I-Spy…middle-class market

We’ve no pictures to support this post, but mention has to be made to the middle-class market that we enjoyed today.

We were meeting Chin for a coffee as we didn’t manage to see her when we were first in London and she can’t make the get-together in August. She’s got a friend’s birthday picnic in London Fields and so she suggests we meet at the top end of Broadway Market.

Broadway Market is great fun to walk around and we play a little game as we do. We spot the over-priced pieces of tat that we threw out years ago, bracelets made from newspaper, organic this and organic that. We try to spot a food stall that isn’t peddling something with tofu or beans and pulses. We give bonus points for people in fashionable wonky fringes, harem pants, skinny jeans, ironic NHS-style specs or dressed with a vintage look.  We pop into the newsagent-cum-Post Office to get some cash out and notice that they have five piles of Grauniad newspapers on the floor – they’ll be needing them all today!

We have a lovely time catching up with Chin and grab a first coffee in the market and then one at the cafe by the heated lido.

We then head off to the Barbican to meet mum because there is a free festival of music and activities on there today. When we arrive it is all very busy and there is loads going on. We have unfortunately missed the Tran Siberian Balkan Street Band (sp?) but we do catch the Boxettes who perform as a group of female beat boxers and are then joined by a male MC, Diz-raeli (sp?), who asks the audience what he should freestyle about and gets the answer from a toddler at the front “playing with Lego”.

There is a stall to make your own microphone, add voice-overs to a video, add sound effects to movie scenes and do all sorts of other random things. Outside there is another market with more foods but we soon head back inside to catch Frank Chickens – a band we first heard after DaddyP found their CD in  a skip – perform. They are great and reassuringly surreal.