A long time ago, in a town far far away...
Years and years ago, I took my then girlfriend away for a weekend in Harrogate. No idea why I chose there now, think it might have been a special offer weekend deal or something.

After driving for hours and hours, we arrived, further north than either of us had ever been. Being February, it was pretty cold. No worries, we had coats.

We couldn't check into the hotel until 1 o'clock and it was only about 11, so we decided to have a wander round some shops to kill the time. Parking up, we followed our nosees towards what we thought would be the town centre.
Suddenly, out of the blue, it started hailing. Proper hardcore hail, too; big chunks of ice hitting the ground with a deafening roar - nearly as loud in fact as the sounds of agony coming from my mouth as my bald shiny head was pummelled mercilessly.

There was only one thing for it: we sprinted into the nearest shop - which turned out to be an antiques/bric-a-brac/junk shop. When I say "nearest", it was in fact the *only* shop, as we hadn't actually made it to the town centre yet.

Sadly, there's no hilarious pay-off to this story (although the look on my girlfriend's face was pretty funny as she saw where we were stuck)... the shop was pretty amazing though; there were random things just piled everywhere, there must have been things in there that no-one had touched for decades. Contraptions, ornaments, tat, strange bits of metal of which I had absolutely no idea what they were, tools, books, cutlery... pretty much everything you can imagine. Some of it was hideous, some of it was broken, most of it fell into the "why the actual fuck would you keep this, let alone try and sell it?!" category. I really can't imagine how they ever sold enough stuff to pay the bills.
There was an utterly gorgeous Grandmother clock though. It was awesome, I was seriously considering shelling out the £1200 he wanted for it when I was interrupted by my girlfriend saying "Come on, it's stopped. Let's get the fuck out of here".

tl;dr - I went in an antique shop to get out of a hailstorm; it was full of shit with a few gems
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Wed 16 May 2012, 10:38, Reply)