Post Cards from La Bourboule – Market Day



Saturday is market day in La Bourboule.  It is not a very elaborate affair, there are several stalls with fruit and vegetables, also some with sausages and hams, ditto for cheese.  I also noticed some clothes stalls, but they, too, sell only solid basics which can be found in any other market or shop.  La Bourboule is a small town with down to earth sensible folk, who don’t go in for unnecessary fripperies.  The tourists are pretty much the same – the luxury loving snobbish upper class types go to Le Mont Dore just up the road.  I have never been to a market day in Le Mont Dore, I am loyal to La Bourboule and refuse to be tempted.

But despite the simple nature of the market I found some keepsakes that will cheer my heart when I return to Oxford (see photo above).  A pottery stall yielded the pig, which serves as a smoked sausage (saucisson) holder.  These sausages are kept at room temperature and are eaten a few slices at a time, so having a custom-made receptacle for them is extremely handy.  They tend to end up in the bread basket, or jostle for space in the fruit bowl, and neither option is very desirable.  If in the bread basket the bread acquires a sausagey smell which goes badly with jam and honey.  If kept in the fruit bowl the grapes end up smelling smoky and sometimes a moist fruit soaks into the sausage and the flies descend upon it.  So the saucisson pig seems like an excellent idea.

I also bought a letter train - a little locomotive which pulls the seven letters of my name.  The price was Euro 5, the same price for any surname.  A good thing my much-married friend Mrs Leadbeater-Beaconsfield-Ffolkes wasn’t there to purchase a train!  This is the sort of idiot purchase one regrets when one returns home, but I like to live in the present and will worry about that later.

I also bought lots of strawberries, grapes, tomatoes, and fennel.  No cheese or sausages, obviously, I will not be unfaithful to Au Regal Auvergnat!  Since we are on the subject of sausages et al, the French word for them is choucrouterie.  This is derived from choucroute, meaning sauerkraut – smoked sausages and ham are traditionally cooked and eaten with sauerkraut.  But although I looked everywhere, I have not found any sauerkraut anywhere, not in the shops and not in the restaurants.  The world is full of things to worry about!

The tablemat in the background of my photo, by the way, was bought at Remy, the newsagent next to Les Galapagos.  I was looking for a ready reference for acquiring some French grammar, and the tablemat seemed the best option.  Remy stocks them for French school children, who are just as bemused by the number of tenses as I am.  ‘Eight tenses,’ I exclaimed when I looked at my purchase while waiting to have my nose Methode-de-Pruetzed, ‘wouldn’t three be enough?’  A little boy who was also waiting to be treated turned to his mother and said, ‘Ha, you see?  I am not the only one!’  The mother shot me a glance which I translated roughly as, ‘stop ruining my kid’s chances of getting into college!’  Luckily it was my turn to enter the doctor’s office.