MARKET DAY

You need to park your im­pa­tience, heed the good­ness.

This is going to take time. Shop­ping in our moun­tain town on mar­ket day is en­riched with life from the tran­quil vil­lages of The Pri­o­rat. Pre­cious few peo­ple are in a hurry. It is un­wise to make plans or clock-watch. Your blood pres­sure could turn you puce.

There is no bus­tle, just a sub­tle height­en­ing of being, from the catch-up chat­ter in cafes to the queues in the banks, bak­eries and butch­ers.

Half the car park is swal­lowed for a morn­ing, as stalls fill the void and a steady flow of folk con­sider the wares and the pears, the prices and the plethora of sus­te­nance on offer for the week ahead.

It is Cata­lan. It is mul­ti­cul­tural. It is colour, it is weekly re­unions and the aroma of cof­fee. Time, place and pace are the bond. Just as vi­tally it is a boost for local busi­nesses with­out which we would be all the poorer.

If we are calm and have the time it is good to be there, to aban­don agenda and switch off from the wider world to the one that mat­ters most. I may even at­tempt it on my own, a man with a list, but this can, fool­ishly, add an ir­re­press­ible seed of ur­gency. In try­ing not to make a mis­take or for­get some­thing I am in­clined to for­get the most im­por­tant as­pect of all.

I was sur­prised on a re­cent solo foray to see just one el­derly woman being served in our butch­ers. So I veered in, feel­ing for­tu­nate. I should have put two and two to­gether. She was not from the town and it dawned on me al­most im­me­di­ately that this was going to be a long haul. Bowed like a Cata­lan stair­case and well be­yond 80 years, she was lean­ing on the counter and watch­ing like a hawk as a chicken was quar­tered. She shuf­fled side­ways and pointed out her next order. It is a long counter. I lost count of the shuf­fles. More peo­ple flowed in, some set­tling on the bench by the side win­dow for a nat­ter. The woman’s stock­pil­ing of her freezer amounted, fi­nally, to three bulging shop­ping bags, clearly far more than she could carry.

As sev­eral of us twitched as to how we could help, the door opened and her hus­band called warmly to her and laboured in, lean­ing heav­ily on a walk­ing stick. We all twitched again. The man near­est to the cou­ple of­fered to help but the in­de­fati­ga­ble hus­band was hav­ing none of it. Some­how they wad­dled out into the street and round the cor­ner, weighed with half the fare from the shop.

The warmth and smiles they gen­er­ated in that mo­ment spoke of the spirit and sus­tain­ing essence, the rib­bon of con­ti­nu­ity, that is mar­ket day.

Steady as you go. Keep on keep­ing on.