This week, a game of two halves: one of no consequence whatsoever and the other that may tear this country apart. (What is particularly disturbing is that this is only one of the two or three items in the news threatening to tear the country apart.)

I’m going to get the serious stuff out of the way first.

Last week, I buried my head in the sand. This week, I can’t bring myself to ignore all of the stories that are vying for attention in the media. So here’s just one.

In Jerusalem last week, I was approached in the street by a haredi beggar. I dismissed him with a wave of the hand, feeling a mixture of two emotions.

Many years ago, I heard a far better person than me quoted as saying that, if someone is reduced to approaching strangers in the street to ask for money, you should contemplate for a moment what can have brought them to these straits, and what this humbling of themselves may be costing them emotionally, and then you won’t feel able to deny them at least a token donation. They are, after all, providing you with the opportunity to do a mitzvah.

So, one emotion I felt when I waved this beggar away was a tinge of guilt. As it happens, I had no change on me. These days, I don’t normally take my change purse with me when I go out. Of course, I realise that, at some level, failing to take it is a convenient way of avoiding having to deal with the question of whether I want to give some change.

The other emotion was the fleeting thought, which is habitual with me, that if you are prepared, and able-bodied enough, to be out on the street in all weathers begging for small change, then you could, with less effort, find and hold down a job that would pay at least as well. This is not a thought that I am particularly proud of, but there it is.

Earlier today, I realised that, the next time a haredi man approaches me in the street to ask for money, I may not be able to resist giving him not a couple of coins but a piece of my mind. The dialogue I have prepared in my head goes something like this.

‘Have you completed military or national (public) service?’
‘No.’

‘Why not?’
‘Because I devote my life to studying Torah.’

‘How does that contribute to the nation as a whole during this war?’
‘My learning contributes to Israel’s victory and helps protect the soldiers.’

‘Then why are you frittering away your time now begging for money when you could be studying Torah? Surely if, by dint of your study, HaShem will protect our soldiers, then by dint of your study, HaShem will provide for your material needs.’

Actually, in light of today’s headlines, I plan to give him two pieces of my mind. Here is the second.

‘There is a serious shortage of manpower in the army that could be met by haredim if they chose to serve. Because of that shortfall, many reservists have served, over the last year and a half, 200 or more days of reserve duty. As a consequence of that, 41% of them have been fired from their jobs or lost their businesses.’ (I may have to explain to him that 41% means more than 4 in every 10.)’Many of these reservists have wives, or husbands, and children. How dare you turn to the Israeli public and ask for money when these people are sacrificing their economic stability in order to defend the nation, which includes you? How dare you?’

You may want to pause here, to avoid the incredibly abrupt change of gear.

Last Shabbat afternoon found me diving down some diverting rabbit holes in the Collins English Dictionary. (I’m the guy who reads the dictionary so that you don’t have to.) On the journey, I encountered a couple of things that I thought I might share with you today.

Let’s do this in the form of a quiz. Do you know what these trousers are called?

One point if you answered knickerbockers. However, if you recognised them as a particular breed of knickerbocker, and correctly identified them as plus fours, then give yourself two points.

When I stumbled on the etymology of plus fours on Shabbat, I was staggered. How, I asked myself, can I have lived for 75 years, and, for at least 60 of them, known what plus fours are, and never asked myself ‘Why? Why are plus fours called plus fours?’

The utterly charming answer is that your standard knickerbocker is cut so that it ends at the knee. However, the distinctive look of the plus four is achieved by adding another four inches of material to the leg. Plus four inches: obvious, isn’t it?

While we’re giving out points, here’s another opportunity to pit your wits. What do the following words have in common?

Bangle, bungalow, chintz, chutney, cot, gymkhana, juggernaut, shampoo, thug, toddy.

Give yourself one point if you answered that they all came into English from Hindi, during the period when the British ruled India. Before we get to the bonus points, let us pause to note that the ‘gym’ in ‘gymkhana’ is a corruption. The origin of the word is the Hindi gend-khana, which means a ‘ball house’ or ‘racquet court’ and is a place where sports activities take place. As the term was adopted by the British in India, ‘gend’ was altered to ‘gym’, purely under the influence of words like ‘gymnastics’.

Now here is your chance to earn five bonus points. When I look at the above list of words from Hindi, one of them stands out for me. I can understand how most of them were adopted in English: they described activities or objects that were characteristic of India and not of England. However, when I read the list, one word puzzled me. Surely, I thought, this is something that was adopted in England rather than in India. Which word do you think that was?

Shampoo: my limited experience of India suggests that 19^th Century Indians washed their hair with river water rather than shampoo. How can shampoo have come into English from Hindi.

A ten-point bonus for anyone who worked out that, in Hindi, champna is a verb meaning to press, knead or massage, and the original adoption in English was for the process of massaging the scalp, then for the process of applying shampoo by massaging the scalp, and only then for the soapy liquid itself.

None of which is of any consequence whatsoever, but at least it won’t get me into trouble with any Haredi beggars I encounter in the coming days.

I suppose I ought to be feeling spoilt for choice this week. There are no end of earth-shattering stories that I could explore. I could offer my take on whether Trump is well on the way to saving or destroying the world order. I could explore the multiple ways in which it appears that Israel is being dragged, either screaming or not screaming enough, to the very edge of self-destruction. I could even contemplate my own mortality.

However, I don’t feel up to any of that heavy lifting today, so instead I will, with your indulgence, offer two totally unrelated and probably trivial musings.

Muse the First: Marking the Passing of George Foreman.

Fairly high up on the list of sports that I don’t understand is boxing. I don’t understand how the deliberate inflicting of, often permanent, physical damage by one person on another qualifies as a sport. I don’t understand why anyone would choose to watch such inflicting. I don’t understand why the fact that so many youngsters view boxing as their only way out of a lifetime of poverty, crime and abuse should be seen as something to celebrate.

I did not watch the Rumble in the Jungle (Ali’s comeback fight in which he knocked out Foreman in Zaire) live or at any time since. Nor have I watched When We Were Kings, the acclaimed documentary about the fight. I haven’t even read Norman Mailer’s celebrated account of it. I did not follow Foreman’s career at all. I never even bought a George Foreman grill.

All of which means that I came to his obituary in The Times with an unprejudiced eye. (I apologise if the link is blocked for you by a paywall.) It was, unusually for The Times, a lacklustre obit, a pedestrian read about an unprepossessing and fairly directionless life. Like all Times obituaries, it carried no byline. I then read, in today’s Jerusalem Post, a tribute written by Alex Winston, the JP’s.English-born news editor specialising in real estate. This piece presented a coherent view of a life that followed a clear arc, a life informed by purpose, the life of a man who had elements of the hero in him. It was a thoroughly enjoyable and uplifting read.

I have no way of knowing which of these retrospectives is accurate, if indeed either is. Perhaps my only takeaway can be that you shouldn’t believe anything you read in the paper. Yet I find myself very strongly wanting to believe Alex Winston’s account. Partly this is because I take comfort, and perhaps even inspiration, from reading about a life of purpose. (It seems that, willingly or not, I may be, at some level, contemplating my own mortality.)

However, another part of the attraction is that this is a coherent story. Most days, at least one and often several of The Times obituaries are really good reads, not always, indeed not even nearly always, because they celebrate a life of virtue, but, rather, because they celebrate a life lived to the full, however outrageous or villainous that fulness is.

