Tuesday 10th April

Admittedly it was Easter Sunday, but the market at Issigues was something else.  Despite the unseasonal weather, with rain clouds churning up the skies above us, everyone was in a festive mood.  And this was a real street market, winding all the way up the high street, and into the village square and down at least four or five other roads too. In fact wherever you went there were stalls selling everything you could imagine.  But not like the shoddy market stalls in England where plastic and cheap tools or packets of out of stock food are sold, or piles of stuff bought cheaply from wholesalers on the hope of a quick profit looking sad and neglected.  No, here everything was good quality, well presented, and genuinely interesting.  There were one or two selling clothes or hats, and a few jewelry stalls too, but most were food, and what glorious food too.  There were of course lots of fruit and vegetables, with asparagus, chard, endives, fennel, and huge bulbs of pink garlic, as well as the more standard items.  These were supplemented by charcuterie and sausages and foie gras and cured hams.  There was a huge variety of cheese; I bought one large piece of the most beautiful semi-hard cheese cut from a wheel, I was so excited that I forgot the name of it.

In the town square there was a feast being prepared.  An old grey-green mobile bakery, which looked pre-war was baking the bread, French women were busy stirring huge industrial sized steel tureens of soup and vegetables, a marquee was being laid with trestle tables and chairs for a banquet.  The piece de resistance was a huge open air barbecue.  A raised thirty foot long metal trough filled with massive burning logs over which were suspended about ten huge legs of pork, blackening and sizzling in the heat.  A man was constantly dousing them with water so they were kept moist.  What a sight, what a discovery, what an adventure, and all happening in a really quite small village in South-Western France.