There's a particular kind of October morning that tests your commitment to farmers' markets: the kind where the field car park is three inches of clay, the tarpaulins are whipping about in a cold horizontal drizzle, and the sensible thing would be to stay home with the radio on.
I've been going to the same Oxfordshire market most Saturday mornings for the better part of four years. I started out with the enthusiasm of someone who'd just moved to the countryside and wanted to feel properly embedded in it. What I discovered along the way surprised me - not because the market changed dramatically, but because I did.
In the early weeks, I was still in tourist mode. I'd photograph everything, sample everything, chat to stallholders with the bright energy of someone making notes. The cheese man, who has a small dairy near Witney, has a way of clocking this type immediately. He gave me an extra sliver of his clothbound cheddar and a look that said: come back in November.
By the time October arrived that first year, the novelty had settled into something quieter. I knew which bread would be gone by nine, and I knew that the salad grower always arrived late and it was worth waiting. I'd stopped photographing and started tasting more carefully. The market had become a rhythm rather than an experience.
"Regulars have a different relationship with the market than visitors. You become part of the social fabric of the stall, not just a transaction passing through it."
That transition matters more than it might sound. Stallholders at markets notice who comes back. The woman who sells heritage apple varieties - Ashmead's Kernel, D'Arcy Spice, Calville Blanc - started setting aside a bag of the odder ones for me after she noticed I kept asking about the ones other people passed over. That didn't happen because I'd researched her farm. It happened because I'd turned up enough Saturdays that we'd had the time to find out we were interested in the same things.
The muddy October I keep thinking about was the third year. I arrived to find the field half-empty. The weather had kept people away; a few stallholders hadn't bothered to come. The baker was there, and the salad grower, and the cheese man with his thermos and his look of mild amusement at the whole enterprise. We stood around and ate slightly wet sausage rolls and talked about why markets in this country are so tied to the idea of performance - of abundance and colour and bustle - rather than just being a useful place where food is exchanged.
Nothing about that conversation was planned. It happened because several people who usually didn't have time to stop all found themselves with nothing much to do on a wet Saturday. The market at its quietest turned out to be the version I remember most vividly.
The argument for attending regularly isn't about habit for its own sake. It's about the kind of attention that accumulates over time. A first visit gives you a snapshot. A fiftieth gives you a story. You start to notice what's changed: which stalls have disappeared, which have expanded, which producers are struggling with a difficult harvest year and choosing not to talk about it. You notice that the man selling chilli sauces has a new label design, which turns out to be because his daughter has started helping him with the business. You find out these things by asking, and you feel comfortable asking only when you're no longer a stranger.
I'm not making a case for nostalgia or for any particular idea of rural life. Most of the producers I've come to know through this market are unsentimental people who are running small businesses under real pressure. What they share is a preference for direct contact with the people who eat their food. The market gives them that. Turning up reliably is the minimum you can do in return.
The next muddy October is only a few weeks away. I'll be there by eight, before the bread runs out.