Other Travellers.

I was thinking the other day about other travellers who used to pass through the village and who you never see any more. Back when I was young you used to get the turbanned Sikh salesman coming around the doors with their suitcases full of household goods. I often wondered what happened to them. I suppose that some made money and went into the restauraunt trade or into corner shops and the pound shops that you see on nearly every street. Some, I suppose, went back to their native Punjab in Northern India, where doubtless they told their friends and neighbours about an exotic land far away where it always rained and the people seemed to have an inexaustible appetite for hairbrushes and Meltonian shoe polish. Now their descendents, rather than coming to our doors with window cleaning materials, phone us at night with the latest offers from our banks and telephone companies.

Then we had the Breton onion sellers with their black berets and bicycles draped with strings of onions who passed through, along with the bearded, smelly, old blokes with their worldly possessions in a carrier bag, who were known to the older village people as 'roadsters'. One known as '40 Overcoats' immediately springs to mind. Occasionally also, you had the old gypsy women selling lucky white heather and offering to tell you your fortune, with the often not so veiled hint that your fortune might not be so lucky if you did not take up their offer, and finally the chaps who offered to sharpen your knives and cutting implements. The departure of these gentleman left a real gap in the market as where can you get your shears sharpened nowadays ?.