Monthly Archives: March 2020

Penamacor Perambulations

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I don’t know about you, but, at the moment, what I would really like more than anything else is to go on a good long walk along the wadi paths of Maale Adumim. Somehow, 20 minutes on the treadmill doesn’t quite cut it, and once round the block doesn’t even come near, especially since, for those stretches where I am technically more than 100 metres from home, I’m listening out for the sound of an approaching police car, looking out for a foot patrol, and readying myself to dive into the bushes if necessary.

So, this week, why not join me on a leisurely virtual stroll around Penamacor, while I point out some of the major tourist attractions?

Weather permitting, Bernice and I like to take Tao out for a walk in his buggy every day, and we have a set route that we often take. Our house is towards the north-west corner of the village, high above the centre, but not at the top of the hill. So, we turn left out of the house and walk up to the top of the street (always better to walk uphill at the beginning, we feel, and to have the downhill slope to look forward to when we head back). We can then turn left and walk along the ridge of the hill, with a steep drop to the valley that includes the kids’ land on our right, and, beyond that, the next range of hills with its array of white turbines slowly turning in the wind.

This high point is dominated by a couple of radio towers and masts, but also at the top of the village are several reminders of what membership of the EU has meant for Portugal. We first pass the sports centre, and, shortly after, the indoor swimming pool, both of them built with EU funding. On both occasions that we have visited Portugal, these buildings appear to be closed, and there is another pool on the other side of the village that is apparently the one that people use. I am wondering whether EU funding covered construction but not ongoing expenses, and whether both of these buildings are white elephants. However, an online search suggests that the sports centre at least offers a wide range of activities. I suspect the locals get out a lot more in the summer than the winter.

Can you work out which is the pool and which the sports centre? Pavilho Desportivo and Piscinas Municipais

On the other side of the road, perched on the very edge of the ridge, is a 6-a-side soccer pitch, built with the support of the Portuguese Football Federation, UEFA, The Portuguese Sport Institute and the Secretary of State for Youth and Sport. As you can see from the goalmouth, it offers a very impressive view of the valley. Clearly, the emphasis in training is on passing the ball along the ground rather than in the air, because any ball that clears the metre-high fence on the far side would run downhill for about 2 kilometres before coming to rest.

Beyond the football pitch, the ground to the left falls away; we have now walked beyond the north-west corner of the village. The ridge opens out a little from this point, as we walk towards the pine and oak forest to the west of Penamacor.

This ridge took a severe battering in the storms that hit Portugal a few weeks before our February visit. Extremely strong north-easterly winds blew across the valley, and felled a large number of mature trees along the ridge and in the forest. It is a strange sight to see them all perfectly aligned on the ground.

There are a couple of trails through the forest, fairly wide and with a compacted-dirt surface, which are well-marked by posts with coloured stripes. One of the paths is designated as pedagogical, and includes neat labels giving the Portuguese and Latin names of the various trees and shrubs that line the route. There is even a picnic spot with wooden tables and benches, which, for anyone coming from Israel, is blissfully deserted.

Fortunately, because Tao’s buggy is designed for all terrain, and has better independent suspension than several of the first cars we owned, he is able to enjoy this walk, at a reasonable speed, without risking losing either of his teeth.

If, instead of walking out of the house and turning left, we turn right, and walk downhill to the centre of the village, we can carry on walking and discover that the terrain of the village is saddle-shaped, so that, once through the centre (which takes about one minute to traverse) we have to start climbing again, towards Penamacor castle and the site of the medieval town.

To be honest, not much remains of the medieval streets, but the ruins of the castle and the old city wall are quite evocative, and the views are stunning, both back over the saddle with the village laid out across it, and south over the plain towards Castelo Branco. In the first photo below, you can see, on the opposite ridge, several radio masts and one of the radio towers (which looks more like a water tower) where we started our walk today.

I first took this walk because I had found, on a local tourist map, the location of the house of Antonio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, the 18th Century physician and intellectual I wrote about several weeks ago. The house was, apparently, along the street that leads to the castle. However, when I arrived at the exact spot, I saw, rather than a centuries-old structure, what looked more like an airport warehouse. I walked all the way round it, and found only one door and no windows.

As I was wondering whether I might have mistaken the location, I took a closer look at the door and noticed the unusual design of the very large doorknob. Clearly, there is an interesting story here, which I hope to find out more about on our next visit (whenever that turns out to be).

And now, of course, since this is Penamacor, we have to plunge downhill before the final ascent back to the house for a cup of tea and a well-earned rest. (Not a lot of words today, but, if you add in the pictures at the conventional exchange rate of 1 pict to 1000 wd, it comes to 14,000 words, which is quite enough for one post.)

