The aisle and the market

A family in Fayoum does its shopping in two places. On weekdays, the supermarket on the main road. On Fridays, the market that sets up on the open ground near the canal.

The supermarket is a model of predictability. The same products on the same shelves, the same prices this week as last, the same route round the aisles. It is efficient, and that is its whole promise: tomorrow will be like today, perhaps a little quicker.

The market is the opposite. Nobody knows quite who will turn up. A man from a village they have never heard of brings a cheese nobody in town has tasted. A woman selling baskets gets talking to a woman selling herbs, and by the next Friday they are sharing a stall. The children come home with a new word, a new game, once a kitten. Things go wrong there too. Nothing is where it was last week.

It is no accident that almost everything new in that household arrived through the second place. The dish the grandmother now cooks every week. The neighbour who became a friend. The idea, for the eldest son, of growing something to sell himself.

Order lowers cost and calms nerves, and much of life should run on it. But it only ever delivers more of what we already know. Surprise, new friendships, the idea that changes a direction: these come from collisions nobody planned, between people and ideas that would never meet in a tidy aisle.

Disorder on its own is just noise, though. What the Friday market has is the right mix of people and rules loose enough that they run into each other.

So the useful question is not how to remove the mess, or how to wallow in it. It is how to make a little room, on purpose, for the encounters that order will never produce.