Kinda coming together

So, the last but one blog entry I posted was sad and lonely, and yeah I got a few emails from concerned friends at the time. So, for the sake of those concerned friends, "it's really not that bad"!

For starters, both the people I actually liked during that scenario are still on speaking terms with me. I stayed away for a long while - well over a month - and on return, the lady of the house kissed me because she'd felt so bad about the whole thing. We aren't ever going to be buddy-buddy after all that, but at least we're comfortable in each others' presence.

Next up, when I finally got around to going back, the scene had changed tremendously. There's a new set of landlords (and also a new set of rules, of which, more later). The old landlords, John and Nicola, did a lot of the groundwork in throwing out the kind of people who beat up other people on a Saturday night for fun. The new landlords have (thankfully) kept firmly to that blacklist. Ergo, given the current clientele, I could be an intelligent shade of blue and there would be no problem in that bar, so long as I didn't start anything myself.

I can't express what a relief that is. You have to understand that the bar is my only social life; I live alone, work from home, I need to get out. I go gently mad if I can't get out - I can live with it, but not for very long periods of time. So having a friendly - or at least, benign - local bar is a major thing for me.

On to the next thing. I don't think I mentioned Andy on here before - he was actually the first person, apart from the bar staff, that ever spoke to me in my Sheffield local. He's a bit young for me (read: under 40), but very sweet. Owing to the earlier misunderstandings, I was away from the action for a fair while - at least 8 weeks - and when I got back, Andy was with A Woman. A rather pretty woman, as it happens - long flowing red locks, blue eyes, pale skin. I'd always enjoyed his company, and rather resented her at first; I felt his new relationship deserved privacy, so apart from the odd nod and 'alright eh' we just didn't speak any more. Yeah well, same old same old.

How wrong can you be? Louise turned out to be stunning - she's the least bitchy woman I ever met in my life. Not an ounce of malice in the girl. Maybe I spent too long down South, where it seems the done thing is to malign every woman your man ever knew before you came into his life... I don't know. But Louise is great, she's a million miles from all that crap, and although I've caused her a few bad moments (I've begged her now to stop taking everything I say seriously) she's fast becoming a real friend. Through that, everything else got better too; I started getting invited back, and enjoyed the company of the little gang that accumulates around Andy.

Andy celebrated with a heart attack.

Whoa. Louise is a single parent whose youngest happened to be in hospital at the time with water on the brain. These days it seems it's all gone tits-up; used to be parents couldn't stay with their kid in hospital, nowadays if they don't stay with their kid in hospital Social Services get involved. Louise and her unsung-heroine mother did shifts, for the last 10 weeks, to look after that toddler 24*7. The childrens' hospital is a long, long way from where Andy ended up, and after committing him to their care and going down as 'next of kin' Louise genuinely couldn't get there for the next five days. So I went instead, because where Andy ended up is within easy walking distance from my house, and I owe him a great deal in terms of friendship.

Louise is possibly the only woman I ever met whose response to that would be a heartfelt 'thank you'. That's how lovely she is.

So - yeah, Sheffield's improved by leaps and bounds as far as I'm concerned. Both invalids are out of hospital now - young Marshall apparently 'without skull' (are they mad? they let a toddler out of hospital with a helmet to cover the part of his skull that's still missing and he has an 8-year-old brother living with him?) and Andy looking a bit pale and suffering from gout in his feet, which is new to him. But at least they're both out, alive.

Back to that 'new set of rules'. Ex-landlord John mentioned back in December that it would be illegal to take glasses outside the bar after 11pm come January. I thought he was joking, but nope. And this is just nasty. Isn't it bad enough that we have to stand outside to smoke in the first place, without this blanket 11pm rule? I know for a fact I'm not the only smoker who finds it hard to drink without a cigarette on the go...

Nigel and I went to Spain for Christmas. It's all very civilized over there. There's a sign on the door of every pub, bar, cafe or restaurant that tells you the smoking policy in that particular establishment. Most are 'smoking throughout' but some are 'no smoking' and others still are 'smoking within specified areas'. We knew where we could or couldn't be comfortable, and on the rare occasion when we found ourselves in a completely non-smoking place it was still OK because we knew what the deal was when we walked in. Now why can't England be that civilized?

