Tea with a cider chaser

I'd never been before; many Londoners haven't. But on a fine summer afternoon, Borough Market significantly eclipses the Tesco traipse, the Sainsbury slog, the Asda ordeal.

It's spacious and sunlit; smoke rises gently up through the high girders from the fires of those preparing hot food. For just a moment or two, and discounting the trains from Sidcup rumbling by overhead, you could be in Goa, Nassau or Marrakech.

The spirit of the agora is a pleasure in itself: you are there to buy goods from the human beings who have produced or imported them rather than pulling them off a plastic shelf and tipping them into a metal trolley.

This capital farmer's market puts wholesome and humane food in your shopping basket rather than concentration-camp chickens, dropsical pork and residue-dusted cabbages. What about drink?

I can't say that drink shopping at Borough Market quite matches the experience of food shopping. There is no ready liquid equivalent of a fine fresh mackerel, or a marbled flank of organic beef which you can darken further in colour for a few days before firing up the oven. It does, though, give you the chance to buy products from outside the echo-chamber of our brave new branded world.

Barry Topp's cider, for a start, sold from a thatched trailer which must cause a few eye-rubbings of disbelief as it comes up the M3 from his New Forest base.

The ruddy-cheeked Topp wears a felt hat and a neckerchief to further his "rustic marketing" campaign, and you can buy yourself a pint of his strong draught cider (the dry version is vigorous, shocking and sour; the medium version a little rounder and easier) for £2.50, or have it decanted into different containers to take home. They're not great, but they're real. (He also sells his own and other producers' more polished bottled ciders and perries from England and France.) A man next to me drank two pints of Topp's finest in 20 minutes and looked unshaken. Had I done that, it would have been girders for the afternoon.

Next to Topp I discovered Alex Fraser, a former art teacher, who introduced me to the Japanese "way of tea" some years ago at the British Museum. He has gone into business with fellow tea enthusiast and Japan explorer Tim d'Offay as East Teas. They have a kettle singing at all hours, and you can sample everything from the almost-mainstream (like perfumed Green Jasmine) to the truly exotic (like Soba Cha, a Japanese caffeine-free tea made from toasted buckwheat).

No less singular a cup is Kuki Hojicha: Japanese twig tea, which looks like chopped reeds and tastes like hot pond water too.

Green tea has become popular lately (though for some odd reason more as a cosmetics concept than a drink): try the real thing with a packet of grass-fresh Sencha from Japan or the pressed, soothing Jade Oolong from Taiwan.