You know what? Here’s another 1000-words-worth to close on.

To learn more about the latest developments in the kids’ plans, you can watch Micha’el and Tslil talking about them, and Tao stealing the scene, in the latest video on their YouTube account.

Blog in the Time of Corona*

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*With acknowledgement to my nephew Saul, who was, for me at least, the first to compose a variation on a theme by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

By the time you read this, Bernice and I will have come to the end of the two weeks of self-isolation imposed on us when we returned from Portugal. We will then, seamlessly, have moved into an indefinite period of staying at home imposed on us as part of the general population, with a recommendation that I at least (as an over-70 with slight asthma issues) self-isolate completely. Having enjoyed two wonderful weeks exploring and redefining our relationship, we are more than a little reluctant to expose ourselves to the horrors beyond the front door, so we are planning to buy, where possible, online and depend on home delivery. As a consequence, the most dramatic change for us, when our two weeks are up, looks like being the chance to take our own rubbish to the municipal bin at the top of the street, rather than having to ask our wonderful neighbours’ obliging son. We are already arguing about who gets the privilege of first bin bag.

You will, I hope, understand that I am finding it difficult, in the current unpleasantness, to maintain the razor-sharp focus and single-mindedness that have characterised these posts to date, and I crave your forgiveness if I ramble a bit this week.

First, the big news. I know each of you has been on the edge of your seat over the residential status of Tslil and Tao; I can now put your minds at rest with the news that Tslil now has her visa, and so the kids are all set for the next few years, until they are entitled to apply for permanent residency status, and, ultimately, citizenship.

And now I feel a pensée coming on. When we were in Portugal last, I started to be aware that thinking about my blog was providing a ground bass to the unfurling melody of my life. In case ground bass is a term you are not familiar with…*

*Very long parenthetical comment here. As part of its desperate attempt to attract a younger audience, BBC Radio 3 (a station devoted to classical music and the arts) has issued guidelines to its presenters. Among these is a total ban on phrases such as: â€˜Of course’ or â€˜As everyone knows’, as in â€˜As everyone knows, the young Bach walked the 400 miles from Armstadt to Lubeck to hear Buxtehude’s organ-playing’, or:‘Of course, by the time Mozart was my age, he had been dead for 35 years’ (pace Tom Lehrer â€“although when he first coined this joke, it was â€˜dead for 2 years’, as Lehrer was only 37 at the time. 37!!! I’d give 33 years to be 37 again!)  Since I recognise that not all my readers are as fond of baroque music as I am, I have phrased the start of this sentence (I hope) sensitively.

In case ground bass is a term you are not familiar with, it refers to a short theme played on the bass instruments (typically a double bass in jazz or a keyboard instrument in baroque music), which is repeated without variation, and which serves as an anchor for a constantly changing upper-register melody. For a divine example, and as an excuse to hear Alfred Deller’s astonishingly pure voice, listen to Purcell’s Music for a While on YouTube. (Deller was the counter-tenor almost single-handedly responsible for the revival of interest in such music in Britain.)

Welcome back! So, what do I mean when I call my blog the ground bass to the melody of my life? Well, in Portugal, I found that, as each day unfolded, I was increasingly catching myself observing, as if from above, what I was experiencing , and mentally earmarking it for possible inclusion in a blog post. I was also starting to find myself â€˜tweaking’ events when I wrote about them in the blog, to highlight a significance or sharpen the humour in an incident. I had even caught myself on one occasion attempting to consciously shape the event in real time so that it would make better copy. This intrigued me, and slightly disturbed me.

As I became conscious of the influence the blog was having on my life, I discussed with Micha’el the phenomenon that I was beginning to become aware of: to my relief, Micha’el recognised what I was describing, and also commented that he feels this is something that we all do all the time as we go through our lives, and we call it memory. The more I think about that, the truer it seems to me.

So, bottom line: don’t take every word here as an accurate account: this is a blog, not a witness statement.

With that last paragraph in mind, I feel emboldened to undertake an activity that seems particularly appropriate to this lockdown age, when increasing numbers of us are experiencing the world virtually. I want now to lecture you on Portuguese cuisine, which is a little like a fish offering to teach you how to ride a bicycle. Bound as I am by the laws of kashrut, I have savoured only three Portuguese â€˜dishes’. The first is beer â€“ which is perfectly drinkable, but whose most distinctive feature is that it is inexpensive.

Any serious discussion of food in Portugal has to start with Pastéis de Nata, the little custard tarts that are ubiquitous in Portugal. They even graced the breakfast buffet table of our hotel.

