Monthly Archives: October 2020

Quercus Suber and the Screwtop

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All this time we’ve been together and we haven’t once talked about cork. Can you believe it? No, I can’t either. The truth is, I planned to write about cork 11 months ago, and then something else popped into my head and drove it out. I really must buy a larger-capacity memory stick.

I’ve been pulling corks out of wine bottles for the last half-century, without giving a moment’s thought to the interesting questions: Why do they use cork to seal wine bottles? Where does the cork come from?

I’m guessing you erudite lot don’t think cork is off-topic; just in case you do, let me tell you that Portugal is the world’s largest producer of cork, being responsible for 49.5% of annual production worldwide. Another 30.5% comes from Spain, and the remaining 20% comes from other European and North African countries in the western half of the Mediterranean basin, whose temperate climate is ideal for these trees.

You don’t have to be in Portugal long to discover the cork trees, or cork oaks, as they are properly known, or quercus suber (which is ‘cork oak’ in Latin and therefore posher), or, in Portuguese, sobreiro. Although the main concentration is in the South, the trees are cultivated as far north as Penamacor, where they can easily be spotted in the mixed-tree forest. 25% of Portugal’s total forest area consists of cork trees.

In the south, over a million hectares are covered by the montado system, an ecologically balanced multi-functional agro-silvo-pastoral system, which has existed for over 1300 years; during all that time, the oak trees have been protected by law, and a Government permit is needed to fell any cork oak.

This three-function ecology, supporting agricultural crops, fruit-bearing trees (the oaks’ acorns) and also grazing land, ensures the continued viability of the soil, acts as a barrier to the desertification encroaching from the south, and produces over a billion dollars in export value of natural and agglomerated cork, making cork Portugal’s sixth most valuable export.

Being an evergreen, the cork oak also photosynthesises throughout the year, and captures an estimated 73 tonnes of carbon dioxide for every tonne of cork harvested. As if that were not enough, the cork forests provide a habitat for more than 130 different species of vertebrates and about 95% of all land mammals in Portugal, including the Iberian lynx that I encountered, stuffed, in Penamacor’s museum.  

As a result of all this, the montados are recognized as one of the 36 biodiversity hotspots in the world and have UNESCO-protected status. In addition, the cork oak was officially designated Portugal’s national tree in 2011.

There are two final environmental boxes that cork ticks.

The harvested cork retains the ability to absorb carbon dioxide, so your unvarnished cork noticeboard is actually helping the planet.

Because of its cell structure, cork does not burn easily. In addition, it produces no flame. It is, therefore, a very good fire retardant, which, in Portugal, is a significant advantage. You may remember I wrote many months ago about Portugal’s recent spate of forest fires.

Now, I’m the kind of person who can recognize a Christmas tree, even without fairy lights (although I can’t tell my spruce from my pine), a horse-chestnut (after a youth heavily invested in conkers), an olive (you can’t walk 50 yards in Maale Adumim without tripping over the roots of an olive tree), a loquat (we have one in our garden) and a cypress (we used to have one in our garden till it started encroaching on the flight-path of passing planes)….and…and…and that’s about it. However, I quickly learnt to recognize the cork trees around Penamacor, at least the mature ones, because of the extraordinary nature of the tree and the way the cork is harvested.

Cork is basically an outer bark of the tree. It can be stripped away, leaving the inner bark, without damaging the tree, and the tree then produces new cork, growing a new outer skin. The stripping of the cork is strictly regulated by law; only a mature tree (at least 25 years old) can be stripped; the width of the band stripped from around the tree cannot be more than three times the diameter of the tree; a tree cannot be stripped more often than once every nine years.

Since the trees have a lifespan of under 200 years, on average a tree will be stripped 17 times in its lifetime. The first and second strippings of virgin cork do not have a sufficiently regular structure, and are too hard, to be used for bottle corks. They instead are used for tiling and decorative items.

Let me illustrate how you can (at least, how I) identify a cork oak tree; it’s the one showing a lot of leg. The number that you can see on the tree in the foreground records the year in which the cork was stripped. Every year, one ninth of the trees are stripped, and this tree is from the last year of the nine-year cycle. (If you stand close, you can almost hear it shouting: ‘ I am not a number; I am a free tree’.)

So that’s the ‘Where from’; what about the ‘Why’?