The readers’ comments that regularly accompany obituaries in The Times confirm that I am far from alone in finding that page of the paper a consistently enjoyable and meaningful read.

Muse the Second: What?! Why?!!

If you have any interest in film, you will already know that a new gangster film – The Alto Knights – has recently been released, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robert de Niro. It’s fair to say that, in itself, this is not earth-shattering news. Indeed, I might well have written, in the previous sentence, “yet another new gangster film….Levinson…de Niro”. However, what distinguishes this film is that it sctus;;y strs Roberts de Niro: both of the mafiosi whose true-life rivalry the film depicts are played by Robert de Niro. At the risk of repeating myself: What?! Why?!!

It is fair to say that one actor playing two parts has a long and sometimes distinguished history in cinema (and indeed on stage). It is a device that can serve any of a number of purposes.

Let’s start by considering Peter Pan. The tradition is that the roles of Mr Darling and Captaion Hook are doubled. Although this is not specified in the script, it is a tradition that began with the very first production 121 years ago, when Gerald du Maurier played both roles. This doubling invites speculation that Mr Darling is only ‘tamed’ by his wife; when she is absent, his ‘piratical’ side shows through, in the same way as the lost boys, lacking the restraining and civilising influence of a mother, revert to misbehaving.

Interestingly, in the fabulous 2016 National Theatre production of Peter Pan, which originated at the Bristol Old Vic in 2012, director Sally Cookson had an actress play Mrs Darling and Captain Hook. Sophie Thompson was gloriously, moustache-twirlingly villainous as Hook, but I personally felt some dramatic resonance was lost in this casting decision.

In a similar vein to Peter Pan, Chaplin’s doubling of roles in The Great Dictator was obviously a clear exploitation of the opportunity to mock Adolf Hitler. If he bore such a close physical resemblance to ‘the little tramp’, there was patently no substance behind his bluster.

Another reason for doubling is that the plot directly calls for it. In most cases, this is because the film centres on identical twins, typically one as pure as the driven snow, the other decidedly slushy. Indeed, Bette David played such identical twins not once but twice: in 1946 in A Stolen Life – ‘Kate is self-effacing and gentle, while Pat is bold and ostentatious, getting any man she pleases. Jealous of Kate’s new beau, Bill (Glenn Ford), Pat steals him away, marrying him. But when tragedy strikes, Kate takes an opportunity to get the love she’s always longed for’ – and then in 1964 in Dead Ringer – Davis plays the wealthy Margaret, estranged from her twin, Edith (also Davis), for nearly 20 years. Edith can’t pay her bills, and with an eviction notice hanging over her head, she enacts revenge upon her sister, killing her, and assuming her identity. 

In other cases, the playing of multiple roles is a vehicle for a versatile character actor to demonstrate his talent. Since in such cases the purpose of the exercise is to keep the audience aware that the characters are being portrayed by actors, this lends itself to comedies rather than dramas. Two such films come immediately to my mind. In the first, Alec Guiness struts his stuff as no fewer than eight members of the D’Ascoyne family, being serially murdered by a fiendish Dennis Price so that he can inherit the family’s title and wealth. While Guiness displays virtuosity, his characters clearly share a physical family likeness.

In the second film, arguably in a class of its own, Peter Sellers played three very disparate parts in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove: German-US ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove, US President Merkin Muffley and RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. As you can see, Sellers created three visually distinct characters. The illogic of him playing all three parts seemed perfectly natural in a film that was gloriously surrealistic – while simultaneously being chillingly realistic.

Which brings us, finally, and puzzlingly, back to The Alto Knights. The burning question here is: What is the motivation for casting de Niro in the two leading roles? I ought to say here that I have not seen the film, although I have read several reviews and back-stories. From de Niro’s own comments, it seems that the producer suddenly came up with the idea and de Niro thought it sounded cute, and might hold his interest sufficiently to render making yet another gangster film a more interesting experience for him.

No great attempt seems to have been made to disguise the fact that both roles are played by de Niro. I find myself wondering why nobody in the film remarks on the uncanny resemblance between the rivals.

In addition, reviews that I have read suggest that there is little chemistry between the two de Niros, which is not exactly surprising. Considering the electricity that de Niro and Al Pacino created on screen in such films as Heat, this feels like very much a missed opportunity.

I end, as I started: What?! Why?!! Is this a case of de Niro being too huge a name in cinema for any objective measure of judgement to be applied.

I apologise for pontificating without seeing the film, but I’m not sure I want to witness what I am sure, from all I have read, is little more than a piece of self-indulgence.

Blogger’s Note 1: The first half of today’s offering is arcane. If it isn’t your kind of arcane, you might want to know, before you give up on me, that the second half of today’s offering updates you on the kids in Portugal. Look for a paragraph beginning “If your memory…” If neither arcane nor Portugal interests you, perhaps you need to find another blog.

Blogger’s Note 2: There is a where that we’re heading for today, but it’s some distance away, and it’s a lovely day out here in the foothills of my mind, so I intend to take my time and follow a couple of interesting side paths. If you’ve nothing better to do, you’re more than welcome to come along for the walk. Stout shoes not required: this is a gentle ramble.

From 1923 until 1973, if you had happened to drop by the British Library (then known as the British Museum Library) and walked up to Desk K1, the odds are that most days you would have found Eric Honeywood Partridge there, surrounded by and absorbed in etymological and other reference works. Born in New Zealand, schooled in Australia and then wounded in action in the First World War, Partridge returned home to complete his BA in classics, French and English. He then became Queensland Travelling Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, where he worked on an MA on romantic poetry and a B Litt in comparative literature. He then taught briefly in a grammar (high) school before lecturing in Manchester and London universities. He married, founded a small press and wrote fiction.

In the four years before his press closed, he managed to publish some 60 books, one of which was his own Song and Slang of the British Soldier 1914-1918. This book marked his first venture into an arcane field of language study that, it is no exaggeration to say, he made his own. To illustrate his range within and, sometimes, beyond, this field, here is his bibliography:

RIGINS: An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English
A DICTIONARY OF THE UNDERWORLD
A DICTIONARY OF SLANG AND UNCONVENTIONAL ENGLISH
A DICTIONARY OF HISTORICAL SLANG
A SMALLER SLANG DICTIONARY
SLANG TODAY AND YESTERDAY
SHAKESPEARE’S BAWDY An Essay and a Glossary
A DICTIONARY OF CLICHÉS
A DICTIONARY OF CATCH PHRASES: British and American, from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day
COMIC ALPHABETS: A Light-hearted History
SWIFT’S POLITE CONVERSATION: A Commentary Edition
CHAMBER OF HORRORS: Officialese, British and American
USAGE AND ABUSAGE: A Guide to Good English
NAME THIS CHILD: A Dictionary of Christian or Given Names
Francis Grose’s A CLASSICAL DICTIONARY OF THE VULGAR TONGUE, a commentary edn
NAME INTO WORD dictionary of proper names become common property
ENGLISH: A COURSE FOR HUMAN BEINGS
THE LONG TRAIL, being songs and slang of the British soldier in WW1
(with Will Granville and Frank Roberts) A DICTIONARY OF FORCES SLANG, of all three services in WW2
A TESTAMENT WORD-BOOK
LEXICOGRAPHY: A PERSONAL MEMOIR
Seven volumes of essays on language (general) and words (particular)

Also some books literary rather than linguistic, e.g.:
GLIMPSES (short stories)
JOURNEY TO THE EDGE OF MORNING (autobiographical essays)
THE FRENCH ROMANTICS KNOWLEDGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETRY

I was going to say that he carved out a niche for himself, but, to be honest, from my forays into his world, I can vouch that it is more a network of rabbit warrens than a niche.