Each region has its own twist on the recipe, but for authenticity, one has to visit Belém, near Lisbon, and specifically the monastery there. Over 300 years ago, the nuns and monks used egg white to starch their clothes; this left them with large quantities of egg yolks on their hands, as it were. They therefore started baking egg tart pastries. (Faced with the same problem at Pesach, when I bake almond macaroons and cinnamon balls, I solve the same problem by making coconut pyramids with the yolks.) When they needed to boost their income, they started selling them.

Then, in 1834, they sold the recipe, and three years later, the Fábrica de Pastéis de Belém opened its doors, and is still selling the pastries 183 years later. I am reliably told that they are to die for, but I have no intention of making them, since they are very labour-intensive, and I would have no way of knowing whether I had captured the authentic flavour. 

Next, we have to talk about chestnuts, which, as I mentioned in an earlier post, are very popular in Portugal. There was once, so they say, a soldier called Martin, who was posted far from home. On a cold winter’s day (bear with me, this does eventually lead to chestnuts), he saw a ragged beggar outside the gates, tore his own cloak in two and gave half of it to the beggar. For this act, he was canonized. His saint’s day is celebrated in Portugal on November 11, and tradition has it (according to the bank employee who was serving us on November 10) that in recognition of the soldier’s act of charity, the weather is always warm and dry on St Martin’s day (as indeed it was last November). In typical Portuguese fashion, the day is celebrated with food and drink. (I suspect that one of the reasons young Israelis like Portugal so much is that they find much that is familiar in the national character of the Portuguese.) In this case, the food is roast chestnuts. The chestnut tree is native to Portugal, and, when we were there in November, the ground was scattered with chestnuts. The supermarkets, on the other hand, were awash with them. On the day itself, marquees were erected in the municipal car-park, and braziers of chestnuts were roasted and eaten. As luck would have it (although my suspicion is that these things are seldom, if ever, determined by luck â€“ many customs and religious traditions naturally arise out of the cycle of the year), November 11 is the first day that the new season’s jeropiga is deemed drinkable. This is a reputedly lethal drink made by adding aguardente (Portuguese brandy) to the residue of grapes from which all the liquid has been crushed to make wine. In English, this pulp is known as grape pomace; in Portuguese, as bagaço de uva, which sounds so much more exotic. Incidentally, the term â€˜bagasse’ in English is reserved exclusively for sugar-cane pulp, which is used as a bio-fuel.

Another brief word on chestnuts. Apparently, until the potato took over as the main vegetable in a meal, the go-to accompaniment in Portugal was pureed chestnut.

And, finally, no exploration of Portuguese cuisine would be complete if it failed to talk about salt cod. Of course, no exploration of Portuguese cuisine would be complete if it failed to talk about octopus and pig…but there’s only so much that I’m prepared to write about. You cannot walk into a supermarket in Portugal without being battered about by cod (there’s a joke there, somewhere). Great chunks of salt cod are stacked, shrink-wrapped, in freezer cabinets; slabs of the stuff lie in flat cardboard boxes in the fresh fish department; whole sides hang on butcher’s hooks. The photograph below, taken in our local supermarket, may not look very impressive. While we were shopping one day, I decided to take a couple of photos with my phone, knowing that at some point I wanted to write about this, and no sooner had I started to take shots than a young assistant dashed out of the storeroom and made it very clear that photography was not allowed in the shop. Micha’el told me later that the Portuguese are very sensitive about taking photographs without the subject being aware, but it had, quite honestly, never occurred to me that the cod might object.

Incidentally, my more observant Israeli readers may have spotted, in the background, the origin of the modern Hebrew name for cod, which is bakala.

You may be puzzled as to why a country should abound with salted fish when 70% of its border is coastline, taking in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and nowhere in the country is more than 50 miles from the coast. My curiosity was certainly aroused. Let me save you the trouble of googling, and astound you with the breadth of my erudition. (An erudite person, in case you were wondering, is someone who can google faster than you.) Portugal is replete with recipes for salt cod. Almost any cod recipe will start by telling you to soak the fish, in order to leach out the salt. Some recipes recommend soaking for 6 hours, others for two days, changing the water after 24 hours. Of course, this only begs the question: How on earth did salt cod become such a staple of the Portuguese diet? My research has revealed that Portuguese fishermen, throughout the 16th Century, would fish the cod grounds off Newfoundland, and, naturally, had to salt the fish they caught to prevent it rotting on the voyage back. The attraction of the banks of Newfoundland was that the shoals were so plentiful and so thick that, in the words of one contemporary account, ‘We hardly have been able to row a boat through them’. Portuguese, Spanish, French and English fishermen would cross the Atlantic to catch cod, until the Portuguese first reduced their involvement after the English raided their fishing fleet in 1585, during the war with Spain, and then withdrew completely after the failure of the Spanish Armada.

