Plastic veg (but they look great in a salad...)

A contact in India posted photos from their vegetable market and this brought back memories... it's 20 years since I first came to England and I still remember being stunned by the salad vegetables here. Thank God they have improved over the years... but still...

Huge cucumbers, all the same length. Tomatoes that were firm and red and... tasteless. Peppers that cost the earth but tasted of nothing. For an Israeli - to whom salad is an essential part of daily life, and is supposed to taste nice - this was a huge culture shock.

Not to mention going to a pub for lunch and discovering that when they said a dish came "with salad" they didn't mean what we mean by salad - they might serve it with coleslaw, or rice salad, or Waldorf salad, or all sorts of things... or even that thing that Brits do, when they throw a whole load of lettuce leaves in a bowl, scatter some cherry tomatoes to give it some colour, and call it a salad...

For Israelis, salad means cucumbers and tomatoes - possibly with the addition of onion/spring onion/peppers/maybe some lettuce - chopped up very small and mixed together. And we serve nearly everything with salad, it's just a totally basic and taken-for-granted part of life, like bread, like hummus.

Well, I kind of got out of the salad habit over the years here, and I don't completely blame the quality of the veg - in a colder climate, salad is less appealing, so it's only on warm summer days that I find myself in the mood for salad here. (And warm summer days are rare...)

But I was very pleased when the new trend started here on the salad veg front - especially on the tomato front. At some point in the 90s, Marks & Spencer's started selling a new, more expensive kind of tomato - on the packaging it said: "grown for flavour". I could hardly keep a straight face when I saw that... what else do you grow tomatoes for? I felt like screaming... but I know - for British housewives up to then, a tomato was just for adding colour to a salad, it had to have a good shape so that you'd have neat slices, it had to be firm for easy slicing, and the idea of flavour - well, they obviously didn't know this was possible in a tomato...

M&S led the way, and others followed. So today I can go to the supermarket and choose from all sorts of nice tomatoes, tomatoes with the aroma that a tomato should have, tomatoes that actually taste like a real tomato! I think the cucumbers have also improved - or maybe I've just got used to them? But the English peppers are still more for colour than for flavour, so now and again when I spot an Israeli pepper on the supermarket shelf I pounce on it with great excitement... But hey, at least I've seen some progress :-)

A Brief Ode to British Summer Time

According to the forecast
the sun will rise at
ten past six tomorrow

but it won't show its face
till the next day

yup - still British Summer Time :)

So are we meant to eat it now?

I was at a special church service once, something with an international theme, and they were passing small pieces of bread round with salt - apparently there's a Polish custom of welcoming people into your home with bread and salt (at least I think it was Polish) so that's why. The thing that tickled me was when I heard someone sitting near me ask someone else: so, are we meant to eat it now?

Okay, to be honest I can see very well now why she might have asked, because probably the only similar experience she'd had in a church setting was when we receive the bread of communion, and then the custom is to eat it only after a prayer has been said.

But at that moment I'm afraid I burst into giggles. Because the Israeli part of me was thinking: of course you're meant to eat it, what do you think it's for? decoration?

The thing is, in Israel we do hospitality in a slightly different way to the Brits - if you come to someone's house, coffee is pretty automatic and there will always be something edible, but the edibles will be placed on the table without a word, and the assumption is that you can see it's food and you don't have to be told what to do with food.

Whereas the Brits are brought up not to touch food until they're offered it. So I have to keep reminding myself when I have friends round - don't just plonk the plate of biscuits down, offer the biscuits! Because otherwise the polite Brit can spend hours sipping politely at their cup of tea and ignoring the tempting biscuits, and leave my house thinking: how awful, she put those biscuits there in full view and never offered me one!

What do you mean "have you switched it on"?

Had another scatty moment today - a very long moment actually... It started when my mobile phone beeped to say the battery was low. So I took it to the little shelf where I normally leave it to recharge, plugged it into the socket, and went back to my desk.

