Monthly Archives: May 2020

Mondries

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Let’s start by not explaining that title just yet, which will at least give you some incentive to read on until we do.

As I write these words, it is 12 noon on Sunday. It should be 10 o’clock in the morning, but it’s taken me much longer than usual to get myself going on this week’s post. Indeed, I think I am only here in front of the laptop today because a few people were kind enough to tell Bernice and myself that they particularly enjoyed last week’s offering, and because a friend whom I regard as a serious writer (as opposed to a dispenser of half-a-yard of assorted ramblings like myself) mentioned this week that my unfailing ability to deliver the goods week in, week out, inspires her to take up her own pen. This is an awesome responsibility, for which, at this moment, I don’t think I thank her. Still, I’ve started so I’ll finish.

This whole getting myself motivated thing is not helped by the reading matter currently on my bedside table. This is because, as luck would have it, none of the books I am reading is of the: ‘Good grief! Even I could do better than that!’ variety. Each one of them is the work of an author exhibiting complete mastery of his art or craft, and therefore, paradoxically, the worst thing to read if you are trying to write while being plagued by impostor syndrome in the first place. (For anyone unfamiliar with the phrase, impostor syndrome is a psychological pattern in which one doubts one’s accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. For some of us, it’s not so much a syndrome as a way of life.)

Anyway, let me share my current reading matter with you: all highly recommended (provided, of course, that you, yourself, are not at the moment trying, and failing, to write).

The first author, and perhaps the most daunting for me, is Bill Bryson, whose The Body – A Guide for Occupants I am thoroughly enjoying. I must apologise for coming so late to what is such a well-publicised book, but I don’t generally stay on top of the literary news; it was my clever daughter who read up about this attempt ‘to understand the extraordinary contraption that is us’, and, thinking, quite rightly, that it had my name written all over it, Esther and Maayan bought it for me for my birthday. It is endlessly fascinating, with an average of three or four scarcely credible facts on every page, and it is written with the easy charm, sense of wonder and delightful humour that characterise all of Bryson’s work. Why is it for me the most daunting read? Because, if I ever think that I might possibly be a writer when I grow up, then this is the kind of writer I might least unrealistically kid myself I could aspire to being, and reading the genuine article can lead to despair.

My only other criticism of it is that it places me, at least twice a day, on the horns of a dilemma: I can’t wait for Bernice to read it after me, and I really don’t want to spoil it for her, but at the same time so much of it is so astonishing or hilarious – or sometimes both simultaneously – that I want to read great chunks of it to her, even though I know I am in danger of spoiling her enjoyment of it when she does read it herself.

Next is James Joyce’s Ulysses, reading which was one of the items on my Retirement To Do list. I started off tackling this task with full seriousness, reading Homer’s Odyssey for necessary context, studying Jeri Johnson’s 50-page introduction to the 1922 text edition of Ulysses, and buying Harry Blamires’ The New Bloomsday Book as a guide to supplement the 250 pages of notes at the back of the Oxford edition. I am enjoying the read; indeed, I think I am enjoying it more as I gradually ease myself free of the perceived need to research every note, and just surrender myself to the sound of the text itself, and let it wash over me. By this means, I am starting to feel that, by the time I get to the end, I will begin to appreciate why so many regard it as such a great novel. I have also discovered that I enjoy it more if I read it aloud, very fast, in an appalling Dublin accent, although, of course, I can only do that when Bernice isn’t around, and, if I ever ride the buses again, I’ll have to refrain from declaiming there as well.

Which brings me to a practice Bernice and I have recently revived: one that we indulged in a lot in the early years of our marriage, usually lying in bed. I am referring, as you have probably guessed, to reading fiction aloud. I read Bernice the entire Jane Austen canon way back in the day; I firmly believe that reading aloud sets a measured pace that allows you to fully savour Austen’s sense of irony. Dickens, of course, begs to be performed as well – he set the unattainable standard for that himself, in his hugely popular reading tours. Ideally, Dickens demands a week’s pause between chapters. That is how many of his original ‘readership’ experienced each of his books: serialised, with one member of the family reading aloud to the household that week’s instalment from a literary magazine.

