Picture, if you will, the most inane, inept and pointless arts and crafts you can possibly imagine. Scatter these woebegone works about in an unrelenting series of cheap marquees, and intersperse these with ridiculously long lines of people waiting for expensive takeaway coffee. Add to this a band or four of happy, hippy musos, playing a hotchpotch of Celtic jigs and Indigenous surf music on flute, electric mandolin and djembe drum, fronted by singers dressed in what Stevie Nicks from Fleetwood Mac would wear to change the oil on her Volkswagen.
Then imagine taking the competitive, climbing masses from every clamorous Saturday Coles supermarket in the western suburbs and flinging them, holus bolus, screaming and scolding, children and all, onto the grass amongst the stalls.
There you have a picture of the Denmark Easter Markets. Imagine if you will coming face to face with this dire ensemble as you crawl hungover from your cheap hotel room and blunder out to face the day. I pay my gold coin "donation" to enter the markets, and buy a spinach and feta parcel from two brightly coloured unwashed girls with dreadlocked beads in their hair. What have they got to smile about, i wonder. Perhaps all the money they save on shampoo. The spinach and feta parcel is a tad too flaky - but then one is what one eats.
The cheery sounds of the flute fills the air once more and suddenly i just can't take it any longer. I leap to my feet and mindful of neither face-painted child nor barefooted rainbow coloured hippy i elbow my way out of this torment. Sartre was right when he said "hell is other people". I make good my neurotic and terror-stricken escape from these seething hordes.
The chirpy folk music and its magpie aesthetic is, thankfully, dulled into oblivion by the deep throaty roar of the 650 as i set off for the Denmark tip. I shake my head. If people must spend their money on rubbish over Easter, there are far more civilised ways of doing it. I flip down the visor as i gather speed, and leave this tie-dyed melee to contemplate the sounds of the Doppler Effect.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE
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3 comments:
Lucky you didn't try the spinach, fetta and mushroom parcel, eh...? Once one o' those puppies kicks in, you'd be ripping off yer duds, admiring macrame and smearing face paint with the best of 'em.
Either that, or reaching for the axe, Eugene...
Either one sounds like my idea of a perfect weekend
i've come across your blog in search of leslie lee and found an oddessy written by my parallel self. strange, i read leaving cararvon and intriguingly clicked hell is other people almost subconciously as that line is what my subconcious consists of anyway for roughly 90 percent...from the opening line my mind immediately travelled to the walpole easter market. You just meant the bigger version next town over. probably the same band.
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