Diablevert

These ain't cockles and mussels, bub

Plums in Pram, Capel Street

Cherries in Pram, Capel Street

Between the big open air market on Moore Street and the fresh fruit wholesaler's warehouses down by the Four Courts, you often see these women selling fruit on the street, or very occassionally little trinkets, toys for kids. (The women are not depicted because they are all tough-looking broads in their fifties, who didn't seem like they'd look kidly to having their picture taken. They could totally beat me up, dude.) They always sell them out of these big, old-fashioned prams. I can definitely see the advantages --- high center of gravity, huge storage space, highly mobile. I just wonder where the heck they get them, in this day and age. I suppose they could all be hand-me-downs --- those things are built like warhorses, made to stand ten kid's worth of wear in the first generation of use --- but some of them have to be fifty years old, at least. Some of them must break down, and not everybody would have kept theirs, and then where would you go to buy another? Because all of the fruit vendors have them. But I know by the 70s baby strollers and such like were all those collapsable canvas and alluminum models, sturdy as a beach chair in a hurricane, and in the 80s and 90s you had the heavily padded kind with the three-part safety straps and anti-lock breaks and snap-on lunch trays and a bar of dangly plastic bits, and nowadays they've got either those or the jogging kind, with the giant off-road tires and a triangular sack to sling the kid in while you race around. I asked the secretary at my old job about how they find the old-fashioned ones and she seemed to find nothing odd in it, didn't even understand the question, really. I suppose one day I'll have to get up the courage to ask them and hope they don't burn me with their fags or pelt me with fruit.