We revived this fine practice with Bernice’s surprise birthday present to me this year: Clive James’ epic poem Rivers In the Sky. I am sitting here wondering which is the more daunting task: describing this poem to someone who hasn’t read it, or describing Clive James to someone who does not know of him. Let’s start with the man. Over a period of 80 years, from the late 1780s, England sent her convicts to Australia. Then, in the 1960s, Australia sent England a string of larger-than-life characters, such as Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and Clive James. This has to be one of the better deals England has ever made. If you need reminding who the first two are, or just want to bathe in nostalgia, you will find Humphries in the persona of Dame Edna here, and Greer in the persona of Germaine Greer here. (Be warned: the Greer documentary is X-rated.)

As for Clive James, he first rose to fame as the man whose weekly newspaper column of TV criticism was read by everyone, not only for its intelligent analysis, but also (and, to be honest, principally) for its often blistering humour. He once described the young body-builder Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking “like a brown condom full of walnuts”. After 10 years at the top of his game as a TV critic, during which James also published several collections of more serious literary criticism, he then, for some of us inexplicably, created and hosted a programme that celebrated the lunacy of the Japanese TV genre of human endurance reality shows, where contestants underwent such challenges as having their torsos smeared with fish food, before being lowered into a river stocked with hungry catfish. James presented this programme with a rather uniform mocking bemusement, and I never understood why he devoted so much of his time to (wasted so much of his time on?) something so insignificant. The answer, I now think, was that he found television, all television, fascinating, because he saw it as an honest reflection of life. He once wrote: “Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”

Those of us who were upset that James was wasting his time and talents on this trivia need not have worried. At the same time as researching and presenting this series, and later a very successful series of travel programs, focussing on a different major world city each week, he was also teaching himself Russian, because he “could no longer bear not to know something about how Pushkin sounded”. He spoke several other languages, and published an English translation of Dante’s Inferno. He could talk intelligently for hours, and apparently frequently did, about his various passions, which included both Formula One motor racing and the tango. TV chat show host, presenter of documentaries, publisher of five volumes of memoirs and several novels, poet and songwriter, he was told, 11 years ago, to expect that he would die very shortly of leukaemia, and was then given ten more years through a miracle drug, ten years in which he produced a number of fine books, and many of his finest poems.

River in the Sky is an epic poem, mostly written in free verse, with some blank and some rhymed sections, In it, James, contemplating his imminent death, looks back to key events, people and places in his life, while also examining a range of cultural references broad and deep enough to make even James Joyce look only half-educated. It is 120 pages of the most dazzling, moving, witty, searingly honest brilliance, less a river than a rollercoaster.

It’s now 6 o’clock on Monday evening, and time to explain the title of this week’s post. Last week, I had little idea what to write about, so I tidied up some loose ends, fed off my readership, and called the resulting pot pourri Sundries. This week, I had even less idea what to write about: the problem continues, so we now have Mondries. I’m just praying this dire situation doesn’t continue for more than seven weeks.

Which reminds me of a piece of verse from the Look pages of The Sunday Times (dedicated readers will know that that is the London-based newspaper of that name). This piece lodged itself between the teeth of my mind in the 1970s, and no amount of probing with tongue and toothpicks has succeeded in budging it since then.

Three Times a Week
Monday:
Choosy
Wendy.
Thursday:
Heidi.
Saturday:
Cindy

And penultimately, some audience participation. I have three other books to tell you about. Shall I do that next week, or are you all booked out? Please let me know – below or by email.

And finally, here’s another reader in the making: over 8 months ago.

It Takes a Village to Raise a Child…

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…and, when times are hard, it takes a readership to write a blog. So this one is dedicated to you, various friends and family members, whose reactions to previous posts, and whose chance comments, will be providing the vast majority of today’s musings.

