Flee Market held on the platforms Tynemouth Metro Station where I'll be wearing my stylised Triple Hare pendant as a talisman to aid me in the search for choice gew-gaws of folkloric significance...

And very nice it was too, blazing sunshine under the Victorian awnings and any amount of aforementioned gew-gaws of folkloric interest, including:

Brass Durham Cathedral Sanctuary Knocker Ashtray. Asking price (AP): £2.00 / Haggled down to (HDT) : £1.50 / Folkloric Significance (FS) : The Medieval Sanctuary Knocker of Durham Cathedral has long been the Face of Durham, one of the iconic constants and symbolic of the sanctuary once offered by the church to various wrongdoers. It is also a fine piece of Romanesque metal work which in my young day was the real thing, it situ, though its place has been taken by a faultless facsimile, the original now residing in the Cathedral museum, or treasury. Consequently the Durham Door Knocker has enjoyed a place in the region's folklore for several centuries (see my opening blurb Here for a personal reminiscence) and has inspired any amount of brass souvenirs most of them, unsurprisingly, in the form of door-knockers. I've seen Sanctuary Knocker horse brasses and toasting forks, but until yesterday I'd never seen an ashtray before, though it amuses me to think of it being bought in Durham Cathedral, circa 1930, when smoking was, I believe, compulsory for everyone over the age of eleven.

Dolmetsh Dolomite Descant Recorder. AP: £3.50 / HDT : £1.00 (on account of slightly chipped mouthpiece) / FS: Where does one begin? Within WAV-lore alone the Recorder enjoys near-iconic status as The English Flute, revived as a Folk Instrument mass produced in Japan in fetching black & white shiny plastic. Long before that however, Arnold Dolmetsch was seduced into mass-producing affordable descants for purposes of education which became the bane of any child suffering an English Education between 1950 and 1980 making sure that recorders would be despised in perpetuity and forever associated with the reeking corridors of crumbling Victorian secondary modern schools haunted by sadistic pedagogues whose joy it was to inflict such culture upon them. I'm speaking of working class kids here, many of whom would ceremonially smash their Dolmetsch Descants upon leaving school - I have seen this done. The early ones were made from Dolomite, a patented shit-brown bakelite which goes soft if left in the sun, but they have a fine tone and a lower register chiff to die for. I'm sure it was that legendary Dolmetsch Dolomite Descant chiff that inspired the distinctive playing of Terry Wincott of The Amazing Blondel - one of the few recorded players, IMHO, to provide us with a taste of how the recorder might have sounded as a folk instrument in Ye Days of Yore. Needless to say I was wandering around Tynemouth yesterday playing the opening riff from Saxon Lady until Rapunzel threatened me with divorce.

Green Man Garden Ornament. AP: £2.50 / HDT : - / FS : Where does one start? Since the craze for all things green, The Post-Modern Green Man has become iconic of a non-folkloric figure which is an entirely modern invention. I see this as part of an Inner Yearning of a Humanity Dispossessed of the Soil and the Seasons; a yearning for Nature, for the Source, despite the fact that the Green Man image we're familiar with today was developed within pre-Reformation Roman Catholicism as a warning very much against nature. Ironic, huh?? Anyway, this has propagated any amount of entirely bogus Green Man gew-gaws, oracle cards, t-shirts, jewellery etc. etc. which I do collect - but only if the price is right, and the workmanship acceptable. Most Neo-Green Man are works of fantasy, modern interpretations rather than facsimiles of original carvings - and whilst I obviously prefer the latter, I do have a few modern GM, and now this one, which is one of the finest I've ever seen at a price that I did not question.

In the Wake of the Plaque : The Black Death and the World it Made - Norman F. Cantor (2001) AP: 50p / HDT: - / FS : I bought this book if only for the fine reproduction of the Dance of Death woodcut that I used to illustrate my TOTENTANZ page some years ago, which is worth 50p of anyone's money. However upon perusing its pages in the local Subway I see Chapter One is called All Fall Down and would have us believe that the children of 1500 were singing Ring Around the Rosies, the origin of which, is, of course, the symptoms of the bubonic plaque. Strange to find this classic piece of fakelore perpetuated in an otherwise scholastic context. I will explore further as time allows.

Polynesian Totem Pole. AP - 25p / HDT: - / FS : A six-inch resin cast gew-gaw of the sort of thing that'll be familiar to any visitor of the Royal Museum in Edinburgh, The World Museum in Liverpool, and The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Not sure if its based on any actual prototype though, but it's a fetching piece that presently stands on my CD shelves alongside the various volumes of the VOTP CDs I've picked up in sales here and there over the years as I wouldn't pay full price for such things. One volume I even picked up at Tynemouth Flee Market! No such luck yesterday of course, but a happy day none the less.