nunoncastors

I have a habit of thinking too much about trivial things and taking an excessive interest in the seemingly mundane. I’m one of those people who look up beyond the ground floor in cities and ponder what buildings used to be used for, who built them and what stories they hold. I’m fascinated by secret doors and all those little things that people see every day but never really look at. I’m a bit odd really.

Oddities aside, I had the following thoughts today as I wandered around Market Square sampling wares from, oddly enough, a market. I can heartily recommend Ostrich burgers by the way, they’re most tasty, doubly so with onions and chutney. Mmm… Anyway, until recently Market Square (Nottingham) was a featureless slab with some slightly shit fountains that served no other purpose that as a congregation point for tramps, wankers, the socially awkward and people waiting for friends.

It is still all of these things.

However, it is now used intermittently for the purpose from which its name is derived. There is, once again, a market on Market Square. Nothing remarkable about that, you may think. Not so because, if you think about it, there’s something enduring about markets. They’re simple and basic and fun. People have been going to them for millennia and, while I agree they seem mundane, there’s something amazing about that fact. I spent my lunch doing something people before my have done for thousands of years. I wandered about, I chatted, sampled and haggled and came away contented. I can’t recall ever having been contented going to a supermarket. And there’s the rub, for all the progress we’ve make in terms of the ‘retail experience’, all people really want is – well, what they want. I sat eating my Ostrich burger (seriously, really tasty) and watching all the people mill around the stalls, poking about curiously and chatting with the traders and it struck me how many of them there were. Granted its lunch and people getting out of their offices for an hour are bound to be intrigued by pretty much anything, but the majority were buying little things here and there.

Two stalls just sold vegetables, proper, home-grown, mysteriously coloured and unusually shaped vegetables with earth still clinging to them, a few more were selling meat and game, and one even proudly sported a sign declaring ‘Grand Sausage Tasting Today’.

And very grand they were too.

This is what I think we’re missing, we’ve vast malls and supermarkets and homogenized high streets, but they’re all so impersonal. Sure, they’re convenient and cheap, but they’re also hollow and soulless. You trudge around a supermarket staffed by people with dead eyes and vacant expressions and, what? You save a little time and money because the food’s bought in bulk to maximise company profits and they’re open all the time because they employ the desperate and needy who’ll work whenever. I hate it, I think everyone does, we just accept it because it’s there and no one thinks about it. But watching people get excited because they’ve spotted a stall that only sells homemade cheese, or someone making approving sounds about the chutney they’ve just sampled, it made me think how much nicer it is and appreciate why markets have endured so well, beyond the need to buy stuff.