As I kid myself that you may not have noticed, the content of these posts has been getting a bit thin of late. (This isn’t, I think, true of last week’s post, which I have been clutching close to my chest since last December, when I first researched it, because I knew that I wanted to save the big reveal until Lag b’Omer.) The truth is that, like any self-respecting squirrel, I have to spend our time in Portugal stockpiling my amusing and fascinating insights into Portugal and my relation to it, and then hope that this store will last me through the bleak months of away-from-Taoness until we are next able to fly. So, when we returned from our first trip, late last November, I had more than enough chestnuts buried to see me through December and January. On our second trip, I had to hunt a little harder for supplies, having picked most of the low-hanging fruit the previous time. So, since our return to Israel in March, I have watched my supplies dwindle.

And now, just this week, we reluctantly cancelled our next trip. We had been due to fly on 8 June, but we eventually faced the fact that that was not going to happen. We are still fairly optimistic that we will be able to get to Portugal this summer. This optimism is based on a number of factors. Both Israel and Portugal seem to have fared better than average in handling the Covid-19 pandemic. Both Israel and Portugal are economically dependent on international tourism, and are therefore eager to reopen their borders as soon as possible. Ben Gurion (Tel Aviv) airport is scheduled to reopen on 1 June. We would be perfectly happy to spend our first two weeks in Portugal ‘isolating’ with the kids, and not going out. My travel insurance agent assures me that our policy would cover us for contracting Covid-19 while in Portugal. So, all things considered, we are hoping, and fairly hopeful, that we will be able to get there this summer.

Meanwhile, however, I have hardly anything left in my blog storehouse. So, let’s start today with some housekeeping.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the challenge of learning Portuguese, and about the amusement to be had from foreign-language phrasebooks. My good friend Joe contacted me twice after that post. First, he recommended to me Pimsleur’s foreign language online courses. I signed up and find myself making encouraging progress. The course is uncompromising in its presentation of dialogue at a pace of speaking that is frighteningly close to the real world, and I am amazed to discover that what didn’t sound at all like a language made up of distinct words two weeks ago is already comprehensible. I have explained to Bernice that, when we do next get to Portugal, we are going to go into a café and, when I ask her what she wants to drink, she had better say ‘Mineral water’, since that is the only thing I know how to order.

Of course, I cannot escape the niggling fear that, when we do get back to Portugal, I will discover that the Portuguese I am hearing bears as close a relation to the Penamacorean dialect as Received Pronunciation does to Geordie (or, if you prefer, as close a relation as Standard American English does to Appalachian mountain talk).

Joe’s second contribution was to remind me of a book I hadn’t thought about in a long time: English As She Is Spoke. In 1855, an enterprising Portuguese named Pedro Carolino had the smart idea of taking a previously published Portuguese-French phrasebook, and adapting it for Portuguese visitors to England, by translating the French phrases into English. At this point, at least two questions spring to mind. The second of these is: Why didn’t he translate the Portuguese directly into English, and cut out the French middle man? Hold that thought, while I ask the first question? Why did a man who had absolutely no knowledge of English think he was qualified to compile a Portuguese-English phrase book in the first place? I suspect he felt that there was a demand that was not being satisfied, and that this represented too good a business opportunity to miss. With regard to the second question (the one I asked first), I suspect there were no Portuguese-English dictionaries available, so he took what he could find, which was a French-English dictionary. In any event, this was a fortunate day for the world of letters, because the end result of Carolino’s labours was a book of which Mark Twain wrote: ‘Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.’ The gloriousness of the mistranslations cannot be described. Let me, instead, give you a couple of examples from the double-page spread that Joe sent me a photocopy of.

In response to a question about whether the road is safe to travel along:
It have nothing to fear, not in day neither the night.

Small-talk to one’s carriage companion:
Let us take patience. Still some o’clock and we shall be in the end of our voyage.

The post-publication story of the book is also interesting. In the years following its publication, initially in Paris, it went the mid-19th Century equivalent of viral in social media. Copies were passed from hand to hand among London society, for native English-speakers to marvel at its butchery of the language. It was eventually published in London and Boston 28 years later, as an entertainment. In 1969, it was republished, again purely for its entertainment value, and a revised paperback version was published in 2004, 149 years after its original publication. One can’t help reflecting that if it had not been such a glorious failure, it would never have been such a resounding success.

