Glasgow's Barras is still going (and selling ready-to-go tombstones) – Susan Morrison

It was the place for a weekend wander when I was kid. You could buy bits of meat and bits of car, sometimes on the same stall. Men sold ordinary towels and bedding but they made a production out of it to rival any huckster gunning for business at a Barnum and Bailey showground.

There was a guy who sold cutlery. He fascinated me because he threw entire canteens in the air and caught them without dropping a spoon. Six-year-old me thought he was a magician, till my dad told me he’d glued the lot together. Spoilsport.

Legend had it that there was a mild family connection. My old maiden Auntie Suzie told us some distant female relative married a Goldberg when they only had a stall in the Barras before the glory days of the department store chain. According to Suzie, she was only married a month, then he died, but she got beautiful linen whenever she wanted it. Said my old auntie, bafflingly, there’s not many of us have that luck.

Work took me there last week, to the iconic Barrowlands Ballroom. Never been before. I wasn’t allowed, for one thing. Many famous names have graced that venue, but the one name that stuck as far as my dad was concerned was Bible John, and that put it on the no-fly list for me.

I took a socially distant drift through the Barras. Oh sure, there were fewer people, and a lot of places were closed, but astonishingly, some of the same stalls were in the same place selling the same weird stuff – 37 Hawkwind LPs, anyone?

They say you can buy anything at the Barras, and indeed you can, because this must be the only market in the world with a stall for tombstones, ready to go to for your own engraving. Obviously, it’s hardly an impulse buy, but still, it might come in handy. Could make a useful doorstop in the meantime.

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