The only question still begged that I can think of is: Why is it that, even though Portuguese fishermen stopped needing to salt cod over 300 years ago, salt cod is still a central pillar of Portuguese cuisine? However, as someone who spent four years reading, searching, experimenting and tweaking, until I found the recipe that made it possible for me to bake the exact brown bread (rye bread with caraway seeds ) that I had known in my childhood, I think I know the answer to that question. I can hear Topol in the background, with the whole company singing: ‘Tradition!’. (Surely there can’t be anyone who needs a YouTube link for that?!)

After all this talk of food, let me leave you with some pictures of a young man who already enjoys his food, and very definitely knows what he likes.

Our Son, the CEO

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I’ll hazard a guess that few of you have familiarised yourselves with the Byzantine complexities of British citizenship, so this week’s post is a wonderful opportunity to plug that gap in your education.

Both of our children are British citizens, but of two different classes. Esther, born in Wales, and even boasting a bilingual birth certificate, is a British citizen by birth. Incidentally, we had to pay extra for the Welsh-language certificate; had there been a General Election during the period between Esther’s birth and our move to Israel, I would have been sorely tempted to vote Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist) for this reason alone.

Micha’el, on the other hand, born over 3 years later in Jerusalem, is a British citizen by descent (born outside Britain to a parent born in Britain). You know, I still can’t quite believe that we have a son who was born in Jerusalem – and, now, a grandson who is a second-generation Jerusalemite!

This citizenship classification is not just a technical distinction; it has ramifications. Specifically, the children of British citizens by birth inherit their parents’ citizenship; the children of British citizens by descent do not.

In other words, any children Esther had would be British automatically, whereas Micha’el’s son, Tao, is not British. Similarly, Tslil is not eligible for British citizenship on the basis of being married to Micha’el (leaving aside the fact that they have not actually been through a marriage ceremony recognised by any authorities).

And therein lies the rub. As a British citizen, Micha’el is the citizen of what was, when they moved to Portugal, an EU state, and therefore he was eligible for a resident certificate in Portugal, allowing him to stay for five years, after which time he can apply for a permanent residence certificate or, after six years, for citizenship. Tslil, on the other hand, is not eligible. And this despite her descent, on her mother’s side, from the Jewish community of Saloniki (or Thessaloniki, the name to which the city has now officially reverted, after some 900 years of dithering). Saloniki was, from 1492 until 1942, a major Jewish community, founded by refugees following the Spanish expulsion, and by far the largest city in the Diaspora to have a Jewish majority among its population. It seems to me that Tslil’s claim to Portuguese residency is far more solidly grounded than Micha’el’s. One of his great-grandmothers claimed to be of Portuguese descent (as I mentioned in an earlier post); other than that, his tenuous link to Portugal is through Britain, and that only goes back three generations (to his other great-grandparents who all came from Eastern Europe) or, if you prefer, two generations, to when Britain joined the EEC, as it then was.

Anyway, bottom line: Tslil, and Tao, are most of the way through a process of acquiring the much-sought-after residency permit. One reason why it is so desirable is that, without it, their status is that of tourists, and they are required, every six months, to spend time outside Portugal. The latest we hear from the kids is that Tslil had a very productive meeting with the authorities in Castelo Branco, except that one document she submitted had not been correctly completed by the authorities in Penamacor. So, another trip to Castelo is scheduled, and we hope that might be the last step.

Perhaps I can tell you a little more about their plans, to explain why permanent residency in Portugal is so important to them. I apologise if I am covering some old ground here, but their plans have evolved considerably since their arrival in Portugal, and it is not easy to keep up with some developments.

Their long-term plan is to form a community of like-minded individuals and families, a permaculture village. Unlike some communities of this kind in Portugal, this is not planned to be a touchy-feely closed community (as Micha’el described it to me: ‘a bunch of hippies sitting round a fire singing Kumbaya‘). Instead, they want to engage in research, exploring the potential of new/old techniques in construction, agriculture, living in harmony with their environment; and also to carry out a lot of outreach, not only to the world community of the ecologically aware and interested, but also to the local rural community in the middle of which they are putting down their roots.

I was planning to go on to describe one such piece of research and potential outreach, in the field of fire prevention and containment. They have developed a novel approach to this very real threat, and their hope is that not only will they be able to persuade the authorities to approve this plan for their land, but also that this will encourage other landowners to adapt and adopt it for themselves. As I say, I planned to explain this to you as best I could. However, Micha’el has just posted an excellent video, which not only does a far better job of explaining than I could, but also gives you an opportunity to see something of the land they have bought. The most helpful thing I can do is invite you to follow the link (and, as ever, urge you to subscribe to, like and help disseminate the kids’ YouTube channel).

