Going to market in the south of France. What sights and smells and sounds. And what prices ...
One of the joys of rural and small-town France is the weekly market. Our marché provençal takes place every Thursday morning. Whenever I have been there in the past, the place has been buzzing.
Three alleys of stalls, selling everything from regional delicacies and horse meat (which, emphatically, they do not sell to me) to arts and crafts, clothing and umbrellas, stretch the length of what is usually the biggest car park in the Mediterranean resort of Le Lavandou.
It is advisable to get there early to avoid the crowds. Or so I have always been told; I would certainly accept that the later you leave it in summer, the more congested those alleys will be when you get there.
But this isn’t summer. So my first mistake was to drag myself to the market by 8am with the aim of avoiding the crowds. It did assure me of one of the reduced number of available parking spaces in town, but this may have been because the market was nowhere near open for business at such an hour.
Traders were slowly assembling and stocking their stalls, or wandering off to the cafe for coffee, croissants and banter. There was no sign of any other would-be shopper and you would not, in this early morning scene, have detected the green shoots of rejuvenated economic activity.
So I walked along the seafront, until a sharp breeze forced me back to the charming and less chilly lanes behind the promenade (and another check on work in progress at the market).
And then I retraced my steps to do it again. It was on my third round of the market stalls that I found at last that I was not the only customer. A few traders were even showing desultory signs of wanting to sell their wares, while grumbling that it was about to rain.
Then came my second mistake. I was armed with a short list of tasty specialities we would offer our friends arriving from Canada including an assortment of olives, anchoiade au basilic, tapenade verte, confit de tomates and caviar d’aubergines.
The stall that normally has these treats - pictured from last summer - was nowhere to be found. Its owners must see it as seasonal trade. Luckily, someone else had a few of things I needed.
As he filled little plastic containers with just four items from my list, I saw that he had not yet put price signs on the counter. Too late: the bill, for what was really just a collection of appetisers, came to €63.
Whatever Europe has lost during the recession, it has retained a painfully high cost of living. You do not need to be utterly poverty-stricken to consider such a sum, for so little, outrageous.
In the end, I had to be thankful for small mercies: the trader let me off the €3; the rain held off long enough to spare me having to hand over another wad of euros at the umbrella stall. But my friends had better like what is about to be served to them.
* Happy to report that since filing my column to The National, Abu Dhabi, our great friends Bill and Lesley Taylor have declared themselves well contented with their amuses gueules de luxe. Less happy to report, they're now on their way back to Toronto. Money well spent, then, or they're brilliant actors.
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