Garage sales are big in Montreal. Every year come June when the snow has thawed and people are starting to actually ‘believe’ that the winter is over there seems to be a mass clearout. For an outsider, experiencing this spring clean out is quite refreshing. It’s as though after spending six months inside with the same furniture and junk, everyone decides to throw open the doors, clean the windows and chuck anything not nailed down. Although in Montreal they don’t chuck. They sell.

Hence the garage sale.

On any weekend in June on the Plateau you will find a dozen or so flyers stapled to posts on the street announcing garage sales in the lanes. Some are good, some bad, large, tiny, clothes, furniture, books, plants – you name it, you can probably find it. It’s part of the spring ritual. First the snow stops, then the streets dry out, then people start in the gardens and then the mighty garage sales begin. All this undoubtedly in preparation for July 1st.

Now for most Canadians July 1st is Canada Day. A celebration for a nation, and a day off. For Quebecers however it is Moving Day (and a day off)… Try to book a truck to move furniture for July 1st sometime after March 1st and the removal company will just laugh at you – they’ve been booked out for months. It’s a day of moving for everyone. If you’re not moving yourself, you’ve been bribed with pizza and beer to help with so and so down the street, or some member of your family, or a distant friend – or even worse you have plans to try and get somewhere and expect to be able to park, forget it! Between moving vans and piles of furniture on the street you’ll never do it… It’s moving day, best to just help out and get it over with.

I was reminded of this charming face of Quebec cultural diversity yesterday when we went out to investigate the UK equivalent. The ‘car boot sale’. Yep, just imagine it. A car backed up, the boot (trunk) open, filled with one persons junk – available for sale to another person as treasure. Now I didn’t mention above how much I LOVE garage sales. In Montreal I would drag Michelle around the lanes from one sale to the next digging up some fabulous bargains and real “finds”. So since finding out about the UK equivalent I’ve been itching to go. Wherever we’ve been, Bamford, Inverness, even Edinburgh I’ve heard mention, or even caught a glimpse of car-boot sales, but I’ve always been diverted by Michelle. Yesterday it was time. I did it.

I did a bit of research on the net to find that the biggest UK car-boot sale was right here in Glasgow, not 3 miles from our house. Armed with important information on how to tell if the goods are stolen or not, off we went to Blochairn. Spread out in front of us was a huge parking lot filled to the brim with cars. And each car had it’s boot open and had developed a new attachment of a couple of folding tables, piled high with ‘stuff’. Lots and lots of stuff. From tools and kids bikes to clothes and furniture. You name it, you could find it if you dug about for long enough. All of this was mixed in with trailers selling fruit & veges, another selling fish and the largest most amazing of all was a caravan like trailer with crowds of people outside listening to a hawker auctioning off meat. It was amazing. He had a microphone and he was auctioning off meat.

“How about this lovely whole turkey, this beauty is over 7 kgs, how about I chuck in a couple of steaks and nice lump of mince and some chicken breasts? all of this for 20 quid… you sir, you’d like this package? ok sold to the gentleman at the front”

“and you sir, you’d like the same? ok, for you I’ll make it 25 quid and chuck in a couple of lamb cutlets – whaddya say?”

He was mesmerizing. If we weren’t trying to empty out our freezer I would have been buying meat by the bucket load yesterday. He was so good.

So that was the car-boot sale. It was very interesting. We pondered the relations between the car-boot sale and the garage sale. One was at home in an empty garage the other was out of the car that should have been in the garage – was there any relevance between the huge country that is Canada and the tiny island that is Britain? Who knows. It doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that we discovered something else new here in Glasgow, a bit more culture, a bit more diversity.

And it was a hoot!