Partridge’s Dictionary of Historical Slang is, without a doubt, the filthiest book I know. I would estimate that some 60% of the entries, from a-cockbill on page 1 to zig-zig on page 1053, are not to be repeated in polite company.

The other of his works that I could not imagine living without is A Dictionary of Catch Phrases, to which I turn to quote in full the following entry that explains in part, for the benefit of those of you who are not simultaneously my contemporaries and my landesmen, the title of this week’s poat:

I’m worried about Jim. In the Daily Telegraph, 23 Feb. 1977, Gillian Reynolds (‘Radio Review’) writes, ‘It says a lot for the potency of radio that comedians can still raise the occasional laugh with a harp glissando and the words, “I’m worried about Jim…”, the catchphrase which came to represent “Mrs Dale’s Diary” in much the same way as “Play it again, Sam” [q.v.] did the film “Casablanca”.” VIBS amplifies: ‘Ellis Powell as the eponymous heroine of radio’s Mrs Dale’s Diary (referring to her doctor husband). Although she may not have uttered the phrase very often, it was essential in parodies of the programme’. This very British, middle-class soap opera was first broadcast in Jan. 1948-and ran for 21 years.

I invite you to admire that paragraph. Packed with information delivered with efficient, but never terse, brevity, it includes an apposite citation, a cultural reference that will capture this catchphrase’s place in British popular culture very accurately for a much wider audience, a telling detail to trigger a delightful sound-memory for any reader already familiar with the phrase. Is it any wonder that, when I ask myself these days what professional path I would like to take if I could have my life over, being Eric Partridge comes pretty close to the top? Of course, I would need to have been born with a much sharper memory and a keener intellect than I have, and – perhaps most significantly – a work ethic that could see me occupying Desk K1 in the British Library almost every day for 30 years.

So, moving swiftly on. Many thanks and appreciation to those of you who inquired after my health after last week’s post. Let me say that I have no intention of turning this blog into Mrs Dale’s Diary. I’m currently in the middle of tests which will doubtless, in the fullness of time, allow my doctor to come to a conclusion. Meanwhile, my infection is responding nicely to the antibiotic.

But what, I hear those of you have not got some anonymous AI bot who sounds nothing like me reading this post out loud to you, of the ‘Gym’ in the title of this week’s post. Not ‘Jim’, but ‘Gym’. I thought you’d never ask.

If your memory bears a closer resemblance to Partridge’s than to mine, you may remember that Micha’el and Tslil are currently preparing to embark on a new and exciting business venture – launching a bodyweight gym in Penamacor. Launch date is now only a month away and things are starting to come to a head. I thought I would bring you up to speed on what, exactly, I mean by ‘things’.

Among the occupations with which our auto-didact son has been filling his evenings this last couple of years is teaching himself Python, a programming language. (Here I find myself attempting to tread the painfully thin path between those of you who imbibed Python with your mother’s milk, and those whom I lost at ‘teaching himself…’. I know that I shall, from here on, be simultaneously patronising and befuddling. I apologise. I am, myself, very unsure of my footing here, but we’ll see whether I can avoid falling flat on my face too embarrassingly.)

As well as developing his programming skills, Micha’el has been immersing himself in online courses in marketing, and small business management generally. Bernice and I arrived in Portugal at quite an exciting moment. Having downloaded the freeware part of a CRM (customer relationship management) software product, Micha’el had been coding all the bits he and Tslil lacked the resources and the inclination to pay for. Our presence gave Micha’el the time to troubleshoot this coding and integration, and, by the time we left, he had a fully integrated CRM program that, two days later, actually worked in real time.

Simultaneously, Tslil and he have been working on promotional materials for a marketing campaign. By the time we left Penamacor, they had temporarily set up their temporary gym premises and held a successful photo and video shoot and their website was up and running with bilingual English and Portuguese text. I reviewed the English text, but Micha’el’s briefing of the AI that wrote it was so fine-tuned that I hardly had any suggested amendments to make. As I remarked to Micha’el: if I were still working, I reckon I would be out of a job.

In addition, their flyers and tee shirts were printed. They managed, while we stayed home with the boys, to pound the streets for a couple of evenings and weekend afternoons, gathering feedback to their market research questionnaire and getting the word out on the street.

A couple of days after our return, Micha’el was able to report that they already had a client very interested in private lessons, and a prospect who, in response to their online campaign, had proposed an appointment. The CRM program had fired back to her all of the appropriate SMS and email messages, captured her data and uploaded it to the database, and pinged Micha’el about the appointment.

As if that were not enough, the online interest had, within a couple of days, stimulated several hundred hits on the website. You can imagine how welcome this news is for Tslil and Micha’el, whose very significant commitment to their plan seems to be starting to pay off. Of course, a visit is not a firm prospect, and a prospect is not a customer, but the word-of-mouth feedback they have received on the street has been very encouraging. Undoubtedly, they are partly helped by the fact that this kind of 21^st-century marketing is not something often seen running through the optic fibre of Penamacor.

This is where you come in. If you could pass on this link to the website to all of your friends and family who live in the Penamacor….Ah, yes, I see what you mean. Well, then, if you follow the link yourself, you’ll at least have a better idea what I’ve been talking about.

For those of my readers of a certain provenance and age, the name Les Dawson will need no introduction. For the rest of you, I need to explain that he rose from a working-class Manchester background to become a very popular comedian and entertainer on British TV in the 1970s and 80s. He had several strings to his bow, but the one relevant to this week’s post is that a regular feature of his weekly show was a sketch consisting of a conversation between two Northern working-class women in their sixties, played in drag by Dawson and his male sidekick. Their conversation often turned to what Dawson referred to as ‘woman’s trouble…down below’.

Spoiler Alert: The next paragraph contains a trigger warning. If you don’t want to discover where we’re heading today until the perfect dramatic moment, don’t read the next paragraph. [It occurs to me that most trigger warnings should probably carry a spoiler alert.]

Trigger Warning: Our theme this week is ‘man’s trouble…down below’. While I promise to spare you explicit detail and, indeed, illustrative diagrams (other than in a link you are free not to follow), if this is not a topic you wish to read about, however obliquely worded, I’ll see you, God willing, next week, in what will probably be the last update that I can squeeze from our Portugal trip, from which we returned in the small hours of this (Monday) morning.

Right. Now we’ve whittled you down to the strong of stomach and the (frankly) slightly perverted, and before I get cold feet, let’s press on.

Just over two weeks ago, I awoke to a dull ache down below. Since this was not accompanied by any other symptoms, and since pursuing this further was bound to be a complicated and time-consuming process that would take us away from the boys for precious hours, Bernice and I made a joint decision to monitor the situation, in the hope of limping through until, two weeks later, I could nestle in the comfortable surroundings of our own family doctor’s surgery.

This was, as it turned out, a less than wise policy. However, hindsight is one of those things that you never seem to be able to benefit from until it’s too late.

From Sunday to Wednesday night, there were ne developments, other than the fact that I rather lost my appetite. However, when I woke on Thursday morning, I discovered considerable swelling and hardness, and we both agreed that we could postpone no longer. Tslil and Micha’el are not particularly impressed by their family doctor, and so Micha’el agreed to accompany us to a walk-in and out-patient clinic in a small city – Covilha – a 45-minute drive away. We were very grateful to have him with us.

