Monthly Archives: July 2020

The Container for the Thing Contained

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Last Tuesday, my heart leapt when I read the following 6-word WhatsApp from Micha’el: The container is 90 km from here…!!! My heart actually leapt twice. The first leap was because this represented the beginning of the end of a process that has been going on for almost a year. Anyone who has relocated to another country will know what a milestone moment it is when you are reunited with all the possessions that you have been making do without for far too long.

The second leap was because I have felt increasingly guilty over the last weeks. I was even considering, (be warned: there is a very bad pun coming up….in Latin) of renaming my blog Paenemacorrespondent*, because it seems a very long time since I wrote anything about Portugal or the kids. I just hadn’t been able to think of anything new to say about Portugal. Some of you have been kind enough to comment favourably on my last few musings, but, at the same time, I know there are some readers who would rather learn about life in Portugal than follow my thoughts on aspects of culture. So, I am thrilled to announce that today we have the saga of Micha’el and Tslil’s container, with which they have now been reunited….well, what they’ve really been reunited with is all of their stuff that was in the container. In other words, I am really using the container for the thing contained, which is one of the types of the figure of speech known as synecdoche. For example, you can say We downed a keg to mean We drank all of the beer in a keg. I am particularly proud of the synecdoche: Mich’ael and Tslil are thrilled to be reunited with their container, because it is, I would argue, the very best example imaginable of using the container for the thing contained, using, as it does, the container as the container for the thing contained.

I cannot hear the phrase empty nesters without a wry smile forming on my lips. (It all ties up; trust me.) When fledglings leave a nest, they leave behind them an empty shell, which their parents can easily nudge over the edge of the nest, perhaps one or two downy feathers that the wind carries away, and nothing else. When our fledglings left the nest, they left behind them twelve years of school notebooks (Esther), a library of impenetrable Eastern philosophy and shamanic and hallucinogenic studies (Micha’el), a wardrobe of clothes that no longer suited her (Esther), a wardrobe of perfectly decent clothes that he had no intention of ever wearing again (Micha’el), cuddly toys (Esther), death’s-head ashtrays (Micha’el), assorted mementoes, keepsakes, albums, old tents, useful pots for putting things in, useful things for putting pot in….and that’s just the top layer.

However, Micha’el’s room, at least, didn’t stay that way for long. Last August, Micha’el and Tslil gave up their flat in Jerusalem and moved in with us, bringing with them everything they had not sold or given away (paid forward, as it were). Then, five or six weeks later, they flew to Portugal, having boxed up everything they wanted to ship and left it in Micha’el’s room. Their original plan was to buy space in a commercial shipper’s container. However, they eventually decided that things would be less complicated if they took space in the container that their colleague Shir was planning to ship. Things would be less complicated… There’s another one of those clauses that you just know is going to come back and bite you.

Shir had already found two others to share the container. Splitting the transport costs four ways certainly seemed to make sense. Unfortunately, both of those others fell through, but then they found someone else to come in.

Of course, this meant that the kids’ boxes needed to get to Tuval, in the North of Israel, where Shir’s container was leaving from. However, their arrival needed to be co-ordinated with the arrival of the other contributions (date as yet unknown), and with the shipping date (as yet unknown). So, the kids moved to Portugal, leaving us to hope that we would be given at least an hour’s warning of when the removal men were coming. As you would expect in any plan (and I use the word plan in a sense so loose that its original coiner would not recognise it) involving three separate laid-back thirty-somethings, things remained fairly fluid until half-an-hour before the removal men arrived. Bernice is much better at going with the flow than I am (I’m more of a major-blockage-in-the-pipe man myself), so I allowed her to handle that headache, while I muttered about people who swan off to the other side of the world and expect things to just fall into place.

However, despite my scepticism (I had envisioned Esther having to dispose of the kids’ stuff when she was clearing the house after Bernice and I both die), the day did come, and the boxes did go, and we were able, once again, to enjoy looking at the walls, and opening the wardrobe, in Micha’el’s bedroom. Life is full of small pleasures; we felt as though we had just followed the Rabbi’s instructions and moved the goat out of the house again.

So, everything arrived at Tuval, where the container was packed, driven to the port, and shipped to Europe.

