Dealer's Diary» Hunters and Gatherers II: Reaching for the Star Lots.
In his classic movie, Solaris, set in a space station, the Russian director Tarkovsky uses the example of Pieter Breugel's oil painting, Hunters In The Snow, to sum up what life on earth means, the necessary suffering of mankind against a backcloth of the intense and unconscious beauty of nature.
Breugel's painting is a masterpiece on all levels, formal and narrative, and it's encapsulation has been a continued inspiration for poets and authors.
The hunters bent with tiredness return from their foray into the wilderness, but the finds have been slim, a ragged coney or quail, the dogs look lean and unfed by any customary portion of the hunt but they smell the familiar scents of home...
Things are not faring so well in the village either, the owners of the Wayfarers' inn burn furniture outside the door, the wind is bitter, and the painted wooden inn sign hangs on by a thread.
Seen from a Christian perspective the hill is calvary and the thorn bush in the foreground can stand for the symbolic crown of thorns.
Winter is never a good time to go hunting. It is the same with the antiques and when the snow gets deep, most lookers or knockers, stay at home and live off the fat in the larder. It stands to reason, the good country furniture is found down the long lanes and up into the hills and mountains where the isolated farmsteads are and these become impassable. Even in the villages along proper roads, in the cold winter, the residents are not out on the street at their front door working and talking as in clear weather - the lookers depend on this, they stop in their cars and pick up information as passers-by through casual enquiry and this proves more fruitful than knocking doors and receiving silence.
If the weather is mild then the lock-ups and sheds will be full through the early part of the year but if severe they will not and this is why I sometimes make a trip just before the festive season as I did this last December and then at least I know we have some fresh pieces in to get a head start in the New Year.
To take a trip right at the end of the year, in a spell of inclement weather and when you feel like a break, then part with a lot of cash just prior to Christmas, is not always the easiest thing to do. But as in many forms of business & endeavor one has to risk, in the Elizabethan sense, to reap reward.
Frequently nowadays we hear of road trips, and buying trips, and read of "a fresh haul of goods" on various websites but often this is no more than a jolly jaunt of mostly a culinary nature to some French markets or a trip down the A1 in a hired van to meet a Dutch wholesaler in a lay-by.
There is a food chain and a pecking order of middle men. In the UK, the country pine dealers have often been at the very end of this chain and the UK, a notoriously shabby (not to say inbred) country in the eyes of Europeans, has normally been the place to get rid of one's leftovers, a place to cash in your 20% unsolds and bad buys from the last container before you start again. The idea is that the English love things that have some original charm, but are falling apart a bit and a great price and if they never see the really good pieces that go to a smart house in Nijmegen or are packed carefully onto a container bound for Atlanta and selling for three times the price then there is no harm done. What you don’t see won’t upset you.
I decided soon after I started that I wanted to try to deal in the better pieces, things to inspire, and not the also-rans.
But to cut across the lines and find better goods is not easy, lines of supply are controlled by bigger money interests and alleigances are in place. When i first started to look into some of the more out of the way parts of Europe, an English dealer, an unsavoury type (yes), put the word out that he would "slash" the tyres on my van - something he fortunately never did as his approach soon gave him some problems of his own to deal with.
Another time i was doing some shopping in Bromsgrove when i received a bizarre call from a European dealer who told me that as i and my colleague were buying in such and such a place he would cause trouble for me. He was as good as his word, one time i had flown 2000 miles, drove three hours further east, slept overnight, then the next day drove all day, stayed in a hotel, then the next day drove early to visit a big gyspy/Roma dealer to try to buy a lorry load. When we got there the gypsy dealer was laughing, it was a disaster he said, he could not sell us anything as he had come to an agreement with my rival who was as it happened just about to arrive himself.
Such situations are typical and there are many stories that could be told.
One thing is for sure that if you want to find anything better than the second rate then you not only need to know where to go (hard enough in itself) but even then you need to be prepared to cover a lot of kilometres (with no guarantee of success) and this in itself is a hazard: burning the candle at both ends and driving for hours and through the night and often on bad roads. Years ago i went to a dealer in Monrovia, I could not believe how many good pieces they had, all stacked up ready to go, beautiful painted boxes and many fruitwood tables and all available, none sold as you would have expected. They told me that they normally dealt exclusively with a Western European trader, and all of these pieces were 'sold' to him but unpaid for, only the last week the man had been to visit and on the way back to Germany had had a high speed accident in his BMW and died.
It is improving now but the classic scenario on the roads of Eastern Europe is to be on a main A- road (so called) and to be stuck behind a Trabant or a Skoda that clearly has not held a valid MOT for at least a decade. Worse still there are the horse drawn carts in Translovia sharing the highways with HGVs and articulated lorries. The main roads are normally only two lanes going opposite ways and overtaking is a necessary game of chance.
Driving in winter, returning to the theme, is of course more hazardous still. There is a road in the Black Country near the border of Petit Rus and Monrovia that locals call "the road of Death". It twists and turns and cambers off to both sides and if you can imagine it unlit at night with black ice at minus -15...
One time, a few years ago, an end of year buying trip had finished, i had paid up, done the paperwork, organised the loading and transport but i couldn't get home because the weather was so bad, so i stayed on another night. The next day it was December the 23rd, it was a three hour drive to the airport and the snowstorm had subsided, no taxi driver would go but i had an offer from Sandor to drive me in his transit, he worked in Petit Rus but lived the other side of Buchagrad and also wanted to get home for the holiday. We set out but half way across the great plain of Monrovia, a kind of giant version of the fenlands, the snow blizzard set in again giving almost no visibility, the road was black ice and cambered off into dykes on either side. I must have seen at least a dozen cars in the dykes and at least two right in front of us spun in drunken ice dancer circles and toppled in. It was touch and go whether we would make my flight, as we kept being slowed down by accidents, so when we did periodically get going Sandor put his foot down as much as he dared keeping the van on course by means of a style of slalom driving with hair trigger reactions moving the van left and right. His lively conversation on the merits of East European womens' tennis was interrupted at one point by a loud whack, we had been inches away from disaster as the driver's side mirror had just been taken clean off by a large lorry heading the other direction at speed. I made the flight, a few thunderstorms over the Alps seemed a doddle and in the words of a saccharine song I made it home for Christmas.
This bring us back to Breugel, the poets WH Auden and the American Carlos Williams saw in the his painting the theme of suffering and as much as this is true it is also about home, and homecoming and where we belong and this was an interpretation brought out in Tarkovsky's film which considers mankind's aspiration to reach beyond the stars. As the despondent hunters crest the brow of the hill they are consoled by the sight of children playing, the thoughts of home comfort, the village in the bowl of the valley, womb-like, is waiting to receive them, it will be a hard winter, but life will go on, this is the place where they will live and die.