Cork has a honeycomb cell structure which gives it remarkable insulating properties.  It’s flexible, compressible and elastic as well as lightweight, impermeable, durable and hypoallergenic. All of this makes it an ideal material for sealing a bottle of wine. And yet….

For white wines, and other wines designed to be drunk young, a completely airtight seal is ideal. This can be provided by an aluminium cap (screwtop). To the best of my understanding, if you keep your white wine for any length of time before opening, a screwtop might be the most reliable way of retaining the full flavour of the wine.

However, many reds are bottled in the expectation that they will mature in the bottle, and they are only ready to drink some time later, and may indeed reach their prime several years later. For this maturation in the bottle to occur, the wine needs to be exposed to some air…but not too much. If the right cork (and I believe this is a function of the exact degree of elasticity and compressibility of the cork, the tightness of the honeycomb ‘weave’) is married to the right wine, then natural cork does a better job than any other material of helping the wine achieve its full flavour.

The big disadvantage of cork is that it can (in a small percentage of cases) taint the wine, so that the wine becomes ‘corked’. How it does that is interesting. Cork, like any wood material, attracts fungal micro-organisms. If the cork has been exposed to certain chlorinated compounds (sometimes used in pesticides), these compounds can combine with the fungal micro-organisms to create TCA, which can be retained in the cork and later dissolved into the wine. While completely harmless and odourless in itself, this TCA can then distort the way our brain perceives smell, and make the wine taste, to us, like mouldy newspaper or wet dog. ‘I’m picking up notes of underripe strawberry and previously flooded basement.’ Remarkably, some people can detect TCA at one part per trillion, which is the equivalent of one thousandth of a teaspoon in an Olympic swimming pool.

However, just as chemistry created this problem, chemistry can resolve it. If you open a bottle at home and find it corked, pour the wine into a bowl lined with cling film. Leave for a few minutes while the non-polar TCA molecules are drawn to the chemically-similar plastic. Decant the wine from the bowl and you will find the essence of soggy doggy gone. (In a restaurant, of course, you simply summon the sommelier and inform him that the wine is corked. If the restaurant does not have a sommelier, you call over the waiter and tell him it stinks.)

Synthetic ‘corks’ avoid this problem, but do not have the same subtly imperfect hermeticity, and therefore cannot be matched as well with great reds.

So, that’s more than you may have wanted to know about cork.

There’s just one more piece of business today. A couple of weeks ago, some of you were impressed by Tao’s skills at breaking into kitchen cabinets. You will be interested to know that he has, since then, upped his game considerably.

To forestall any comments:

  1. Tao is entirely self-taught; he learnt this skill purely through observation.
  2. There are no caustic products in that cupboard. The washing powder and other products are home-made and not hazardous.

Nevertheless, I think we’ll be returning those child-proof locks and asking for our money back.

There’s Old….and Then There’s O-o-o-ld

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You find me in a dilemma. In recent months, I have, I hope, served well those of my readers who are happy to follow me along any whimsical byway. However, those who demand that I give at least a passing nod to my ostensible subject – Portugal (as is more than suggested by the blog’s witty title of Penamacorrespondent) – are, by this stage, probably feeling cheated. What am I to do?

My fund of anecdotes about personal encounters with Portugal is exhausted; until Bernice and I manage to get there again, I have only two choices. I can make stuff up (tempting, but rather risky, having already learnt the hard way what an erudite lot you are), or I can Google. So, this week’s post comes to you freshly but shamelessly milked from the internet; it will, of course, be filtered through the distorting lens of my particular and peculiar perspective.

Today’s basic fact, then, is that Portugal is old. I realise that this bald statement needs a little elaboration and context, so let’s talk about Montreal. When I started working as a technical writer, my first business trip abroad was to Montreal. When I mentioned this to friends and work colleagues, all the North Americans assured me that I would love Montreal because it was so old.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, and I certainly hadn’t thought this through, but, when I had a chance to look around the city a little, it wasn’t quite what I had been led to expect. There were a couple of charming corners, but it was mostly just a modern city. It was only when I had made several further trips across the Atlantic, and seen St Louis, Dallas, Seattle, Atlanta, and other cities, that I understood. For a North American city, Montreal is indeed unusually old. However, for a European who knows London, Paris or Budapest, Venice, Florence or Rome, Montreal is nothing very special. There’s old, and then there’s o-o-o-ld.