After Micha’el explained the situation to the receptionist, and requested a doctor who spoke English, we had a not unreasonably long wait before a charming young doctor saw us. In a fashion typical of educated Portuguese of his age, he claimed that he spoke only a very little English, but, in fact, the entire consultation was conducted in English, and his only hesitation came when he couldn’t recall which of the words ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ was which.

After a brief examination, he diagnosed a bacterial infection – epididymitis. (Just now, my own doctor corrected this diagnosis to something that sounds even more like one of the lesser dinosaurs – epididymo-orchitis – follow the link or don’t!) The Portuguese doctor referred me to a urologist, who would be holding surgery the next day, and who would be able to give me an ultrasound to confirm the diagnosis. Meanwhile, the GP was confident enough in his diagnosis to start me on a two-week course of antibiotics, rather than waiting another day.

Before setting off for the clinic, I had called our medical insurers’ emergency number to explain the situation, and the agent I spoke to had unlocked the credit card they had issued to us in Israel. I was therefore able to pay for the consultation using this card, which was certainly convenient.

The following day, Micha’el and I went back to see the specialist. Curiously, despite having made an appointment, we had to wait far longer than we had the previous day. The urologist was less the gentle provincial Portuguese and more the cosmopolitan Coimbrian, hailing from Portugal’s distinguished university city, famed throughout medieval Europe. Finer featured, silver-haired and refined, when asked whether he spoke English he declared scornfully: “Of course!”…and indeed his English was excellent. He swiftly and efficiently confirmed the diagnosis.

I then asked him for a written summary of the consultation, a request he absolutely refused to comply with. I explained that my insurer required it. He arrogantly dismissed the very idea, claiming that he had treated many French and German tourists who required no documentation other than a receipt. He patiently explained that the information he had entered into the computer was not in the form of a file, and it was not possible to extract it in any file format.

He further explained that Portuguese patient confidentiality laws prohibit extracting or printing any patient information. When I protested that I needed to be able to present this information not only to the insurer but also to my own family doctor, he questioned what they would do with a document in Portuguese, for all the world as if AI were a figment of some sci-fi author’s imagination,

I then asked him whether he could give me a handwritten summary. This he was prepared to do (Where had the law disappeared to? I wondered, though not out loud), but that this would be considered an additional consultation, and so there would be a second fee of 90 euros. This was clearly his final offer.

Despite all of Micha’el’s persuasive powers, the administrative staff were no more help, and so I left the clinic armed only with two receipts for the two consultations. To further complicate matters, I discovered that the initial activation of the insurer’s credit card had been for 24 hours only (a fact that the agent had not thought to mention to me at the time) and so I had to pay with my own card. Obviously, I will be claiming this back from the insurer.

For the last eight days of our stay, I was certainly not firing on all cylinders. The antibiotics did not kick in quickly, as I had hoped, and my energy level was well below par. On reflection, I probably tried to do more than I should have. In addition, I also started developing (possibly as a side-effect of the antibiotics) some acid reflux, which kept me awake for half the night last Saturday night.

Then, on Sunday morning, on 3 hours’ sleep, I had to face a 15-hour door-to-door journey, starting with a three-hour drive, through intermittent rain, followed by the route march that is navigating a major airport, followed by a five-and-a-half hour overnight flight in an economy seat in which I could find no comfortable position for my down-belows, and consequently I did not sleep at all. This was followed by a second major airport route march. As I remarked to Bernice when we boarded, I should have requested wheelchair assistance. There’s that damned tardy hindsight again.

I did catch half-an-hour’s sleep in the back of the taxi from the airport, and another five hours from 5:00 to 10:00 this morning. However, now that we are back home, I rather think it has all caught up with me, and I have spent most of today sitting on the sofa with my feet up feeling sorry for myself, and fretting over not having written this post.

Which I have now done! And, cleverly, I have the bulk of the insurance story to delight you with at some point in the future when it is all resolved, one way or another. Until then, and if you have made it this far, I admire your tenacity.

I must stop here, since I have to leave for an appointment with my own doctor, who has, I know, the stomach for a considerably more detailed account.

Quick update. My doctor feels the antibiotics are doing a good job, but, since he is extremely cautious, and since there is no emergency urologist, he referred me to A&E, so that they can run a bank of tests and another ultrasound and just confirm that everything is on track. No need to rush in tonight, but he wants me to go tomorrow. So, instead of going to see Raphael, I shall be sitting in a hospital waiting area…waiting, for most of the day, no doubt.

At least now, if you bump into me in the next couple of days, I hope you will understand why I don’t exactly look like I am just back from a luxury winter holiday in Portugal.

One can’t help feeling sorry for civil rights campaigner, human and animal rights activist and feminist writer Rita Mae Brown. In her 1983 book Sudden Death, she attributed to a fictional ‘Jane Fulton’ a very memorable saying that has become something of a cliché and has been immortalised on countless mugs and posters. “Insanity,” she wrote, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

How galling it must be for her to see this memorable pensée misattributed, almost universally, to Albert Einstein, who, let’s face it, doesn’t really need the publicity. His reputation, after all, rests on rather more substantial foundations.

Speaking personally, I feel rather more comfortable going head-to-head with Rita Mae Brown than I would with Einstein. For my intention today is to demonstrate that, contrary to what Einstein didn’t say, doing the same thing twice and expecting different results may be eminently sensible.

Some months ago, Micha’el, Tslil, Tao and Ollie embarked on an expedition to Lisbon with two objectives. The first was to obtain an apostille of the translation from Portuguese to Hebrew of all of their relevant documentation. I should explain, for the benefit of those of my readers whose nationality issues are rather more straightforward, that an apostille is a document used in international law that is issued by a government in accordance with the Hague Convention and that certifies that another document has been signed by a notary public.

Armed with the apostille, which sported a suitably impressive embossed stamp on the last page, they then made the short journey to the Israeli embassy, in the hope of registering Ollie’s birth and establishing his Israeli citizenship.

Their experience at the embassy was horrendous. Security was understandably strict; however, it seemed excessive for the strictness to stretch to refusing to allow them to take in any personal items whatsoever, including any equipment for their then infant son, and any book or game for their older son. Having been assured that the waiting-room was equipped with items to occupy a child, they found it boasted a couple of sheets of plain paper and some dried-up felt-tip pens.

When they finally saw an official, they were told that the apostille should have been stamped and signed on every page, and could not be accepted, and, at the end of a long, fraught, unpleasant and wasted couple of hours, they left. Bear in mind that this entire waste of energy required a stay of two nights in Lisbon.

Having taken a considerable time to recover from this experience, they finally felt ready to try once again, and so we included a city break in Lisbon for the whole family in our visit this time. We arrived in Lisbon on Monday. On Tuesday morning, Bernice and I took the boys back to the experiential science museum that we had visited on our previous break, while Micha’el and Tslil attempted to obtain an apostille stamped and signed on every page. The museum was even more fun than last time, both because Ollie was now old enough to enjoy a lot of the hands-on exhibits, and because of a temporary exhibit demonstrating and explaining the various animation techniques employed by Pixar studios in making Toy Story, Wall-E and other films. The entire museum is hands-on, and both boys had a wonderful time.