There are two ways to organise shipping a private container to Portugal. The expensive, hassle-free way is to hire a shipper to pick up the container in Israel, drive it to the docks, ship it to Lisbon, release it from the docks and drive it to Penamacor. Hassle-free is undoubtedly good, but expensive is less so; indeed, Shir felt that the good of hassle-free was outweighed by the bad of expensive, and so the kids decided to let him handle the whole process, instead of paying someone,

Unfortunately, because of Corona, the journey took longer than expected, but, eventually, Micha’el was notified that the container was at the docks in Lisbon, and they could start the process of releasing it. Since Shir is currently in Israel, it fell to Micha’el and Tslil to handle that process. This first involved registering with the shipping company as the people picking up the container. Micha’el submitted all the documentation, which was approved. The kids wisely decided that, rather than attempting the round trip in one day (a three-hour drive in each direction with who knew how many hours at the docks in the middle), they would book themselves into an airbnb in Sintra, a beautiful national park adjacent to Lisbon, and have a couple of days’ break.

Those of a nervous disposition should probably stop reading here.

The kids had been having some trouble with their car overheating, which had been fixed by their garage in Penamacor. We’re talking here about a car that has seen a lot of mileage, but that seems to be in pretty good shape for its age. Since our first car cost us £10 (the equivalent of about £130, or US $165, today), we have sympathy with their lifestyle choice. Our first car, incidentally, broke down frequently, but never more than half-a-mile from home, which, considering that we used it to travel 180 miles from South Wales to London several times, was remarkably generous of it.

Micha’el and Tslil decided to drive to Lisbon in the early evening, in the hope that Tao would sleep for most of the journey. However, along the way, the car started overheating, and they had to stop repeatedly and let it cool down before topping up the radiator. Their journey took seven hours, rather than the expected three, so that they arrived in the middle of the night, exhausted and very worried about how they were going to manage.

A search online revealed a garage a 7-minute drive from where they staying, with warm recommendations from several customers, and Micha’el drove the car over in the morning and managed to explain the problem to the mechanic, who agreed to take a look and then contact them so that they could decide on how to proceed. Micha’el then took the 40-minute walk back to their bnb.

Next stop was the port, where he learnt that, although they thought they had paid all the required fees, they had indeed paid the necessary taxes to the shipping company, but not the customs fees. Nobody had mentioned the customs to them because, as Israeli residents importing their personal and used possessions into Portugal, where they now resided, they were entitled to a customs waiver. However, in order to qualify for this waiver, they needed to have received a letter of authorisation from the Portuguese embassy in Tel Aviv that it was, indeed, the case that they were Israeli residents importing their personal and used possessions into Portugal. Nobody had mentioned this authorisation to them. (Speaking personally, this is the point at which I would have regretted not arranging shipment door to door.) Without the authorisation, they could not release the container from the port. Apart from the fact that this meant that their entire journey had been wasted, they were also in danger of incurring prohibitive storage charges while they sorted out the paperwork.

In the middle of all this, the garage mechanic phoned Micha’el to discuss the car. Now, I don’t know about you: I am told there are people who, while not themselves car mechanics, can understand car-mechanic speak. I’m not sure I believe that; in any event, I am not one of this super-breed. I certainly can’t understand a mechanic speaking to me in Hebrew – and that is after 33 years in Israel, and also regardless of the fact that much of Hebrew car-mechanic vocabulary is derived from English. (I believe this is a result of British mandatory army vehicle repair before the state was founded, when the Hebrew language was being dragged into the 20th Century.) I am, therefore, full of admiration for Micha’el, who was able, after less than a year in Portugal, to discuss car repairs with a mechanic, in Portuguese, over the phone.

In the event, the garage was able to carry out repairs, replace a few parts, and make the car roadworthy again, for less than the car had cost the kids originally! Their journey home from Lisbon was smooth and uneventful, and the car has not overheated at all since then. So, that was one good outcome.

Once home, the kids, and, independently, Shir in Israel, applied to the Portuguese Embassy, and, after some delay, Shir obtained the necessary authorisation. We still haven’t received the kids’, but that may be a reflection on the efficiency of the Maale Adumim postal service, rather than the Portuguese Embassy. Shir fedexed the original documents to the authorities in Lisbon, and, a week ago, the container was released. A couple of hours later, Micha’el sent us the message I started with today.