Since I count some ex-Montrealers (by birth or adoption) among my regular readers, I should hastily add that, over a number of later trips, I grew very fond of the city, resenting only the fact that on my winter trips (and, let’s face it, most trips to Montreal are winter trips, whenever you go), my eyebrows tended to freeze up.

It strikes me that different countries, different cities, wear their age differently. Almost all of my travel has been on business, to major cities, and my opportunities to explore have usually been restricted to one Sunday, or sometimes just one evening. This means that I have a snapshot of each city. Let me share some of those subjective, undoubtedly extremely incomplete, snapshots with you, and see how many other readers I can antagonize.

First, the difference between Athens and Rome. Athens was, for me, an unexceptional, shabby city, with rundown neighbourhoods apparently inhabited by men in vests and stray dogs. The Acropolis feels completely divorced from the city. However, I must say that, even though when I climbed it I discovered the Parthenon clad, mid-renovation, in scaffolding, I still found it to be a magical place that transported me back two and a half millenia, and allowed me to completely forget the city beneath.

On the other hand, the thread of Rome’s history is woven into the very fabric of the modern city. If you walk the city at night, every time you turn a corner you discover another church, or fountain, or ruin, stunningly but tastefully lit; you have a sense of a beautiful city that had a continuous and long-running historical importance.

Then there is Dublin, where you find isolated pockets of Georgian architectural splendour, single magnificent buildings or entire elegant streets: all memorials to the brief period at the end of the 18th Century when Ireland enjoyed prosperity. Of the centuries of poverty and obscurity on either side of that brief period, nothing much remains. From 1800, the city appears to have leapt to the 1990s, and a brief period of EU prosperity and expansion.

Of course, there is also London, where there are a mere handful of national treasures from before the Great Fire of 1666 – including the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Hall, and Guildhall – but a wealth of glorious architecture from every period since 1666, starting with Wren’s churches. There are streets in Central London that you can walk down and view fine examples of architecture from every century from the 17th to the 21st. Whether you regard that as a ghastly mishmash or a glorious riotous celebration is a matter of taste.

Which brings me to Jerusalem, and Israel in general. London’s divider, 1666, is a very thin line; Israel’s is a great swathe. In Israel, if you find anything more than 120 years old, it will almost certainly be more than 2000 years old. The presence of the distant past is inescapable. Scarcely can a road be laid or an underground carpark built without some archaeological find being uncovered. Just in the last few weeks, a prehistoric copperworks has been unearthed, which may contain the earliest known example of a smelting furnace in the world. So far as distinctive city architecture is concerned, Israel’s World Heritage masterpiece is the Bauhaus architecture of Tel Aviv, Israel’s first modern city.

Ah! I was supposed to be writing about Portugal, wasn’t I?

While Portugal cannot compete with Rome, or Jerusalem, it is old. As you explore its towns and cities, you can see buildings, intact or in ruins, that reflect the centuries of its history. As I have written earlier, Penamacor itself shows evidence of the last 900 years of occupation. Indeed, there is an important archaeological dig going on there at the moment.

Portugal is the oldest nation-state in Europe, in the sense that it has had the same borders since 1139, when Alfonso Henriques was proclaimed the first King of Portugal. England could have been a contender for this title; sadly it has been, in contrast to Portugal, unable to sit still over the last 400 years; instead it has been fiddling around, adding Wales and Scotland here, Ireland there, and then losing most of Ireland again. Throughout all of these upheavals, Portugal has remained constant and unchanging.

When you’ve been around that long, you acquire some other age records along the way. The English first gave military aid to Portugal in 1147, during the Siege of Lisbon, which ended with Portugal taking Lisbon from the Moors. After thinking about it for over 200 years, the two countries eventually signed the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance in 1373. Since then, they have been coming to each other’s aid against such common enemies as Spain, France and Germany. Even in the Second World War, when Portugal carefully maintained neutrality, it offered significant humanitarian assistance to Allied civilians and some logistic assistance to Allied military forces. The Alliance still stands, and is the oldest extant diplomatic alliance in the world.

Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon is the oldest bookstore in the world. It has been trading since 1732 (beating the Moravian Bookshop in Pennsylvania by 13 years). Of course, Bertrand has not been in the same premises all that time: It was forced to move in the aftermath of a massive earthquake, and has only been in its current premises since 1755.