Indeed, it features in a favourite book of mine that celebrates such triumphant disasters of the human spirit: Stephen Pile’s The Book of Heroic Failures. Pile comments:

Is there anything in conventional English which could equal the vividness of ‘to craunch the marmoset’?”

This is an entry under the book’s Idiotisms and Proverbs, and represents the author’s attempt to translate the French slang idiomatic expression croquer le marmot, used to indicate waiting patiently for someone to open a door, with croquer referring to the knocking or rapping sound, and marmot, a term for the grotesque door knockers in vogue at the time.

And now, I think it’s time to give you Chapter 2 of the Tax Authority saga. I left you two weeks ago waiting for the arrival at our UK contact address of a letter containing the new password enabling me to go online in the hope of being able to verify that the payment made by Micha’el by bank transfer on our behalf had been correctly identified. (If you’re lost, and care enough, you can reread the post from two weeks ago.) A few days ago, the letter arrived, my contact read out the password to me, I went online, remembered that my favourite film is, apparently, Citizen Kane, and keyed in the password – a string of 12 letters.

Not accepted.

‘Aha!’, I thought, ‘I wonder if it is not upper-case, as I assumed, but lower-case.’ Keyed it in.

Not accepted. Followed by the dreaded: You have two more attempts.

Curses, I thought, or, actually, %&*&##@!!. (I never knew that a string of meaningless symbols substituted for a curse is called a grawlix, until today. This is now a word I will treasure, like aglet, which is that little plastic tube clamped onto the end of a shoelace to prevent fraying – as if you didn’t know.) Keeping calm as I breathed into a paper bag, I called my UK contact, to ask whether the password was upper-, lower- or mixed-case.

‘Upper-case. Couldn’t you tell I was reading it in my upper-case voice?’
‘Your voice always sounds upper-case to me.’

Back to the site, hoping that I had simply mis-keyed the password originally. Tapping out, letter by letter, cross-checking after each letter. Pressing Next. Waiting. Oh,that endless, gut-wrenching wait.

Success!

Of course, every success is only really the opening up of another opportunity for failure. I had now unlocked a website that stretched out before me like Hampton Court maze, except for the fact that it had no helpful hedge to keep on my left….or is it right?. Anyway, in an hour of stumbling through the pages I found my message board, with a very nice message reminding me that I had until 31 May to pay my tax, and a personal data page, where I was able to enter my email address and nominate it as my preferred means of communication. This produced an almost instantaneous result, in the form of an email notifying me that I had until 31 May to pay my tax.

At this point, I admitted defeat, sent all of the details to Micha’el, phoned him on WhatsApp and asked him to please call the authorities to ensure that they can locate and correctly assign the payment. For further developments, watch this space.

And finally, after last week’s photos of a chainsaw, I passed on to the kids a comment from a friend that: In Tennessee, most hillbillies wait until their kid is two before giving him serious tools. I’m pleased to see that they are taking this advice seriously.

This week’s post has been brought to you by the words idiotism, grawlix and aglet. Thanks, respectively, to Joe, Norma and Andrea B (and pleased not to disappoint you, Andrea S.)

Call That a Bonfire?!

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In any normal year, Monday night this week would have been a time in Israel for staying indoors and closing all the windows, because, as many of you know, Lag b’Omer started on Monday night. As with many Jewish traditions, just exactly what we are marking on Lag b’Omer is open to argument discussion: the ceasing of the plague that killed thousands of Rabbi Akiva’s students; the beginning, almost 1900 years ago, of the rebellion against Roman rule that was led by Bar Kochba, and supported by Rabbi Akiva; the death of one of the very few of Rabbi Akiva’s disciples to survive the revolt, Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, the putative author of Judaism’s major mystical work, the Zohar (which could be translated as Incandescence). Or, possibly, all of the above.

