Flea markets on tour

We went on a flea market tour with Tero and Susanna last weekend. Elina, Kauto and I took a train to Tampere on a Friday morning and met Tero and Susanna there and headed for Ikaalinen, Parkano and Kankaanpää, pretty small places in the Northern Satakunta, with population somewhere around 5000-10 000 (I'm not so sure about Kankaanpää, it could be bigger than that). It was a nice trip, even though Kauto wasn't so happy about it. As we don't have a car (and can't even drive one), he was pretty unaccustomed to just sit there and do nothing and not be able to move. He slept almost all the way back to Turku, luckily.

We thought that the flea markets in such small and pretty remote towns would be full of vintage stuff that no one had ever thought of buying, but would be ripped screaming out of hands in big cities. But, alas, no. The flea markets were all very neat and well kept and there were no exciting piles of clothes and ephemeral stuff we so much like. Tero and Susanna took some marvellous pictures, though, and I think this proved to be a worthy trip.

On Saturday, we went to Piikkiö and Paimio, two small towns close to Turku, with one or two flea markets. I found Patrick Hamilton's "Hangover Square" (1941) in a Penguin edition with a J.B. Priestley foreword. It's a British noir novel, set in the late 1800's and the lead man is a composer who thinks he should kill his girlfriend. And apparently, he does, but the poor guy doesn't remember a thing. John Brahm made this (rather freely, I must say) into a marvellous B picture in 1945, with only 65 minutes. Laird Cregar was in it and he was always a brilliant overactor when he did lunatics.

We also found a very funny early seventies toy LP player from Fisher-Price with the records intact, but the seller asked 20 euros for it, so we are still thinking. It's just so cute: check this out (scroll down to TY-o72). (There's other pictures of it in the web: just google with "Fisher-Price record player".) We are definitely thinking...