As I was doing stuff on the computer, every now and again I thought I heard a beep from far away - very similar, it seemed, to the kind of beep my mobile phone emits in order to tell me that its battery is low.

Poor little phone. There it was, at the other end of the house, trying to communicate with me, and there was me in another room, totally ignoring it.

Have you worked it out yet? The Brits amongst you may have figured it out by now - yes, you're right, I hadn't switched the socket on.

The Israelis amongst you (and possibly people from other countries that don't share this British invention) may be wondering what on earth I'm talking about. Switch a socket on? What do you mean switch a socket on?

Well, this is one of those things I had to learn when I came to England. I remember when I discovered it - it was probably my second day in London, I was staying in a room at a university there (they let the students' rooms during the summer break) and had tried to switch the lamp on so that I could read in bed, but no, it didn't work. I thought it might need a new light bulb. The person at the reception desk was surprised when I said the lamp wasn't working - had I switched it on at the wall?

It's amazing the number of normal everyday things that can be different in different countries - so many things I've had to learn here! I had to learn that electricity sockets here have an on-off switch; I had to learn about bayonet-fitting light bulbs; I had to get used to separate taps for hot and cold water (though in the kitchen here we do have this fantastic new invention called a mixer tap - the only kind of tap I knew back home).

There are probably lots of other things that I don't even remember learning about, as I've got used to the way things go here. I've got so used to driving on the left that when I go home for a visit I have to really concentrate when crossing the road, and once on a visit to Poland I actually stepped off the pavement when I shouldn't have, and got a very loud beep from a driver who obviously didn't fancy the idea of running me over...

Now, is that poor mobile cooked yet :-)

What do you mean, the kitchen is closed?

Went out for a meal recently - not something us fuddy-duddies do very much, but it does happen - and I found that after all these years, I still haven't got used to the way things are done here. My Israeli mind is again and again stunned by that phrase that I heard in the pub at 10.15 when we wondered about ordering dessert: the kitchen is closed.

In Tel Aviv things would just be waking up, and here they're getting ready to fold up the pavements and go to bed. I was stunned when I arrived in London (nearly 20 years ago now) and discovered that the pubs close at 11. But what is probably more shocking to me (being Jewish does mean you tend to regard food as very nearly the most important thing in life) is the idea that a place that serves food can be open but not serving food right now because the kitchen is closed. I still remember the shock of going into a London pub at around 3pm in search of lunch, to be told: the kitchen closes at two. And saying that, they look at you as though you've just landed from Mars or something, or you're a complete imbecile who doesn't know the most basic things about life. Out on the pavement, your tummy rumbling, you wonder about this strange place where people only eat at set times, and then you gratefully discover a pizza place where they don't stick to these weird customs.

But really - in Israel there is no way that this sort of thing would happen. Israelis are used to walking into restaurants at any time of day or evening and ordering food. I keep hearing from my niece about being out with friends and having something to eat at around midnight. And then the other day we were talking in the evening and she mentioned that she was going out to a café with some friends, and I found myself longing for that relaxed Israeli café existence, as opposed to where I live now where they all seem to shut by 5 at the latest, not to mention some places that close at 3 or 4! (Yes, I mean in the afternoon, not the early hours of the morning, when some Tel Aviv cafés do start thinking of closing...)

But the thing is that to the Brits, going out just for drinks seems perfectly reasonable, whereas we would be saying: that's all very well but where's the food?

I remember in my university days in London, looking at the noticeboard where all sorts of meetings were advertised - the photography club, the birdwatching club, that sort of thing. The Jewish Society was the only one where it said loud and clear: tea and cake will be served. Because, let's face it, we just wouldn't bother turning up otherwise, would we? Look at our forefathers all those centuries ago, being rescued from slavery in Egypt, and what were we moaning about? Food. We were missing the food in Egypt. And how does God lure us towards the promised land? He tells us about a land flowing with milk and honey. He knows what we're like.

It's only through living in England that I've discovered that this is a peculiarly Jewish thing. You can live in Israel for years just assuming everyone's like that. Because, well, why not? What's not to like about food?

