Hello, my name is Paul and......I'm a snob.

It was inevitable I suppose that being a professional, voting new labour and no longer eating fish and chips out of the wrapper by choice, I was going to have to come out as either upper working class or very low middle class.

The truth finally hit home this afternoon as I walked through Christchurch High Street, which is closed on Monday to traffic because of the market, and realised that some things in life are best avoided. The market. The word market is derived from the French word Mercari - meaning to buy, well I could think of another French word that begins mer and carries on with de to describe the goods on display.

What is it with English provincial markets?

No actually make that English markets. I've been to the fabled Brick Lane Sunday market in the last year and the only difference between that and Christchurch is that in E1 the crap is sold by dodgy looking blokes wearing traditional dress from Bengal or Senegal - rather than Oswald Bailey's.

The French do great markets, so too the Spanish but the English sell stuff that looks dirty, cheap, dirty and cheap - the food is packaged in non-descript packaging, the burger on the fast food stall is doing the backstroke in the grease it's cooking in and let me ask you - 6 DVD's for £5.99? I mean is that dent in the case entirely due to its fall from the tailgate of a lorry.

Farmers Markets are a different deal altogether, you can pick up the produce, taste it, squeeze it and when you've finished with the Farmers wife put her down and buy some of her husbands meat, fruit and veg or my particular favourite lemon curd (even diabetics have to have something worth living for in the culinary department).

One stall today was covered in stickers and homemade posters declaring "Everything £1 or less." What can you possibly buy that costs less than £1 and will last longer than a Rowntree's Fruit Pastille? Another stall was selling cases and covers for mobile phones, it's selling(?) point was the fact that the stallholder could unlock any locked mobile phones while you wait. The catch being, and I know this because I was earwigging as I walked past, is that you have to wait four hours for the mobile phone company to come back to you with the authority and the code. To me that seemed more than ample time for Mr Stallholder to clone your Sim card and drain your monthly call time as you went for a long coffee break. Let's face it you can do anything while you wait given an infinite waiting time.

When I got home the big clear out continued and a neighbour spotted me struggling with a huge pile of vinyl LP's.

"Are those the music from when you were a little boy?" he asked.
"Yes," I replied, "I'm dumping them, no use for them anymore."
"You can't do that, those are collectibles."
"I know, but I've stopped collecting."
"I'll take them, make a few bob."

And so he did.

In the process of putting the albums into piles, I was working on the same selling idea as the fruit stall down the market, you know where the front of the stall is all the good stuff but when you ask for a pound of bananas - Mr Fruit Seller turns round and grabs a bunch of the blackest almost liquefied plantains on the stall. On the top of the pile was an Elvis Presley five album boxset, closely followed by Bruce Springsteen, U2, Talking Heads, Elton John (when he had hair and a career) etc, but dig deeper and you reached the black banana section: Rainbow, Ultravox and then you reach Janis's early teenage years: Slik and The Bay City Rollers.

What my neighbour didn't realise was that the really collectible stuff: Beatles, Stones, Who, Clash etc wasn't going anywhere - nor were the three hundred or so collectible 7 inch singles.

This morning it was the turn of the books to return to their roots, i.e pulp. I get less sentimental the older I get and moving hundreds of books from one room to another whenever redecorating took place was getting too much - as Jerry Seinfeld once said "If you've read a book once, why keep it?" I've restricted my 'keeping' to a selection of fifity or so classics, plus books that fall into certain categories (autobiography/biography/travel/history) the sort of writing that doesn't come and go with fashion.

I'm only two days into my first week's holiday of the year and I'm knackered. Taking into account the cost of her trip to Italy, the cost of decorating materials and new furniture it's also the most expensive weeks holiday Nathalie has ever had. Still she's worth it and I've still got to buy her really special present for when she gets back.