Johnny onions

The frenchman who cycled round my home town selling onions when I was a child was probably the first foreigner I ever met. I clearly remember the beret, the bicycle, and the strings of onions that my mother hung in the kitchen.

I now know that they came from Roscoff, in Brittany, and brought the onion harvest over in July or August, staying to sell their onions from door to door before returning five months later.

It seems there is now a museum to the onion sellers in Roscoff. Inevitably, there is a Wikipedia article, but best of all, there is a short BBC film from the 60s, with Olivier and Alain telling us about their lives - in accents that wonderfully manage to combine Geordie with French.