We went to a car boot sale – Hayes Farm – last Sunday. I was struck by the number of enormous and expensive-looking cars: BMWs, Mercedes, Lexus; we followed a huge Lexus 4 by 4 along the dirt tracks out to the farm exit at the end of the sale.

Today I was eating my lunch, sitting on a low wall in St George’s Walk, Croydon. The Council wanted to close it down, and beam in a new development, called Park Place, to be designed and installed by Minerva. But, with lots still vacant in Croydon’s other shopping malls, the Whitgift Centre and Centrale, the project stalled. By this point, many businesses in St George’s Walk had closed down, so the place has a sort of ghost-town look. In theory, the Council’s trying to support small businesses with low rents and, nominally, with a bit of promotion (which boiled down to a temporary sign one weekend saying “there are some shops in here”) . But Croydon shoppers are snobbish, aspirational. They drive Lexus 4 by 4s, BMWs to their car boot sales.

As I sat there, a crushed napkin blew, tumbleweed-like, down the mall, followed by an empty sugar sachet. It reminded me of a passage I read a while ago in a pop science book, about how vortices dissipate their energy into smaller and smaller vortices, until the energy’s lost to entropy: we stop thinking of it as energy, because we can’t capture it, can’t make use of it. So… the tiny gusts rolling the sugar sachet down St George’s Walk are… what, energy dissipated down from huge flows of warm air around the atmosphere? I’m not sure whether I understand it properly, to be honest – I’d personally like small gusts to be able to cause large air currents, but… there you go, I’m not a professional.

I’ve started buying lunch and coffee from the Madeira Deli, and today I bought a broom from DIY Den, but I don’t think that’ll be enough by itself to save them in their competition for hearts and minds with B & Q, the national and transnational crap-vortices of the big brands. So is there a sense in which St George’s Walk is a small vortex of transactions, dissipating mater-energy out to people who drink the coffee, or let it go stale, or use the broom, wear out the broom? Dissipate the value of the broom, the coffee, to entropy, to dust and smelly piss?

I’m sure that car boot sales, jumble sales and charity shops can be viewed as small vortices of transaction and of goods, of matter-energy, relating to the world of transnational commerce and high street retail in the same way little eddies of wind relate to intercontinental cyclones.

On Sunday at Hayes Farm I watched a woman try to sell a dress. “I want £5 on it love, It’s Oasis, I spent £100 on it. No, can’t take £3, I spent £3 getting it dry cleaned.” Her voice had a confessional edge to it, as though she was ashamed at having spent that much money, making back so little. If you sell your stuff for 2% of the price for which you bought it, you’ve dissipated its value. You’ve taken that item from a high-value to a valueless state. Is there a sense in which she’s literally dissipated energy, created entropy where there was order before? BMWs depreciate quickly. If your lifestyle involves buying BMWs new, then selling them after three years, are you dissipating a lot of transactional value?

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