A Trip To Bury Market

Yesterday we had a day out to Bury Market. It's a long, long (very long) time since we last went to Bury and the size of the market there takes the occasional or new visitor a bit by surprise. It is huge! There are rows and rows of market stalls selling everything from sweets to food of every kind and from material and sewing thread to gowns and evening wear. If you are looking for cheap entertainment items there are stalls with both new and second hand books and DVDs. Hidden amongst all these rows of delights are small, sometimes tiny cafes with a few tables where people sit cheerfully (or sometimes a little bit morosely...) nursing a mug of coffee or something to eat.

There's a meat and fish market hall that has to be seen to be believed. I had no camera with me of course - I refuse to treat my phone as a camera, it takes bloody awful photos and I hold a camera more steadily if it's jammed against my eye... So I waited until I got home and then looked for a photo on t'internet and got the coloured pencils out.

The meat and fish stalls looked wonderful and there was little smell which tells me that the fish was very fresh and had been properly looked after on stands that were well maintained and cleaned. There were other foodstuffs too that made me think of school days and had my mouth watering.

Manchester tart. Not the sort with high heels and caked-on make-up masking advancing years ("Fancy an 'orrible time, dearie?")... I put this photo on my FaceBook page last night and immediately people were drooling all over their keyboards in the rush to comment. Moya Gleave in New Zealand was the first to describe it for those southerners who had hitherto doubted its very existence. "It's a pie....Almond shortbread with raspberry jam, custard, coconut & cherries."

The cherry should be a little more prominent... We went to do the weekly shop once back in Blackpool and Miss Franny placed it in a bag under what she thought was a bag containing two iced buns. It was actually a cauliflower... Not an iced one...

And - joy of my childhood - a wimberry pie! Wimberries are like bilberries but with a much more concentrated taste. They seemed to disappear from shop shelves in the 1970s and then we had to make do with bilberries which came from Poland or Ukraine or somewhere else that was affected by the clouds bearing gifts from Chernobyl. So they disappeared too. I haven't tasted a wimberry pie for four decades, but a few minutes ago I cut into it and...

oh. my. god....... So that's the first of our weekly visits to Bury then...