Saturday, 31 March, 2018
On Wednesday I went with Lisa to do her Passover (Pesach) shopping. We drove into North London through the back streets that she drives with great confidence. I know I will never know London like that! That morning I’d decided to wear regular shoes and set aside the boots. And I wore a sweater and a jacket. I felt free until I went out. The rain began to pour down and the wind blew and I wasn’t dressed anywhere near to appropriately. In fact, I was freezing and my day had hardly begun.
Close to where we were going we got stopped by some cops and had to park at least a five-minute cold and wet walk from where we needed to go. There had been an accident – a car had ploughed into a shop window and the whole frame was taken out. Lisa heard later that two pedestrians had been hit. I did feel like a ghoul taking a photo but anyway, I did!
In the end, we got falafels from a little place Lisa likes. I did enjoy the experience. Hot falafels were poured into bowls at the end of a long salad bar with all the usual (and unusual) falafal fixings and you helped yourself. We ate them on the go. Delicious!
But we turned back from that area. It was pointless shopping when we would have had to carry the groceries so far. We drove instead to an area Lisa had taken me before. It has the unlikely name of Temple Fortune. (This conjures up a small town in Thailand and not North London!) We shopped in one little grocery store where we bought mostly matzo. Then stopped by the bagel bakery where I got 8 little cookies and some cheesecake. They turned out to not taste very special for the price.
A cold, wet adventure! Oh, and I fell on the wet sidewalk. A lesson in not swapping boots for shoes too early in the year.
Last week I had two aborted attempts to go to Mare Street Market. The first because Instagram had led me to believe it was opening on Monday – I was greeted by a notice saying ‘Open on Wednesday.’ Then Krish and I walked over on Thursday in the rain but didn’t really stay since he couldn’t deal with the crowd and the noise. So I took a few photos and will go back between now and Tuesday, when they will still have the 50% soft launch prices. I can’t resist a bargain. Maybe I’ll even go twice!
The Mare Street Market is occupying a building that used to be the housing benefit office. It was a depressing, shabby building at best. The renovations to turn it into what’s described as ‘a curated space in Hackney for eating, drinking, and shopping.’ If you click on the link above there are some photos that do this space justice but I took just a few of my own.
At 50% off, I do think I might go twice. The menus all sound fantastic and will probably seem too expensive once the soft launch ends, I assume Wednesday.
Passover was approaching and Lisa had plans to go to family this year. No invitation pending, my brother John suggested I look into a community seder. It took me a while to decide but in the end I said yes to going to the one I contacted.
And here’s what happened!
I had no idea where the synagogue was but had seen a photo on Google Maps of an office building so assumed it was close by. It turned out that the office building *was* the synagogue entrance so in I went. There was a very long table with one smaller table placed like a T-junction to the long one and the table was already laid with cutlery, small plates, glasses, napkins and some bottles (kosher wine, white grape juice, some other juice and three big bottles of diet pop) and some bowls of salad I knew I wouldn’t eat (tomato, cucumber and red pepper), small bowls of chopped liver, and soe plates of matzo covered with napkins. At the back of this room was a door and prayers were going on in there. I peeked in and saw just a few men chanting along with the rabbi/cantor and in the nearest end some women with a small barrier for them. Then everyone started piling into the dining space. (Turns out this is a temporary space until a new place is ready for them.)
A lady said hello to me and we chatted a little bit and she invited me to sit with her family. There were about twenty people at the table, including the rabbi’s children – four of them, I think. Two young women (one very attractive with long hair and a close fitting dress, the other in leggings and a long sweater, the younger) and two young men (one was the rabbi/cantor guy I’d seen, maybe about 25, and he was the person I assumed was leading the Seder, and a younger one around 18 not anywhere as traditional looking as the first but still cleancut). I’d spoken to the rabbi’s wife on the phone and she said she and her husband would be elsewhere. The young women were buzzing around the kitchen while the brothers greeted guests. Not a totally Jewish crowd. There were a few black guys there and another one or two who seemed also as if they were friends of the person they sat with.
I won’t do this in order but… The leader acknowledged us all and said he knew some of may not know what was going to happen and that was OK since this night was about asking questions. He summarised what Passover was about and said he would answer questions later during the Seder once it started. We each had a Haggadah. Nice big print – one side English, the other Hebrew and he began. We also took a matzo each and broke it in half. One half we broke into several pieces and ‘hid’ although with no children there we would be finding it ourselves later and eating it ‘for dessert.’ We drank the first wine (ugh) on an empty stomach and after that I made sure a little less was in my glass.
There were five or six Seder plates so that each group had their own. We did all the stuff as expected, parsley with salt water, horor which was grated horseradish, haroset which was pureed, each got a hard boiled egg when the time came, paid attention to the bone, which was a roasted chicken neck, and had two sessions of hand washing. There were also several songs. Some I didn’t know – those were pretty tuneless. And someone went to the door for Elijah, and the younger brother came in with a huge hat draped in cloth that obscured his face. It was pretty funny and dramatic. People laughed and clapped.
Now I’ve been to a few Seders – and not much more than that so not everything is unfamiliar but I’m no expert. There were a few new or different things here. We read very long passages in the Haggadah – went all around the table, that long. I was dreading that it would be formal and very solemn and religious but this was as crazy and chaotic as most I’ve been to but on a larger scale. People talking when they felt like it, fumbling and looking lost like they had never done this before, and all chanting along with the leader at their own pace, all over the place. As things went on, the leader demonstrated an extraordinary ability to recite at triple or quadruple the normal speed. This created even more chaos as no one could join in at the same pace. There was laughing and doing things in their own time, eating matzo when they weren’t supposed to, sipping wine ditto, and not eating the half matzo in under four minutes as they were warned to.
Finally we ate. Bowls of cole slaw, potato salad, egg salad came out of the kitchen. Then we got the food we’d asked for – I had ordered fried fish because I knew what to expect and it pretty much was except much larger and thicker a piece than I wanted to eat, so I left about a third. After that we had ice cream (must not have been dairy?) and ate the afikomen we had stashed away. There were a few more extremely rapid-fire verses and three more songs and we were done.
By the way, the people I sat with had three other family members arrive and they chatted with me a bit. They also had a friend who sat with us or maybe he was family too and he asked me if I was into politics. I said a little bit. He said oh, and then told me that the man sitting opposite me had been the mayor of Haringey, and he too had been the mayor of Hackney and was now a councillor. (turns out it was Michael Desmond) . They bandied about tales of local and national politicians and a couple of royals. The mayor guy told me I should come to that shul and get to know them. (Won’t happen since I work Saturday… and the rest…but I was intrigued with their company.) We talked a bit about heritage too and mayor guy asked if I knew about the Hackney Archives and that I should visit them. I may do this some time, especially if it will help my brother with his genealogy.
I went to the bus stop by myself and while there a couple of young guys seemed to be talking about matzo. I wondered if I imagined it.