And it churns me up inside to hear that apparently the House of Commons is exempt from all the crap they've merrily inflicted on the rest of us.

One of the saddest moments was hearing that the same stupid law landed in Israel some time later. You'd think 'yeah but at least it's warm there'... but you'd be missing the fact of winter.

Shoshijesh!

I have this terrible craving for sausages, and I didn't fancy hauling my sorry ass a mile up the road after last night's disastrous outing, so I went shopping locally for the first time in forever.

The Happy Shopper on the corner has the usual selection of bread in various shades of grey, but does sell some nice-looking red potatoes grown within spitting distance of Sheffield. No deli meat, though. At all. When you come to think of it all the deli meat (well most of it) in the UK is pork-based, and in Sheffield - home of the Hot Pork Sandwich - this goes double. Our Happy Shopper is Muslim-franchised, so the options are: bloater paste, salmon paste, sardine paste, tins of Prince's hotdogs (don't know how they slipped through the net) or crazily expensive tins of sliced beef in onion gravy.

I invest in the potatoes, some milk and a suspiciously baggy pound bag of frozen peas, and head over the road.

The grocery over the road is downright weird. It looks Lebanese, but it actually sells Polish food in among the dates and pomegranates.

It has sausages!!!!!

Half an hour later I've finally gone through the sausage collection. Veal (smoked, piquant or au naturel), beef (likewise) or chicken (likewise), plastic-wrapped slicing sausages with 'ready to eat' lurking at the bottom of the label, available in two different lengths or in strings. Roughly 18 different varieties of Polish sausage of indeterminate ancestry. Some have helpful labels in English that say things like 'dry and crumbly' or (more usefully) 'grilling sausage'. Some appear to be cocktail sausages; most appear to be pre-cooked, even the ones that aren't. There's something that looks like a whole pig's ear and has small spots of blue-green mould growing on it (is that intentional? who can say?). There are several very greasy-looking white cheeses with a brown rind, served up in vacuum-packed slabs.

The guy who runs the shop definitely isn't Polish, so he couldn't read any of the original labels either. But at least he knew where he'd hidden the last bag of sugar in the shop, behind the huge pots of cheap honey.

Now to figure out how to cook the things!

OK so I'm pissed (off)

So it's not enough already that my introduction to Sheffield is a beating because "yerv coom to blur us oop". Oh no, we're beyond all that now.

I don't introduce myself as an embryonic Jew any more. I rarely mention Israel. I've learned.

I haven't made contact with the very nice lady's sister. I met the very nice lady at a Christian introduction to Pesach earlier in the year. I still have the very nice lady's sister's phone number, but I scarcely know what to do with it...

'Er, hi, I want to be a Jew'

Doesn't really work.

Tonight I inadvertently offended two people by trying to fit in. Literally, by repeating what others around me were openly saying to those people. Didn't work. When locals say it, it's okay. When I say it, I've no right. And as one of the guys said to me later, 'You've been a right bitch throughout.' I tried to explain that I wasn't trying to be a bitch, I just wanted to fit in...

This town can be a fucking miserable place at times.

My mother - who will be retiring to this very house in six months' time (thereby rendering me homeless, but that's by the bye) - loves it here.

I guess we just don't meet the same people.

Shabat Shalom

I have to leave Israel next week. It hurts.

I finally decided - after years of thinking about it and trying to find a way out - to join the Jewish ranks.

I'm too much part of it now - or it's too much part of me - to just walk away. And Jerusalem for me is as nectar to a hummingbird. I need to suck it up.

My family know this of me, and are incredibly supportive. Even my little niece Rowie wrote: Yay, you're gonna be a Jew!!!

A fairly startled Ze'ev asked me why I'd want to become Jewish, and whether I'm in my right mind, and whether it's purely because I want to live in Israel. I'm shaking my head at him and not finding a way to tell it.

"Shabbat in Jerusalem" should be all I need to say, but it isn't, because even Ze'ev doesn't know what that means. So OK I will tell y'all about Shabbat in Jerusalem.

Shabbat begins when the woman of the household is ready for it. That means, she's cleaned up the house and she's cooked enough food to get through the next 24 hours without firing up the oven again. Her work done, she relaxes, she lights two candles, blesses God for making that requirement of her, eats salted bread (blessing God for allowing her to eat the fruit of the earth) and drinks wine (blessing God for allowing her to drink the fruit of the vine).