Hundreds of thousands, mostly ultra-orthodox, Israelis flock on Lag b’Omer to Mount Meron, to the grave of Rabbi Shimon, to celebrate the mystical secrets that he allegedly shared on his death-day, by singing, dancing, and, principally, by lighting large bonfires, evoking the spiritual light that the Rabbi brought to the world.

This ritual is replicated thousands of times, in every community in Israel, as teens and pre-teens indulge their pyromaniac tendencies. Indeed, from the day after Pesach, from Metulla in the north to Eilat in the south, no piece of wood that is not firmly nailed or glued in place is safe, and the streets are full of purloined supermarket carts laden with planks, offcuts, branches, all pushed by young boys, some not old enough to see over the handlebar.

Then, on the night itself, I don’t recommend driving down Road 1, the main artery in Jerusalem leading from the North and East. At one point, this road skirts the Old City walls on one side, and ultra-religious neighbourhoods on the other side; on Lag b’Omer, ranged along that side of the pavement, a series of huge bonfires blaze away between the traffic and the apartment buildings, and threaten both. If you’ve ever wondered what the height of stupidity is, look no further: it’s about 2 metres.

Or so I thought, until last year. Take a trip with me, now, through space, from the Eastern end of the Mediterranean to the Western end, and through time, from mid-May to late December, and join me at the madeiros of Portugal. Another religion, another tenuous tradition, and another set of bonfires.

In very many towns and villages throughout Portugal, in the days leading up to 25 December, piles of firewood are brought from the forest to the town square, where a huge bonfire is built, and lit, on 24 December, symbolically to warm the newborn infant child. Historically, the gathering of the wood was undertaken by young men about to be enlisted in the army. These days, the collection is non-gender-specific. Historically, there were two methods of collection. Generous landowners would have their contribution of wood paraded into the town centre, with festivities and glasses of the traditional wine-based spirit, jeropiga, all at the landowner’s expense. Less generous landowners would have wood stolen from their lands by the peasants, and these ‘offerings’ would be deposited in the town square at dead of night, with no ceremony. These days, the felling, sawing and transportation of the wood is a highly controlled process, coordinated with the Forestry Commission.

Ideally, the fire, once lit on the night of 24 December, should burn constantly for the next 12 nights. Over the years, quite naturally, rivalries grew up between neighbouring towns, as to which could produce the biggest and best madeiro, and it was not unheard of for the young bloods of one town to steal the firewood from the pile of a neighbouring town, again under cover of darkness.

A brief etymological aside. When I first encountered the word madeiro, which I assumed meant bonfire, my excitement was intense. The word for bonfire in Hebrew is medura, and the two seemed like cognates, words (often in two different languages) that have a common etymological origin and, in this case, an identical meaning. I suspected that the Portuguese Sephardic Jews had adopted the Portuguese word. However, my research revealed that medura is a word used by the prophet Ezekiel, and is from the root DOR (דו”ר) with the meaning circular. From the same root come the words dor meaning a generation, and davar meaning a postman, who delivers letters on his round. A medura, as any good boy or girl scout knows, is made by placing logs in a circle and then lighting them.

Now I was excited in the other direction: perhaps the Portuguese had borrowed the word from the Sephardi Jews. Alas, it seems not: madeiro actually means a log or beam, and is from the Latin materia, meaning wood, or material/matter, and ultimately deriving from the Proto-Indo-European for mother, presumably in the belief that all matter is born from the Mother.

So, I now have a philosophical question. If two words in different languages look very similar, and have the same meaning, but are not etymologically related, should we regard them as true cognates, or false cognates? At this point, I’m guessing that some of you don’t find this quite as urgent a question as I do, so let’s get back to the main theme of today’s meander.

I was interested to learn that Beira (the province in which Penamacor is situated) is the area of Portugal most ‘into’ madeiros, and that the string of villages and towns north of Castelo Branco are the most fanatical, and that the jewel in that crown, the biggest, tallest, longest-burning madeiro in all Portugal is the one gathered, erected, and ignited every year in Penamacor. On 6 December, the logs are brought into town, the bonfire is erected, and the Penamacor fire is actually lit on the night of 23 December, a day earlier than everywhere else.

