Devil's Eyeballs

Market day today in our local town (Ceret). Always a busy day, but the cloudy weather kept away some of the usual hordes. It's a real experience for us - used to the more sterile aisles of supermarkets or even the quiet order of the local farm shop. Here the whole town seems to come out in force and with about 6 streets worth of stalls there's plenty to choose from, with amazing cheeses, bread, olives, rotiseries, wine.... (and all the market tat you'd expect too before I get carried away with the rural idyll!)

We've been coming here for 10 years now, and it's been really interesting to see the market grown and change. A new development this year is this organic veg stall, mainly tomatoes but also aubergines and lovely yellow courgettes. The tomatoes are, as you can see, all the ones that our lovely UK supermarkets would turn their noses up at - ancient varieties, nobbly, ugly, bizarre colours and (I am told*) utterly delicious. The most interesting one is the one we've dubbed the raspberry ripple - because when you cut into it that's what it looks like.

*I should quickly interject that I loathe tomatoes. Always have. Every year I try, thinking I might grow into the taste. I even tried growing them once, thinking that might help. It didn't. The title of this blip is a friend and fellow tomato-phobe's name for them.

Anyway, Ceret is a fab town: come on Saturday for the market, then have a coffee and chill out in the great art museum (lots of Picasso) then adjourn to Bar Bigaro for a long, long night...