And, finally, Portugal was the world’s first genuinely global empire. In 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas gave Portugal the eastern half of the New World, including Brazil and parts of Africa and Asia. Portugal’s empire actually lasted from 1415, when Cueta, a port on the Northern coast of Morocco, was captured, until 1999, when Macau was handed over to China.

The more I read about Portugal, the more it seems to have in common with Britain. There’s even the explanation of how Portuguese Jewish exiles brought fried fish to England (via Holland). The breadcrumb batter served to make palatable the fish that was fried on Friday to be eaten cold on shabbat.

The Doting Grandfather

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You can’t say I’m not giving you fair warning this week, with that heading.

One of the things on which Bernice and I agree to differ is competitiveness. She used to remonstrate: ‘It’s only a game!’, until she realized that I had no understanding of what the word ‘only’ meant in that sentence. In the early years of our marriage, when we had no children and boundless energy (and I had two working hips), we used to play badminton regularly. However, it was never an entirely satisfying experience for either of us, because I couldn’t ‘enjoy’ the game in the way she wanted, and she couldn’t take the game as seriously as I wanted.

Those of you who don’t hail from Britain may be unfamiliar with the observation of Bill Shankly, a very successful football (soccer) managers of the 1960s, who said (or, my research suggests, didn’t exactly say, but it’s a great quote, genuine or not): ‘Some people say that football’s a matter of life and death, but it’s much more important than that.’ Well, I don’t actually agree about football, which has always left me cold, but I applaud the sentiment as applied to competitive sport in general, and, indeed, competition of any kind.

One measure of the magnitude of Bernice’s devotion to family is the fact that, after both of our kids had inherited my competitive gene (‘I’m more competitive than you!’ ‘No, you’re not! I’m much more competitive than you!’), she participated with scarcely a word of complaint in years and years of board games, charades and trivia quizzes. Indeed, even through those stormy teenage years (mine lasted until well into my forties), we were always the family that would play together to stay together.

I’ve always had a fairly good general knowledge, or at least I did have until I put it down somewhere, and now for the life of me I can’t remember where. I’ve also always been interested in finding out the answers to things I didn’t know, or couldn’t remember. These days, to do that all you need is an internet connection and a nose for distinguishing between fake news and fact; where (and when) I come from, you needed a good reference library.

Of course, I realise now that distortion, misrepresentation, and pure invention did not start with the internet. I was for several years the proud owner of a handsome volume entitled The Commonwealth Annual 1963, full of informative articles about the far-flung islands of civilization that Britain had established among the barabarians. When, a few years ago, I revisited this book for the first time in 40 years, I turned into the deeply ashamed owner of it, with its colonial condescension and cancelling of indigenous culture…and then I binned it.

Fortunately, for us the importance of a good reference library has not been completely eclipsed by Google. If you are Shabbat-observant, then none of those thorny questions that arise over the Shabbat dinner table can be resolved on the spot online. Your only options are to wait until after Shabbat (and you probably don’t need me to tell you that the challenge then is to remember what the hell it was that you didn’t know six hours previously) or to refer to your reference library in real time. Among my favourite volumes in our particular library is Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, whose every entry is a miniature enlightenment. Here’s the entry on tawdry, for example:

A corruption of St Audrey. At the annual fair of St Audrey, in the Isle of Ely, cheap jewellery and showy lace called St Audrey’s lace was sold; hence tawdry, which is applied to anything gaudy, in bad taste, and of little value.

Many’s the time that I’ve been able to satisfy our curiosity as to the origin of, say, raining cats and dogs, which, by the way, has nothing to do with household pets being washed out of their beds in the thatched eaves of a medieval dwelling.

Let me attempt to steer this ramshackle carriage back towards my intended subject. I remember Micha’el telling me a few years ago that he still remembered the shock he felt when he first discovered that I didn’t know everything. Knowing me, I would have expected that to be a humiliating moment for me. And yet, it was a moment that gave me immense pleasure: recognizing that your parents don’t know everything is an important step on a child’s journey to autonomy.