Sure enough, a little while later, the lorry arrived, with the container on its bed. The driver leapt cheerfully down from his cab, and asked: ‘So, where’s the crane?’, just as Micha’el was thinking: ‘So, where’s the crane?’. Micha’el pointed out that he had ordered and paid for a crane together with the lorry, and that the haulage company was supposed to provide it. After some hasty consultation, the hauliers agreed that it was their responsibility, a nearby 12-ton lifting crane rental company was found (no, I wouldn’t know where to look for one, either) and, in almost less time than it takes to tell, the kids had a container sitting on their land.

When Shir is next in Portugal, he will move the container to his own land. Meanwhile, the other family who took space have collected their boxes. Micha’el and Tslil have started taking their stuff, most of which they will transport back to the house, to use straight away (musical instruments, tools, clothes) or to store in the loft (most of the equipment whose purpose I know nothing about). The big furniture (their bed and a chest of drawers) they plan to keep in the container until their tipi is erected.

Incidentally, when I sent my notes to Micha’el, for him to confirm the sequence of these events, he added that there is a new and exciting development this week. Someone else in Castelo Branco apparently signed for the package containing all of the original documents they had been required to submit, and so it has not arrived. Micha’el is ‘trying to sort it out now’, so this horror story may well still have a twist or two left in it.

To learn how Micha’el and Tslil manage to stay sane through all this, view their latest YouTube video.

*If you didn’t have a Classical education, then, just this once, I’ll tell you that paene is Latin for almost. But please try to plug the gaps in your education before the next Latin pun comes along.

Every Problem is an Opportunity in Disguise

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I’m not a great fan of cracker-barrel philosophy, but…

One of the very few positives to come out of the coronavirus lockdown has been to see the way artists, both amateurs and professionals, have adapted to the completely new constraints imposed. It has been almost impossible to keep up with all the short videos circulating: orchestral instrumentalists, popular singers, members of ballet corps, performing in isolation and being post-edited together; lovers of musicals and Gilbert and Sullivan creating and performing corona-themed parodies; visual and verbal humour; lip-syncing of stand-up comedy routines (when did that become a thing?); and so on and (it sometimes seems) on and on and on.

And then there’s Staged.

For the benefit of those who don’t either live in the UK or have a way to access BBC iPlayer, and for whom this may have slipped under their radar, let me briefly explain. Simon Evans is an English comedian, who was due to start rehearsals for a production at the Chichester Festival this year…until corona. When the director suggested holding the rehearsals over Skype or Zoom, this sounded like a really bad idea to Evans, but, in a eureka moment, he realised it was a brilliant idea for a comedy drama. He and Phin Glynn, desperate to find creative work during lockdown, developed the idea. Evans recruited a couple of pretty big names in British theatre – David Tennant and Michael Sheen (who are apparently good friends in real life) and the result is a 6-part series of 15-minute episodes, following the story of Evans as director trying to guide his two leading actors, Tennant and Sheen, through Zoom rehearsals for a production of Six Characters in Search of an Author. All three play (slightly exaggerated versions of) themselves. It undoubtedly helps that both actors are married to female actors*, who also put in the odd appearance.

This is, quite simply, the laugh-out-loud funniest and sharpest humour I have seen on television for a long time. Tennant and Sheen (or Sheen and Tennant) are completely natural, and have a wonderful rapport. Indeed, Bernice and I argued about whether one scene in the final episode was rehearsed or improvised, because the response of all the cast to the lines is so authentic.**

I mention Staged only because it serves, I think, as a wonderful example of a truth about art. What initially looked like the constrictions of lockdown, preventing artists from breathing, turn out to be, rather, simply parameters. In the hands of a team of artists who are not intimidated by them, and who are prepared to explore the possibilities of this new situation, they can open up unexpected creative opportunities.

For example, with each actor’s face occupying exactly a half (or, when Evans is involved, a third) of the screen in close-up almost all the time, the focus is not on the speaker (with an occasional cutaway to the listener for a reaction), but, rather, all the actors are equal players all the time, whichever one of them is speaking at the moment. This means that the interplay and the relationship between them is always in focus. Again, the medium places tremendous importance on the facial gestures of the actors. Both of these actors, it has to be said, have very interesting faces and several months without a haircut means that their faces are interestingly framed by their hair. Finally, the contrast in the lifestyles of the actors is a constant, captured in the domestic background in front of which each of them appears. This is new, refreshing, exciting drama….and screamingly funny.