'baruch' - literally, blessing - probably doesn't translate well to Christian or other non-Jewish cultures. For the record, it's pretty much 'thanking', only different.

The next thing is the shofar being blown. In Jerusalem's Nachlaot neighbourhood technology's moved beyond this; we have a two-minute siren to announce the beginning of Shabbat, one hour before sundown, every Friday. But then everything stops. If someone was playing a CD it stops. If someone had the TV on loud, it stops. Sure people still do these things, but on Shabbat they will turn down the sound so as not to disturb the fly on the wall. That'll be the practising Jewish fly on the wall...

Unless you've lived it, you won't know how wonderful it is to only hear the sounds of voices. Human voices, cat voices, bird voices, dog voices - but all unfiltered.

I have an unfortunate talent or sickness: I hear/see digitalized sound in blocks. That means I find it very uncomfortable to watch TV or listen to the radio unless I'm totally absorbed in the content. And overhearing everyone else's shit that way is downright painful - too distant to become absorbed even if I wanted it, but close enough to disrupt my pitifully weak psyche. I grow irritable and have to do breathing exercises to retain any sense of equilibrium. So for me, Shabbat in Jerusalem is a total release. I don't have to worry about digitalized sound. I don't have to 'translate' it. I can just relax - and on Shabbat, after the siren, after the male voice choir efforts from the synagogue next door (beautiful in a formalized kinda way), I will only hear the sounds of friends and family eating and laughing together, and then the next day the sound of children playing and men praying. Me, I hear it and I feel it, that huge gap between Shabbos and the empty day.

So now even Ze'ev knows where I'm coming from...

Shabat Shalom (may the peace of the Sabbath be yours), and please don't take that lightly!

Collective punishment

So I'm sitting in a bar (how unusual) swapping insults with Itai (how unusual) and jiggling to some Middle Eastern-sounding music (that turned out to be Spanish), and suddenly Itai stops barracking me and asks if I read French. He's trying to book a Eurolines coach from Paris over the Internet, and there's no way to do it in English. As it happens I do, but I can't actually read the bar monitor - it's some 10 feet above my head - or reach the keyboard or mouse, so I'm useless to him. I'm bemused too - it's only a few weeks since Itai came home from a major trip around Europe, most of it unplanned. He was mugged in London and fled to the European mainland shortly after, which is a distressingly familiar tale among young Israeli travellers.

Turns out it's not Itai that's going. It's Abu something or other (Arab guys are known through their sons). He's always been chatty and cheerful, but I didn't even know he had any sons 'til he showed me his travel permit - Palestinians don't have passports as such - and visa. I was a little taken aback to find his home town given as Jerusalem but his nationality as Jordanian. It didn't occur to me until then that there are some real problems with the Palestinians not having a state in this day and age - don't ask me why, but I'd assumed they'd all be down as Israeli, perhaps with some proviso. We both smiled over the workaround of having Jerusalem as a Jordanian city, but it's a bit sad, in the sense of pathetic. As was the difficulty of figuring out where in Europe he'd legally be able to travel with his French visa. The limitations sure as heck weren't clear to me either from the document itself - and the girl he plans to meet actually lives in Denmark.

Hopefully he won't get arrested for contravening some regulation he doesn't understand along the way. He's no threat to anyone, just a normal dude doing normal dude things, one of the many here who works alongside, and has friends among, the Jewish population. Who have an equally bad time abroad, if for completely different reasons.

Isn't it about time Europe stopped randomly punishing people for being from the Middle East?

Just a thought.

Support for the Palestinian people

It's not often that a feedback post in Ha'aretz actually cheers me up, much less one from a Palestinian writer. But this one - in response to an article saying that the EU/World Bank money is starting to trickle through into Gaza and the West Bank - did.

Title: Give food, medicine and work, not money
Name: George

As a Palestinian, I ask that those who support my people give only food, medicine, medical equipment and tools to help further our scientific (not religious) education. Rebuilding a power plant is a good step but most of all we need jobs. I don't know of even one European manufacturing factory based in Gaza or the West Bank. Any donated (cash) money will quickly disappear into the Swiss Bank accounts of our corrupt politicians and will also be used to build more Kassam factories in Gaza and purchase weapons on the black market from Iran and Syria (though Lebanon and Egypt). Anything but jobs in Gaza and the West Bank (and abroad) will contribute more to the vicious circle of violence, not less. Is Sweden ready to build a new Volvo or Saab car plant in Jabalia ? Can Egeland pledge to employ 10,000 Palestinians to work in Norwegian and North Sea offshore drilling operations ?