The biggest, tallest, longest-burning madeiro. But what, exactly, does tall mean? Or, to repeat my question, what is the height of lunacy? Well, early last December, the kids took Tao down to the village square, when the bonfire had been erected.

I am informed that in Penamacor – in, you may remember, the heart of forest-fire country – the madeiro, which, as you can see, is erected less than two metres from buildings on either side of the village square, has sometimes been built over 10 metres high.

Incidentally, you can see a sign near the top of the woodpile. I originally assumed the sign, with its legend Malta 1999, was commemorating Penamacor’s gold medal in the Mediterranean Madeiro Games of 1999, held that year in Malta. However, it actually means Cohort of 1999, referring to the 20-year-olds who in 2019 took the lead in wood collection, and who were, of course, born in 1999. The background of the sign actually shows a pile of logs, each of which bears the name of one of the cohort.

If you’re interested, you can see how these logs arrive in town in the ceremony of the bringing of the firewood here (the actual parade starts around 2 minutes into the video).

Despite the fact that, once it is alight, firemen play hoses on the edges of the bonfire continuously, the kids decided it would not be responsible parenting to bring Tao down once the fire was lit, so I can only offer you some footage from the provincial news station. You can see the madeiro in all its glory here.

I mentioned responsible parenting earlier. In this context, let me share a couple of recent pictures of Tao with you.

Another birthday present?  You really shouldn’t have!
You mean it’s not for me?

Misfortunes

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François de La Rochefoucauld was a 17th Century French nobleman, best known for his published collection of over 500 maxims, mostly reflections on human behaviour and character. He did not pull his punches, and, in the introduction to his Maximes, he shrewdly wrote:

…the best approach for the reader to take would be to put in his mind right from the start that none of these maxims apply to himself in particular, and that he is the sole exception, even though they appear to be generalities. After that I guarantee that he will be the first to endorse them and he will believe that they do credit to the human spirit.

I mention him only because I want to cite one of his maxims, by way of introducing this week’s ramblings:

In the misfortunes of our best friends, we find something that is not unpleasing.

It is in this generous spirit that I offer you the following story.

Let’s start at the very beginning. You basically don’t exist in Portugal until you get a NIF (Número de Identificação Fiscal, or Tax Identification Number). Without a NIF, you can’t open a bank account or buy property. So, of course, when I first visited Portugal for 4 days, principally to acquire the services of a lawyer, open a bank account and start the process of finding and buying a property, the first thing the lawyer had me do was acquire a NIF. To expedite this process, I had to furnish an EU address through which I could be contacted, which I did. All went smoothly, as you know, until…

A couple of weeks ago, tiring of reorganizing our  book collection (I can recommend by spine colour, for its aesthetic effect, and by original publication date, to remind yourself that Cervantes and Shakespeare were contemporaries), I went into the Portuguese Tax Authority website, in the hope of changing our EU contact address to our address in Portugal. Navigation was actually fairly straightforward, since bureaucratic language in Portuguese is not that different from the English equivalent.

I started by providing my NIF, and then was asked for my password, of course. At that point, I realized that I had tried to sign in, rather than registering, so I started again. All went smoothly until I came to a page that I did not understand at all. A quick copy and paste into google translate established that I was being asked to choose a security question and provide an answer. Now, I am used to objective security questions that yield an unequivocal answer, such as my mother’s maiden name or the name of my primary (elementary) school. The questions I was invited to choose from, however, were all subjective.

What is your favourite film?
 Oh, I don’t know! Citizen Kane? Or is that a bit obvious? Les Enfants du Paradis? Just a tad prententious? (Not really pretentious François Truffaut once said that he would give up all of his films to have directed Les Enfants du Paradis. I can’t find the film online, but you can watch a charming 4-minute excerpt on youtube here.) It’s a Wonderful Life? Is that really the corny image I want to project?

