If it is a nice day for walking, I go past where I’d normally turn for the West Finchley Tube stop, and I keep on truckin’ down Ballards Lane to Finchley Central. It’s a funny thing, Finchley: up by where I work, you find the klatsches of expatriate Japanese mums dropping their kids off at school; continue southwards on Ballards Lane long enough, and there’re the drunks slapping each other in the street. Today, a fresh-faced flower of a girl in a pink tank top and the smallest of skirts was handing over money to a stumbly gent so he’d buy her a beer.

There’s a grocery store I pass sometimes, when it’s a nice day for walking. The Aroma. The hand-painted lettering on one of the side doors reads, from doortop to doorbottom, white on black: WE SELL POLISH GREEK TURKISH IRANIAN PRODUCE. A stand-alone signboard out front says: PRODUKTY. In the last so many weeks, they’ve had a large wire bin of giant watermelons by the entrance. The cut halves show a luscious red, like sin.

I had never gone into the Aroma, though I have thought of it often—but I have work to do at home tonight, so of course I was procrastinating like the best of them. I might’ve stopped in the Tasties caff, even, a greasy spoon with laminated menus and Technicolour food photographs, if I hadn’t already planned a chicken-zucchini bake for dinner.

O!, foreign-produce grocery stores!, how you never fail to disappoint! I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: the world is an amazing place. So many treasures in one little hidey-hole: the Attiki honey, yes; and the collection of halloumi, sure; but also the buckets of yoghurt—truly, buckets!, with handles!; the selection of preserved cabbage leaves, a small army of squat glass jars; the aluminium tubes of varied hams and meaty spreads; and, CC, are you listening?, Ülker enough to make a girl wild-eyed in the narrow aisles.

There will be pistachio halva tonight, moppets, and this weekend, “the best kind of coffee, roasted and pulverized for the people”.