Towards the end of our long morning there, Tslil and Micha’el joined us, with good news and bad news. The bad news was that the apostille required by the embassy could not be obtained. The office had refused to sign and stamp every page of the documentation, stating that several months ago the procedure had changed in Portugal, and now only one signature was required. The good news was that, when, from the office, Micha’el phoned the embassy, the clerk there assured him that, indeed, only one signature was necessary.

When, the following day, all four of them walked from our hotel to the embassy, in bright sunshine, Tslil was optimistic, while Micha’el was resigned to failure. On this occasion, they were attempting to register Ollie’s birth with the Israeli authorities, obtain recognition of their Portuguese civil marriage, renew their own Israeli passports and obtain Israeli passports for the two boys.

Anticipating that their stay at the embassy might be a drawn-out affair, we had agreed that Bernice and I would have a grown-up day of sightseeing in Lisbon, and we would make our separate ways back from Lisbon to Penamacor.

Imagine our shock when, after a ridiculously short time, Micha’el contacted us to say that: the reception at the embassy had been civilised rather than, as previously, surly; that they had been allowed to go back to reception a couple of times to retrieve a couple of items they needed to keep the boys entertained; that, as promised, the single signature was all the embassy required; and, finally, that they were now in possession of a marriage certificate, an identity number for Ollie, and four brand-new passports.

Our best guess is that, at the time of their previous visit, the Portuguese authorities had just changed the law, and the Israeli authorities had not yet caught up with the change. As Einstein might not have said, on the continuum of life’s roller-coaster, they had been in the right space at just the wrong time.

Faced with the delights of Lisbon and an entire day to enjoy them, Bernice and I planned to take a 25-minute tram ride to Belém, site of a tower that offers good views of the city and location of the Monument to the Discoveries, celebrating Portugal’s glory days as a maritime explorational super-power. Having stood waiting for a tram for 15 minutes or so, we discovered a notice posted on the tram shelter explaining that, owing to road subsidence, the service was to be diverted on that day.

At that point, together with a motley crew of French and Japanese tourists, we walked a couple of hundred metres to a bus-stop. A few minutes later, our bus arrived, but we were too far back in the queue to get a seat. For the next 20 minutes, we stood, while the bus edged about 200 metres along the road. At this point, we decided to cut our losses and rejig our day’s plans. Hopping off the bus, we headed away from the river estuary. Moovit showed our walk as about a kilometre, but failed to mention that about 750 metres of that was uphill.

You may well not have paid sufficient heed to the fact that ‘uphill’ is a fairly vague term, covering everything from: “You know, when you’re driving along this road, you don’t actually notice that it’s uphill; it’s only when you walk it that you realise” to “There must be a station where they provide oxygen masks some time soon”. ‘Uphill’ in Lisbon is considerably closer to the second than the first experience. However, having enjoyed a decent hotel and excellent vegan meals for a day and a half, Bernice and I were easily up to the ascent, and, while the view from the top was nothing special, the archaeological museum nearby was fascinating.

Housed in a desanctified 14^th-Century church that was severely damaged in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that devastated the city, the museum displays many findings from paleolithic times, excavated from a site near Lisbon, and also an impressive collection of pieces from all periods of Portuguese history.

The roofless nave has a series of tombs, fountains, windows and other architectural relics from different places and styles. The one shown here, the gravestone of Yehudah ben Rimok, from the 19^th Century, particularly interested us. As did a second stone, marking the founding of the Porto Jewish community in the 14^th Century.

The museum also offered an interesting video, explaining how, in 1995, a plan to flood the valley in which the recently uncovered paleolithic settlement lies was thwarted by a group of schoolchildren who led sit-down protests and eventually persuaded António Guterres, then prime minister, to reverse the government’s plan and build a museum on the site.

Finally, we watched a well-produced audio-visual display, projected onto, and incorporating the features of, an original vaulted wall. This traced the history of the church, including an account of the earthquake and the story of the establishment of the museum.

From there, it was a short walk to a much better vantage point, affording a panoramic view of the city, and then to a vegan restaurant offering an all-you-can-eat buffet that was not only a bargain but also very tasty. We walked off lunch by making our way to a bizarre street-art comic-strip mural of the history of Lisbon, painted on an underpass and boasting, at its centre, a public lavatory that was, by Portuguese standards, less than salubrious. (Public facilities in Portugal are, in our experience, spotlessly clean and well-appointed.)

This was followed by a long walk that was, finally, downhill, and that took us past a pizza parlour with an eye-catching placard.

We ended up where we had started, at the large square on the front, from where we caught a bus back to the Edward VII Park opposite our hotel.

This park was renamed to commemorate the visit to Lisbon by the King of England in 1903 to reinforce the ancient Portuguese-English alliance. Unfortunately, the bus dropped us at the far end of the park, which was, naturally, downhill from our hotel. A further long walk led us to a huge greenhouse, where we spent a magical hour or so forgetting that we were in the centre of a bustling city.

By the time we boarded the coach back to Castelo Branco, we were very glad to sit down, and by the time we parked outside the house, at 10:30, we were more than ready for bed. However, the whole family agreed that it had been an enjoyable and productive break. Next stop, we all agree, should be Porto, possibly at a sunnier time of year.

This week’s post was almost fully mapped out in my mind. I planned to tell you about the kids’ experience at the Israeli embassy in Lisbon, and about our family city break.

That I can’t devote this week’s post to that story is something that, I imagine, needs no explanation. I hope, and pray, that next week I will be able to cover those topics. However, since I cannot know what new depths of obscenity will have been plumbed by then, I cannot, sadly, be certain.

What I do know is that there is – there can be – only one topic to address this week, although how to cover it I have no idea.

As the events of last Thursday unfolded, we were given the opportunity to better understand our own, and others’, humanity. Was there a point at which you stood speechless in horror, or broke down in tears, at the barbarism that was revealed in stages?

Was it perhaps the sight of masked, armed Hamas monsters ‘ceremoniously’ carrying the coffins of the Bibas’ children? Or when forensic investigation revealed, as the Hamas barbarians knew it would, that the body in the third coffin was not that of the children’s mother, Shiri, but that of an anonymous Palestinian woman? Or when, having claimed that the chaos of the destruction left by the Israeli bombing that, they alleged, killed the Bibas family had led to the ‘confusion’ over bodies, the savages effortlessly handed over Shiri’s body? Or perhaps when the Israeli authorities announced that the autopsies had further revealed that the children, and their mother, were all killed by the animals’ bare hands, many months ago?

I find myself wondering whether there was such a moment for the Hamas apologists who have been marching in Western capitals, tearing down posters of hostages and terrorising Jewish students on campus. Or whether their antisemitism has removed them, like the Hamas beasts they extol, from the human race. Because killing a baby with your bare hands is not the act of a political activist; it is not an anti-Zionist act; it is pure antisemitism. And failing to be horrified by that act, but rather applauding it, is, equally, antisemitism. More than that: the act, and its celebration, place the perpetrator, and the celebrator, beyond the pale of humanity.

I urge you all to keep track of the reactions, and lack of reactions, of the world’s leaders. Last Thursday, Hamas removed the last traces of any fence that any thinking human being might have believed it was possible to sit on. Those who don’t come down with a statement on one side or the other must have their silence interpreted as consent for the actions of Hamas. They will, of course, not be held accountable for the consequences of their silence and inaction, but you, dear reader, we, dear reader, must make a mental note.

