Craaza

People assume it was romance, and it was mostly rent. After nine years on the billigs of a crêperie in the old town I priced a room of my own and found that the walls cost more than the flour, and that a ceiling over two cast-iron plates needs an extractor the size of a wardrobe and a great deal of money to keep it humming. A van has the sky for ventilation. So in the spring of 2019 I bought a tired one, built in 1971 and ribbed like a tin roof, and spent that summer fitting two 40 cm plates and a gas rail into the back of it, burning my wrists on exactly the edge I had burned them on for nine years, except that now it was my edge. The first market morning was a wet Saturday in September. The square sloped more than it looked, the batter ran to one side of the plate, and for the first month I levelled the van with folded beer mats under the wheels; there is still a stack of them in the glovebox for any new pitch that leans. There is a regular on the Saturday pitch who brings his own plate from home, a blue enamel one with a chip at six o'clock, because he will not eat off paper, and I fold his galette a little tighter so it fits. That is most of what I wanted from all this: to cook one galette at a time for someone standing a metre away, to change the galette du mois on the first Wednesday because I have grown bored of the last one, and to go home with the plates still warm and the van more or less level. And now I am telling you about the beer mats again, which means it is time to stop.