Every artist works within the limitations of the medium; the great artist makes a virtue of that necessity, and sees new possibilities within it.

There is, for me at least, a great thrill in admiring the technical skill of the artist. Alan Ayckbourn wrote a trilogy of plays, The Norman Conquests, which tell the story of a couple inviting four of their friends to stay with them at a country home for the weekend. Each of the three plays is set in a single area of the house – the dining room, the living room, the garden – at various times during the weekend, and to some extent the times overlap, so that if a scene in Table Manners starts at 6:00PM, and 45 minutes into the scene a character leaves the stage by walking through the door that leads to the living room, then in the play Living Together, in a scene which starts at 6:30PM, the same character will enter the stage by walking through the door from the dining room 15 minutes after the scene starts. Each play is written to stand independently, and each play does; however, the trilogy is ideally viewed as a unit, and can be viewed in any order, with no loss of impact.

Bernice and I watched it in the 1970s in Cardiff over a single weekend: Friday night; Saturday matinee; Saturday night. The production starred David Jason – then unknown but already a brilliant comic actor, and the weekend was a unique theatrical experience. As with many of Ayckbourn’s works, the technical constraints (in this case entirely self-imposed), far from holding the work back, send it soaring, and give it a very effective claustrophobic intensity. As the weekend unravels the audience revisits the scenes of disastrous events we have previously only heard about or seen the fallout from. These accumulating revisits create a sense of the intensity of the emotions closing in ever more stiflingly. (Like all the best Ayckbourn, the plays have no difficulty being simultaneously achingly funny and painfully sad.)

I have read that Ayckbourn wrote the trilogy in two weeks. While that seems to me to be a display of almost supernatural creative powers to rival Mozart’s, I can only assume that the rigid frame he had locked himself into allowed him to find relatively quickly the only way out.

And finally, m’lud, Exhibit C is a sad case of a square peg in a round hole: a stage production that was, I would argue, completely insensitive to the play it was presenting. Cast your mind back to the London theatre world of 1597. This is actually very easy, now that you can visit Shakespeare’s Globe on the south bank of the Thames in London. The first thing that struck me when we visited is that wherever you are in the audience, you are very close to the stage. This is a very different theatrical experience from the one in most of London’s theatres, especially older theatres where climbing to the upper balcony requires a Sherpa and an oxygen mask, and the view that awaits you is largely of the tops of the actors’ heads. Bernice and I once went up to London for the day and saw Frank Finlay in Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Anthony Sher in Singer (a powerful play inspired by the story of the slum landlord Peter Rachman). In both cases we stood behind the last row of seats in the upper balcony. I mention this only because the force of Sher’s performance hit us, even that far back, so powerfully that it was all we could do to remain standing.

However, that kind of acting, while brilliant in context, doesn’t work in the Globe, which calls for a more delicate touch. Shakespeare knew this, and he took full advantage of it in his writing. For example, when Iago moves to the front of the stage, so that you, in the audience, are closer to him than Othello is, at the back of the stage, you can easily accept that, while you can hear Iago’s aside, Othello cannot,

Another feature of the Globe is that it does not allow elaborate scenery. There are no wings to roll scene changes out of; no flies to drop sets from the space above the stage; no possibilities of lighting changes. This means that everything must be done through the poetry, as Shakespeare was well aware: indeed, in the Prologue to Henry V, he appealed to the audience’s imagination to supply scenery, accommodate changes of location, infer the passage of time:

Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass.

Nowhere does Shakespeare create magic from the technical limitations and intimacy of his stage more effectively than in Antony and Cleopatra, with its short scenes jumping repeatedly between the hedonism of Egypt and the harshness of Rome, and with its multiple scenes of intimate exchanges between just two characters. The National Theatre recently chose to broadcast, as part of its At Home series, the 2018 production directed by Simon Godwin and starring Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo. It may be that, on a traditional stage, in front of a large audience stretching a long way back, this production was as great as the critics indicated. However, the filming of a production, using close-up and sensitive microphones, unavoidably emphasises anything that is ‘big’ in the acting or speaking. As a result, on the screen, there was no sense of intimacy between Antony and Cleopatra: she in particular came across as raucous. This was a bad choice of production for NT to make. They do much better sticking with productions whose very character is large and unsubtle: One Man, Two Guvnors, for example.

