Lovember: Shopping Locally

This is my walk to the greengrocer's. On the right hand side are the garden walls and thick conifer hedges with half-obscured, rusty long-disused doors to the gardens of the big stone Victorian villas behind. On the left is the Tweed, just down from Junction pool where the fishermen with the deepest pockets play. Mostly the fishermen are jolly, and sometimes you can see a salmon being caught or better, see them leaping -especially at this time of year.

The greengrocer is Romanian I think. He's lovely, but better still is his younger brother who was shipped over to help him when his wife (the owner's...) had had a baby. The brother is not a happy rabbit, and he's an unhappy rabbit in only the way an Eastern European can be. He's been here too long. He'll NEVER get home because it's been two years now and who knows where it will end? There will probably be another baby. And then he will be trapped here forever. But what can he do? And I nod and sympathise and tell him what a lucky man his brother is, and then I get asked about what I'm going to cook with my purchases. And that's where the real fun starts. And sometimes the tears when I'm told of the soup only his mother can make...

Even if they didn't stock 125 different varieties of plum when plums are in season and this week 8 varieties of cabbage, not including the kale, and even if they didn't get me whatever nonsense I've decided I'm going to try from the latest recipe book - I'd still shop there.

It's a world away from Sainsbury's and all the better for it.