Bacchanalia.

We drove down from the artists’ colony and headed south west through the foothill-underpinned and heavily treed suburbs of Montmorency (which always reminded me, when I drove through it, of the fox-terrier in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat), Macleod and Rosanna; and then the road flattened out and we were back in the inner-city grid heading for a warehouse in the back street of a used-to-be working class suburb, where once men hacked and sawed and planed and amber-shellacked, and made things of lasting beauty and utility that would never be placed on the street for the hard rubbish collection.

And there it was: an old sawtooth-topped factory of red brick. It was such a caricature you could almost see it breathing in and out, cartoonishly, along with the let’s work soundtrack, and workers inside putting tops on jars in hundredfold unison. Now, endless decades later, the sun dropped below the building's zigzag roof making a glowing halo around its jagged perimeter. It was set back from the street, where post-war trucks, their clattering engines idling and ticking impatiently, would be loaded or unloaded by hatted, grey-overalled storemen.

Inside, spotlights hung from wires suspended over a blacked-out interior; in one corner, a bandstand swarmed with instruments, as yet unmanned, waiting expectantly, an angled cymbal, an upended saxophone. Original louvre windows reinforced with enmeshed wire lined one wall; below these stretched white-clothed tables laden with extravagances. The focus: the honeypot: the drawcard. No denying it; at weddings, people go for the food. Mostly with manners. Vessels of various heights held seemingly intentional overflows, like a scene from a Roman feast. On the opposite side, a bar served drinks of most colours. I had a clear one in my hand.

Meanwhile, out on the old delivery forecourt, open-air chefs were baking pizzas in portable ovens like giant beehives, and turning lamb and chicken on rotisseries. Fragrant white smoke rose from these, and disappeared in the pale golden eternal light of an early autumn evening, appeasing Juno and Hera.