A more fundamental criticism, and this is a criticism of the stage production itself, is that it used the full panoply of modern staging effects: a revolving stage alternated clunkily between the sunken pools of Egypt and the satellite-fed hi tech war room of Rome. There are no fewer than 42 scenes in Antony and Cleopatra, and a production that does not recognise that this calls for minimal sets and instantaneous, seamless transition between scenes is bound to be a leaden failure.

It turns out that, while Staged proves that every problem is, indeed, an opportunity in disguise, this particular Antony and Cleopatra showed that, equally, every opportunity can be a problem in disguise.

Judge for yourselves whether Micha’el and Tslil are unmasking the opportunities in their problems, by watching their latest YouTube video, with a guest appearance by their very own toddler.

*Sorry: there’s a cultural time lag between Britain and Israel. I know I’m no longer allowed to say ‘actresses’, but I haven’t yet absorbed the fact that I’m no longer allowed to say ‘female’.

**Having just watched an interview with T&S (S&T), I can confirm that there were improvised scenes; Bernice was, of course, right.

And for Those of You Watching in Black and White

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Bernice and I are currently enjoying watching Seven Worlds, One Planet – one of David Attenborough’s prestigious blockbuster series that highlights “the incredible rich and wonderful diversity of life found on our planet’s seven unique continents”. The series is certainly visually stunning, exploiting all of the technology available these days to a film crew. If much of television is ‘food porn’ and ‘real estate porn’ this is undoubtedly ‘fauna porn’.

However, I am cantankerous enough to have certain issues with the series. I’m not suggesting that, in light of the fact that Attenborough spent much of his early TV years presenting Zoo Quest,in which he traversed the globe in search of rare animals to hunt down, rip from their natural habitat and put behind bars, he should be ‘cancelled’ by environmentalists everywhere. My objections are, I hope, less totalitarian.

For starters, a series celebrating the diversity of life does itself no service by resorting to a rigid format, for all the world as if it were The Great British Bake-off or one of those makeover programmes – for clothes, cosmetics, interior design, garden design, it doesn’t really matter. We know that we are going to get, at some point, an amusing small animal going about its domestic business (courting and nest-building rituals are favourites), a large animal, sometimes basking, but always looking awesomely powerful, and a central, longer, set-piece of a lone animal or a pack hunting for prey, at first unsuccessfully, but eventually making a kill.

All of this will have often intrusive musical accompaniment, which, together with a somewhat arch commentary, will miss no opportunity to anthropomorphise and thereby, I would argue, demean the animals thus patronised. In addition, every episode will lead up to a conclusion that illustrates and bemoans the loss of natural habitat resulting from Man’s failure to steward his activity responsibly. In fairness, the series shows powerfully the inter-connectedness and delicate balance of the elements of an eco-system, and the often surprising and far-reaching effects of what may seem at first to be a trivial change. However, the message is not made more powerful by being hammered home in the exact same way in every episode.

As I watched Attenborough in his orange oilskin, with the drone-mounted camera slowly rising ever higher as it pulled back from close-up to reveal the puniness of this single human on a wide beach in front of a storm-tossed sea, my mind went back 47 years, to another man, perched this time on a hilltop, talking about the development of the human species. Let me explain how he got there.

In 1964, a third TV channel was launched in Britain, with the brilliantly inventive name of BBC2 (to distinguish it from the existing BBC channel, which was, in a similar stroke of genius, renamed BBC1). I hope you’re keeping up so far. BBC2 boasted a new technology, broadcasting not on 405 lines but on 625. This made it the obvious choice for introducing colour broadcasts, which were launched to coincide with Wimbledon 1967. The lush green of the grass, contrasting with the pastel summer shades of the spectators’ clothes and the pristine white of the players’ kit, made colour an instant success.

