Here and There Read Free

pollarded planes and uncomfortable ironwork benches, and at its corners will be the most holy of holies in the je ne sais quoi market: a café. A café with cream and pink woven chairs and little metal tables and a waiter with a long apron and the look of a man who is beaten by his wife. And here you will meet the rest of your party after two hours of worshipping at the long temple of Frenchness and order your café au lait and perhaps just an Armagnac, if you’re having one, and perhaps a tasse of the rough but immensely agreeable local wine – just to smell it is to understand utterly the superiority of terroir over mere talent.
    And you can examine the rewards of your forage, the amulets of pilgrimage. Oh, I didn’t get much – just this artichoke, because I liked the colour. Oh well, we got this marvellous chèvre. The man said it was made with his grandmother’s goats, or perhaps that his grandmother was a goat. And this charming gingham bag for hanging on the back of the kitchen door and keeping old plastic bags in. Not, of course, that we now use plastic bags anymore, on principle. And no, you’re right – we don’t actually have a kitchen door, either. But still, it seemed so here, so right. I’ll give it to the daily; she’s from the Philippines. Did anyone get any olives? I tried to get some of that divinelooking pâté, but I think I bought an eggtimer instead.
    And here is the truth of French markets: it’s almost impossible to actually buy anything in them. If you had to really do your entire weekly shop in one, it would take you a fortnight. So consequently the French don’t – they use supermarkets like everyone else. This isn’t for buying, it’s for worshipping. France isn’t really like this at all, it’s just an idea of a France just like this. This is where they teach their je ne sais quoi before they go to the convenience store, the gym and the office and figure out how to be more like the Germans and the English and the Irish and the Americans. I said that what I liked about markets was that you couldn’t fake them, that they’re immutably driven by commerce. Except for these ones. They are the exception that proves the rule. The French are not like their markets at all. Their markets are actually like the rest of us, or our ideal selves. Somebody once said that when good Americans die they go to Paris. Well, the rest of us go to a market somewhere in the south of France.

All in the family
    Only in Sicily is organised crime a tourist attraction. Just don’t ask the locals about it.
    There are many singular and specific things about Sicily. Indeed, Sicily is a specifically singular place. But perhaps the most striking singular thing is that it’s the only holiday destination on earth that tourists visit because of the organised crime. Sicily has the distinction, dubious or ironic, of having murderous kidnapping and extortion as an attraction, like the whirling dervishes of Istanbul or the street mimes of Vienna. (Actually, slightly less murderous than the street mimes of Vienna.)
    The mafia’s USP – and I think in this it is also alone in the world of crime – is having a strict rulebook that prohibits the robbing of strangers. You keep it in the family. Sicilians are understandably taciturn and annoyed by the visitors’ interest in their thugs. It’s like having a psychopath in the family that everyone else thinks is a charming and exciting raconteur. The black hand of crime families grew out of the grotesque feudal poverty of the Bourbon rule of Sicily. Peasants had no rights, no redress and no justice; the secret organisation grew from the aching tumour of revenge. But unlike Robin Hood, the mafia didn’t rob from the rich to give to the poor; it robbed the poor and protected the poor against robbery, setting up a circular monopoly of both crime and crime prevention that has lasted