So you think you’d like to try your hand at being a street market trader do you? We’ve all seen them. Stock piled high and happy faces. Money flowing about all over the place. Change being given from bulging wallets packed with notes. Men wearing overalls full of jingle. Everyone buying. All that easy money!
You’re not working at the present time, aka you’re unemployed, but the first sounds better, or you’ve got a job and it pays jack so you need to find other sources of income. A Saturday job would be fine only there aren’t any for the over thirties. Nobody will give you a job for a day on the weekend unless you give yourself one. Yes, that’s it, I’ll work for myself, and then you think of the men on the market and all that money you’ve seen. All that ready cash flowing in. The markets! It’s like some biblical vision and there you are in it… with all that money! Yes, that’s it you think, like you’ve had some happy revelation. I think I’ll work on the markets!
Sorry to pour a bucket of shit on your head. Don’t! I’m telling you straight. Doing you a kindness that you ignored and only remembered years later after you’d gone through a whole world of hurts. Yeah, I remember him now! The guy who wrote that post advising me against it. Nice read and all that but I wasn’t going to allow some literary jerk off tell me what to do. Not me!
Let me repeat my humble message to you good sir. If you’re thinking about working the markets, don’t! Nobody who’s ever worked markets anywhere ever got rich out of them unless they were the owners who took rent from the stallholders or traders who sold drugs on the quiet. All the rest make a fair living if they’re any good but never get rich, even if they have plenty of outlets. There’s the rent to be paid, the bribes, the cost of your gear, the endless trouble, the police, the tax man, the bitching… And that’s apart from the days when you don’t take any money, the setting up and packing away, the driving, the lousy weather, the customers with evil intent, the eight to ten hours selling each day, the dislocation of your normal nine to five life with all the consequences of less time for your family.
And what’s it all for? All that money you’ve seen is just an illusion. It isn’t there really. Gross takings before all the deductions are made. Do yourself a favour. Apply for a job as a toilet attendant. It comes without any illusions. It’s easier work with a regular income!
That said, working markets is not just a Saturday job. It’s four to six days a week, sometimes more. Like gambling you’ll wonder how much you’ll make every day. Ultimately it becomes an addiction. A whole way of life. An interesting one but not necessarily a happy one, unless that is you’ve got other ambitions. You work the markets to save money so that one day you can do something else. Something special that you’ve always wanted to do. Something you’ve set your heart on so the markets are bearable. Just a means to an end and not the be all and end all of life. It’s that special thing that you keep in your head through the drudge and the hell of it all.
If you’ve got nothing else and the markets are all that you have, then poor you. I’ve known people like that. Not unintelligent but made it their whole existence. That’s where they live and that’s where they’ll die. At some grubby stall in a filthy gutter on a cold grey November morning with no-one giving a shit and the wife and kids they’ve neglected taking the money they’ve worked so hard to save and making whoopee!
Some life! The only one you had and you pissed it up the wall so don’t do it, unless you’ve got something bigger and better inside your head.
They were the best of times, they were the worst of times… You can have some good moments working on markets but just as many are lousy. Probably more. What traders cynically describe as an experience. This post is about one such ‘experience’. Desperation for Louise and I in the wee small hours of Saturday night at the Reading Rock Festival.
We did it once. Never again. It’s a whole world of hurts. An endless sea of unlimited trouble. Violence, threats, intimidation, abuse, thieving, you name it. And there we were, hot to stay open through Saturday night like a couple of virgins. Our stall lit up to every temptation and vice with our bright, fragile goods ready and waiting for evil. We took fair money up until midnight then it began to tail off. The main event of the festival over and the crowds gone in search of food till one a.m. then back to their tents or the portaloos pissed on rough cider and vodka. From that time on only a few hundred stragglers about and most stalls on our drag closed for the night. The exceptions sold clothing and one, forty feet away, did hash pipes, chillums and other smoking paraphernalia along with shirts from Thailand, fancy jackets and a side line of ‘herbals’ and amphetamines. Their music came loud out of two high volume ghetto blasters that by one in the morning was doing our heads in.
The racket was sensible business. It brought people over from every corner on site. The heavy metal music thumping its way into the night. There was no point putting our gear away, covering our stall and going to bed in the van even if we wanted to. With the noise going full pitch there was no way we could sleep and they knew it. Four lads. All well known for dealing dope in the perfect place for it. The clothing and smoking accessories all just a front. We knew them from elsewhere. Dope dealing trouble all flush with money and flash. There’d been times when I’d wanted to put my hands on them but it just wasn’t possible. People who ran markets needed them more than they needed us. They did good business and paid for the privilege. Our stuff was just ornamental!
The noise ran on and on. Two-thirty, three, three-thirty… Its blast unabated despite our requests. It was still bringing people over to their stall so it continued. If they stopped by ours, drunk or blown out of their heads it was only to make trouble which we knew could come at any time. And if we stalled down and put away we’d still have trouble so we just sat there covered in blankets, trying to be friendly but ready for anything!