Another sport that looked better in colour, incidentally, was snooker, with its 8 different colours of balls against the green baize table. Of course, there was a considerable period when many viewers had not traded up to a colour set, and continued viewing in black-and-white, which led to the famous observation by an unfortunate commentator I alluded to in the title: ‘And, for those of you watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.’ I have always felt sorry for Ted Lowe, the commentator in question, because his comment was actually helpful. In black and white, the yellow and pink balls were very similar greys, whereas the green had its own distinct shade of grey. In addition, the green was, at the time, on its spot, and therefore very easily identified. But I digress – no surprises there!

The Controller of BBC2 at the time was a young fellow called David Attenborough; he was charged with devising programmes that would show to the greatest advantage this new technology, which was, for the moment, a unique selling point for BBC2. Unsurprisingly, the first choice of programme was a series celebrating the greatest works of Western art. I suspect that this series initially virtually wrote itself. Fly the team to the great European storehouses of art (the Vatican, Amsterdam, and so on), point the camera at the ceiling (Michelangelo’s The Creation of Man), or the wall (Vermeer, Girl with a Letter), and have a figure of appropriate gravitas and eloquence stand in front of the works and present them to the viewer. Kenneth Clark, art historian, museum director and broadcaster was an obvious choice. In the event, Clark opened up the series to be more wide-reaching, and visually more interesting, even, than originally planned. The 13-part series of 50-minute programmes, Civilisation, which traced the history of Western civilisation chronologically, was an instant and huge success, and the format was well and truly established.

With the American bicentennial looming up on the horizon, and with an eye on possible American sales, BBC2’s next blockbuster was America, a look at the history of that interesting nation, fronted by Alistair Cooke, a wonderful radio broadcaster, and an established figure on both sides of the pond. Making this 13-parter bought time to think about how to realise the next project. Everyone agreed that it should be the counterpart of Civilisation, but focussing on science, rather than the arts. This presented challenges: science is less obviously visually ravishing than the arts; it is abstract and theoretical rather than concrete; it is perceived as less accessible to the man in the street; its humanity is less obvious. In short, how do you tell the story of science in 13 bite-size full-colour chunks.

Enter Jacob Bronowski, a little, bespectacled, Polish Jew, with a receding hairline and windswept eyebrows. Well, that’s one way of describing him; here’s another. Having arrived in England as a child, he won a scholarship to study maths at Cambridge. He taught maths at university, then led the field of operations research during the Second World War, increasing the effectiveness of Allied bombing. After the war he headed the projects division of UNESCO. He worked for the National Coal Board in England, before becoming a resident fellow of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. When he wasn’t at his day job, he indulged his passions: for chess and for poetry. He was the author of several studies of the poetry of William Blake, as well as being a published poet himself. If it’s any consolation, I’m told he was a very bad cook.

And here’s another description: he was a brilliant, mesmerising, natural explicator and television broadcaster. With Bronowski at the helm, the 13-part series, with the evocative title The Ascent of Man, was screened in 1973 and immediately soared. I was absolutely hooked from the opening moments, and my wonderful wife, as my graduation gift in 1976, bought me the book of the TV series – first-hand – hardback, no less. (That was when I really knew she loved me.) We didn’t eat for a week, in order to pay for it, but it was well worth it. As I reread it now, I hear his distinctive voice, with its not-quite-native English accent, his soft but throaty r’s, his dramatic (sometimes almost flamboyant, but never less than gripping) pauses, his total grasp of narrative, of how to tell a story.

I remember the series for many, many things, but, above all, for a moment that genuinely shocked me in 1973. At the end of Episode 11, an episode entitled Knowledge and Certainty, Bronowski took us to Auschwitz, stood in front of a pool into which were flushed the ashes of countless Jews, and spoke about the Shoah. I cannot remember an earlier occasion in mainstream British culture when the Shoah was presented, and certainly not presented so starkly and so unsensationally. It is difficult now to remember a time before the Shoah was part of the general discourse: in Britain now, the Shoah has a place in the school syllabus; Valentines Park in Ilford, where I grew up, is now home to a Holocaust memorial. But 50 years ago, that was far from the case. The sequence at Auschwitz lasts less than four minutes, and I urge you to watch it here. David Attenborough, recalling the making of The Ascent of Man, described how Bronowski filmed the entire scene in one take, with no script.

