A walk across the sea

Just before Rosh Hashanah, my best friend and I went to Lindisfarne, the Holy Island. Because it's a tidal island, you walk across the sea to get there. And you have to run the gauntlet of scary signs...

The first danger sign...

The second.

Now with graphics.

A refuge hut to climb into when the waves come

If the sea doesn't get you, the explosions and quicksand will

Or the guns

Or the rocks

Or you might slip!

This was the Bleakest Moment of Ultimate Fear

And then we arrived, and it was so serene. This serene:

Happy new year!

Yesterday I was walking on the cliffs, crossing from England to Scotland and back again, and now I'm back in London and it's Rosh Hashanah. First there was the problem of the quince. Yes, singular. One was about 15foot up my tree, and there was no getting it down. The second, I got down by using a ridiculous fruit picker. I felt like a loon, but it was worth it. The quince was satisfyingly heavy, and smelled faintly of orange blossom. It's poaching now, with some water, sherry, cinnamon and a bay leaf. We'll have half tonight and half tomorrow; it's the symbolism of the thing, really, eating the first fruits for the new year. I've also been running round getting figs, honey, pomegranates, carrots and a zillion other vegetables for a seven-vegetable stew (seven is the lucky number!), string beans, chives, dates—oh, and silver polish. Because my candlesticks look like they came from before the Flood and a friend recently described my housekeeping as "erratic" so obviously I have to prove him wrong! I'm nearly ready for all the wishing and symbolic destruction of enemies that goes on in the Sephardi seder. So: happy new year! I hope your years are round and sweet and full of good things.

Black swans

All summer I've been seeing this black swan in St James's Park. It was fatter and fluffier than the sleek white swans. I just read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan.

Taleb writes that the medievals thought all swans were white. Then in 1697 Willem de Vlamingh saw black swans in Australia and millennia of empirical evidence were disproved. Knowledge is fragile, life is uncertain. You can suddenly see a black swan. Or neutrinos can go faster than light! The trick is to be robust in the face of negative black swans and expose ourselves to as many positive black swans as possible. I find this strangely comforting.

Taleb's first black swan came when the Lebanese civil war started in 1975. I grew up with people whose black swan was the loss of their home, culture, community and language—they were anxious but also amazingly resilient to change. They taught me that when the unthinkable happens, you cope and hope. They made me an optimist.

Quinces are go!

So just as I had given up on my quince tree for this year, two (two!) quinces appeared. I rang my mother and asked how much lowzina mel haiwa we could make with two quinces. Lowzina are diamond-shaped marzipan sweets flavoured with cardamom and lemon juice and quince and sometimes rosewater or orange flower water. They are ridiculously sweet—and satisfyingly scarlet. The answer was: not very much lowzina. So we'll have to see if more quinces appear. We're very early in the season, after all. But I'm going to do something with them for Rosh Hashanah, when one of the Iraqi Jewish new year traditions is to eat a "first fruit".

How Iraqi do you feel?

I got asked this question this week, when I was interviewed for a radio documentary about Iraqi Jews (which involved me cooking dinner on the radio!). I think I feel, well, pretty Iraqi. I've just written a play about Gertrude Bell making the state of Iraq in the 1920s, dedicated to my grandfather, who first told me about her. I'm writing a play about my own childhood dreams of flying to Baghdad on a magic carpet. Out of my window, right now, I can see the quince tree I planted because quinces were one of the first fruits to be successfully transplanted from east to west and it makes me feel more rooted, just knowing it's there. (I'm still waiting, by the way, for it to fruit.) I use orange blossom perfume. I carry salt. And I put date syrup in my porridge. And, yes, porridge is more Little Lord Fauntleroy than Thousand and One Nights, but I'm second-generation, I can't be authentic either to London or Baghdad. And it's delicious.

Saints on the run

I may have disagreed with my family on who might be my Mr Right but I've never had to grow a beard to escape a marriage. Which is exactly what happened to Saint Wilgefortis. Promised to a man she didn't like, she prayed she'd be made repulsive and woke on her wedding day with a full beard. Her father had her crucified. Years ago, I visited her shrine in Prague. It's bizarre. She looks like Jesus in a dress. I admire her pluck. Also her hirsuteness; how many men could grow a full beard (and moustache!) overnight?


Apparently her English name is Uncumber—and she's particularly venerated by women who want to escape (be disencumbered from) bad husbands. 


It's amazing how many saints started out as women on the run from marriage. I met another when I was on holiday in the Lake District. St Bega was a seventh century Irish princess who fled the man her parents wanted to marry, crossing the Irish sea to land in Cumbria. She found it "covered with a thick forest, admirably adapted for a solitary life", she became a nun and performed miracles including healing people with her bracelet (I love a miracle that involves good jewellery) and causing a snowstorm which saved some monks from people who were trying to steal their land. I took this picture at her church. I hadn't meant to go there but I was glad to have encountered her.