I love a market any time, any place, anywhere.
But one nestled in the hollow of a prettily pastel Italian town, sun tempered by a light breeze drifting through the streets from the ocean below, rates pretty highly with me.
I’m browsing Camogli market.
Tiny multi-coloured tomatoes lie like tangled beads in wooden crates. Squeaky purple aubergines vie for space with bunches of punchy macho Italian basil. The abundant produce stars alongside the sorts of clothes designed to appeal to carefree holiday-makers dreaming of a better life.
What do I buy?
Well, apart from a pot of pungent homemade pesto, a paper bag bursting with cherries and three lusciously ripe peaches, I snap up a vivid emerald linen dress, lovely and loose and easy. Perfect for the hotter days to come and not too tricky to manoeuvre over your head within the tight confines of a dinky campervan. Also, some drawstring trousers, dark in colour and generously cut. They make me think of yoga retreats and hippy hangouts. I almost fall for another dress in a gregarious floral print - fabulous flashes of gold, yellow and turquoise. Purse poised, I recall just in time those dire warnings about holiday shopping errors - buying things on a whim that you would never dream of wearing at home. Can I really see myself in this startling dress back in Lewisham? The answer sadly is no.
I’ve learned the hard way.
I’m fifteen and heading off on my first (and only) school trip abroad. We go to Normandy to see the Bayeux Tapestry. The tapestry itself is monumental, but I really only remember the holiday because of the clothes associated with it. All my spending money goes on a pair of newly-fashionable pedal pushers. I’ve never seen anything so stylish. I don’t really need them but that isn’t the point. I just desperately yearn for a slice of that fabled French glamour. But the charm wears off on reaching British soil. The bright white pedal pushers just don’t cut the mustard when I wear them on the streets of South Wales ‘sans bicyclette’.
Before going to France, my Mother had generously taken me shopping for a couple of special new outfits. I was thrilled with the mint-green bomber jacket and matching trousers that we selected. I’d always been rather fussy about the things I wore on school excursions. Once, getting ready for a year six trip to Cheddar Gorge, I refused to put on my summer dress in spite of it being the most sensible thing to wear. It was set to be a stiflingly hot day but I would not be GIRLIE. I would be a FEMINIST. I would wear TROUSERS (trousers meant feminism to me back then). And so I set off, clad in a thick pair of rust coloured cords and a cinnamon-coloured teeshirt. My statement outfit stuck horribly to my sweaty skin as I clambered up through the gorge. I was oven-baked and sun-blistered by the time I emerged at the top. I nearly collapsed through heat exhaustion.
I was not going to make ill-judged holiday fashion choices in Camogli thirty years on. No way!