Living in England - well, I guess dying is naturally included in this topic

A friend of ours has suddenly died.

It hasn't sunk in, and writing about it is probably my way of trying to get it into my head that he's gone. What is hard to get into my head is that he's never going to ring us again and leave his crazy jokey messages. The most weird thought I keep having is: we can't just ring him and ask what happened. From past experience of people dying, this is the thing that keeps coming up now and again, over the years - my sister died in 1996 and there are still moments when I have to stop myself thinking: I could tell her about that...

And being Jewish, I feel weird not being able to just go visit the family. Back home it would be quite obvious what you do, the customs and traditions kick in automatically and everyone knows where they are. If you're part of the immediate family, you stay in for a week, normal life completely stops, and people come to visit you. If you know the family, you go and visit. If you're a neighbour, then there's no way you could not know about it, as there would be a huge black notice outside the house, so anyone passing by knows that this home is going through bereavement. It's like having a notice outside saying: handle with care, or: please don't expect us to behave normally just now.

Here they do things very differently. The funeral doesn't take place the next day, it's arranged and planned and it takes place at a time that is chosen by the bereaved. The family have a huge amount of choice as to how, when, where - which could be a blessing but from my experience of bereavement, I think it could also be an extra burden at a time when all you want to do is just stop and let other people take over.

I remember years ago when someone I worked with lost his wife, whom he had loved dearly. He was back at work the next day! I was stunned. But apparently his English upbringing had conditioned him to ignore what had happened and keep soldiering on, to get back to normal as soon as possible, and even at the funeral it was really important to him to keep his feelings under control, to "keep strong", which to me seemed extremely unhealthy. And to my mind it looks like an insult to the person who died - my Israeli mind says: if you love someone then you will care enough to shed some tears when they die. But I think the thing is that the English do shed tears, they just do it in private and not in front of a whole load of strangers.

The closest I came in England to experiencing our own customs was, to my surprise, when my Ghanaian friend lost her husband and I found that the Ghanaians have similar mourning customs to ours, that the family does sit at home with people visiting - only in their case it's not specifically a week, it's from the death until the funeral, and in that particular case that meant several weeks because there was the need to allow for time for relatives from Ghana to get visas to come here for the funeral. I found it so much easier to relate to that, it seemed natural to me that my friend would be at home and people would be coming to visit. Whereas when a neighbour of ours died recently I felt thrown, confused - my instinct was to go and visit his wife, but I wasn't sure how she would see that, whether she would regard it as prying, sticking my nose into what to her is a private matter. After nearly two decades in this country I still don't feel I really know where I am with these things, though having an English husband does help in some ways and in that case I discussed it with him and we went round together one afternoon to visit our neighbour.

Living in England, for me as an Israeli, sometimes feels like treading in a minefield. If I act according to Israeli norms - as I did when I first came here - I'd come across as extremely rude. But there isn't a written rulebook, no user manual handed out at the airport when you arrive, so I'm still trying to work it all out, and no doubt still offending people now and again by what seems to me very normal behaviour!

Sorry, I forgot about the coffee

Here, at long last, is the post I promised ages ago, when I wrote about what the English mean by teatime.

I must start with a confession: I am not a coffee connoisseur by any means. I have always been an instant drinker (and by that I don't mean that I down my coffee quickly - I mean I drink that stuff that serious coffee drinkers wouldn't touch even if they were desperate) and in my youth I favoured what my friends referred to as "babies' coffee" - weak instant with lots of sugar and lots of milk. My biggest treat was if it was made with hot milk instead of hot water - I guess in today's terminology that kind of makes it a latte, only a not very high-quality latte...

But I digress. I was going to talk about what happens in England. Part of my culture shock on arriving here was on the coffee front, because back then - nearly two decades ago - they just didn't seem to have anything remotely approaching a decent cup of coffee. Not, as I've pointed out, that my standards were very high, which says a great deal about the low level to which the coffee here had sunk. And as an Israeli I still find it funny now the way the Brits tend to assume that you will drink tea - the more old-fashioned the person, the more likely they are to make this assumption. They won't ask you what you'd like to drink, they'll just talk about "putting the kettle on" and making "a nice cuppa", and they simply won't think of checking with you whether you actually want any tea.