One more set of questions: Was your mounting horror matched by mounting disbelief or incomprehension? To put it more bluntly, did anything in this entire horrible story surprise you? If so, I’m afraid you haven’t been paying attention over the last 16 months, 75 years, 96 years. Our enemies have rarely felt the need to conceal their true beliefs and colours.

To believe that Hamas would negotiate any agreement honestly and honourably shows astonishing naiveté. I have maintained since the very beginning of the war that there is no sense in which Hamas’s interests are served by returning all the hostages. The hostages represent a lever with which Hamas can hope to tear Israeli society apart. This has not changed.

The Israeli Government announced two war aims: the complete destruction of Hamas as a military force and the return of all the captives. It must by now be clear to everyone that neither of those two aims is achievable. Hamas could only be destroyed as a military force if every man woman and child in the West Bank and Gaza were killed. There is no way in which all the captives can be returned, other than the cutting off of all humanitarian aid to Gaza, leading to the collapse of the lighting, heating and ventilation systems of the tunnels, followed by the reoccupation of Gaza and the retrieval of what would, by then, be the bodies of the hostages.

Hamas’s trump card is the knowledge they gained in the agricultural fields of the kibbutzim of the Gaza envelope where the Hamas spies worked for decades, in the cars of Israeli Jewish volunteers who ferried Gazan cancer victims to Israeli hospitals for treatment, in the prisons of Israel where Hamas leaders served long sentences. This is the knowledge that Israel will never act with the institutional inhumanity that Hamas and the Gazans have demonstrated. This conflict is being played out on a very uneven playing field. Existentially hard as this makes it for Israel, there is surely no way in which we would have it any different. If Israel were to act with the inhumanity of Hamas, it would have no more right to continue to have a state in Eretz Yisrael than Hamas has to demand one.

It’s now only Sunday afternoon, but (for reasons that will become clear later) I don’t expect to have another chance to write this post before Tuesday, so I’m seizing the opportunity while both boys watch their videos.

I left you last week as we were anticipating the “ungodly hour” at which the boys would come bursting in to greet us on Tuesday morning. In fact, 6:30 is a pretty godly hour, particularly if your body actually thinks the time is 8:30. So, no real complaints there. In fact, no complaints at all anywhere. We’re now at the end of a first wonderful, if, as usual, routinely mundane, week.

Perhaps the first thing to say is, when you are only two-and-a-half, or, to be honest, even when you are very nearly six, ten-and-a-half weeks is a long time. We had only been away from Penamacor for less than eleven weeks, but neither Ollie, not even Tao, had wasted that time. Tao seems more socially engaged than when we were last here; conversations with him are that little bit more adult, and, most noticeably, he now seems much more comfortable speaking Hebrew to Tslil than when we left. He was quite capable of speaking to her in Hebrew, but, in the past, usually preferred to answer her in English, which is still definitely his first language, even though she always speaks to him in Hebrew.

Micha’el has, in the last few months, begun speaking to the boys in Hebrew one day a week, and perhaps that has helped to tip Tao over. Tao now goes to his Portuguese-speaking gan two days a week. On the second day, there is a different mix of children, and his friends include an Israeli girl who speaks no English and English friends who speak no Hebrew. Tao, according to Micha’el, feels very comfortable translating both ways for these friends.

As for Ollie, we left him speaking fairly freely, and we have returned to find him incapable of stopping speaking. He seems equally comfortable in English with Micha’el and in Hebrew with Tslil, and, when not conversing with them or us, he is still always speaking. In these situations, if you ask him what he said, he informs you in no uncertain terms: “I’m talking to my friend”, who is none the worse for being imaginary.

Whereas last time Ollie wanted us to read his book of nursery rhymes and songs incessantly, he has not asked for it once since we arrived this time. This may be because he has now committed many of the songs to memory, and so has effectively cut out the middle man. Instead, our first full day here consisted of Ollie “doing my puzzles”, a half-a-dozen jigsaw puzzles of increasing difficulty which he has fully mastered, and reading “Little Blue Truck”, a charming and heartwarming story about the importance of friendship, even if it does lose a little of its charm on the fifteenth reading.

Ollie also enjoys playing doctor, with the kids’ doctor’s bag (a really nice set of wooden props) and his doctor’s hat. This requires a volunteer patient lying down on the couch – this is the kind of role play I can really get into – and telling the doctor what is wrong. Whatever the complaint, the treatment often turns out to be trimming the patient’s fingernails, which proves to be a remarkably effective cure.

The highlight of the doctor’s visit, as far as I am concerned, comes just before he arrives. He goes to the entrance hall and waits for a phone call from the patient asking him to pay a house call. Then, as he walks across the salon, bag in hand, he doo-dee-doo’s a cheery doctor’s tune That is utterly convincing and, I imagine, was picked up from his father (possibly via his big brother).

If Ollie’s make-believe play is often limited to playing doctor, and is within fairly narrow constraints of flexibility, Tao’s imaginative play knows no bounds. As requested, two of the gifts we brought this time were Purim (and Halloween) costumes for the boys: for Ollie, a dinosaur (which, if he persists in calling it a crocodile, I may consider taking back), and for Tao, an impressive Batman costume. We gave them these costumes on Friday lunchtime, as Shabbat gifts, and, since then, they have barely taken them off.

While Ollie is capable of wearing his costume but still remaining Ollie, Tao has actually been Batman since Friday lunchtime. He was invited to a birthday party today, and the guests were asked to come in costume. I suggested to Tao that he should really wear everyday clothes, since Batman was no longer a costume for him, but rather what he wears normally. He was, unsurprisingly, not amused. He has, by now, got used to the fact that “Grandpa is being silly”.

We have also had a chance, in this first week, to catch up with Micha’el and Tslil’s plans to launch their bodyweight training gym. Everything seems to be going well as they get ever closer to launch. Micha’el is currently wrestling with the challenges of setting up an interactive website that will offer a very positive and supportive customer experience. In addition, they have bought the modest equipment that a bodyweight gym requires, and, last week, they took all of the equipment to their initial premises, for a video-shoot, to provide video and stills for the website. You may remember that I mentioned that the local municipality is offering them premises rent-free for a three-month initial period. All went well with the shoot, and, of course, Nana and Grandpa got the boys all to ourselves for a few hours.

This week will be a big change from routine. In the ongoing struggle to register Ollie’s birth with the Israeli authorities, and to renew their passports, the kids have made another appointment with the Israeli embassy in Lisbon, scheduled for Wednesday morning. Since the boys both need to attend in person, we all agreed that this sounded like an excellent excuse for a city break. So, tomorrow (Monday) morning, Tslil, the boys, Bernice and myself are driving the 40 minutes to Castelo Branco, to catch the bus for a two-hour-and-twenty-minute trip to Lisbon. Micha’el, who has to teach several lessons, will come by train from Castelo in the evening.

We are booked into a hotel in the centre of Lisbon for Monday and Tuesday night. This will give us a whole day free in Lisbon on Tuesday. Micha’el and Tslil plan to visit a gym, to enjoy its facilities and to carry out research. This, of course, means they can claim the entrance fee as a business expense. Bernice and I will be able to have fun, meanwhile, with our grandsons.

On Wednesday, Bernice and I will have the city to ourselves for an unspecified time. Whenever the kids and grandkids finish at the embassy, we will meet up again and have, we hope, a few hours before we make our way back to Castelo, pick up the car and truck, and make our weary way home. I think we are all very much looking forward to the adventure.

