Both sides of the train tracks housed the flea market that was already crammed with stallholders by the time we arrived. Heads down, they busied themselves setting up bookshelves, which they filled with dog-eared paperbacks. They unfolded trestle tables, covered with lacy tablecloths and filled with all manner of trinkets, antiques, crafts and (in some cases) junk. The professionals had brought attractive parasols and hand-painted signs directing buyers to their wares. They had also been clever enough to bring chairs and thermos flasks of steaming drinks to keep them alive in a station that was as much outdoors as it was indoors. The cold was already biting the end of my nose. The woman in charge of stall layout was Sylvia, a fiery-haired artistic fifty-odd year-old who wore layered, floaty kaftans despite the cold, far too many beads and who littered her sentences with French terms even though she was neither French nor in France. By the time we tracked her down waltzing between the stalls, the trestle tables covered the floor space like a game of Tetris.
