Markets a frisson of yarns in fabric of life. Telling stories of place.

Earlier this year my tight schedule crossed England, Glasgow & Rome and still found time to visit markets, farm shops. Adding more photos of markets to an extensive collection  40 yrs gathered  . filling albums or nowadays icloud with notes squished into travel books and digital notes.

In my 20’s I travelled from Britain overland for 6 months until stopping in Sydney.  When visiting a new city town or village we visited cinemas & markets.  As backpackers & local bus riders slipping into the outer edges of the overland trails, or flying over the lands refusing visas to woman  unaccompanied by a male. merging mingling observing cinemas and markets brought two females, less conspicuously into the world of communities, families.  We had friends in most countries to visit.

But inevitably such hosts came from some sort of privilege, we as the visitors in countries a maybe drop by some historic or world wonders tourist sites but it’s always been people that captured our interest.

Markets are not just food, day or night families or woman come to shop and echo to the origins Towns and cities formed at the junction roads met as people came to trade. 

People  - producers and their customers -create markets.  There’s the flow of trade, of exchange.  Without analysis we visited flea, family, life stock auctions, markets and to this day I visit farmers markets and wholefood groceries to merge the people of food markets whichever country it is - we eat, we purchase food, this is our human commonality  - the joy is in the cultural diversity of food.

   Nowadays I don’t bother with the local cinema, no more sheets up and 16 mm projectors with wee kids gently bounced between siblings crossed legged knees.

Internet globalisation removed cinemas as lenses to experience community.  But markets still are a frisson of the yarns into a fabric of life.  They still tell stories of place, even the most ornate superficial plastic to the deepest sincerest soil enriched place.