Well, I can hear that the video time has finished, and we need to start thinking about what we are going to pack for our mini-break, so I will stop there and wish us all that we hear good news. (Being away from the pressure cooker that is life in Israel is, in some senses, a welcome relief, and, in others, not easy.)

Once again, I write to you with my knees jammed against my chest, from the comfort of El Al Economy, as Bernice and I make our way across the Mediterranean to Lisbon.

Actually, we’re quite relieved that Bernice is sitting in her window seat, because, for a brief period yesterday, it was touch and go whether she would be sitting there, or, indeed, anywhere on the plane. At 1:45 yesterday afternoon, an email from El Al dropped into my inbox, informing me that I could now check in online for today’s flight. All went smoothly until it came to filling in Bernice’s passport details, when I noticed – goodness knows how, but how fortunate that I did – that I had made the booking for a Mrs Bernice Browmnstein, with a rogue interloper ‘m’.

Pausing only to panic fleetingly, I attempted to amend the spelling. However, this proved impossible. I realised that I had to get the ticket reissued under Bernice’s correct name, as it appears on her passport. A link on the check-in page opened a WhatsApp dialog for me, allowing me to bang my head against a brick bot, who offered me a generous menu to choose from. Unfortunately, ‘Correct a Misspelled Name’ was not one of the options.

When I attempted to explain to the bot what I needed, it chastised me for an unrecognisable response, and gaily repeated its list of options. Eventually, I accepted defeat, and chose the closest option to what I wanted: ‘Cancel your booking’. I must admit that I chose this with a certain amount of trepidation, fearing that the bot might take me at my word and blithely cancel our booking and then ask whether there was anything else it could help me with today.

Fortunately, it chose instead to inform me that cancellation was, as it were, above its payscale, and it was transferring me to a human agent. A follow-up message informed me that my request was being queued and the agent would strike up a conversation as soon as possible.

I decided that it was worth opening an assault on a second front, since the clock was ticking, so I phoned El Al’s customer support service. After I had made a ‘fairly close’ selection from another menu that didn’t offer me what I wanted, I heard the usual three rings, followed by muzak, followed by a message informing me that I was 40^th in the queue, and the waiting time was estimated to be 30 minutes. A minute later, I was offered the option to request a callback and hang up. I accepted the offer, only to be informed, after my acceptance was accepted, that my call would be returned within 24 hours. Since that window potentially took us beyond our departure time, I decided that call back was not such an attractive option, and immediately called again, to discover bad and good news: I was now 44^th in the queue, but the waiting time was still only 30 minutes. Clearly, I thought, a new shift of agents had started, who were some 10% more efficient than the workers they had replaced.

Over the next 20 minutes, I received repeated updates, as my place in the queue progressed healthily from 44 to 40, then 36, then 32. However, slightly less healthily, the expected waiting time remained constant at 30 minutes, and I began to realise that this was not quite as sophisticated an algorithm as I had at first imagined.

It was, therefore, a very pleasant surprise when, 20 minutes in, a very pleasant gentleman answered the phone, immediately understood my problem, saw the error online, asked me to email him a photo of Bernice’s passport, and confirmed that he had requested a reissuing of the ticket. 50 minutes later, he called me again, to inform me that the ticket had been reissued with the spelling corrected, and I could now check in, which I did, with much relief. It would have been such a pain to have to unpack the suitcases just to take out the two items Bernice was taking with for herself.

I am taking this whole experience as an indication that I have become a little too blasé about international travel, and I need to be rather more in the moment when making arrangements in future.

Needless to say, all of this excitement got the adrenaline flowing, and helped us through the last stages of working through our checklist for Portugal. Since we were flying on a Monday, we had many last-minute things to do on Sunday. This was even truer than usual, since this last Shabbat was my brother-in-law David’s 80^th birthday, and the family celebrations had stretched from 11AM on Friday till after Shabbat. By the time we arrived home we were all partied out and not really up to confronting the checklist.

So, Sunday was quite a busy day! However, we managed to get everything done. We found ourselves left with little enough excess fruit to make the bag we hung on our neighbour’s front door not embarrassingly large. All the other leftovers fitted comfortably in the freezer. This morning, virtually all we had left to do was to wash up the breakfast dishes BY HAND(!), empty all the bins, remember to transfer the 2 kilo of cheese from the freezer to the suitcases (a mantra we had been chanting for over a day) and close all the doors.

Our taxi driver arrived five minutes early, as always, and, since he had allowed a generous amount of time to get to the airport, and we had allowed our usual ludicrous amount of time at the airport before boarding, Bernice remained perfectly calm throughout the drive, which was through fairly heavy traffic. This trip, for the first time, we decided to take a taxi from home to the airport, rather than to Jerusalem train station. We have eventually accepted the fact that struggling to lift two cases, two carry-ons and two backpacks onto the security scanner at the railway station and then down an escalator and a lift to the platform is not a dignified way for people our age to behave.

The airport was uncannily quiet when we arrived at 10AM. (For those of you who don’t know, Ben Gurion is usually a buzzing hive of activity at almost any time of day or night.) Our driver dropped us off at 9:57, and we were through security, baggage drop off, hand luggage check and passport control by 10:27. The longest queue was, unsurprisingly, at duty free, where we picked up our usual four bottles of wine, one for each of the next four Shabbatot. Fortunately, the usual 1+1 offer meant that we paid no more than we would have done in our local supermarket or vintner’s.)

Finally, time for a confession. I led you to believe that I was writing this post on the plane. This was because I fully expected to be writing the bulk of it there. However, as mentioned above, we were through all of the various stages of reaching the departure lounge unusually quickly, only to discover that the café Aroma has indeed closed at the airport. This left me with enough time to write this entire post before our flight is even called. In fact, it has just been called now, so….see you in Penamacor.

Hello from Penamacor. It’s now 10:45 on Monday evening (or 12:45 in real money), and we arrived at the house half an hour ago after a very easy and smooth passage through the airport at Lisbon, a very swift car pick-up, and an easy drive through a clear and dry evening. As always, the last 35 kilometres, on winding back-roads, was tiring, but we arrived in good shape and better spirits to a warm welcome from Tslil, Micha’el and Lua. Now it’s straight to bed, ready to face the onslaught from the boys at some ungodly hour tomorrow morning. Can’t wait!!

When looking for a petri dish in which to develop philosophical arguments, I don’t automatically turn to the annual media awards season, but this year these awards are proving to be a fertile breeding ground. I thought we might ponder a few questions together.

Is it theoretically possible for an actor to win the award for best actor and best actress for the same film? As you probably know, unless you have been on a space station for the last couple of months, the musical (if that’s the word I’m looking for) Emilia Pérez has been taking the movie world by storm. It has so far garnered 87 wins and 225 nominations.

(There is an entire blog to be written exploring the reasons why it has attracted this almost record-equalling amount of recognition. It is difficult to escape the suspicion that no small part of this is the motion picture industry raising its collective middle finger to the 47^th president of the United States.)

The 87 awards include the following wins: Cannes Jury Prize; European Film award for best actress and best director; Satellite award for best original score; Cannes Film Festival award for best actress (won jointly by four people – in what universe does that make sense?); Golden Globe award for best foreign language film. The film has also been nominated for 13 Oscars, including best picture, best director and best actress.