Every time we walk on the land, or even see a video of it, I am struck by the scale of the task that lies ahead of the kids. This is clearly a project that will span decades, which seems to me very daunting, but, for the kids themselves, is not the least exciting aspect of it.

Even the first steps in building this community are small and gradual. However, after five months, the kids have made a lot of progress. They now have a clearer picture of the bureaucratic process of getting planning permission to build a home on the land. Together with their partner, Shir, they have registered themselves as a company, which made bureaucratic and administrative sense, focusing on research and consultancy in the broad field of permaculture. Immediately after we left Portugal, a week ago, two other potential partners arrived, to stay with the kids for a few days, explore common ground and discuss plans. Going forward, Micha’el and Tslil will be receiving a monthly salary for the development work they are doing, and they have already been approached by potential clients for their consultancy services. In the light of these developments, Micha’el allowed his mother to buy him a couple of button shirts and a pair of respectable trousers, for official meetings. All the rest of the time, he prefers to dress casually. But don’t think Val Doonican or Andy Williams; this casuality has a much stronger Eastern influence below the waist and a much more sleeveless t-shirt one above. The key concept is ‘comfortable’, which translates to ‘baggy’. Bernice is reminded of her late father, who could not stand feeling constricted by clothes, and who therefore always wore shirts whose collar, and trousers whose waistband, were at least two sizes bigger than he was.

Those of you who know Micha’el well will, doubtless, share the astonishment Bernice and I feel every time we see our son, in his capacity as a landowner and joint CEO of a registered company, driving off in his smart clothes to a meeting with his lawyer or accountant. But then, Micha’el’s mission in life since childhood, it sometimes seems, has been to astonish us, in a huge variety of ways.

By the time of our planned return to Portugal in June, there should have been several developments on the ground. Novel coronavirus willing, we are eagerly anticipating seeing how the community, and our grandson (but not necessarily in that order), have grown and developed in the intervening three months.

Speaking of Tao (nice segue, eh!), he is one year old today, and just about ready to graduate to his new car seat. He’s not a great fan of sitting in the car seat, but he loved the box it came in. (Excuse the appalling out-of-focus shot, into the dark, facing the light. The B after the David clearly stands for Brownstein rather than Bailey.)

Ganging Agley

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It’s a fair assumption that any wise old saying that I can recognise in three different languages is likely to have more than a grain of truth in it. If you caught the reference in the title of this week’s post, you will be way ahead of me. Just in case you didn’t, here’s what I’m referring to.

The best laid schemes of mice and men gang oft agley.

Man proposes, God disposes.

Der mentsh tracht un Got lacht.

(I understand, incidentally, that the origin of the English version is in Latin, from a work by Thomas a Kempis, the 15th Century German cleric.)

Anyway, I planned to be writing this week’s post at an altitude of 30,000 feet, somewhere between Lisbon and Tel Aviv, rather than in a Lisbon airport hotel. However, Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit, as Tom so snappily put it. Let me explain.

Bernice and I were booked to return to Israel on an overnight El Al flight, landing at 2:30AM on Monday. This was a smarter move than it sounds, because Taanit Esther, the dawn-to-nightfall fast that precedes the holiday of Purim, would start about two hours after we were due to land, giving me an opportunity to eat and drink just before the fast started. It also meant that we would be able to leave Penamacor in the middle of the day and have a civilised drive to Lisbon, rather than slipping away during the night as we did in November. We felt that Tao might more readily accept our absence if we drove off during the day, rather than disappearing overnight. It is, for us, upsetting that we cannot explain to him at this age that we will be back and have not deserted him.

So that was the plan. We had, of course, been following closely the spread of the Corona virus, and were relieved that the number of cases in Portugal was small, and that the kids had chosen to move there, rather than to Spain or Italy, particularly after the Israeli authorities ruled that anyone returning from the worst affected countries had to self-isolate for 14 days.

I was woken on Sunday morning at 6:00 by Tao’s crying. (He is cutting, or rather not quite cutting, a tooth.) I was secretly a little pleased, because the pain does not seem to last very long, and Tao is then wide awake, while his parents are usually still exhausted. My selfless offer to keep him entertained downstairs while they go back to bed is gratefully accepted, and I get to look like a hero, while enjoying an hour or more of Tao to myself. Lying in bed, waiting to see whether Micha’el managed to coax Tao back to sleep or gave up and took him downstairs, I checked my phone, and read an SMS from El Al inviting me to check in online (which I had already done) for our 7:00PM flight the same evening. This SMS had been sent at 5:37AM. A second SMS, sent by El Al at 5:38 (a minute later) informed me that our flight had been cancelled! While I was struggling to absorb this information, I heard Micha’el go downstairs with Tao. I followed them, and asked Micha’el to stay with Tao for a few minutes while I phoned El Al.

