poppy seed cake and the deli counter: unfriendliness, rage and shame

After some dedicated weeks of scouring supermarket shelves and google-translating cyrillic I had nearly gathered together all of the ingredients required for Rachel Allen's poppy seed cake, which was the most Russian-sounding recipe I could find that didn't involve fifteen different layers or have the phrase 'bird's milk' in the title. I now had all the ingredients except for poppy seeds. Fail. I'm determined to make this cake to the point of insanity. I don't know why. I just must make it. My quest is now a long drawn out and ridiculous one that involves me going into supermarkets, picking up bread with poppy seeds on it, finding the least hostile-looking member of staff, pointing to the poppy seeds and saying 'You have?' like a retard. They don't have. They never, ever have. They glance around dully as if there might be some scattered around on the floor somewhere, and then they say 'Nyet.' And with every stony-faced nyet, part of my dignity crumbles. They don't care about my poppy seeds. Literally nobody does.

On Sunday, as a final effort, I decided to seek out the famous Eliseyev supermarket: chandelier-lined cereal aisles, gold-plated fridge sections, jewel-encrusted carrier bags; it really was stupidly ornate, and surely they since they had all sorts of totally pointless groceries they might also have poppy s… nyet. The bloody woman couldn't even find it in herself to be nice about it. Not 'really sorry, we seem to be out!' or 'I don't think so, but perhaps you could try [useful information]', or 'I know poppy seeds is the Russian element in your cake, and here we are in the most quintessentially Russian supermarket in the world, and all we eat is poppy seeds on everything, but we just don't seem to stock them or sometimes even know what they are – weird!' Just another stony-faced nyet.

So now I was depressed and so hungry I was starting to feel dizzy, and I knew that what I needed most in the world was an uplifting snack and as quickly as possible. So it was against this background that I went to the deli counter. I queued for 15 long minutes. Finally, deli counter woman looked at me humourlessly. I brightened. My uplifting snack! It was coming!

'Um,' I said, gathering my thoughts and summoning the word for 'I would like' – and then an Odious Witch bustled in and barked her order at the deli counter lady, as if my presence in the queue in front of her was an inane fact that had absolutely no bearing on her life! Like a football score! And I could just be brushed aside like some sort of small beetle! My mouth fell open. The humourless deli lady regarded me for a moment - as if some social etiquette was niggling at the peripheries of her consciousness, something about common decency, but she couldn't quite… no, she'd drawn a blank – and the Odious Witch was duly served, and the beetle was not.

I had expected to encounter a lower threshold of unfriendliness here, mostly since all of the advice given to me before I left for Moscow revolved around the central premise that if I smile too much people will think I'm some sort of lunatic. But that wasn't a massive revelation, frankly. I was actually very confident that I had, over the years, mastered the art of not smiling in situations where to do so might sound alarm bells in the minds of the people around me. Overcrowded buses. Post office queues. A crowd of people gathered around a cyclist who is lying about 8 metres away from his bike. I'm usually quite adept at playing these things by ear. How different can Russia be, I thought.

No but seriously, they said.

Oh, I said. Well. Then maybe I'll take it up a notch or two, maybe I'll extend my repertoire of non-smiling situations to also include situations where I previously might have smiled if I was in a good mood! I don't know like, handing clothes back to fitting rooms assistants. The Waterstones queue. Standing up to allow someone to get to their seat. Where they might have had a smile in London, they will have a curt nod of acknowledgment in Moscow. I will conduct interactions with sales assistants and waitresses with an air of gravitas. There would be a distinct cooling of my general demeanour.

No, they said, as in, even when you meet people for the first time and you're introducing yourself, don't even smile then.

But that's actually just rude, I said, and thus began my struggle with the cultural personality of Moscow, which came to a head right at the moment when the Odious Witch pushed in front of me in that queue, and the Rage came, I knew it would, I tried to quell it but after a month of stony-faced nyets it was so evitable it was almost prophesized, and as I walked up to her I thought (so angrily that if this thought had been hovering in text above my head, there would have been flames blazing off it) 'Let's see how easy it is to ignore me when I do THIS' - and lightly shoulder-shoved her as I walked past. I think I meant to just pointedly elbow-knock her handbag, but I must have made real contact, in the way the you might if you were trying to get off the tube and the doors were about to close, because she actually oomphed. I've just done that, I thought. I've just shoved a lady. She oomphed.

The Rage fizzled out like a crap firework, quickly to be replaced by the Shame. I dashed out of the supermarket, genuinely mortified by the discovery that after years of believing that I was well-adjusted, I was, against all odds, an aggressive anti-social menace. What else might I be capable of? I caught up with Philip and examined him anxiously from the depths of despair, wondering if he would break up with me when he knew that I was unhinged. But apparently he already knew, so we spent the rest of the Sunday much like we had spent Saturday: not baking Rachel Allen's stupid sodding poppy seed cake.

Actually, we went to the zoo and it was quite fun. Maybe I should have been writing about that instead.