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| Photo I took in Roses several years ago |
Shopping along Kilburn High Road. Love the ethnic diversity. Check out the Polish shop at the north end looking for pepper spread. No luck. Find myself instinctively trying to summon enough Polish to explain what we want. Ridiculously, both because J would do a much better job and because the girl at the counter presumably speaks fluent English - she lives here. Habit triggered simply by walking into a Polski sklep.
The Turkish shop down the road is much bigger and more tempting. They do have what we want, but it’s overpriced. Here too, I try to summon up the words (from a much more limited vocabulary) not to explain but to decipher the labels, interestingly there seems to be no legal requirement for food to be labeled in English as well as the language of its country of origin, though much of it is. Sundried olives are tempting but we’re heading out to the land of olives soon. Check the oil section. Many varieties, including some we recognise but never seem to see in the wilderness, like avocado. Astonishingly, though, lined up with the others, are glass bottles labelled linseed oil, castor oil, and hair oil. Can manage to separate linseed oil from its uses on furniture and recognise that it may simply be food grade flaxseed oil. And castor oil has obvious uses in the medicine cabinet. But HAIR oil?
Brings us to Roses (no, shouldn’t have an apostrophe - as it’s 🌹🌹🌹). We’ve been going there for years. Twenty? Wasn’t on the day’s agenda, but why retire if you have to have an agenda? So decide it’s more or less time for a meal and stop for cod and chips. Nice moist fish in crisp breading. It is unhurried, as always, and the few other late afternoon customers are men, sitting separately but looking like comfortable regulars. Roses has gone upscale over the time we’ve known it. Both the decor and the menu are more ambitious, less working man’s caff. And the menu is no longer chalked - and amended - on blackboards on the walls. But we do feel some regret for the loss of the old checked table cloths and the characters who were at home there.
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