all packed up after a moderately prosperous morning and early afternoon. Britain does like to partake in the kind of activities that are simply designed to make us feel very good about ourselves. Our car boot sale venture had been reflected and replicated by millions of people across Britain.

And so it was our day of pleasant selling, bargaining, haggling and bartering had occupied a rewarding spot on a late August Sunday morning. It had been far from being a spectacularly wealthy day but we'd enjoyed the weather, chatted to our fellow stall holders and generally had a good time. Sometimes the most innocent of pastimes can be just the tonic on the most ordinary of Sundays. Still there are some of us who can look back to Sunday lunchtimes when Family Favourites were top of our hit parade and cheerful Charlie Chester entertained us at tea time. And we'd still have time for a car boot sale.