24-hour museum.

Is it mozzarella? Is it challah? No, it's a treccia.

Word Count
I've just done something... slightly scary. Partly in terms of a backup, partly just because, I've copied my entire blog into word, unformatted text. And counted. Since January 2002? 213,000 words. Sheesh. Now about ten percent of that is blog guff, date headers and the like. So let's say it's more like 191,000 words. Then, let's say only about 30% of it is interesting. That's still 57,000 words. A novella.

Everyone has a sock fairy, I'm guessing, but I seem to have a black-clothes-fairy. In recent months, these items have whisked themsleves away for better climes:

black camisole that matches a pair of knickers

a pair of black stretch wool trousers which were my comfy-yet-smart kegs of choice

a black t-shirt that matched a skirt. Serves me right for buying things that match

my new, black bubeleh t-shirt I bought in New York

Most upset about my new t-shirt. I mean, where can it have gone? One day, I left it folded on the chair in my bedroom - the next day, v-a-r-nished.

Are you bipolar?

"As much as depression was the illness of nineties, mild bipolarity has become the new diagnosis for a slice of society that includes hard-to-treat depressives and some with a personal disposition that perhaps hedges into ordinary moodiness."

I have a butternut squash and some sage. What would I have done before the internet? Looked in recipe book indexes?

On a separate, but recipular note, I'm pretty sure A&A made this Delia bread and butter pudding on Sunday, and it was fabulous, dahling.

Google in Yiddish. I've arrived.

Chicks with Dicks. Dick Lit. Please.

From The Postbag: Two

[these are real, btw, I'm not making them up]

Sasha,

I write, as a Jewish reader of your blog, extremely concerned about your lengthy discourse, on a historically and geographically centric event which you attended. Unfortunately, this repetition, of a highly intellectual theological debate, together with a bit of local gossip, has absolutely no relevance to the majority of people who read your blog. In the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury "TOO JEWISH"!

I and many like me, are concerned, that you do not lose sight of the rule of blogdom, which centres around an opportunity to read, the rants and musings of those who do not attend anything of intellectual substance, but sit in a flat, looking for anything to write about by watching television, reading print media and looking out of the window.

This well established creative approach to blogdom, reflects those who read your blog. I went out to the shops sometime in September 2000, but thereafter realised (on installation of one of the first high speed connections), that there was never any need to venture out again.

I receive all intellectual and sexual sustenance from reading from my computer screen. I receive all food from takeaways, I receive all basic provisions from delivery shopping.

I recently purchased a car on the internet without needing to step outside my door. This last purchase was particularly interesting, because I realised on delivery, that I actually didn't need it (although I did need the process of buying it). I also discovered that my desired part exchange had been stolen. On ringing the police and being asked to confirm when I had last seen the damn thing, the response to my reply of September 2000 revealed, (as I am concerned your recent blog entry does) a fundamental misunderstanding of blog culture.

With this in mind, I hope you will reconsider the aforementioned lengthy entry on your blog, and ensure that standards do not diminish by use of an over-developed intellect.

Yours,

Blogwatch (presently bored and unemployed)

New phrase I just invented: mezuzah surfing. It's when ober frumers knock on your door asking you to give tzedaka (charity) soley because they saw your mezuzah and figured you're Jewish.

Years ago, I looked at a house in Hendon (it was the cheapest house there was, because it was at FiveWays Corner, and you could only go one way when you came out of the house, because of the traffic, and it invariably wasn't the way you wanted to go), and they had lots of old, overpainted mezuzahs. I asked the woman about them, and she told me: "I think they're something Jewish? They were here when we moved in, and they feel like they're part of the history of the house, so we felt we couldn't really remove them."

Cute, eh?

Reminds me. When I lived in Singapore, I was in a rented apartment, and tacked my mezuzah up on the doorframe. The thing about Singapore is that every comes from some religious tradition or another: Buddhist, animist, moslem. The phrase you hear people say all the time is "it's my custom" - it's a catch all for whatever their thang is. Went away for the weekend, came back, mezuzah gone. Varnished. Covered in clear coating of polyeurothane (Alexei Sayle reference for the 0.001% of the world who get it). I called the doorman, and we couldn't actually communicated, and got into advanced charades, where I'm pointing at my door and he's thinking I'm a nutter. I ask him to call the maintenance guy to see if he knows where it is.

The maintenance guy calls me on the phone, and isn't that interested. It's Sunday night, long weekend, he's tired. Can't it wait till Monday? Suddenly, the phrase comes to me: "it's my custom," I tell him, "I can't sleep without it on my door." Oh, I should have said. He rushes straight round, and finds it, and refixes it, because, after all, it's my custom.

Kids oriented, but a great resources: parties in North West London.

Here's a question: is someone a friend or a friendster?

I think doing the Atkins diet is like being in a cult.

Apricot kernels are supposed to be good for you.

Not my problem, but interesting - when journalists blog, editors get nervous.

Is it just me, or is Bloglines buggered? I'm now - technically - reading 43 sites, and I can see the updates, but I can't click and read the feeds. I've opened and closed to my hearts content. Now what?

