A Morning Stroll to the Market

This morning I woke up at 8am to sunlight streaming through the curtains. I had set my alarm for 9, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was ready to get up the first time I woke - unusual for me.

I spent my usual hour faffing around and then I strolled into town with a mental shopping list: some dice (for a language game in my ESL lesson), a bottle of oil for my pile-of-rust bike, a pair of scissors and whatever vegetables looked interesting at the market.

I love my market veg stall. There are several different stalls which are at the market on most days - one serves the local restaurants, so imports a lot of hot-housed stuff from London, one sells glossy packaged vegetables which probably were flown in from abroad, and one prides itself on sourcing locally-grown produce, often things grown in their own allotment. You can probably guess which one I go to (hint: it's the latter).

Today, I pondered the wisdom of buying a tray of mixed lettuce plants so that I would have fresh salad every day. After talking it over with the lovely stall holder, we decided that I would be likely to get excessively busy in the middle of term and leave them to die, which would be sad. Also, I don't really have an ideal room for growing things in - my window faces into a north-facing courtyard and rarely gets any direct sunlight. So it's bagged salads ahoy.

The bunches of radishes looked delicious, so I bought one of those. I also grabbed a couple of handfuls of salad potatoes, two small onions, four small pears and an orange wrapped in one of those attractive waxed-paper wrappers which don't seem to serve any purpose beyond making me feel glamorous as I buy them. The whole lot came to £2.35, which is about what I'd have paid for the pears alone in the supermarket.

Lunch today consisted of a slice of spinach quiche, which was also last night's dinner since I froze them in two-portion slices, and a big heap of salad. I've been snacking on radishes and cherry tomatoes all afternoon, and dinner will be spaghetti bolognese (also out of the freezer - I'm attempting to empty it for defrosting), probably with more salad. Summer is delicious and i-cumen in.