I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all this blog’s Jewish readers a very happy and kosher Pesach. We’ve had a couple of excellent family Seder’s so far, one of which involved introducing my son to a fast paced punk version of Dayenu, which he enjoyed.

I would also like to relate a really funny or rather bizarre story about having to explain to a non-Jew about what one Jewish writer once described as ‘weird Jew stuff’. In common with some Jewish families we cover our kitchen worktops with tinfoil for Passover so that there can be a barrier between the Passover food and utensils and an area that might have had bread or other forbidden Chometz foods in contact with them over the course of the rest of the year.

Unfortunately whilst I was in the middle of doing this mammoth tin foiling exercise I noticed that our kitchen tap had very low pressure. I contacted the water company and they sent an engineer out. I couldn’t help but notice that the engineer had obviously noticed the large volume of tinfoil covering every surface. Now if we were living in an area with lots of Jews a tinfoil covered kitchen at Passover would not be anything remarkable, non-Jews in such areas who saw it would be more likely to be familiar with the custom and just think ‘oh harmless weird Jew stuff’ and go on their way. But my family are the only Jews in the village and a tinfoil covered kitchen would seem really odd to a non-Jew round here who is not familiar with my family and where most people’s knowledge of Judaism doesn’t go much further than not Christian/Holocaust/weird food. I therefore had to explain to the engineer the reason for the vast amounts of tin foil lest he go away with the erroneous view that he’s uncovered a bunch of tinfoil fetishists, report the matter up and bring us trouble. I had to give the man a very very short explanation that we were doing what we do to remember the Exodus from Egypt and why we avoid bread and similar items. It must have been quite the headscratcher or the engineer to encounter yours truly putting vast amounts of tinfoil all over the kitchen.

Still, at least nobody saw me later on standing in the garden taking a garden flamethrower to a boiled egg to create the burnt egg for the Seder plate LOL, now that would have taken a whole lot more explaining.