‘A few minutes.’ I only had to wait on the line for 35 minutes before a clerk answered. I explained our situation, and learnt that, as I suspected, the airline was ‘condensing’ flights. I imagine this is because passengers are cancelling, and also because flight crews returning from some European destinations are having to self-isolate. When I confirmed that I wanted an alternative flight as soon as possible, I was transferred to reservations. This involved me holding for another 90 minutes, quite convinced that at any moment the line would go dead and I would have to start the whole process again, but eventually another clerk answered, and, after I had explained the situation, he offered me a TAP (Air Portugal) flight the following afternoon. When I confirmed that would be fine, he asked me to hold while he made the booking. A mere 7 minutes later he was back, and I soon received email confirmation of the booking. It was now 8:30AM, and Bernice and I started thinking of the other changes we had to make. She whatsapped our insurance agent, to check whether we needed to extend our travel insurance by a day. In fact, since we had been due to land at 2:30AM on Monday, we were already covered for the entire day. Meanwhile, I called the car hire office at Lisbon airport to explain that we would be returning the car a day later than arranged.

Which is where Got really started lachting. The conversation went something like this:

‘Our flight has been cancelled, and I would like to extend our rental period by one day.’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible, sir.’

‘Im sorry. Could you repeat that? I thought I heard you say that isn’t possible.’

Note: In my experience, car hire companies are only too happy to extend the rental period, and often don’t even require you to notify them. You can return the car a week later than agreed, and they will be delighted.

‘That’ s correct, sir. Your contract is for 28 days and that is the maximum contract period that we allow. You will have to make a new contract.’

OK. I’d like to make a new contract for one day.’

‘No problem, sir. Just come in to the office and we will do that.’

‘So you are telling me that I need to drive a 90-minute round trip to Castelo Branco to make a new contract for one day? I can’t believe you are suggesting that.’

‘No, sir, you misunderstood. We don’t have an office in Casto Branco. You will have to come to Lisbon.’

‘So, in order to extend my contract by a day, I….’

‘No, sir, you cannot extend your contract.’

‘Of course. Silly me. So, in order to take out a new contract for 24 hours, I have to drive three hours to Lisbon and three hours back.’

‘Yes, sir. Exactly, sir.’

‘And I cannot do this over the phone.’

‘No, sir. You have to bring back the car in person, and we will issue you with a new car.’

‘You do realise that this is complete madness!’

‘I’m afraid there is no other way, sir.’

After a brief discussion, Bernice and I decided that the only solution was to leave Penamacor as planned on Sunday afternoon, book into a hotel near Lisbon airport, leave our luggage there, drive to the airport and return the car, then spend the night in the hotel and return to the airport the following morning. At least this would all be at El Al’s expense.

Growing increasingly frustrated, I googled and found an airport hotel, booked a room online, printed out the reservation, and asked Bernice to put it with the rest of our travel papers. She spotted immediately that I had booked a room for Monday night, instead of Sunday night. I tried to alter the reservation, but that was not an option online, so I had to cancel the reservation and start again.

By the time I had done that, the clock on my laptop showed that we had barely enough time to pack and make some sandwiches to tide us over the next 24 hours, before we had to leave, if we were to drop off the luggage at the hotel and then return the car within the contracted time. (I was using the clock on my laptop because my watch battery had died a few days before; it transpires that God, like his opposite number, is in the details – we had not found anywhere in Penamacor that replaced watch batteries.)

I was far from quietly growing increasingly hysterical as the clock ticked, and I had no idea why the rest of the family were staying so calm and looking at me as if they did not understand my concern. It was only after we were ready to go that I realised that, since my laptop was still on Israel time, we in fact had more than an hour before we needed to leave.

This meant that Bernice and I had time to make and eat some breakfast (at around noon) before saying our goodbyes. Never easy, but our next trip in June is already booked. We had an uneventful drive to Lisbon, found the hotel and checked in without incident, and returned the car on time. We then walked back from the airport to the hotel (a 40-minute walk, which was a good opportunity to stretch our legs after the drive), went straight to our room, showered, ate some of our sandwiches and spent a pointless 20 minutes looking for something worthwhile to watch on TV. My goodness, wasn’t The Ten Commandments a dreadful film? And why did the Egyptians and Hebrews all speak with a British accent (Chuck Heston, Yul Brynner, even Edward G Robinson,), while the Midianites all spoke with American accents? We soon opted for an early night, after an exhausting day.

I am now writing this post at 30,000 feet, as originally planned, so I suppose that all’s well that ends well. Of course, when we land, we may discover that Portugal has been added to the Israel Ministry of Health list, and we will be facing two weeks of self-isolation at home. Mind you, after the last day and a half, two weeks of doing nothing at home sounds pretty attractive.