That one scene gives you a taste of Bronowski’s manner, but it obviously fails to capture how the series grew, organically, to offer a coherent and cogent presentation of the development of civilisation from the perspective of science, rather than the arts. It certainly offered this layman viewer, and many, many others, some insight into the big questions of our existence, and even some possible answers.

You can find some, if not all, of the episodes of The Ascent of Man on YouTube. I have rewatched some extracts over the last couple of weeks, and, for once, I have been reassured to find that my memory has not been playing tricks on me. I did indeed live through a golden age of intelligent television, and Jacob Bronowski represents the pinnacle of that age.

And finally, our grandson may not yet hold the key to life, the universe, or even everything, but he does have the keys to the car!

Could Be Worse. Not Sure How, but it Could Be

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I shouldn’t be writing this post. I should be writing a completely different post. Oh, how I wish I were writing a completely different one! When we first came back from Portugal, in early March, we already had our next trip booked, flying out on 7 June and returning on 5 July. This would then have been, should have been, a light-hearted post, full of amusing accounts of how we flew to Tel Aviv, but our luggage preferred to take a short holiday in Buenos Aires, of how our seats were double-booked and we were bumped up to business class, of how bittersweet it is to leave our family in Penamacor and come back to our home, our family and our friends in Israel.

However, it will come as no surprise to anyone to learn that, once again, we might be pretty strong in the proposal department, but when it comes to disposal, there’s only one firm in town, and it certainly isn’t us.

So, I’m writing these words, just as I was last week, and the week before, and the week before that, and every week about as far back as I can remember, gazing out of our back window at the late afternoon skyline of Mount Scopus, and coming to the conclusion that this is the right time to address what appears to be a burning question.

We have started to venture out gingerly into society – here a conversation over the fence, there an hour or so with friends in the garden, each of us sitting in a separate corner, like prison guards overlooking the exercise yard. At some point in these encounters, the question is always asked: ‘So, any idea when you’ll be going off to Portugal again?’

It’s a fair question. It’s a very good question. It’s a question you might want to phone a friend about…and then ask the audience…and then go 50-50. I just wish I had a good answer.

For the first few weeks of lockdown, one of us thought there was still a chance that we would be able to use our booked tickets. The other one of us tried to cool that ardour, and to inject a shot of realism, a carefully regulated dose designed to take the edge off the optimism, without sending both of us into deep depression. To help you identify exactly which of us was which, let me just say this: If the Brownsteins decide to record a dramatised reading of The House at Pooh Corner, the casting director might well invite Bernice to play the part of Pooh or Piglet…but I will undoubtedly be typecast as Eeyore.

By mid-May, even Piglet had to admit that Eeyore was right, and so I went online to clarify what TAP Air Portugal’s refund policy was in our Corona world. The first thing I discovered was that TAP is a rarity in Portuguese cyberspace: their site’s home page sports a discreet Union Jack in the top right corner, with the magic two-letter combination EN alongside it. More remarkably, the English displayed is easily understandable, with not a single postilion in sight.

Even more remarkably, TAP has a very fair refund scheme in operation. Not, of course, a full cash refund: Eeyore certainly wasn’t expecting that ; even Piglet wasn’t expecting that. However, they did offer a voucher, valid for two years, redeemable against any flight to any destination, transferrable to a third party, and worth the full value of the sum originally paid, plus a supplement of up to 20% extra, if used to purchase a ticket that cost more than the original ticket. In other words, if I originally bought a ticket for $500, and then redeemed the voucher for a flight costing $600, the voucher would cover the entire cost of the new flight. Eeyore needed to sit down when he read that!

So, I filled in a ridiculously straightforward 6-question form and clicked Submit. I then had to repeat the process for Bernice’s ticket, since a separate voucher is issued for each ticket. Within minutes, a confirmation email, in English(!) arrived in my Inbox, with a reassuringly complex 15-character identifying code, assuring me that I would soon be receiving the voucher by email. Within minutes, a second confirmation email, with an equally reassuringly complex, but subtly different, 15-character identifying code arrived, assuring Bernice that….

My inner Eeyore remained sceptical, but, sure enough, three days later, two emails arrived, one for myself, the other for Bernice, enclosing our vouchers, with even more reassuringly complex 20-character identifying codes.