In Israel we tend to make a similar assumption about coffee - in many an Israeli home when you walk in the door you are greeted not with "what would you like to drink?" (not that we have a way of saying that in Hebrew - we'd say "what do you want to drink?", which to the English ear may sound just a tad gruff...) but the question will be "coffee?" But at least, in our defence, I can say that we do actually ask! And if someone were to say, "actually I'd rather have tea" then we would find a teabag somewhere in a dusty corner of our kitchen. Even my Brazilian friend in Kfar Saba, who pretty much has coffee running through her veins instead of blood, is perfectly capable of rustling up a cup of tea for me. But here there seems to be some hard and fast rules that people don't even think about - it seems from my observation of the Brits that if you arrive any time in the afternoon, the drink you'd be offered is tea. Coffee is for mid-mornings, or elevenses; or as an after-dinner drink. It just isn't something you drink in the afternoons.

Unless, that is, you go to a coffee shop. That's where in the last decade or so the Brits have been practising American-style behaviour, ordering tall skinny lattes and short decaff mochas as though they've always done it. I well remember the beginning of the American-style coffee shop era - I was living and working in London at the time, and right next door to our office there was a bookshop which started running a coffee shop in a corner, and the coffee was so delicious it quickly became our regular morning treat, grabbing a latte in a disposable cup on our way in to work. It was so popular in our firm that one of the partners managed to arrange a staff discount for us. Not surprising when all we had in the office in terms of coffee was a kettle and a jar of instant. I get the impression that Americans would have gone on strike over such bad working conditions... (But from what I remember from my Israeli working days, all we tended to have in the office was a kettle and a jar of instant - except in some places where due to popular demand there was also a packet of Turkish Coffee, which was used to make what we call "mud coffee". We call it that because there's this huge amount of mud-coloured sediment at the bottom of the mug.)

The Brits may correct me, but I have the feeling the word "coffee shop" arrived with that trend from across the ocean. I think until then there were only cafés, where you could get a not-particularly-brilliant coffee if you asked for it, but also tea of course, and light eats.

And then there is the different kind of café, which is pronounced "caff" - sometimes referred to fondly as a "greasy caff" or a "greasy spoon" (short for "greasy-spoon café) - which is really a basic down-to-earth restaurant where the plebs can go for a meal and feel at home, and the not-so-plebs go to enjoy the sort of food that the posh restaurants wouldn't dream of serving, even in an ironic post-modern style. This is where you can get the great British all-day-breakfast, which consists of bacon and eggs plus all sorts of possible additions: grilled tomatoes, fried mushrooms, sausages, baked beans, fried bread, and one of my favourite things: bubble and squeak, which I've been told was traditionally made of leftovers from Sunday lunch, and like so many dishes that developed as an attempt by poor people to make the food go just a bit further, is so much nicer than some of the super-duper gourmet food! In my single days in London, before I learned to cook and before I made the decision to stop eating pig, I used to sometimes go to one of those greasy caffs on a Sunday after church for a belated breakfast (never had time to eat before church, me being not very much of a morning person). These meals are obviously not what the health food brigade would recommend - some have referred to them as "cholesterol on a plate" - but they are certainly very filling! (and if you're on Atkins or any low-carb diet, then you can go for it with no qualms at all...)

So if you come to England and you see what looks like a no-frills restaurant offering "all day breakfast", "cooked breakfast", or "English breakfast", this is what they mean. You won't get any croissants there, that's for sure! (And don't expect a decent cup of coffee in there either. They'll do you a mug of what's fondly called "builders' tea" - so strong you can stand your spade in it... If you want a decent coffee, look for a smart place with a name that seems American. I shudder to think what reaction you'd get if you walked into a greasy caff and asked for a tall skinny latte... I expect the response would be along the lines of "you wot?")