Market evolution

 They are sitting on a wooden bench in the covered market in San Sebastián. A married couple of retirement age, visitors to the island, and almost certainly British because they’re neither well-tailored like the Germans, long and thin like the Dutch or noisy like the French. They are obviously married because neither is trying to impress the other in the hope of achieving a meaningful relationship - they’ve had one for a long time. And grandchildren.

We can tell they have grandchildren because Doris is elbowing Bill, with a soppy smile on her face, as she points to two toddlers tumbling around on a wooden car in the children’s play area. The larger of the two toddlers is preventing the smaller one from getting her hands on the steering wheel, which soon provokes rage, tears and a very loud tantrum. As their mother hurries over to sort things out, dangling shopping bags and looking harrassed, Doris turns to her husband: “Well, I think that’s our cue to get on with the shopping, Bill!”

Bill, who is a little heavier than he should be, pulls a face. “More shopping? I thought we’d…”

“Fruit, Bill, I told you. We need some fresh fruit. You can’t live on biscuits.”

“Not in this ruddy household,” Bill mutters sourly as he pushes himself to his feet. He follows his wife towards one of the market’s fruit-and-veg stalls. There are several, each set into its own niche around the periphery but spilling outwards with colourful, fresh produce arranged on multiple tiers of plastic crates. Visitors often pause to take photos.

They also take photos of their kids climbing around the wooden car, or of themselves seated on one of the wooden benches in the centre of the floor space. The benches follow much the same concept as those in an art gallery - a central location in which to look thoughtful and involved while surreptitiously easing off your shoes.

For Bill and Doris this place is just San Sebastián’s town market, but for anyone who knows what came before and fears the kind of progress that makes things worse, the market is uplifting. It’s new but it really works. And it has a lot to live up to because in its earliest beginnings, the market was a twice-weekly event held under the huge and beautiful Indian Laurel trees in the Plaza de la Constitución, where local farmers used to set out their produce on tables or simply on the ground. A tourist’s dream - so local, so authentic and so picturesque!

Tourists often tripped over a crate of apples or a box of lettuces, however, and for the farmers it was hard work to drag all that stuff out of the van at six in the morning every Wednesday and Saturday, set up the tables then haul it all away again afterwards. So the town council, in one of their occasional bursts of urban creativity, built an entirely new covered market for them.

Doris has already added apples, mandarins and bananas to her shopping basket and is now considering an attractive display of paraguayos, those exotic-sounding fruits that sellers with no poetry in their soul may call a flat peach. “Bill, would you fancy a few of those?” Bill looks up innocently from the display of locally-baked almond biscuits he has discovered in one corner. “Hmm?”

The council’s new covered market, the mercado municipal, was incorporated in an extensive complex that houses also a bus station, toilets, a restaurant, shops, an underground car park and an underground supermarket. Unfortunately, the architect’s enthusiasm to provide everything that anyone might need led originally to a tragic mistake. The open space allotted to the market was filled with permanent rows of concrete stalls. Each was in the form of a square with a tall, grey-tiled rear wall and marble-slab counters blocking the other three sides. They were cold, echoey and ugly, and together they looked like a communal workshop for something unpleasant.

Everyone realised it was all wrong but it took many years for the next wave of creativity to put things right. In came the big yellow bulldozers and out went the stalls! They cleared the entire space, tiled the floor and - a really nice touch - suspended little wooden crates upside down from the ceiling to add cosiness as well as context. A few wooden benches, a few plant pots and suddenly the market looked like a space intended for humans rather than Daleks.

There are now two cafes there as well, one at each end. Bill, having been forbidden to add a bag of almond biscuits to Doris’s basket of fruits, sits sulkily at one of the tables with a cup of coffee then, struck by a happy thought, waves to the waitress. “Have you got any doughnuts?” Fortunately she understands him straight away, both doughnuts and tired husbands being much the same whether they’re English or Spanish.

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The Spanish word for doughnut is donut, basically the same word Americanised. Depressing for any lingering defendants of the British mother tongue but in this case (and many others) it seems to me the Americans are right.

Spell it doughnut and how is a Spaniard supposed to know how to pronounce it? Duffnut as in ‘tough’ or doffnut as in ‘cough’? Dornut as in ‘thought’ or doonut as in ‘through’? Or downut as in ‘bough’?

There’s also the ugly uh sound as in ‘thorough’ to choose from. Foreigners have only a small chance of hitting the correct dohnut as in ‘although’. This kind of thing is, of course, part of the richness and diversity of the English language.