Bertram on the Frome Independent Fair

I have written before, in this journal, about the difficulty of fair-buying for a small cabinet. The short version: you arrive at 8am, you queue, you walk fast, you buy in cash, you eat a Cornish pasty at noon, and you spend the second half of the day regretting at least one purchase. The Frome Independent of the first Sunday in April is no exception, except that it is busier and the pasties are warmer.

The list

Eleanor's lists are notable for being almost exactly half of what she means. The morning's list read:

• A first-printing Dominion, base set, complete, condition immaterial
• Any Spiel des Jahres-winning game from before 2010 in shrink
• A Game Boy Pocket, working, any colour but yellow
• Vita memory cards, 16GB or larger, original Sony, no counterfeits
• Vinyl: the Persona 5 soundtrack, any pressing
• The 2012 Edge magazine reissue boxset, if seen
• A working Bandai WonderSwan, any colour
• Pokémon TCG: any complete Neo Genesis non-holo set in sleeves
• A working original Sega Saturn, model 2, white
• A nice mug
• "Whatever else"

The walk

Of these eleven, I found seven. The Dominion first-printing went in the first hour to a Bath collector I have nodded at three times across the last four fairs; I should have moved faster. The Vita cards were not at the fair at all. The WonderSwan was at three different stalls but every one was Japanese-region, which is fine technically but not something Eleanor wants on the consoles aisle. The Saturn model 2 was at one stall, in pristine condition, but the seller wanted £180 and I could not in good conscience pay it.

The "whatever else"

This is, in a small private cabinet, the most important line on the list. The fair always produces three or four things one had not gone looking for and which turn out to be the day's actual purchase. This week's "whatever elses" were:

• A boxed Atari Lynx II with two carts and a working battery pack — £85, and well worth it.
• A pair of unused 1991 Game Boy "stadium light" attachments, the kind that clip onto the top edge. I had not seen these since I was twelve. £4 the pair, from a man who had three crates and didn't know what they were.
• A complete-and-sealed Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition, the one with the corrected sheet. £40, paid without negotiation, and I think the seller may have been about to ask £80.
• The mug, which is now Eleanor's morning mug — a 1995 Sega Saturn promotional mug, white, with the original SEGA logo, dishwasher-faded but otherwise sound.

The accounting

The seven-hundred pounds in cash went, in the end, to: £85 Atari Lynx, £40 Twilight Imperium, £55 spent across four smaller board games for the tabletop shelf, £180 of Pokémon cards (the Neo Genesis non-holos and a small lot of Jungle commons), £30 of bits and pieces, and the remainder — almost £310 — returned to Eleanor's strongbox at the end of the day. Iris reports this as the lowest spend at Frome since 2022. I take this as a sign of restraint rather than poor pickings.

The Cornish pasty

From the trailer at the corner of Market Yard, as always. Beef and Stilton. Eaten standing up while watching three children attempt to barter a man down from £30 to £10 on a clear-shell GBC. They got him to £18, which I thought was a good day's work for all three of them.

The Atari Lynx II, the Twilight Imperium and the four smaller board games are all on the cabinet's shelves as of this Tuesday. The Pokémon cards are sorted in the back room and will appear in the curiosities corner once Iris has finished cataloguing them.