PS: …. two weeks of doing nothing at home sounds pretty attractive. This is just as well, because, in a move that proved beyond doubt that we are no better off than mice in the planning business, we landed in Tel Aviv exactly 75 minutes after Israel extended the self-isolation requirement to Israelis returning from any foreign country. (Word on the street is that Israel wanted to extend the requirement only to a number of countries where the situation had worsened, including a number of states in the US, but Mike Pence ‘explained’ that America would view with dissatisfaction being labelled unclean, but would be prepared to accept being part of a blanket restriction.)

So, I am completing this blog in the comfort of our own home, where Bernice and I will be enjoying a second honeymoon, desperately trying to remember what we did on the first one almost 48 years ago.

We are comforted by the fact that, having returned, from an isolated and so far virus-free area of a country that is (again, so far) much less affected than Israel, and having arrived back at our home town of Maale Adumim, whose first case of Covid-19 was diagnosed today, we actually feel much safer at home, isolated from all those potential carriers on the streets. The only drawback is that our internet is not working at home, and, as of the time of writing, I do not know when I will be able to upload this post. So, please accept an advance apology for prospective tardiness.

And next time, having spent a week locked up at home, I will have no news from here, and should be able to bring you up to speed on the kids.

Bring Me the Head of…Hudson Hawk

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At my grammar school (high school for my trans-pond readers), one of the Classics masters was a mildly eccentric character who could easily be deflected from the topic of the lesson by an ostensibly innocent question from a pupil. There was a running competition in the school to see which class could manage, using this method, to get this teacher to speak on the largest number of subjects in one 40-minute lesson. I believe the record was 47. (Incidentally, this was one of the more gentle examples of ways in which we tormented our teachers. The more I look back on my own childhood, the more convinced I am that William Golding, in his dystopian novel Lord of the Flies, painted far too rosy a picture of pre-pubescent boyhood in post-War middle-class England.) Anyway, I invite you to count the number of topics in this week’s rambling and entirely trivial post.

I have only walked out of the cinema in the middle of a film twice. Once I gave up on Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils, from Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun via John Whiting’s stage play. In a family blog like this, I can’t go into the intricacies of the plot but two of the film’s publicity taglines were ‘There have never been exorcisms like this’ and ‘Hell will hold no surprises for them’; so you can imagine! The film starred Oliver Reed in one of his more understated performances (which was almost the only understated thing in the film), and I can, having now put 49 years between it and me, remember little else, thankfully.

The second film I walked out of was Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). You may know this film first hand, or you may know it from regular references to it (largely by Graeme Garden), in BBC Radio 4’s self-styled ‘antidote to panel games’ I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue (ISIHAC). While the programme has fallen off a little since the demise of Humphrey Lyttelton, the jazz trumpeter and bandleader who chaired the show from 1972 until his death in 2007 at the age of 85, it still has me listening, not least to marvel at the continued speed of wit of Barry Cryer, who wrote material for many of Britain’s comedy greats in the 1950s-80s, and who,at 84, has lost little of his comic creativity. Please don’t write and tell me that the panel get a week’s warning of the topics in the upcoming edition of ISIHAC. I prefer to live with my illusions (particularly as 84 seems to me less distant than ever). You can hear a typical archive edition of the programme here, but be warned: the humour is very British and very schoolboy.

Or (to return to the second sentence of the last paragraph), you may never have heard of Bring Me the Head… If so, let me explain that the title is a quote from an American Mafia boss on discovering that his daughter is pregnant by said Alfredo. The remainder of the film, which I have always thought of as Peckinpah’s blood-soaked parody of 1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (but which he apparently regarded as the only one of his films on which he did not have to compromise with studio executives, and which appeared on the screen exactly as he envisioned it), documents various people’s efforts to retrieve and hold onto the eponymous head, in order to bring it to the mafia boss and collect the one-million-dollar reward.

The only other thing you really need to know, for the purpose of this post, is that the central character, who initially retrieves the severed head from the grave, keeps it in a drawstring canvas bag on the passenger seat of his convertible as he drives across the Nevada desert, so that, as the film progresses, the bag attracts more and more flies.

And so to the topic of this week’s post, which is my adventures last Friday at the hotel where we are staying. Because we sleep over at the house on Friday nights, we have to check out of the hotel every Friday morning, and check in again every Saturday night. Seeing how under-occupied the hotel is, we requested to keep our belongings in the room over shabbat, to avoid having to physically pack, vacate the room, and then unpack the following night. The hotel readily agreed.