So I mind parabens in deodorant, and I've thrown them all away, and bought new, expensive, crystal ones. This morning in the shower, I read the back of my (Redken/Loreal) shampoos. They have parabens, too. Do I mind? I'm thinking, probably I do...

Have you noticed how the world revolves around smaller and smaller specialisms and interests? This isn't chick-lit - it's Irish Chick Lit. Funny how Jewish chick-lit has all the Jewish taken out of it; reading as an insider, you know that forty eight recipes books, North London and a propensity to phone in a passive aggressive manner every day is Jewish. Other people probably just think it's an interesting characterisation (I'm talking about one of Anna Maxted's books here - don't know which one, they're all the same.)

Not Only Is It Emes, It's A Fact

Just got back from hearing "The Boundaries of Heresy" panel at Jewish Book Week (or, as we like to call it, Book Week. To go with The Embassy, The Chronicle and The Quarterly. Because when the whole world's Jewish, who needs a signigifier?). The panel was Louis Jacobs, Geoffrey Alderman, David-Hillel Ruben and Clive Lawton, chaired by Joshua Rozenberg.

Without a doubt, the best thing about Louis Jacobs is that despite decades of being away from the Greater Suburban Northwest, he's lost neither his Manchester accent nor northern sensibility, and he's a great racconteur. He's also pushing eighty five, and while totally on the ball, surely not as sharp as he was in 1957. Anglo-Jewry likes nothing more than old men who are well-past scary.

Joshua opened the evening with a short history of the Jacobs Affairs (1961 and 1964), and then posed a series of questions Louis Jacobs; what's his view on Torah min hashamayim (the concept of the five books being straight from heaven - effectively divine revelation), given the chance to look back on the Jacobs Affair, does he now beleive the Israel Salanter view that "not everything that is thought should be expressed, not everything that is expressed verbally should be written, and not everything that is written should be published." Not the question will we have Jewish grandchildren, which Louis Jacobs already has, but will we have the office of the Chief Rabbi in the future, some room for personal reflection, we may or may not get onto the current chief Rabbi, and the future of Anglo-Jewry. Short-order, then.

[Anglo-Jewish history lesson: short form. Louis Jacobs was on track to be Chief Rabbi, he published We Have Reason To Believe in 1957. In 1959, for a host of probably politcal reasons, people read it, and discovered that he wasn't commited to Torah min hashamayim, and beleived in a divinely inspired text. He never made it to Chief Rabbi, head of Jews College, or even back to his original pulpit. This one ran and ran. Two Jews, three opinions? Not even close. Lesson over.]

Geoffrey Alderman, who's a historian and the author of Modern British Jewry, talked us through the pre-history, the history, and the post-history. But it was Jacobs who came out with the gem that about the Maurice Joseph affair at Dennington Park Road, where he was apparently denied a pulpit for admiting that he couldn't honestly pray for the restoration of sacrifices. And this from a shul with a mixed choir. Struck me that Alderman's not so much a professor of Jewish history as a professor of Jewish gossip: while fascinating, his stories took on the timbre of a North London Friday night dinner table and the broiguses that includes. Kinda Suzie Gold with balls and politics.

I was only very slightly surprised that there were probably 700 people in the room, five men on the panel, and of the ten or so questions from the audience, only one from a woman. Quel surprise that that woman was me. I was interested to know what Rabbi Jacobs thought about a post-denominational future for Anglo Jewry (he mentioned in passing the idea of having a "foreman for all the Jews", which I was keen for him to expand on). He took it as an opportunity to "tell tales out of school" with his unique mix of boyish charm and northern humour. Edited highlights:

Isaac Woolfson (then president of the United Synagogue) said to him: "they tell me your aim is to bring the intellectuals nearer to the synagogue. First, you'll never succeed. Secondly, who wants them?"

Talking about Chief Rabbi Adler during the "Joseph Affair" at Dennington Park Road, he said that Adler "inhibited Joseph from serving as minister in an orthodox shul.". "Where did Adler get his inhibitions?" Jacobs asks. "The same place he got his gaiters - from the Anglican church."

"Who am I?" he continued. "My zaide came from Telz in Lithuania. My first community in Manchester was thoroughly heimish, I taught a blatt gemorah in Yiddish. When I came to London, it was different. Ango-Jewry used the word frum, but added meshuggah. Meshuggah frum - gone too far. But a very high level of piety, all the Lords and Ladies and Knights, kneeling on the floor on Yom Kippur. I believe very strongly in minhag Anglia, but that's nothing to do with my theology."

And theology is what still turns Louis Jacobs on. He was much more excited about debating the philosophical nuances than in community politics, or he was tonight. I have no idea what he was like as a thrusting your Rabbi in the early sixties. All I do know is that sometimes, the people of the book turn into the people of the argument, and no-one wins. Clive Lawton said that the tragedy was that we'd trapped Louis Jacobs in a time-warp talking about his first book, and in doing so, had lost out on all the other great work and works he might have produced if things had been otherwise.

Also, we might have had a chief Rabbi from Manchester, and that could have been no bad thing.

Apparently, G!d hates shrimp.