Charity shops are ace. You can find untold treasures in them, or even a Right Said Fred annual, and all you have to do is polish your kung fu skills so you can fight off the old ladies who are eyeing up your stuff.
The final boss of the charity shop is Yvonne, Guardian of the Raffle Tickets. She stands behind the counter, and will charge you an arbitrary price for something depending on whether or not she likes the look of you:
“Those slacks look common. 20 quid for the jigsaw.”
“You look like a woman I don’t like called Beverley. I’m not selling you this.”
“Your Malcolm works at the bowls club doesn’t he? Have this Faberge egg for 50p.”
She will also bar your path with her mighty bosom if she decides your handbag’s too big.
If you can get past Yvonne, you may begin to browse the charity shop. Because I am nice, I’ve put together a handy sightseeing guide, including things to look out for and things to avoid during your charity shopping adventure.
Books
As well as a book on flower arranging by a woman called Margaret, a hardback of ’99 Ways With Pork Jelly’, and a book about interpreting your dreams, you will find these:
Calm your tits lads, sadly they’re not ‘Video Library’ VHS cases. They are Reader’s Digest ‘classic novels no one’s ever heard of’. They are all called ‘The Daffodils of October’.
At some point, you may be faced with this shelf:
Remain calm. Back away slowly. Try not to inhale.
Jeans that fit no human being
Unless the human being is one of the following:
– 10″ waist, 20ft tall
– 1000″ waist, 1ft tall
One net curtain
On a coat hanger, and inexplicably in the men’s clothing section. No one ever buys it.
Soup cups
For soup. Handily, they also come with soup recipes printed on them, in case you’ve bought these accidentally without knowing how to make soup, where to buy soup, or what soup is.
Free DVDs
Free with the Daily Mail/Daily Express. Ideal for people looking to purchase a kilo of films.
Pink shit
See also: anything that claims the owner is a fairy princess. This will be a divorced, 42 year old fairy princess with a lot of problems.
Balls of wool
In a wire basket. Like the net curtain, no one ever buys the wool, but the old ladies will guard it fiercely. If you try to go near the wool, the old ladies will all look at you.
This bowl
No one knows where it came from or what it’s for, but everyone knows it used to belong to a man named Ken.
Naked Bratz dolls
Always Bratz, and always naked. This is because Bratz dolls are slagz. They have no feet when they are naked. This is also because they are slagz. The one in the middle is called Callum.
PS2 games
Sports games. All sports from football to soccer. Perfect for people who really want to play as the 2004 Watford team. Also golf sometimes, but no one cares about that. Tiger Woods isn’t even a real tiger. Or a real woods.
Occasionally you might find some interesting looking PC games in jewel cases, but these will all turn out to be copies of the film Big Momma’s House on DVD.
Mugs
In the case of #1, there will be 30 in stock. This number rises to 6000 every July. I’m sceptical of the claim that every teacher is the best teacher in the world.
Music
Occasionally you may swap the above for a single by the Lighthouse Family, or a copy of Now 42 with a scratch that means ‘End of the Line’ by Honeyz won’t play properly.
Interactive DVD games
Yesterday’s technology at tomorrow’s prices today!
BE PART OF THE SHOW. The box orders you to do this.
‘Be part of the show’ by pressing one of the arrow keys on your DVD remote, waiting 10 minutes for it to load, then discovering you’ve accidentally claimed Nelson Mandela was born in Sheffield.
Play these with your family, if you hate your family.
I know I’ve just spent 10 minutes of your time taking the piss, but do go and visit your local charity shops. They are brill. Be sure to carry mace with you at all times, to defeat Yvonne.
If you like my stupid posts, please do RT them and share them on Facebook, and whatever the kids are using these days. That’s how I get new readers, it really does help a lot.
I always forget that ITV tried to make the primetime Saturday night career of Vernon Kay hosting rubbish reboots of old game shows a thing in the mid 00s until I see ‘DVD games’ that take an age to load littering the shelves of charity shops with his mush on the front.
I always found Bratz dolls a bit creepy. They looked like a latter career Pete Burns if they’d done Barbie dolls of him.
I loved those soup mugs, we had them growing up and I bought myself a set second hand from Oxfam – St Alban’s branch – when I was at uni!
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1. Buy Reader’s Digest book.
2. Cut a cavity through the pages in the shape of a revolver.
3. Keep emergency vodka miniatures in it.
4. Next to the fake plastic bean tin that you keep your spare car key and a five franc note and the Koh-i-Noor in.
I like that lineup of PS2 games, too.
FIFA
UEFA
FIFA
UEFA
PETER JACKSON’S KING KONG THE OFFICIAL GAME OF THE MOVIE
FIFA
UEFA
FIFA…
But I could never brave the old ladies to see it for myself.
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Great stuff. I am a charity shop manager and yes, we get lots of the soup bowls. Really funny reading, well done. And btw Yvonne is actually maureen and we sell loads of wool lol.
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Fuck. Me. I may genuinely never fully recover from the google-confirmed revelation that there’s a book of Cliff Richard’s favourite bible stories.
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Not only do I have a copy of that book, it is signed by cliff.
Bizarrely my Wife’s Uncle did all the illustrations and the cover, so he got a signed copy.
However, he never met cliff.
Why the fuck we have ended up with it, I have no idea.
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You totally missed board games, charity shops are legally required to stock at least one copy of Popamatic and Ker-plunk with half the sticks chewed on. That and 40 year old Blue Peter annuals.
And you’re lucky about PS2 games, I only ever see a demo disc from a ’90s PC magazine that the old dears think is worth at least £20.
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My family had the whole set of those soup cups.
My favourite was Scotch Broth.
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My favourite charity shop find happened 4 years ago when I had just moved to Manchester. In the process of clearing out the old house we got rid of a lot of tapes, including the first-ever albums I got owned, a gift from my parents for Christmas in 1986 – NOW 8 and HITS 5 (known to almost everyone as The One With A Big Red Dice On The Front). I was gutted to be getting rid, but since we no longer had a tape player, they went. However, it felt wrong to chuck the vinyl, so despite the lack of a record player, they stayed.
Anyway, once we’d moved to our new flat we decided to get a record player to make the most of said LPs. And then I decided to boost our vinyl collection with a mix of new and second hands stuff. On day one I went out into Stockport in my lunch break, fully intending to raid the charity shops to see what I could find. The dream would be to obtain either HITS 5 or NOW 8 (or both) but I couldn’t imagine they would be all that easy to find at all.
The first charity shop I hit was British Heart Foundation. And the first thing I saw as I came through the door was a shelf with all the new records they’d recently had in – and there, the centrepiece of the display was a familiar Big Red Dice (or Die, or whatever). For a fiver. On day one of record collecting.
Later that week I was also able to get a still sealed NOW 4 for £4 from another secondhand shop.
Good times!
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I live in a town where every 3rd shop is a charity shop. They all look like someone opened a door, emptied the 1990s out of a bin bag and shut the door again.
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