A view of produce at a London Farmers Market. (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
What is, perhaps, hard to understand if you’re not a market trader or a guardsman is that not moving very much, generally standing still, generates little or no heat and those bracing temperatures are enhanced just as much as by wind-chill factors.
Whenever I wandered off to shop a little then the extreme cold, this is on Saturday, mellowed into a winter wonderland. That is, other than when I stopped to chat in one of the windier corners of the market where I became grateful for the fairly sheltered site of the East Teas stall.
I was wearing seven layers, eight with the apron, nine with the money belt (how insulating those deep piles of £50 notes are – if only). Sufficiently padded as I am generally, with these extra dimensions I became like Bibendum, the Michelin Man, and the outer layers were hard-pressed to encircle me.
Our business associate in Massachusetts, Curtis Vouwie, whose new mail-order tea company East Wind Tea is selling teas from us in the States reports temperatures of zero Fahrenheit, about -16 degrees Celsius. ‘Nuff said.
Markets (the real kind) are susceptible to weather, though generally in an unpredictable way. Had any of us accurately predicted how trade would be on any day with its myriad variables, many often unknowns such as a recipe in a newspaper or magazine, then, I am sure, they would be very rich.
That said, those of us with a feeling for the market and knowing the community of its earlier days feel rich in still being there in the sharing of good times and hard times. So be it.
Alex runs East Teas in Borough Market on Fridays and Saturdays. Email epoch@eastteas.com.
