Kitchen Dispatch 4

This morning I went for a wander around the Marche du Prado in Castellane, which is a massive, diverse market, with vendors selling underwear and wool and jackets and cheese and fruit and patches to sew on jeans and spices and leather belts and make-up and fish and hair-dye and vegetables and cleaning products and a lot more besides that I do not have time or inclination to list here. 

It was wonderful and slightly overwhelming. I bought some patches as a birthday present for my friend, from a seller who had a huge, reassuring grin and very large hands. 

I walked from the market on towards Noailles, which is where I always seem to gravitate when I wander in this city, and decided I would come to the Bibilotheque L’Alcazar - a massive municipal library about a 7 minute walk from the Marche des Capucins. The building that houses it used to be a “salle de spectacle”, where people used to come for some entertainment, to sit and drink and smoke and watch something hilarious and absorbing. It used to be decorated in a style inspired by the Alhambra, a kind of faux-Moroccan, which has now sadly gone, having been replaced by lots of glass, white walls, grey desks and steel bookshelves. The most exciting part of the interior is the lights that illuminate the desks - one of which I sit at now. They are formed by white domes, with four undulating circles of pink glass protruding beneath, each directing a shaft of warm light towards one workspace. When you look from afar, they appear like little jellyfish, floating aimlessly, reliably, above their studious companions. 

I do love a library: there is something endlessly comforting in the anonymity, the peace, the expectation of anti-social behaviour (in the quiet sense). Someone I follow posted on twitter recently: “Yeah I'm an intellectual, I've cried in like 10 different libraries”, a sentiment I understand; there is something about crying in a library that feels much better than crying on the tube or in a shop or sitting on a  park bench. Peopled as they are mostly with detached and introverted academics, or else with variously unoccupied people who are just trying to pass the day out of the house without having to converse with anyone, there is little risk of being asked what you’re crying about. Bliss.

So here I am - not crying today! - just trying to get some things done that I know I’ll never do at home, and also write this. 

I find a pre-requisite for working in the library is a good coffee-and-sugar hit, so I resolved to find somewhere nearby that could provide this. I wandered around for a little while, slouching past café-tabacs that I was far too intimidated to enter alone, and boulangerie-patisseries that could provide ample colourful, cream-filled, shiny confections, but only coffee from a machine of the sort that you get in petrol stations on UK A-roads. I’m glad I didn’t succumb - eventually,  having circled round to the street just opposite the library, I found the inconspicuous Les Délices or Patisserie d'Aix - a little Arab bakery and cafe. Piled up in the windows were baklava and other gorgeously crispy pastry confections: bright orange, glinting jalebi and astonishingly white kourabiedes, as powdered as Elizabeth I's face on portrait day. In French the word for window shopping is “leche-vitrine”, which translates directly as “lick-window”. In this case, very apt.

I pushed the door open gingerly, but the patron beamed at me immediately, and asked what I would like. “Puis-j’avoir un café?”, was my timid response, to which he replied “Bien sûr!” with a hearty chuckle, and directed me to a table. The interior is industrial; it really is just a bakery filled with a few cafe tables and some red metal chairs. Three sides of the room are piled high with Middle Eastern delicacies, mostly sweet: nutty, honey-filled, golden, glistening treats of every shape imaginable, while on the other side gleams large, silver espresso machine. 

I ask for a baklava to go with my coffee: it is a lozenge-shaped pile of nuts and honey, removed from a towering pyramid in the window, with a thin layer of crackly pastry on top. My fork almost gets stuck when I try to break away a bite. The coffee is short and sharp and satisfying. The two together are something like how I aim for my writing to be: sweet but with substance; clearly made with personal care, but also possessing of the bold, unaffected incision of a good espresso; compact - a carefully measured dosage - but energising. Perhaps I’ll get there one day. Hopefully I’ll get back to La Patisserie d'Aix before that. 

 Dreamy