What is your favourite book? Bernice suggested The Bible, on the grounds that I was more likely to remember that. I also felt that it was a good choice for the Tax Authority of a staunchly Catholic country.

What is your favourite colour? I don’t think I’ve got one.

I was beginning to feel completely characterless.

Next, I was asked to provide my password, again. Of course, I still didn’t have one, so I selected the option to set a new password. A popup informed me that a temporary password would be sent to my contact address. At this point I gave the whole thing up as a bad job.

Then, a week ago, my UK contact informed me that a letter had arrived. I asked him to open it, and send me a photo of the contents. Of course, the disadvantage of this method is that I didn’t have a soft copy that I could paste into google translate, and the quality of the photo I was sent wasn’t good enough for my Translator app camera to identify the text accurately. All of this meant that I had no easy way of finding out what the letter was about. However, 20 minutes of deciphering, typing short phrases into google translate, comparing the letter with other documents in my possession and, alright, blind guesswork, led me to the conclusion that the letter was a demand from the Portuguese tax authorities for the first of two payments of the property tax due on our purchase of the house in Penamacor. Impressive, no? Either that, or it was an eviction notice…or possibly a two-for-one offer on Portuguese wine.  

Having established the nature of the letter, and understanding that the bill had to be paid before the end of May, I then turned my attention to the section of the letter that outlined Instruções sobre as formas de pagamento. Payment, I learnt, can be made at a Smart Multibank ATM. This is, by the way, an ATM at which you can pay bills, order theatre tickets, and perform other advanced transactions. Of course, you need to be in Portugal to do that, so this was not such a smart method for me. Payment can also be made by cheque, but we don’t have a chequebook, so that was out as well.

Fortunately – if that’s the word I’m looking for – the letter also gave the address of the Tax Authority portal, which I then visited again, in the hope that I could pay the tax online. After hardly any time at all, I navigated my way to a section that gave the Tax Authority details for bank transfer, and stressed the two items of information that had to be included as a comment in any bank transfer – my NIF and the document reference of the demand for payment.

Now we were cooking! Or at least in the advanced stages of food prep. I grabbed my phone and went into our bank account app, entered all the details of the transfer and advanced to the approval screen, where, of course, I was confronted by the message: Bank transfer requires enabling the Matrix functionality, which you have not done. Those of you take copious notes each week will remember that enabling the Matrix functionality requires receiving an SMS with a one-time code and keying it in at an ATM, and that we are unable to receive, when in Portugal, SMS messages on our registered phone, unable to reach an ATM when in Israel, and unable to change our registered phone. I am thinking that, on our next visit to Portugal, I might leave my debit card with Micha’el, request my bank to send me the SMS immediately after our return to Israel, and forward the SMS to Micha’el, for him to enable the functionality at an ATM. (Rereading this, I wonder whether I actually want to leave Micha’el my debit card and have him be the only person who knows the password for advanced functionality.)

Meanwhile, I had to find another way of paying the tax. It seemed to me that I had no choice but to bother Micha’el to pay it for us. So, I phoned him to explain the situation. He, of course, readily agreed, and I sent him the bank details and the two vital pieces of information (NIF and document reference number). Soon afterwards, Micha’el sent me a photo of the bank transfer confirmation. I immediately spotted that there was no mention of the vital information; when I asked Micha’el, he explained that he had tried to make the transfer from an ATM, but at some point had not understood how to proceed; he had then gone into the bank, and asked a teller to carry out the transfer. She was not very sympathetic, because she felt he should have used the ATM, and, as a consequence, although he had stressed to her the importance of the vital information, she had been fairly brusque, and had apparently omitted it. Micha’el suggested I email the Tax Authority with the vitals, and I thought to myself: ‘Well, that sounds straightforward’. (This is, as you probably realise, one of those dramatic irony lines that make you smile wryly when you watch the film for a second time.)

So, back I went onto the Tax Authority website, and looked for an email address. I couldn’t find one anywhere, but I did eventually come across, and was able to download, a file with contact details for all the offices, branches, departments and officials of the Tax Authority – addresses, office reception hours, phone numbers and email addresses. Fortunately, this was an Excel file, so I was able to filter the hundreds of rows and search for the department I needed. Less fortunately, the department I needed was not listed.

