Birmingham Post

My personal circumstances mean I work from home for part of the week. Sometimes I am terribly busy but at others I have the odd spare slot to scour the post-lunchtime news programmes, that period otherwise known as the graveyard of broadcasting.

There are plenty of tame US crime dramas such as Murder, She Wrote and Diagnosis Murder, a terrible ITV ladette/wimmin's chat show, the occasional spiffing old black and white flick and the vastly underrated Birmingham-based Doctors, which is ER without the action, the glamour, the storylines, the stars or the viewing figures.

Then there are the pits-of-the-earth shows, the hardcore stuff for those who have not only given up on life but on whom life has given up. Fronted by nauseatingly jocular men in puke coloured sports jackets and cravats, these are the amateur antique shows. Take a bow Cash In The Attic, Bargain Hunt and What's Granny's Crappy Old Egg Cup Worth?

These programmes encourage half-wit viewers to think they could be sitting on a fortune if only they took the effort to clear out the loft and uncover that forgotten Michelangelo masterpiece.

Now because I don't have the cash to invest in frippery, because I am 100 per cent sure I have nothing of value in my attic and because I have a pulse, I have no interest in these programmes.

I mean, what sort of weirdo actually spends their weekend poring over other people's junk looking for a bargain? Not me . . . . until I discovered the joys of the vide grenier on my just-finished holiday to rural France.

Vide grenier roughly translates as "clear the old toot from your attic, missus" and offers the French a brilliant opportunity to fleece their fellow countrymen and tourists at Sunday morning gatherings by the boulodrome.

I have never visited a voiture boot sale en Angleterre but imagine there are striking similarities in the curiosities on offer - iffy ornaments, tatty lampshades, spoons (loads of spoons), trolls, dirty toys, knackered Amstrad computers, liqueur glasses and porno DVDs.

The French, at least those in the MidiPyrenees, also seem to have a predilection for whopping great spanners, mallets, hammers, rusty scythes, axes and basically anything of a tooling nature that is old, lumpy and capable of inflicting a fatal or brutally disfiguring injury on a house-breaker.

Fearing the attention of HM Customs and the namby-pamby UK laws on self-defence, I resisted the temptations of buying a would-be murder weapon rustique during my rounds of the local vide greniers. My eye was drawn to a set of eight Louis XIII chairs - "Got to be worth a mint," I pondered - until closer inspection revealed they were produced closer to 1973 than 1643 and had been weed on by a household pet. Not much chance of shifting those in Chipping Camden.

Undeterred, I went niche and snapped up some classic French key rings. A personal favourite is a Butagaz design for the 1967 Tour de France. At 50-cents, it was a steal.

And what about this! For a mere three euros I got my hands on a fiche technique for a BMW 1800-1800 TI. Produced by the Syndicat National Des Expert En Automobiles et Materiel Industriel, this handy illustrated faded factsheet means I now know oodles of information about a car I will never own, including its vitesse moyenne des piston.

It's utterly useless - and endlessly fascinating. Just imagine what you might have in the attic.