Last Friday morning, Micha’el whatsapped me at about 6:30 to ask if I was/we were awake, and, if so, whether I/we could come over early, to relieve them after a not-so-good night with the baby. I was awake, but Bernice wasn’t, so I got up, dressed, grabbed a quick breakfast, then went back to our room to collect our drawstring laundry bag, since we were planning to do a wash and tumble dry before shabbat.

As I was walking across the (fairly large) lobby area on my way to the car, it suddenly struck me that: a) the hotel staff at the desk had only ever seen Bernice and myself leave the hotel together; b) we usually left around 9 to 9:30, whereas it was now 7:15; c) I was carrying a drawstring canvas bag of about the right size and shape to contain a severed head. To my relief, the desk was unstaffed, and I managed to reach the hotel doors unspotted by any of the staff.

At about 2 the same afternoon, while waiting for the hallot to rise prior to giving them a wash of egg and putting them in the oven, I suddenly realized that I had left my chumash (the book containing the Torah reading that I needed for shabbat) in the hotel. So I set my phone countdown timer for 25 minutes (after which time the challa would need my attention), asked Bernice to turn the oven on in 20 minutes, and set off for the hotel (a 5-minute drive away).

Which is where Hudson Hawk comes in. This 1991 comedy crime caper is, for me (or, rather, was, in 1991 – whether my tastes have changed I couldn’t say) a delightful piece of fluff, with Bruce Willis proving as entertaining as he was playing opposite Cybill Shepherd in the TV series Moonlighting. In Hudson Hawk, he plays an art thief who works with a partner. On the job, they calculate how long they have to carry out the job, and Hudson, from his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Great American Songbook, and of the standard versions of those songs, selects a song that is exactly the right length. The two thieves then sing said song concurrently but separately, to time and synchronize their exploits. (Among their choices, for example, is Bing Crosby’s rendition of Swinging on a Star.)

So there I was, entering the hotel, with 20 minutes still on the clock. I knew deep down that, if I was seen by the desk clerk, I could easily explain that I had forgotten something in the room, but I nevertheless hoped to get in and out without being seen. Again, the desk was unmanned at the time. I reached our room, to discover that it hadn’t yet been made up. I assumed that they were leaving that until the next day, and it occurred to me that I had just enough time to take the shower I had skipped in the morning, in the walk-in shower, in a warm, spacious bathroom, rather than facing a colder, over-the-bath-hand-held-showerhead shower in the house, made all the more exciting by the chance that someone would, at the same time, use the kitchen sink (which is upstream from the bathroom), thereby giving me the dubious pleasure of being frozen or scalded almost to death. I brought my phone into the bathroom, and calculated I had just enough time. Indeed, I managed to complete my shower, dry myself off and get dressed except for my socks and shoes, before I heard a tap at the door. I toyed for a moment with the idea of tiptoeing across the room, silently opening the balcony French window, slipping outside, swinging over the railing and hanging by my fingertips until whoever was at the door had let themselves in, finished and left the room. (I blame this fantasy on the fact that one of the hotel TV channels had just run a season of the Bourne films.) However, I soon saw sense, and opened the room door, to see two chambermaids. It only took a moment or two of pointing to my watch then holding up two fingers (in the nicest possible way), while muttering ‘Dos minutos’ (with no idea whether this was the Portuguese equivalent of Dog Latin), for them to understand, express what I assumed from their body language was agreement, and start to walk away. A glance at my watch told me I still had 7 minutes, so I hastily completed my dressing, picked up my chumash (remember that?) and left the room. I caught up with the chambermaids and proudly used almost half of my Portuguese: ‘Desculpe. Obrigado. Boa tarde!’ (‘So sorry! Thank you! Good afternoon!’) I found myself wishing that their cleaning trolley had included a bag of spelt flour, so that I could deploy over 50% of my entire stock of vocabulary: ‘Desculpe. Obrigado. O! Farinha de espelta! Boa tarde!’.

I walked swiftly to the hotel door, where I stopped to check how much time I had left on my phone. My phone! Where was it? Aaargh! I had left it in the bathroom. Hastily, I retraced my steps, retrieved my phone from the smiling chambermaids and raced back to the door. Unfortunately, there was a clerk at the desk as I crossed the lobby. Without breaking step, I smiled in my most winning way, waved my chumash and called out: ‘Would you believe it? I forgot this book this morning’, and went out the door.

Four minutes later, exactly as my phone’s timer started beeping, I pulled up outside the house.

And that was my Hollywood Friday!

I’ll do my best to provide more serious content next week.

Meanwhile, here’s Tao helping me to make challa. Note that he appreciates this is a serious business.

Remember: If you want less of the meanderings of my stream of consciousness, and more of the kids’ progress, you can follow, subscribe to, and like their youtube channel.