In the Polish shop you can buy Polish beer. Polish beer gets you drunk in a Polish way - a way that makes you want to shout, embrace, pump your fist into the cold night air.
But Polish beer also gives you a Polish hangover, a hangover that barely shelters human life. It is the flip side: with the ecstasy of the unknown comes the fear of the unknown. Polish beer is like the Polish flag: it has its red half and its white half.
Sometimes, when I have one of these hangovers, I speculate as to what other terrible secrets of science and the occult are trapped inside the Polish shop. I wonder if all of their produce has this dualistic, red-and-white effect. If the slices of cold beef come from some cloven-hoofed cow whose task it is to tempt salivating Englishmen with the deep mushroomy flavours of central Europe then impregnate their arteries with eye-popping levels of fat. And I wonder if, out the back of the shop, behind the little lady with giant glasses, there is a laboratory or a den of alchemists working round the clock to keep red separate from white, praying that no-one invents a cure for the hangover.
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