It has also garnered more outraged attention than any other film this season. It raises questions about the ‘appropriation’ by outsiders of another culture’s concerns and issues. The French director Jaques Audiard freely admits that he had no interest in making the film ‘realistic’ in its cultural depictions. Many Mexicans are apparently up in arms about the perceived ‘shallowness’ of the film’s handling of the problems of drug cartel violence and the mass disappearance of citizens, as well as about the Mexican accents.

My personal outrage is reserved more for the staggering and laughable inanity of one of the non-Spanish language songs in the film. (Thanks to my good friend for pointing me towards this song.) If you haven’t yet seen the clip featuring the song Vaginoplasty, I recommend you pour yourself a stiff drink, sit down, and watch this excerpt. Before you do, let me give you the plot background. The female singer is a lawyer who has been hired by a Mexican drug cartel lord to discreetly arrange for him to transition to a woman, which will enable him both to ‘disappear’ and to finally become his (her) true self. Now you are as ready as I can make you for the song. Off you go. I’ll wait here for you.

It’s difficult to single out one element for particular attention here, given that the tune sounds like something my five-year-old grandson just improvised and the staging makes no sense at all. But I think, after watching it, you will agree that the lyric deserves a special mention, being both fatuous and repetitive, in addition to not answering the ostensible dramatic trigger for the song (the lawyer learns neither the risks involved in the transition surgery process nor the time needed) and neither scanning nor rhyming.

Blogger’s Note: For reasons that will become clear, in the following paragraphs, I follow the practice that became common in the 2000s, of using ‘actor’ as a gender-neutral term applicable to thespians of both sexes.

But I didn’t bring you here to weep at what musicals have come to, but rather to reflect on the fact that the film’s Oscar nominee for best actress is Karla Sofía Gascón, a Spanish actor. I invite you to watch Karla’s acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, here. Karla was previously Carlos Gascon, a Spanish actor. I’m including a photo of Carlos from 2015.

So, our first philosophical question is this. Suppose there is a remake of Emilia Pérez whose pre-transition scenes are filmed with a male actor playing the part of the drug lord, and whose post-transition scenes are filmed with the same actor, after the actor has, in real life, transitioned to a female. Is it theoretically possible for this actor to be nominated for both the best actor and the best actress awards? If the actor wins both awards, is the best actor Oscar considered to have been awarded posthumously, or can the actor themself collect it? (Asking for a friend.)

Speaking of raising the dead, the Grammy award ceremony just took place, and featured another interesting philosophical question. Winner of the Best Rock Performance was Now and Then, a song written by John Lennon and featuring The Beatles. Our philosophical question is: What constitutes a performance in the arts?

Again, for those who’ve been on the space station, here’s the back story. John Lennon wrote Now and Then, and recorded it as a solo home demo, in 1977. After his death in 1980, the song was considered as a ‘reunion’ single for the 1995-6 retrospective project The Beatles Anthology. George Harrison added some guitar tracks and overdubs as part of this. However, production difficulties proved too great, and the idea was shelved. In 2021 (20 years after George Harrison died), Peter Jackson commissioned machine-learning-assisted audio restoration technology for his documentary The Beatles: Get Back. This technology enabled extraction of Lennon’s voice from the 1977 demo, with a result that was of sufficiently high quality to make it possible to build a recording of Now and Then around it, with additional lyrics by Paul McCartney, featuring contributions on guitar, drum and vocals by Ringo Starr and a beautiful(?) creepy(?) eerie(?) evocative(?) video. You can watch and hear it here.

This ‘assemblage’ has now been awarded Performance of the Year by the Grammys. If one of the performers recorded his contribution over 47 years ago, another added his contribution 30 years ago, and only the other two were performing while hearing, and, in some sense, feeding off, the contributions of John and George, is that, technically, a ‘performance, by The Beatles’? Is the voice of John that we hear on the recording actually John’s voice? Is it less John’s voice than any recording of a singer is that singer’s voice? Does any of this matter?

Which brings us neatly back to this year’s Oscars. Another contender for best film is The Brutalist, a biopic of a fictional Hungarian Jewish architect who emigrates to the USA after the Shoah. It was recently revealed that, for sequences in which the film’s leading actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones speak Hungarian, the film’s editor (himself Hungarian-born) used AI software produced by a company called Respeecher to tweak the actors’ vowel sounds, making them sound convincingly Hungarian.

The outrage this has generated appears to be because the filmmakers were not up-front about this tweak. In films in which similar techniques have been used openly, no such outrage has resulted. In the case of The Brutalist, there has been debate about whether the leading actors should now be eligible for acting Oscars. (Brody and Jones have been nominated for best actor and best supporting actress, respectively. [Blogger’s note: I was going to write “respectively, obviously”, but, in the light of this week’s first story, not as much can be taken foir granted as used to be the case.)

There is a philosophical debate to be had here about the particular point, if any, at which such tweaking of a performance makes the actor ineligible. Suppose Hugh Grant’s voice were to be digitally manipulated to simulate a perfect Lower East Side accent for a role. Suppose 5’ 6” (168 cm) -tall Alan Ladd were given an orange crate to stand on for close-up scenes with his leading lady, or a trench were dug for her to stand in (as, apparently, happened). Suppose all of Matt Damon’s stunts in the Bourne films were performed by a double. Suppose each of an actor’s scenes in a particular film were spliced together in the editing room from hundreds of different takes of each scene. Suppose an actor’s physical appearance on screen were digitally manipulated, to express emotion or to convey complexity through body-language. Is there a point at which such manipulation renders it meaningless to talk about the actor’s performance, or, at every point in the development of cinema, does whatever is technically possible become acceptable?

At this point, I should probably make it clear that, this week at least, I offer questions rather than answers. I’m really not sure where I stand on any of this, but I strongly suspect that these are discussions we will increasingly be having, as technology develops.

All I know for sure is that, based on Karla Sofía Gascón’s appearance and demeanour at the Golden Globes, I found excellent her/his/their portrayal of a woman in the brief clips I have seen from Emilia Pérez after the drug lord undergoes surgery. But that’s really another story.

I’m a great believer in pushing the envelope, and so this week I am performing a dramatic experiment with the form of the blog post. Consider this a post-modernist expression, exploring the limits of the medium.

Due to circumstances more or less completely beyond my control, I am not in a position to write a post this week. Nothing sinister; don’t panic. I have it on good authority that the sun will rise tomorrow. It just isn’t possible for me to produce a post today. The sausage factory has simply run out of you-really-don’t-want-to-know-what-we-put-in-them.

So, I would like you all just to take a moment to reflect on what you imagine I might have chosen to write about this week, and then to allow your mind to explore the nooks and crannies of what you imagine I might have said.

This is, I admit, something of a calculated risk. The golden rule of blog-writing, all the self-help manuals insist, is consistency. With the exception of one calendar hiccough, I have produced the goods, every Tuesday, week in, week out, for the last 267 weeks. That’s about 400,000 words. Mostly drivel, it’s true; but never mind the quality, feel the width. And now, here I am, risking the entire edifice crashing down on me.

Even more risky is the fact that you may conclude that your imagined version of my post is a lot better than what you usually read, and, from now on, you’re going to cut out the middle man, and just go straight to imagining what I have written about every week.

Still, for better or worse, I’m not in a position to do anything about it. Here’s 300 words and change; if you want any more this week, I’m afraid you’re going to have to write them yourself.

As far as I am in control of this monster, I undertake to rectify the situation next week, when normal service should be resumed. Meanwhile, it’s over to you.

Blogger’s Note: No animals were harmed in the writing of this post: one ego, but no animals.