One helluva flower.

nest below

A week ago I left a cauliflower in my local market.

I had paid for the vegetable, received my change and then moved the thing to the stall selling coffee that was opposite.

There I bought some coffee, drank it, discussed various existential subjects and then said goodbye and walked away.

I forgot my brassica.

This week I returned to the market - it is a Sunday ritual as well as a necessity – took some money out of the bank’s cash machine and headed to the stalls to procure a weekly supply of food.

EVERY-one knew about the cauliflower -even the guy selling cheese.

His stall is as geographically far from the cauliflower seller as the town allows, but the first thing he said was – are you the guy who left the cauliflower?

I should point out that it was a big cauliflower.

It would have been a topic of conversation even if I hadn’t left it among the coffee beans.

Sebastien – the local torrefacteur – had found me much, much later in the exhibition of artistic books, or bookish art taking place inside the Town hall.

He looked incongruous holding a giant cauliflower at the centre of a literary event.

“Is this yours?” he asked.

It’s not the first time I have left things at his stall, which is always the last place I stop at in the market.

Once I left my coffee there and though he had only a very vague idea that I live somewhere to the south he spent the afternoon tracking me down, and downing my track to reunite me.

It’s a service you don’t get in a local Tesco.

This week he asked me how the cauliflower had been.

I explained that it had fed two of us, constantly, for three days.

He asked if we had enjoyed it.

I explained that the first time, yes, we had?

“And by day three?”

“We were looking for alternative recipes to the baked one that had inspired the whole Cauliflower adventure.”

It’s not often that you get to write cauliflower and adventure in the same sentence.

I have now.

Twice.

int/30