Saturday 14 July 2007

the handmade soap man.
it’s not him that’s made by hand.
i think it’s the soap

Now and again I go on a quest to look for the soap man, of Church Street market, and garner a new supply of his semi-mythical hand-made peppermint soap. Actually, it’s not semi-mythical. I bought some a while back, and I have to say that it is the best soap I have ever had. It just seems that every time I go to the soap man he has sold out of the stuff.
Today he sold me some ‘jellangela’ (that’s what it sounded like, anyway) and a bar of seaweed.
‘The thing is, mate’ he says, with cockney barrer-boy precision, ‘I’m here early morning, and one bloke might want seventeen of these and another might want ten of those, and on another day they might want nuffink.. but a lot of stuff goes in the mornings, and you come here at two o’clock and expect to get yer peppermint!’
‘Ah,’ I said.
‘Exactly,’ he says.
‘So what it boils down to… is that I should get up earlier.’
‘Yer’ve got it in one, sunshine. That’ll be a fiver!’
So I mosied off to the park with my bag of soap and a Greggs pasty, where I did a bit of writing, until I was disturbed by small children rolling themselves down a grass slope, over and over again. It’s not that I don’t like children, there are some children who are very funny and just brilliant, it’s more that I can’t stand the whiny noises children make. Isn’t there some way we could silence them when they’re out in public, like with muzzles or tongue-clamps?