Monday 25th May

Today (yesterday) was the Vide Grenier in Eymet.  Vide Grenier literally means empty your attic and it is a fantastic town-wide car boot sale.  Each small town seems to have one a year, but Eymet is renowned as one of the best.  There are a few traders but an awful lot of ordinary people just selling old stuff they have had in their homes for a long time.  Glasses, vases, cups and saucers, old pots and pans, clocks and ornaments, chairs and bits of furniture, plants, toys, books and paintings.  And it went on and on, there must have been about two hundred stalls, all along the Boulevard National and up by the old Station and all around the East side of the Boulevard.  But unlike our car-boots there was a lot of very good quality stuff. The Antiques Road-Trip would have had a field day.  Our house is already full of junk but we could have easily filled it twice over again.

I opened the café just before nine, and even though the vide grenier was the other side of town many people parked their cars in the square and walked up our street stopping for a coffee on the way.  By lunchtime I had sold out of scones and most of our cakes and we had been busier than market day.  We closed at one-thirty but could have been packed all afternoon, but I was tired by then and we have never just been interested in making money. Besides we had a ‘vernissage’ that evening; Andy Barber’s superb photos of Trees and Shopfronts which look fantastic. Another successful soiree and then a late dinner at the Creperie.