Bank Holiday Boot Sale Bargains - and a Bird

Let's start with the good bits of the Bank Holiday weekend, I managed to get to two boot sales - one on Sunday and one on Monday.  I got the above selection of toiletries for the grand total of £2.50.  The large bottle of M&S organic handwash was particularly timely as we are just about to run out of the 20p bottle I got at a summer fete in June.  (That particular one retails for £2.03 in Sainsbury's I discovered recently - which made my 20p bottle a brilliant bargain.  Not that I'd have paid £2.03 for a bottle of handwash, but still!!)

Also on the toiletries front were a large bottle of Body Shop shower gel - 50p - and, also 50p, an unopened tub of Body Shop body butter.  As the body butter retails for £12.50, that was a stonking good bargain. 

My favourite find of the weekend though was this Swedish Dala horse for 50p. 

He is a little battered, especially around the ears, but he goes very nicely with the smaller blue one that I found last summer at the same boot sale.

On to the not so good part of the Bank Holiday weekend.  Some half-wit, cretinous, imbecile collar dove / wood pigeon-type bird had kamikazed down our bedroom chimney and wedged itself in there.   Some half-wit, cretinous, imbecial human had, at some point, stuffed said chimney with old black sacks stuffed with styrofoam.  I imagine this was done to a) stop birds falling down the chimney (that was a fail, then,) or, b) to stop howling gales whistling down the chimney in the winter.  Either way, you would not believe the mess it made trying to get it all out to release the bird. 

By Sunday evening we could see both daylight up the chimney and the bird's tail feathers.  Fast forward to Monday lunchtime and the idiot bird is still stuck up there, though we knew it was alive as it kept turning round.  By Monday afternoon it had finally freed itself (along with a goodly amount of masonry from inside the chimney!!) and was waddling around the bedroom poo-ing neon green cr*p everywhere!!  It finally made it out on to the landing where the window was wide open for it.  Did it fly out?  Nope!!  Finally we coralled it in the study (where the windows were also wide open) and at some point during the evening it got out.  But not before it had left another of its neon green 'calling cards' on the study floor - nice!!

This is the second time a bird has jammed itself down the bedroom chimney in as many months - we're sincerely hoping there won't be a third.  At least now I see where the expression 'bird brain' came from!!!!

Comments

[Vix]

I loved that first horse you bought, what luck to find a companion! Ugh, those stupid birds and their chimney antics! Ours are capped but it used to happen all the time at my parents! x

[Loo]

Blimey Elizabeth, what a birdy hoo haa.

You and your toiletry bargains. I never ever see anything half decent and for a good price at boot sales anymore. Oh woe is me. Mind you, my daughter won rather a lot of toiletries at the Gosforth Agricultural Show's tombola last week which pleased me greatly. xx

[nellie dean]

I love that you find toiletries for 50p, they seem to sell for about £2 round here. Mind you, I have given up looking now.

Your bird down the chimney storey reminds me when we had a bird fall down our chimney in the lounge. First I knew about it when the bloomin thing was tapping on the glass on the woodburner. Yes, it actually was inside the woodburner tapping to be let out. I despair....

[Charlie (forages & finds)]

Oh dear sorry to hear about the crazy bird problem! We also have a bank holiday worry... a mole just creeping along the border of the garden!

But great idea about the toiletries, I went bank holiday car-booting and would have got more but for the rain & people starting to cover up their stuff :(. Still, got an uber-country-living-style step-ladder to display my mum's plants, two mugs covered in map-print, and some vintage tins. Love car boots so much ♥