So after sifting through me blog dashboard, I was correct when I feared you can’t edit the order of your blogs……..so my confession now is that I write this blog in retrospect, in glorious shimmering colours – my trip to Israel (copied from a three shekel Kohinoor notepad from the aeroplane):
Is it a delusion, or does serendipity come knocking as soon as you’re near an airport?
Is it the synthesised calm that amplifies the poignancy of happenings?
I had lazed around so much that morning that I was tired again by the time it got to three.
All dressed down with somewhere to go, I locked the apartment I had come fondly to know. The strange grill-oven and the tired and sweaty sepia tiled floor. The grates on the windows where popmusik wannabes bashed out their woes nightly at the studio behind.
My own keys. Not to be returned. The ultimate souvenir. Down the steps and into the street, where dust and stray cats and people went about their non-business impatiently.
The familiar uncertainty of Tel Aviv streetlife.
My last supper a bureka and some fish eggs, my via de la rosa a memorised google map.
A soft pride fills my beshawled chest as I make my way past the broken warehouses and caryards. Shoken. Herstel Levinsky. Look for the bus station. Get to a bridge. Find the train station.
And I did.
Without my local guides I can’t get away with being Jewish. Possible a Russian. Prostitute. The guards are always nice enough, but no messing. The girl in front of me in the queue asks for a single to Ben Gurian. Handy. The train leaves at 3.33. I ask for the same and my OCD kicks in as I hear it’s Stein – platform 2, the same as my envisionment of the journey before I set out.
The girl in front turns out to be Polish. She has my middle name, and took the same flight as me to get here. She stayed in a hostel around the corner from my dwelling. She possibly passed me in the street.
She has a crusty face. I wouldn’t have looked at her. I understand why our paths never crossed.
So, is this a help or a hinderance? She is happy enough, but has that Polish bluntness about her, with large, sudden movements contradicted by muttered, semi-shy ramblings.
We both do kickboxing. She is a white belt, I am green. You do the math.
But it’s good to be interrogated together. She dismisses my intuition at the terminal and we wander into an entirely deserted departure hall. Sometimes reading the sign is not equal to being given a sign.
Anyway, the bogs are empty so I happily pontificate with my luxury tampons (four times the price of anglo equivalents), whilst she doesn’t interfere with my luggage.
We get severely frisked. I by a young hormonal guy. She by an alien. And the valium-inspired airport feeling starts to kick in.
At the duty free lounge I want to shake free, and eventually I do, weaving between teenage skull-capped school trippers and exchanging wise looks with older Jewish women. It’s all gone a bit Mossad.
My nicotine cravings start to outweigh any sense of Anglit politeness, and I start to eliminate people in the queue. An american couple twang away in front of me:
“ Oh my gwod, I’ve been searching all week for some decent hamburger”, as he tucks into a flat McDeathburger.
Look pal, if you want some meat in your mouth, go home and get stuffed.
Talking of meat in the mouth………
Tourism versus friend-dossing; yes, I never saw Haifa, but I saw an old man hurling abuse at a worker, then telling me a bad joke with a lisp, and asking me to translate the word ‘furry’. As in ‘I am covered in fur’. Trivial, one might say. Bizarre another. But lying on a crate next to a portaloo reading Bukowski beats dinner with ten other tourists followed by bed bugs in a bunk bed.
No, I’ve never been to Galilee, but I came somewhere near me.
And I sucked someone off on the banks of the Dead Sea.
By the way, there are no fish in this dead sea, giving a refreshing twist to the old saying…….
I kissed the wailing wall and a riot broke out, stoning, tear gas and all.
I touched Jesus’ grave with a crucifix, then spat semen over the quicksand, like a proper Magdalene to my false prophet.
I can say ‘okey dokey’ in Hebrew and enjoyed philosophical debate on the subject of foreskins.
I drank double-kosher ritual wine and took a toddler to the park to hang out with the other suburban nannies.
I cooked burnt soggy pancakes with my estranged lover and shot arak down my neck like the messiah had arrived.
I stuffed my face fuller than ever in an Arabic fish restaurant in the old city, then smoked fags in a shady bar whilst listening to Balkan Beatbox.
And the bloody rest.
Action points:
• Change my voice message to a faux-holy greeting
• Visit Sinai to slum it in a shack with sweet FA to do all day
• Learn some Hebrew
• Let my floods blow
• Embrace ritual
• Remember I am not a womble, but a sacred, rare animal
• Love and follow my dreams
• Throw that pinch of salt over my shoulder, and remember there ain’t no fish in the dead sea.
Too late for new years resolutions I hear you say?!....
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