As always, Saturday was taken over by gallivanting.  Isn’t that possibly one of the best words ever created? Gallivanting. I gallivant, you gallivant, he/she/it gallivants. Brilliant. Anyway… Yes, Saturday was a day for cruising round the mill towns of the Peak District; all sparked by a visit to the auction house to pick up my winnings.

Alas, I didn’t bid high enough on the vintage hats (slight despondency at this, but I shall learn how this auction malarkey goes with time – malarkey, there’s another great word of the English language). However, I did manage to win one item:

This little chap is the only thing that I won – for the grand sum of £4. I didn’t realise it was Avon when I first picked it up; I thought perhaps it was some old decorative figurine.  Then I turned it over and read the ‘Avon’ impression on the bottom. Good design, nice materials plus the Avonness… had to be mine, really.

I’ve got a few Avon bits and bobs, but he’s definitely the best one so far. I’m envisaging him sat on a shelf in a bathroom, alongside some of the other bits of vintage Avon.  As always, I’ve researched him as much as I can on the internet.  There isn’t a vast amount to find out: he’s called ‘Fly-A-Balloon’, he’s a cologne bottle for the scent ‘Moonwind’ and he’s not valuable really.

As well as the trip to the auction house, we also visited Holmfirth and Huddersfield to have a look round. We actually got nothing in any charity shops in either place. Actually, that’s a lie: I bought a book for my reading shelf at school.

The reason for visiting Huddersfield was to pick up an amusing Ebay item that my boyfriend had purchased. He’d won some Beanie Baby toys – 31 of them – to sell on the car boot sales next year. Good job he only paid 99p for them as they were covered in dog hair… yuck!

If you’ve never been to Huddersfield before: don’t bother. It’s really not anything to write home about.  The only items of interest were the following:

Cool blue tiles in the midst of a 60s shopping hell-hole… Former shop underneath was called ‘Mobile Mani’. Good to know that basic words are so difficult to get wrong!

The reason for this photo is the shop name: Something Wicked This Way Comes.  We like a band called British Sea Power, they have a song called ‘Something Wicked’ using the line ‘something wicked this way comes’; this in itself is a reference to Macbeth (by the pricking of my thumbs/something wicked this way comes) and Ray Bradbury’s book ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ – subsequently turned into a play. All of which, I like rather a lot.  I did get spotted taking the picture, which earned me a funny look which turned even funnier as I then had to backtrack and scurry past the shop owner to get to a charity shop down the street…

Two videos for your delectation: one, a fan-made video of the British Sea Power song ‘Something Wicked’; the other, a preview (in retrospect!) of the theatrical production of ‘Something Wicked…’ by the Catherine Wheel Theatre Company.