And then, later the same day, two more emails arrived, one for myself, the other for Bernice, enclosing a second pair of vouchers with equally reassuring but completely different 20-character codes.

I waited, and waited, but no further vouchers arrived. Nevertheless, the vouchers we had already received represented a 140% return on our investment in just 6 months; I was sorely tempted to reinvest immediately in TAP tickets, and then request a refund, until I realised that, of course, the refund offer did not apply to tickets booked later than mid-March.

Four weeks later, a further pair of emails arrived. (TAP write to me more often than any of my other friends.) These emails pointed out, politely but firmly, that Por lapso, foram emitidos dois vouchers (Through a lapse, there have been emitted two vouchers), informed me which of the vouchers had been cancelled and which were still valid, and apologised for any inconvenience caused.

I haven’t heard from them since then…I do hope it wasn’t something I said.

So, to return to the burning question. When we do decide to fly, it will make sense to fly TAP, so that we can redeem our vouchers. Of course, if we want to fly direct, we only have two options: TAP and El Al. You may remember that we (and especially Piglet) definitely do want to fly direct – indeed, interestingly, when we flew with a layover in Vienna, I briefly became Piglet and Bernice was Eeyore. (Rather like Gielgud and Olivier in Romeo and Juliet, or Cumberbatch and Miller in Frankenstein.) Of course, in Vienna, Piglet’s optimism proved well-founded, just as, in the current situation, Eeyore’s pessimism is, sadly, proving equally well-founded.

TAP and El Al. Currently, El Al is in dispute with its pilots, and has recalled all of its fleet to Tel Aviv and grounded all flights – passenger and cargo. The greatest likelihood is that El Al will need a substantial Government bailout to continue operating. Meanwhile, in mid-April, TAP requested a Government bailout, cut its weekly flights by 98% and put 90% of its employees on furlough. If we want to fly direct from Tel Aviv, our best plan at the moment looks like going to the Mursi in Ethiopia for some serious ear-lobe stretching and then finding a magic feather.

There may be other options. A week or so ago, it looked as though Israel would be signing an open skies agreement with its East Mediterranean partners – Greece and Cyprus. That would have meant Aegean Air flights from Tel Aviv to Athens, with the possibility of a second leg from Athens to Lisbon. However, a moment’s thought led to the realisation that the flight from Tel Aviv would be full of Israeli 18–25s, enjoying their first real taste of freedom in four months, and heading for a drink- drug- and ‘social-activity’-packed two weeks on the Greek islands. If I’m going to die, I can think of dozens of methods preferable to contracting Covid-19 while I’m locked in a tube hurtling 35,000 feet above the Mediterranean at 900 mph, surrounded by people who, even pre-pandemic, I tried to avoid eating in the same restaurant as. (Winston Churchill and I are happy with that ‘as’ just where it is, thank you very much!)

Now, of course, as Israel’s numbers of new infections soar onwards and upwards, and as even Portugal is acquiring a spike, a trip seems further away than ever. Fortunately, WhatsApp offers us a substitute: a very poor second, but infinitely better than what we could offer our parents, in 1986, when we took our almost-three-year-old Esther away. Those were the days of queuing at the Jerusalem Central Post Office to book an international phone call to London, of airmail letters and aerogrammes, and of an annual two-week visit by grandparents. In contrast, we have a long WhatsApp video call with the kids every week, and now that Tao is walking, understanding, and interacting more every time we speak, the call is sheer joy. At the same time, of course, it is very frustrating, as we watch how far he has progressed since we last saw him in March, and realise how much we are missing. Still, we are learning to be very grateful for what we have: with a happy, healthy, bright, inquisitive 15-month-old grandson in one pan of the scales, we know we really have no cause for complaint.

You can see what I’m talking about in the kids’ youtube video from last week, co-presented by Micha’el and Tao.

And finally, this week, I apologise for the bleakness of this week’s title: Could be worse. Not sure how, but it could be. It honestly doesn’t reflect how I feel: I am, remember, one of those lucky ones whose natural tendency towards social distancing has suddenly become public-spirited. It’s just that I wanted to begin with a quote from Eeyore, and I think that is the Eeyoriest. If you want something a tad more upbeat, he also said: The nicest thing about the rain is that it always stops. Eventually.

So: stay dry, stay safe, stay well, stay sane….and stay reading!