Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
styles of music less appropriate to French village life - except for maybe Death-Slash-Metal
or whatever it's called, which shouldn't be allowed anywhere, Scandinavia included.
For once, though, the music seemed appropriate and the busiest market day in months was
bustling about its business to the silky sounds of Tino Rossi and Charles Trenet. There was
a happy hum in the air as people wandered slowly through the lanes between stalls and refri-
geration vans. In the winter, market shopping is more like a raid as you know exactly what
you're after and are unlikely to hang around to browse. The numerous
boucherie
and
charcu-
terie
vans had long queues, the cheese and
saucisson
stalls were all doing a roaring trade -
each having their loyal and distinct followers - the vast and buxomly stocked fresh fish coun-
ters were gleaming and the individual
vignerons
were giving away more freebies than they'd
possibly have liked but were happy to have the attention.
This year there were new sellers around too: a fresh pasta seller, a stuffed olives stall and a
ground spice man, and though always welcome I feared they won't last the course. The mar-
ket is a conservative place where traditional wares can thrive and have done for generations,
but unlikely to support exotic interlopers in a sleepy, rural backwater like this. Though, hav-
ing said that, some of the most unlikely stalls return every spring and for the life of me I can't
see how they survive. There's the African/West Indian stall selling Bob Marley towels and
dubious-looking 'cigarette' paraphernalia, like this is Camden on a Sunday morning; there are
the 'clothing' stalls which are ideal if you want your young daughter to dress like a street-
walker or your son to look like he still hankers for that East 17 or New Kids on the Block
look; and there are the shifty-looking watch sellers who constantly scour the crowds hoping
that whoever bought a cheap timepiece the week before won't be back looking for a refund.
The same faces are there year in, year out, a comforting presence for the regulars. There's
Ali, the gruff Moroccan fruit seller, who towards the end of the morning will start be-
grudgingly giving away rotten fruit and then moaning that we are 'taking money from the
grandmother he has to support.' Jean-Jacques, the ribald
charcutier
, whose risqué jokes
nearly always have a variant of
pain au chocolat
as the punchline; there's the depressed fish-
erman; the man who sells vegetable plants and if he doesn't have what you want he'll 'go and
dig some up'; there are successive generations of Romani selling baskets; salesmen who in
the winter sell
chauffage
(central heating) and in the summer it's air-conditioning; and there's
the woman who owns a lingerie stall but who, in a tragic example of bad marketing, spends
the entire morning adjusting her own obviously ill-fitting bra.
And so into this veritable hotbed of rural Frenchness we strode. A family with a mission:
hen hunting. It's true that all of our animals were rescued in one form or another, and although
we were paying for these hens there was a feeling that we were rescuing them too. There was
one stall selling hens, cocks, geese, guinea fowl and ducks and, even though it was outdoors,
it reeked. Somehow I was the only one who seemed to care enough to put his cravat over
his nose. The woman in front of us wanted to choose three
poules
for Sunday dinner as she
