Tourism in my own home

Today's question comes to you courtesy of the Yarden shop in Golders Green. It is...

Why do kosher grocery shops stay open until 11pm? On Golders Green Road this evening, all the ordinary grocery shops (including Seoul Plaza, must go there another day) closed at normal times. All the kosher shops were still open at 10.30pm. One friend suggests it's because they're all run by Israelis, who are operating on Israeli time in which they expect we've all had a siesta to cope with the *boiling heat* of the day and then want to shop at night. Another friend says: Jews stay up late because we're too neurotic to sleep. I wonder if it's because of the lack of a 'shopping day' on Saturdays - because you can't shop on Shabbat. So we have more need of late-night shopping. I asked the girl in the shop but she didn't know. Any further advances?

Krefttik 2.5: Krefttik thwarted

Drove over to the East End today for dinner with Adrian and Margaret so thought it was the perfect opportunity to pop into Klein's on my way to try to find some Krefttik. But no, even though kosher shops are *always open* on Sundays (it's a quirk of the Sunday trading laws: if you close on Saturdays for religious reasons you're allowed to treat Sunday as a normal trading day) Klein's was closed. Damn them. I stood outside and shook my fist at the sky.

Instead, and because I had loads of time to spare before my dinner, I made a short detour to Hackney where my grandmother Lily who died in 2006 lived when I was a child. I hadn't been back until earlier this year when I spoke at Hackney Limmud but I found it oddly comforting just to stand on the street outside the house, thinking about what it used to look like inside, about how it felt to be there. I took some pictures (worrying all the time that the people who live there now would come out and shout at me) and ran my hand along the rough brick wall outside: a very physical childhood memory.

Unlike some of the houses on that street, my grandmother's house hasn't been gentrified yet. This pleased me. The plants she grew in the front garden are still there, grown tall and wild. The chequered-tile front step is still there, the mouldings above the front door are still thickly coated with paint just as they were in my childhood. I hope they keep it like that.

A rift in the space-time continuum

See, you thought I'd forgotten all about this blog, didn't you? But instead I've just been away, to a place where the BT Openzone wifi is shakey, probably because of all those time-space disturbances and people constantly having sex with aliens: Cardiff.

I was in Cardiff on Thursday and Friday to give a talk about online storytelling and digital stuffs at the National Theatre Wales - who are literally the loveliest bunch of people you'll ever meet, and who talk about the arts as if they are serious, proper and important things. Which I did not realise was something I'd missed so much. It is a strange experience to have a book published: people start talking about your creative work as if it is a commodity, there's a lot of talk about covers and publicity and not so much about what the book means or how one responds to it. Which I suppose is as it should be: it'd be terrible to have a publisher who spoke movingly about the meaning of one's work but failed to think about how to sell it. But it's still very nourishing to spend time with people who just think that the arts are the most important thing in the world. Novelists get editors, but we don't get directors, I suppose that's the difference.

Anyway, Cardiff was surprisingly pretty and pleasant. Why do I say surprising? Because I realised while I was there that I am ever-so-slightly prejudiced against Wales. I suppose it's because of history, because of how early England conquered Wales and installed our own Prince there, that English people tend to regard Wales as 'not a real separate country' in a way that we don't feel about Scotland. Scotland, because of geography, was harder to conquer and hold; the eventual union was a grudging mutual acceptance of James I/VI, rather than a full-on conquest. So, basically, English people have a slight prejudice that Wales is more 'ours', and maybe a bit more 'wussy' than Scotland. Scottish people eat haggis and allow us to take their lives but never their FREEDOM. Welsh people eat leeks and organise charming male-voice choirs.

It's quite surprising, even shocking, to find prejudices like this lurking in one's mind. I was thinking about how I've heard Dr Who fans be quite scathing about the fact that Torchwood is set in Cardiff (after all the capital city of one of the four countries in the union) - I can't imagine they'd complain if it were set in Edinburgh, or even Manchester or Liverpool or somewhere pretty and historical like Oxford. Having noticed this, I feel I want to apologise to the Welsh for a lifetime of unconsciously thinking they were slightly marginal. Sorry. I'll try to do better in future.

Cardiff, anyway, is worth a visit. Not only for the Torchwood-hub above, which really does hang in the sky like an alien spacecraft, but also for its bustling streets, lively nightlife and really gorgeous hilly landscape all around. Here is a statue to Ivor Novello, another son of Cardiff:

And here is the light, airy Castle Arcade where the offices of the National Theatre Wales are. I loved visiting, I hope they invite me back.

 

Krefttik 2: The Search for Krefttik

On to lighter matters. Made a little detour to Golders Green today, in search of the mysterious Krefttik. Friends, I went to Kol Tuv. I looked through their shelves. I saw no Krefttik.

Eventually I spoke to the man behind the counter.
"Excuse me," I said, "do you have Krefttik?"
"I'm not sure..." he said, "what is it?"
"Ah," I said.
I guessed at breakfast cereal, but it wasn't there. Or anywhere. In fact, I suspect that Krefttik may be a rather more *specialist* product.

The hierarchy of kosher shopping areas in North London goes: Hendon < Golders Green < Stamford Hill, where < means "less removed from the modern world".

It was immediately obvious to me when I saw the advertisement that no shop in Hendon would stock Krefttik. Hendon's kosher shops stock sundried tomatoes, for goodness' sake. Pesto, they have, and fake turkey bacon, and other products which mean that you can make a stab at a Nigella recipe with a few substitutions.

Golders Green, with its butchers that stock 'jellybones' (for making calves' foot jelly) and the massive Kosher Kingdom superstore, is a little more esoteric. It was not impossible that Krefttik might be found there.

But it's clear to me now that I'm going to have to go to Stamford Hill. The belly of the bearded beast. Where they stock newspapers labelled only in Yiddish and would have thought me a heretic even at my most religious. I have my suspicions that I may never see this Krefttik: perhaps I'd need to be wearing the full Chasidic-woman regalia to get my hands on it. Still, when faced with a quest like this, one must try.

A mad world, my masters

I have a little piece in the Guardian today. Which, because it is about fatness and is illustrated by a picture of a *naked lady* is now their third most-read story today.

What really amazes me are some of the incredibly horrible comments. Various people, men and women, are rushing to say how *disgusting* they find this beautiful woman. (She is, incidentally, incredibly lovely. When I spoke to her she came across as the archetypical delightful Californian, a sweet, joyful, adorably giggly young woman.)

I'm not arguing that people *ought* to find this or that attractive. I mean, find what you like attractive and go for it. It'd be awful if we were all attracted to the same thing and luckily we're not. There are plenty of people out there of all different body shapes and sizes who find someone to love them and be attracted to them just as they are. What a wonderful world.

But I wonder if we were always like this: always so critical of other people's bodies, always so determined to state that what *we* find attractive is the *only* thing that is attractive? Eh, maybe we were. Humanity has never been distinguished mostly for its capacity for peaceful toleration. But that doesn't mean we ought not to strive for it.