Viva Lewes Issue #138 March 2018

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SHOES ON NOW: ‘I’LL GIVE YOU A POUND FOR IT’
When you are a kid you don’t have
much economic power, do you?
Maybe your parents give you some
pocket money, but £2 or £3 will
barely buy you a magazine nowadays.
However, there’s one place
in Lewes where you can feel rich,
even without very much money -
the car boot sale.
It’s recently been upgraded to a
rather fancier Vintage Market, but
the old stalwarts are still there in
attendance. So, one cold February
Sunday morning, I take two of my boys down to the
back of Waitrose to see what bargains are to be had.
My middle child is a natural haggler. His technique
is to offer a pound less than the asking price then to
gradually increase his offer in ten pences until the
stall holder either gets exhausted
or until his younger brother gets
impatient and starts begging,
‘Please, please, please.’
The sale gives the boys the
opportunity to negotiate in a
safe environment and to have a
bit of fun doing it. We’ve often
got into lengthy conversations
with the stall holders and most
of them have a tale or two to tell.
And somehow, we feel as if we
are supporting a more independent
way of buying and selling. There’s an array of
goods: from large plastic dinosaurs, to old Beano
albums and even a giant exercise ball. Sure, there’s
some tat but part of the fun is sorting through to
find affordable treasure. Jacky Adams
HIGH IN THE OLD OAK TREE BY ED BOXALL
High in the Old Oak Tree tells the
story of a little boy who climbs up
an oak tree and never comes down.
He climbs so high that he can’t see
the ground, and the higher he gets,
the stranger things get. He meets
bears and wolves hiding amongst its
leaves, and when he reaches the top
he can touch the moon with a stick.
The book was written as a poem by
local author and illustrator Ed Boxall,
who will be performing High in
the Old Oak Tree, along with some
other poems and music, at Skylark
in the Needlemakers on the 10th of March. “It’s a
very magical, kind of surreal poem,” says Ed, “quite
in the tradition of Edward Lear – sort of nonsense,
but quite melancholy and serious
at the same time.”
“It was inspired by something
quite specific: over near Hastings
there’s a Woodcraft Folk camp
that I took my kids to every year,
and there are these two enormous
oak trees there. I made up a
version of the story while I was
camping there one summer, and
over a couple of years, it slowly
turned into the poem that appears
in the book.”
There will be two performances
on the day: one at 11am and one at 2pm. These are
aimed at children aged five and up.
edboxall.com
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