Pink wafers from a corner shop, fresh naan at the grocer’s – and a heart-warming sign in one shop window: ‘We are still baking’
I must have walked by the shop in question hundreds of times in the years I’ve lived here, and it has never looked anything other than utterly unprepossessing, all Cillit Bang and slightly dusty green peppers. But the queue at the greengrocer, marked out by the taped lines we’ve all come to know so well, was more than usually long, and so it was that the other day I finally went in. I saw the fresh coriander straightaway, and grabbed it. But then I spied something else, even more lusted after: fresh naans as big as satellite dishes; Middle Eastern flatbreads as long and as soft as linen table runners. Treasure. I gathered up bags of each, paid, and went home feeling thrilled: another discovery made.
Has this happened to you? During the lockdown, my mind maps have completely changed. I walk for an hour each day, usually at about 5pm, always heading east from my front door, which is less leafy than in other directions, but vastly more interesting: mosques nestling up to baptist chapels; plaques dedicated to long forgotten aldermen; terraced houses that seem to come in one of only two states (peeling like psoriasis, or fully Farrow & Ball-ed). Sometimes, I’m not after any shopping, and on those occasions I just take it all in, my eyes working to peel back the layers of the city. Often, though, I am in need of something, even if I don’t know exactly what – and these perambulations are even more satisfying. I go in for tea bags or rice, and come out bearing halva, or a paper bag of the loquats, golden and mottled, that I loved in my Jaffa childhood. The other day, standing in a corner shop that seemed to specialise mostly in tortilla chips, I found a box of pink wafers. I’d forgotten all about pink wafers! Reader, I bought them.
The pluck of restaurants selling dishes through a hastily fashioned serving hatch lifts the heart
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