The Glass Bead game

It's been a very long time since I read Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game", and in truth I've forgotten nearly everything about it. And just as well, as this post has nothing whatever to do with the book.

It's really about my visit to the 'The Big Bead Show", at Sandown Park last Saturday and what I found there.

The first exciting thing was that two different shows were on at the same venue and the sexes neatly divided at the entrance. The other show was called "The Carp Society Winter Show", and if you have the stomach for it here's the organiser's website: The Carp Society Winter Show

It attracted a certain kind of man - well, in truth, every man in the car park except myself - all of who were dressed in an identical set of camouflage gear, or army green, and sported a certain rugged appearance.

You know the type: the kind of chap who had no qualms about widdling behind a bush, or likes nothing better than sitting by the bank of a stream for four hours with nothing to sustain themselves but roll-ups and a six-pack of cooking lager. I suppose there must some kind of purpose to it all, and a bit of coarse fishing gets them out of the house and away from the wife-and-kids (gawd bless 'em), but it's not my idea of pleasure.

There's a small public park at the end of my road, on the Thames, where you can see many a similar-looking gent idling away his time over the weekend and making that bit of the park look a tad unsavoury (no toilet's, so no ideas what they use for their other, ahem, more solid toiletry requirements. I just hope they do it on the outgoing tide, otherwise it will hang about for quite a bit, spoiling their catch).

But I digress . . .

The Big Bead Show was about 70 stands selling all kinds of beads: glass, polymer clay, minerals, acetate, plastic or wood, and about 75% all had exactly the same stuff available. Not just similar, oh no. 'Exactly' as in 'identical'.
So there was a lot of running around by visitors to find the best deal on the most common stuff.

The other 25% were the ones that were interesting and what I'd come along to see, because they were the lampworkers selling their own beads, usually made from glass. If you're interested, go the Glass Beadmakers UK website <http://www.gbuk.org> where they have examples, courses and general information on how to make beads.

Some points about the show:

• I don't tend to buy things from people who cannot spell what they're selling, unless English is clearly not their first language, so the stand proudly advertising "Freshwarter Pearls" got a lot of sniggering from me. But I see from Google that they're not the only ones misspelling it, so perhaps it's some kind of brand name, in which case I take back my snigger (yeh, but I bet it's not).
  

• Beads are the new rock and roll, or something. Or probably not. Anyway, they're cheap to buy and can be made into a number of nice-looking designs. If you have a flair for it then jewellery or items covered in bead-work can, I imagine, be a nice therapeutic hobby, and certainly less intrusive on other people than crapping beside a river see previous: carp fishing. But it's also cheap to set up in the bead business. Think about it - the stock is cheap, it's an ideal web-based business, and while I imagine there's a lot of competition amongst the run-of-the-mill bead suppliers, I'd hope the lamp-workers can earn some kind of decent income from it.
  

• I worried about the number of glass beads sourced from China, and think that given the tiny price they sell for and the amount of work involved in making them - polishing, drilling, etc - it must provide a very poor return for the poor sod doing it.

And basically, that's it.
I spent a happy two hours looking at beads, touching beads, thinking about beads, then came home.

And it was good place for people-watching.