A harvest festival at Borough Market

London has some great street markets: Portobello Road for antiques, Columbia Road for flowers, Petticoat Lane for clothes and household items. It doesn't have a huge number of covered markets, though. The best-known is Borough Market, which is arguably Britain's "food central". By this I mean that if national trends are largely started or amplified in London, any changes to the way we eat will be reflected in and may be led from Borough Market. Londoners who are passionate about food shop there. There are shops and stalls selling fruit and vegetables, rare meats (some free-range and organic), amazing cheeses, bread and baked goods, jams and preserves, oil, honey, seafood from the coast, all sorts of things. Fresh tofu! Quinces! Italian ham! Live oysters! Raw chocolate!

There are plenty of vendors who invite you to "try before you buy" -- to take a taste for free. There is also lots of street food for lunch -- fantastic sausages, fried scallops, hot spiced apple juice. And there are tea shops with beautiful cakes and pastries, and delicious restaurants, and the pub that Bridget Jones lived above in the movie.

Every year in October, the market hosts a loud and cheerful performance by a troupe of actors . They dress in medieval costume and celebrate the harvest. First they walk along the riverbank from the nearby Shakespeare's Globe Theatre to the market, and then they perform a play to amuse adults and children. Nobody understands all the words, but the meaning is clear! You can see the photos here and here and (the best) here .

Films in Trafalgar Square

One of the changes I've enjoyed in London is seeing Trafalgar Square become much more used as a public space, for celebrations and not just for pigeon feeding. (I'm not fond of pigeons.) Everyone knows it is Nelson's Column in the middle, but not one in a hundred Londoners could name any of the other statues in the square. There are four plinths, one on each corner. Three are occupied with forgotten figures -- statesmen or soldiers. The fourth plinth is empty, and a few years ago it got a new life. Different art works each take a turn of a few months, more or less just in front of the National Gallery. Some of the works are very strange pieces, and most of them get passers-by talking: "Is it art?"

Last Thursday and Friday there were film clips shown in the square, as part of the London Film Festival. They stretched all across the twentieth century, feature films and documentaries, sad and happy and ironic, lovers and eel pie sellers and children. There were hundreds or thousands of us in the audience, sitting on the steps or on the ground, enjoying the atmosphere. (See the photos here.) It's just the right season: dark enough for after-work outdoor films, not yet too cold. I noticed the clever people next to me had brought a thermos of something hot to drink, and a flask of something warming: tea and whiskey!