Okay, do you still want to make money on markets? In popular mythology, music festivals are where all the really big money is made. Correct… if you’re selling drugs or you’re the festival organiser!
Four a.m. Reading Rock festival site in the Thames Valley. It’s late September and the night air’s chilled down to freezing. That would be bad enough if there wasn’t an icy damp mist rolling along the drag with music hammering out of the ghetto blasters and the occasional violence merchant falling over your stall. You can’t imagine the horror of it all. We were already tough hardened market traders used to just about anything, but the damp freezing night air getting under our skin despite all the layers, the racket from forty feet away and on top of it all our exhaustion, made it all hell. Louise brewed up and we smoked incessantly.
Sickening exhausting desperation and not the sniff of a shilling! It was no longer the money. It was coming down to survival! Our minds blown away by the music. We kept looking at each other, way beyond cynical laughter. Quite frankly I was close to going over and smashing their blasters with a few kicks. I could easily have done it. I was being driven to violence, then a new sound floated our way. Easy, mellow and tuneful. I tried to catch the words. The voice sounded Caribbean…
I’m going to put on an iron shirt and chase the Devil out of Earth
We liked it and instantly picked up on the lyrics,
I’m going to send him to Outer Space to find another race…
Catchy music, catchy vocal. Never heard it before. We were soon up and stomping. Doing a strange little dance in the dark. It was so cold you couldn’t believe it but right there and then it was like we’d been taken over by some kind of madness and turned into zombies! We left the stall and walked out into the grassy field of the main drag. Past the drugs paraphernalia stall and its music and into the night with the lights of our rig already at distance. And then, like a couple of automatons, began doing a kind of zombie stomp in time to the beat of the music up the field and back!
The lads working the drugs stall had seen us and were staring with astonishment. We gave them a wave as we stomped past, freezing and gone beyond misery. It was a completely mad thing to do. What I can only think of as a dance of the desperate! All we wanted was sleep but that was impossible. Instead, we were jerking our arms and legs around like we were under the spell of some shaman’s hallucinogenic till we reached our lights. A few turns and we were jerking our way back up the field.
Put on an iron shirt… send him to Outer Space…
The lights again in the distance then back down the field to our stall. We did it three or four times till we were done for, finally getting inside the frame and collapsing into our chairs, by then shaking with cold and laughing the laugh of the hopeless. Louise held it together to brew up some tea. Moments later we heard a new sound. We couldn’t believe it. The bastards next door had switched off the music. Silence!
With a huge effort we covered the stall with tarpaulins, clamped them on, got into the van and under the duvet with a hot water bottle. Two minutes later we were asleep.
It can only have been a brief spell of oblivion before I woke with a start. There were voices, quiet voices outside near the stall. I instantly got up naked in the freezing van, dressed in seconds and rushed out with a short iron bar that was part of the stall frame. Lucky I’d moved fast. It was still dark but in the fogged out gloom I made out two shapes crawling under the frame with boxes of gear. I dropped the bar and went to work with my feet, glad I’d shoved on my boots. A few good kicks, a few yells then two undoubted thieves on the run! Couldn’t see their faces but I’d let them have it alright. I was soon back with a lamp. Great! Animals on marble scattered all over the grass. It took me an hour to pick them up and wipe off the mud. That done I plonked myself down in the chair and sat at the back of the stall till daylight feeling dead. Meanwhile Louise slept on, peacefully unaware in the van.
Six o’clock daylight and the music started up all over again. Sunday morning. Thank God only another day left. And where was that iron shirt when I needed it? I knew as I sat there that we’d both need a week to recover and Tuesday morning I was due back in London to work one of the markets. Meanwhile all I could think about was sending the bastards next door into space.
So, do you still think you’d like to try your hand being a street market trader supplementing your income with a big killing at a music festival?
Before you answer I want you to go into the bathroom and look in the mirror. Okay, now tell me what you see. Or, to be more serious, what is it that you think you see?
Now if you’ve enjoyed reading this post and others in this series, why not try reading a novel I’ve written? It’s a highly enjoyable black satire about the English Literary Racket and what unknown writers have to do to try and get their work published. It exposes the whole dirty world of literary agents, celebrity writers, journalists and publishers and it tells you the truth. I know, I’ve been through it all. My novel, A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH is one that Rupert Murdoch’s book publishing company Harper Collins, the largest in the UK refused to publish. You can download it on Amazon and it will cost you $1.99 or around £1.30.
On Amazon, you can read the Foreword for free if you like. Above all I hope you enjoy it and that it makes you laugh because I enjoyed writing it. The rest of the novel has many different characters and one or two heroes. It also has a serious message, about the people who really control publishing and the kind of books they allow you to read. All the publishers refused to give this deadly black comedy a public hearing. They pose as liberals, believers of free speech, but they’re nothing of the kind and the thing they fear most is satire. If you read A CONSPIRACY OF TRASH you’ll understand why.
