Market Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.

Philip Larkin

All those Market days that have scurried away down the mouse hole of memory! Sunny days, grey days, hot days, cold days, fascinating days, tedious days, happy days, sad days. Perhaps they need to be caught and looked at.

Market days: All human life is there! as The News of the World used to proclaim.

I've stood market on, at a rough guess, three and a half thousand occasions. Each of those days has been full of incidents, people and sensations.

Market trading is an occupation that is as much a way of life as a profession. It has been about as long as people have had surplus goods to sell and a town to take them to. Many markets have been operating for at least a millennium. Leicester Market, for example, where I stood for seventeen years [sounds tiring doesn't it!] can trace its history back for at least a thousand years. No doubt there were markets in Leicester right through the so called 'Dark Ages'. There certainly were in Roman and pre Roman times.

Market trading is now an endangered way of life. Until recently, the trip to the market was the most important shopping expedition of all, particularly for ordinary people and particularly for small towns. These trips were not just about shopping; they were also lively social events when people met up in pubs and cafes, at street corners and under market crosses. A lot of eating, drinking, flirting, gossiping, shouting, moaning, discussion on politics, dissemination of jokes, news, rumour and so on occurred on market days. There was a buzz, the crack on market days. There still is on some markets on some days and it is to be savoured: it is the raw current of life. It needs cultivating and nurturing.

Today I've just visited Grantham to get some shopping. Like most shopping trips it made me feel sad and dispirited. Chain stores, supermarkets, charity shops dominate the High Street. In the Isaac Newton Centre old people, young mothers, the unemployed, the disabled seemed to have congregated. No one eating, no one drinking [it's forbidden] no one laughing [seems like that'as forbidden too], no one looking remotely happy. This is the raw social squalor of our country. No Dickensian vitality enlivens it. Here we are in 2010, with 'stuff 'produced by cheap labour in the Far East gradually inching towards landfill sites. More stuff than we can ever need and a social fabric that is soiled and ragged and producing misery by the container load. We can't go on like this.

Changing the way we shop can help. Shopping needs to become a human activity again. Markets, a human form of shopping to my mind, can help. I want to see them come back from the brink. I'm not saying that markets are in good shape as they are. Traders themselves need to get their act together and provide better goods and better service. Many have colluded in the long term decline of markets by offering surly, mean spirited service and, to be honest, by not always being honest.

But despite the odd miserable so & so, most market traders are decent people. Many of them are fascinating people who have had all sorts of life experiences, all sorts of interesting histories. They're a group of people worth getting to know.