Absolutely. Negotiate with Abbas, negotiate with Olmert, get a guarantee from Israel that there will be a 'hands off' approach to any such enterprise and a free flow of goods, get an agreement from the PA that the security team overseeing the building of the factory and (later) the day to day comings and goings of the employees and goods will be Israeli, or at the very least Europeans vetted by, overseen by, and under the control of Israelis.

You think that's hard, to be searched every day on your way in to work? S'funny, in Israel (or at least, the parts of Israel I know) it's almost impossible to move around without being searched somewhere along the line, but people here cope with it because we all know it's necessary. We're watched like hawks, too. Why should the society responsible for Israel's security problems be trusted while we still can not?

So there it is. And BTW the only Palestinian George I know is a Coptic Christian, so going by the name of the writer his is unlikely to be the prevailing view amongst the Muslim majority. It's still a good idea, with the provisions as above, it would go a long way towards helping the Palestinian people without inadvertently supporting their terrorist elements, it would help build an element of trust and co-operation between Israel and Europe (not to mention Israel and Gaza) - and it's probably do-able.

Pride and Prejudice

I bumped into a bunch of English guys last night in Mike's Place, three seconds after I'd bought a soldier on leave from Lebanon another beer.

For once they weren't a group of football fans, UN soldiers or journalists travelling together, so everyone had opinions of their own. One preached 'when in Rome...' (like I needed to learn it?) and another expressed similar sentiments in a more modern way, aka 'when in New York...' We were discussing the Gay Pride march, which was to have been held in Jerusalem and now is not. The Third Man, being non-Jewish and new to the area, felt strongly that the Gay Pride parade should've been allowed in Jerusalem. 'Why not Tel Aviv?' I asked - Tel Aviv is far more European than Jerusalem will ever be. 'That's no challenge, obviously,' the American Jewish visitor sitting behind me offered. Probably that's the entire reasoning behind this particular issue. The Third Man certainly thought so, but his response to that idea and mine were so far apart that we found each other offensive, even though we'd both played by the rules of social engagement.

I think having a Gay Pride march in Jerusalem at present would open the town up to overt violence all over again, as opposed to the bubbling undercurrent of potential violence we all know and love. The effort to prevent the parade united Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious leaders here. Now that is an achievement; in Israel we hear next to nothing about these moments of unity between religions, but briefly there was peace... peace in a stranglehold maybe, but still peace...

He thinks having a Gay Pride march in Jerusalem will normalize the city, make it part of the world. Hm. Yeah actually so do the rabbis, priests and imams. That's why none of them want it. How's a man to make a living?... nah, it really would be offensive to them, as it would to many sectors of the population living here. Including me, and please don't bother telling me I'm anti-gay, because I'm demonstrably not. I just think if I'm treading on someone else's toes it'd be polite to move away, is all.

Inevitably, Daniel said to me (much, much later) he was all for hosting the Gay Pride march in Jerusalem. 'If you need to say something you should say it loud'. 'But in Jerusalem?' - I'm shocked. Heck, I might be a goy but I don't even eat pork in Jerusalem, it would feel so wrong. Jerusalem is a beautiful princess in bondage gear, waiting hopefully for her Prince Charming to come back. And there you have it, in a nutshell.

The debate isn't about whether you are for or against gay activism; the debate is about whether you see Jerusalem as a symbol, or as a city much like any other. Seeing her as a symbol doesn't in any way preclude knowing Jerusalem as a city, but it's the one thing the various religious factions here share and understand about one another, without effort. Treating her as a secular city means ignoring that other reality; it effectively means sidelining the religious population, of all persuasions. While that may be a road to a secular peace, it doesn't take into account the history of the city, or its social make up, or its physical situation on the borderline between East and West. It assumes that everyone else is - or should be - prepared to leave God out of the equation. In Jerusalem, that's quite an assumption to make.

I'd join that march - in Tel Aviv.