Pesach

For most young people, moving to London is not simply a case of seeking out a swanky pad, wallpapering it to taste and then inviting all and sundry round for a flatwarming. Very few people can afford their first place alone and so to split rent, we embark on flat-sharing. Most of us gain experience of this in our uni towns, bickering about washing up, getting burgled and never buying loo roll. At college, I was lucky enough to be given a room with cleaner for the duration, though I did take part in a spot of sharing while living in Germany and got to see all the conflicts and conflagrations played out in beautiful Foreign.

In London, we were three flatmates with five rooms, having secured our ramshackle palace above the shops in Belsize Park thanks to one of our number’s decisive cheque-writing. The fifth room really lacked space enough to squash a spider, let alone swing a cat, so we endeavoured only to fill the larger fourth room. Our Gumtree ad posted, the popularity of our location saw our first prospective making contact within four minutes. We met a number of people and eventually found someone perfect, having been incredibly picky with the applications, turning down people for being called ‘Deano’, for playing the guitar or for describing themselves as ‘mad’, as well as those who professed that their friends would also describe them as ‘mad’, which everyone knows translates roughly as ‘boring’.

“I’m Jewish but I’m not really practicing,” our new addition had said when we met her for drinks one evening in Angel. As open-minded young people, this was a complete non-issue for us.

So several months later when I found myself sitting in my lounge wearing a yamukkah and chanting ‘Dayenu’, I began to wonder what we had let ourselves in for. I am no maverick when it comes to organised religion. Never christened or baptised, much to the chagrin of my only grandmother, church was where you had to sing carols at Christmas or watch coffins containing elderly relatives borne aloft by jittery oldtimers while someone’s toddler screams in the back row because the oppressive stench of death is getting on their wick. My mum had used the local Baptist church’s Sunday school as a babysitting service. During my year abroad, a friend wanted me to see an impressive church in her home town of Speyer in Germany. Having been to Rome and concluded that if you’ve seen one church, you’ve seen 'em all, I was less than interested. However, I was pleased at the provision of a sink in which to wash dirty hands - quite refreshing on a warm day. This was then pointed out to me as the ‘Weihwasserbecken’ or holy water font. Whoops. Her family were particularly amused by this story that evening, asking innocently how old I was at the transgression, expecting me to simper that I was five or six. They cleared their throats of embarrassment when I explained unashamedly I had done it that afternoon.

Our flatmate explained that Passover was the biggest event in the Jewish calendar and given that her family were in South Africa, it would mean a lot to her for us to join in. “Don’t worry,” I said, “We done it in RE.” I never go anywhere on a Saturday at the best of times, partly to avoid embarrassing drunks (such as myself) and mostly to preserve funds. Our flatmate crocheted us each a little skullcap, which I had thought was called a ‘chutzpah’ until the very last minute. A friend had to pin it down to my curls as it kept slipping off after my late arrival at the ceremony.

The coffee table was decked out with Seder, there were Haggadot for all and the TV, for once, had been switched off. I had begun things with a faux pas by sitting myself down on a spare stool and grabbing a spare glass of wine. There were awkward inhalations of breath all round. At the ceremony, a glass and a seat are kept free for the prophet Elijah, should he return, and I had plonked my arse straight down on his seat and was about to quaff his finest red plonk. I imagined a berobed and bebearded individual tapping me on the blasphemous shoulder and saying in a deep voice, “Excuse me but that’s my seat.”

We then proceeded with the ceremony but in a sort of Diet Passover version, having heard that the real deal goes on from sundown till the early hours. We dipped bitter herbs in salt water to remember suffering, but it was quite tasty. Wine was poured here and there, biscuits broken and hidden and a story read out, which we all took to varying degrees of seriousness, with some gushing in the multiculturality of the moment and others giggling like choirboys.

It was something I would never have had the chance to witness at home, Surrey’s greatest minority being people who live in caravans. Nevertheless, my disassociation with all of the major faiths can be attributed to my lack of comfort when it comes to group chanting. I just feel a bit silly. So after shouting out ‘Dayenu’ for the fifteenth time, the novelty began to wear off and I remembered why I had embraced heathenism. Things drew to an end, all were self-congratulatory and I marked the occasion with, “Does anyone mind if we watch Britain’s Got Talent?”