Elgin Railway Market

 The buzz and hum of talk is punctuated by by the odd clink of cutlery; a cool breeze comes fitfully through the large sliding window that the man at the next table has just opened. The big wooden refectory tables with their benches can seat 20-plus; the space is filling up as visitors arrive to see the approach of the train. Will today be steam? It’s what they have all come to see… the tame dragon from a past era, that demands coal and water and constant tending as it hauls its passengers up the pass to these upland apple orchards with their surrounding forests and hills. Beyond the old station yard are more sheds, then hills, then higher, pine-forested hills beyond them. Today they are dimmed with a fine mist.

A shrill child's voice breaks into my thoughts, and the musician downstairs is starting up again (not Country and Western this time, please!). We are sitting in the upstairs level which forms a gallery around three sides of this old market building. Two of the three sides are filled with tables; the other side contains boutique shops of different sizes; and along the fourth side, an arched walkway connects it all, inviting exploration. Several staircases, each in  a different style, lead between this and the floor below. The focus of the shops and stalls around ground-floor perimeter is on food - wine, coffee, sweet treats, curries, sushi, pizza, Middle Eastern (Petra is the name)… every taste catered for. The huge tables occupying the central area are almost all occupied. The specialist gift shops offer African and more local Western Cape clothes and jewellery and scarves and kitchen ware and there is a Gentleman’s Emporium… and the guitarist has just started a Christian song. We finish out coffee and go out onto the upper deck into the drizzle, gazing down at the platform where the train is due to arrive. But no train can be heard. Steve goes off to enquire. "The wheels are slipping in this wet weather, unable to get up the pass," is what he hears from the barman, who seems to know. Suddenly I'm five years old again, hearing the steam engine straining to chuff-chuff-chuff its way up Field's Hill, the screech of brakes as it tries to find a foothold on the wet tracks... It seems the problems with steam have not changed since then.

But we came for the outing, not specifically to see the train, so we turn back inside out of the wet and thread our way through the jostling families and out of the rising noise. My eye is caught by a bright orange glow of beads on a wire hoopoe bird. He reminds me of the birds in my childhood garden; we wait while the artist affixes beady black eyes. He explains that some people don't like the birds to have eyes, so he waits until the purchase to add them, if wanted.

Now the bird sits watching me as I write, poised on tip-toes, beak lifted as if ready to take flight, with the look of a toddler about to run off on the next adventure, giggling.