Market

I belong to a photo group and each weekend we are set a subject challenge and this week it is markets. I was born and grew up in Cambridge and in the centre of the town there was and is a market. I never really thought very much about it; it was a place I liked to go and see all the different stalls selling the wonderful fresh fruit and vegetables. I seem particularly to remember when it was celery time and the air was full of its peppery fragrance, the stalls loaded with brilliant white heads with black fen soil still clinging to the roots. It is so difficult to find white celery these days, nutty and fresh with a delicious sweet flavour, not like the bitter green stalks which seem to be the only choice these days…

The stalls had stripy awnings which made the whole square so colourful. There were other things apart from fruit and vegetables, but that is what sticks in my mind… which leads me to other markets. Cambridge market must have had a great influence which I didn’t realise at the time, because now, whenever I see the word ‘market’ I’m almost irresistibly drawn to follow it. Another great market was Bolton market – well actually there were two, the general on one and the fish market. In my memory the fish market was in a massive hangar like shed which seemed to stretch for hundreds of yards; the stalls were piled with fish of every sort imaginable, familiar and unfamiliar, river fish, sea fish, shell-fish, and every sort of marine animal that is edible. The fish lay on ice and were so fresh that they really did look like silver darlings (silver darlings actually refers to herring!)

When I went to Singapore to meet my long-term pen-friend Eddie for the first time, he and my host, lovely Jamilah, took me to many markets, and I must have wandered around with my eyes almost popping out of my head at all the marvellous and exotic things on display. There was an elderly man squatting on the pavement with a colourful cloth spread out and baskets of reading glasses. Squatting beside him was an elderly Indian lady trying them on, trying to find a pair which fitted.

I was in the USA, staying with my dear friend Wendy she took me to Pike Place market… wow, that really was something else… It was glorious, wonderful, unbelievable! I wanted to grab a basket and fill it with bunches of this, and pounds of that, and some of those and a dozen of these… I just bought a poster which I put up in my kitchen when I got home.

Friends of ours moved to Spain and they took us to the ancient city of Elx; there was a medieval market which I believe happens every year. The stall holders were dressed up, and with the palm trees all around the market place it was just wonderful. I bought a pair of olive-wood salad servers… I could have spent a fortune!

Occasionally we have a market her in Weston-super-Mare… and I still enjoy visiting it, bit it really isn’t as exciting as other markets I’ve visited!