Back in Brittany

A good market can capture the essence of a nation as quickly as its anthem.

I’ve just arrived in a Brittany. It is market day and I am instantly infused with unmistakable Frenchness. The influx of aromas has triggered a flood of memories. Images of family holidays in Brittany, a student summer in the Loire, and months working on a hot Languedoc campsite, all start to crystallise in my mind.

The market stalls are pitched precariously on a sloping, cobbled town square, overlooked by the town hall and the old post office. The white canvas that frames each stall is flapping in the salty morning breeze, like sails catching a gust of wind.

France being France almost everything is food. There’s pungent cheese, cooked salamis and hams, raw meats – including horse, fruit - oranges, lemons and grapes, vegetables – olives, onions and garlic, and fabulous fish – as we’re near the coast.

Standing on the edge of the market I get caught in a wonderful crosswind that adds a whiff of freshly baked baguette from a nearby bakery to the heady mix of airborne flavours. The buyers are in charge here. French women are discerning purchasers and the market is full of them – smartly dressed and gesticulating forcefully, locked in commercial combat with the stall owners. I buy a French comic, some Emmental cheese and a few slices of salami. Then I generally amble around, a gear or two below my French counterparts.

After an hour on the cobbles, I take my wares and retire to a café – being careful to retreat a few streets to avoid being charged a premium for a ringside seat at the square.

            

The blackboard outside advertises a set price menu for a modest price – but it’s not quite lunchtime so I opt for a hot chocolate. There is only handful of customers in the café. Some older men are playing a dice game and drinking small glasses of beer. And three teenagers are playing ‘Flipper’ (Pinball) and drinking something that looks like bright green washing up liquid. Apparently it is not as harmful as it looks.

           

The café reeks of polished metal, strong coffee and lingering French cigarettes. It is smart, but ordinary, having all the necessary qualifications for a backstreet pit stop – TV, flipper, basic menu, cheap wine and liquorice spirit, beer, coffee, newspapers and conversation.  

            

The waiter leaves me a small square of a bill with my drink. The bill features an indecipherable array of purple numbers and has a serrated edge where it has been hastily torn from the till. Locating the price on these things can be challenging.  I remember a family holiday when my mum mistakenly tried to pay the date instead of the price.

We had all laughed.  The waiter had simply shrugged in a French way, and wondered how we could have ever thought a cheese toastie could cost so much. 

I wanted to tell him it was because we had just come from Paris.