However, on another tab of the Excel file I did find the right department. Scrolling across to the column headed Email Address, I found that on this tab there was no such column. There was a phone number, and I could, I hear you suggesting, have just phoned the office.

If you live in Israel, you are very used to phoning a Government office and hearing, in Hebrew, ‘For Hebrew, press 1’, then, in English, ‘For English, press 2’, and so on, for Arabic, Russian and Amharic. In Britain, if I remember the last time I visited a hospital, interpreters are available for six or seven languages, and explanatory pamphlets are available in 20 others. Well, let me tell you, in my experience, Portugal is, by comparison, insular; indeed, I find Iberia as a whole is peninsular. When I was working as a technical writer for a large software company serving the telecommunications industry, I captured minutes for meetings working with clients in 20 or so different countries. I can only remember three instances when the meetings were not conducted in English. In Russia, following the mass immigration to Israel of Jews from Russia, our company always assembled a complete team of native Russian speakers: managers, software engineers and technical writer, and all meetings, emails, documentation were in Russian. The company touted it as our competitive edge over our rivals in America and elsewhere. In Austria, the client insisted on conducting meetings in German, although I am quite sure that the client participants all spoke reasonable English. In this case, the client wanted to ensure that it had the upper hand in meetings. In Spain, the client insisted on meetings and documentation being in Spanish, because the participants’ English was simply not good enough, and because insisting on using the Spanish language was a matter of national pride.

So, I knew that there was almost certainly no point in phoning the Tax Authority, not with my command of Portuguese and my collocutor’s likely command of English.

In the end, I found a page dedicated to non-residents and foreign nationals, which included an option to submit a question in writing. This seemed like my best shot. So, I composed a message in English, explaining the situation, giving details of the transfer and all the vitals, and asking for the payment to be credited to me. For good measure, I asked whether, at the same time, the Tax Authority could update my contact address to our Portuguese address, and also, in any reply, could use my email address rather than my postal address. Feeling rather pleased with myself, I pasted that message into google translate, pasted the translation into the message box on the website, and Hey Presto! I got the popup message: You have exceeded the maximum of 500 characters. There then followed 15 minutes of chiseling away the superfluous material, like Michelangelo, to reveal the essential message perfectly formed within, then google translating it and pasting the result. After four or five attempts, I finally got the Portuguese down to 520 characters, while still preserving an almost coherent narrative. I then discovered that the heading of the message did not count towards the 500-character limit, so I added my email address to the heading of the message and reached the magic 500.

Tolstoy can scarcely have felt a greater sense of achievement on completing the final sentence of War and Peace than I did when I hit Send.

Not 15 minutes later, my contact phoned me to say that a letter had arrived. It transpired that this contained the code for registering with the Tax Authority. He relayed the code to me, using our typical fumbling approximation of the NATO alphabet. (Michael McIntyre, who I know I have referenced before, has an amusing 2 minutes on this at the beginning of this clip.)

My pulse racing, I went back to the Tax Authority website, entered my NIF, was asked to choose a security question, selected What is your favourite book? and typed in The Bible. I then got a popup message: This is incorrect. Try again. This time I selected What is your favourite film? and typed in Citizen Kane. Success! I felt as though my each-way bet on the Grand National had come in second. Unfortunately, I forgot that this was an accumulator bet. I was next asked for my password, and entered the password my contact had given me. Incorrect password. You have two more attempts. It was only at this point that I realized that my second visit to the Tax Authority website had generated a new password to be posted to my contact address, whereas the password I had used was the first one generated, which I had subsequently rendered obsolete.

So now, I am waiting to receive my second password, and waiting to hear whether the Tax Authority is able to locate and assign my payment. A lot of waiting. Fortunately, I have several weighty books to read….and I’m not going anywhere, not even Portugal to see our grandson, who seems to be getting very grown up.