Kelly and I decided to check out the Hall Village markets on the weekend.

I can’t believe this is the first time we have been to these markets. It’s barely a half an hour drive from home and the markets have been running every month since 1987.

It was a crisp morning capped with an uncommitted high fog that you just knew was going to tap out to beautiful sunny day.

After creeping into a crowded dusty parking spot at the showgrounds we all spilled out to immediately experience that distinctly rural smell: a complex combo of cow manure, straw, sweet eucalyptus smoke, and barbequing sausages.

Location: Hall	Weather:
Temp: 13 C	Distance Today: 15 Km

We wandered around for a good while. Fresh produce stalls, bespoke crafts, recycled upcycled transcycled goods. Quality ranged from beautifully crafted woodwork furniture to cheap junky knick knacks.

Enveloped in the background white noise of family conversations, and kids playing whilst magpie and cockatoo poked through. Jinky 80s disco music drifted rather discordantly over it all from some rubbish speakers down at the inflatable jumping Castle.

Over there a local bakery was selling a genius spread of pastries including some of the fattest most delicious looking croissants I have ever seen.

Remind me to tell you about my recent obsessive addiction to fresh croissants one day.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. Many people had brought their dogs who seemed to be enjoying themselves even more. Juno’s tail was a frantic whip. He ran out of marking pee in the first 5 minutes left to simply go through the motions. Hoping his high leg lifting and assertive stance would be enough to bluff his way into a little decent pack status.

After making sure we hadn’t missed anything, we wandered across to the village proper for a coffee. Next to our table was a totally random manifestation of Dr Who’s Tardis. This turned out to be somewhat prophetic as the service was time-bendingly slow. I think they had been totally overwhelmed by the complex latte, almond-milk, half strength, double shot, big breakfast orders from a large group of lumpy-lycra-clad road cyclists. I soon wished we had grabbed a brew from one of the stalls back at the markets. But we had left our keep-cups at home and didn’t want to generate plastic landfill. Anyway, I got to finish my book.

It’s been a while since we went to a good market. I had forgotten how many orders of magnitude more enjoyable they are than the cloned franchise dross of today’s shopping malls. The range of goods and produce are personal, and varigated and surprising.

More importantly, they always seem to have a certain uplifting atmosphere about them. Perhaps it’s some distant memory teased out of our DNA from back when village markets and town squares were a vital nexus of community.

I recommend you re-experience it for yourself ASAP.