In a similar vein, I fought as hard as I could to win any game I played with the children; nobody could ever accuse me of throwing a match in order to let my kids feel good. What that meant, and what I wanted it to mean, was that when they did beat me for the first time, at tennis, or chess, or snakes and ladders, or uno, they knew that they had beaten me on equal terms. These are the only contests where I have accepted defeat with equanimity, and even delight. To be outstripped by your children, it seems to me, is one of the great pleasures of parenthood.

These days, of course, I have long since ceased to be a worthy opponent: here I am, a physical wreck, whose knowledge of popular culture ended in the early 1980s, and whose grasp of academic subjects ended much earlier. Good grief: the school I went to didn’t even teach biology; the only ‘respectable’ sciences were physics and chemistry. These days, I know that Micha’el’s grasp of quantum mechanics far outstrips mine. (To be honest, I don’t actually have a grasp of quantum mechanics.) We knew Esther had left us behind when she started her master’s in Glocal Development, and we gently told her there was no such word as glocal.

However (and here we reach today’s subject), I had thought I would have a bit of time before I needed to be worried about being outsmarted by Tao. Our grandson is, after all, not quite 19 months old. And yet…

For Bernice and I, the highlight of our week is a video chat via WhatsApp with the kids every Thursday. As well as catching up with any news, it also gives us a chance to spend time with Tao. In the last few months, his engagement has grown, and he is now a very active, and pro-active, participant in the conversation, even though he is not at all verbal: vocal, yes, with a variety of animal sounds and a few sounds of letters, but, for the moment, he substitutes grunts for words.

He also has a limited repertoire of songs of which he is excessively fond. On Thursday, almost as soon as we started our chat, he ‘said’: ‘I wonder if you would mind singing for me: The wheels on the bus.’ Rather than me trying to describe just how he conveyed that message, Tao kindly agreed to demonstrate for you.

Just in case this is a song that has slipped under your radar, its primary thrust is: The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. The wheels on the bus go round…’You get the idea!

Of course, like the doting grandparents we are, we obliged. This was doubly satisfying. Not only did Tao reward us with a generous round of applause when we finished, but we also earned Micha’el’s gratitude, since every time we sing it is one less time that he has to sing it that day.

We carried on our conversation and, a couple of minutes later, Tao rolled his arms again to indicate that he would like a reprise. How could we say no?

When he asked for a fourth time, I decided to apply some of that clever child psychology that I have learnt from my wife, who has a T-shirt with the totally accurate slogan: I’m a kindergarten teacher. What’s your superpower? I ignored his hand signals, and asked him whether he would like to show us a book or a toy. As he instantly turned and trotted off to his book cupboard, I allowed myself a moment of self-satisfaction. I have spent the last 25 or so years behaving like a matchbox – Keep away from small children – and here I was managing Tao like a pro.

When Tao came back and placed himself in front of the screen again, he had one of his favourite books, a Hebrew word and picture book. Without hesitation, he turned to the page with a picture of a lorry (truck), and pointed, pointedly, to the wheels. There I was, sucker-punched by a child just over a year and a half old; paradoxically, I couldn’t have felt prouder. Needless to say, Bernice and I treated him to a 5-star rendition, with 4 verses and harmonies, which, in fairness to Tao, earned us a big smile and another generous round of applause.

Grandparenthood: the dote to which there is no known antidote.

Temporarily Permanent or Permanently Temporary?

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I had intended to try to dredge up online something illuminating to say about Portugal, to satisfy those of you who claim to find an outsider’s view of Portugal more interesting than an insider’s view of my mind. However….

I am sitting writing this in my sukkah. If I’ve lost you already (my readership being to some extent heterogeneous), then you can get a quick background on the sukkah by reading the first four paragraphs here.

It’s noon on Sunday, so I’m feeling much less pressured than last week, and anyway sitting out under my schach and decorations feels very relaxing. Mind you, since many of my weeks at the moment consist of sitting outside doing very little it’s not easy to understand why this feels different. To explain why, let me tell you the history of our sukkot.

For our first year in Israel, we used the wood of our shipping crate to construct a sukkah on the balcony of our apartment on the absorption centre.

When we moved to a ground-floor apartment in Jerusalem, we bought a metal-frame, material-wall sukkah, three metres by two, which we erected on the grassed area outside our salon window. Until we put in French windows, accessing the sukkah involved negotiating kitchen steps placed on each side of the salon window, but it was all good fun…and we were much younger then.

Mind you, climbing through a modest salon window while holding a pot of hot soup or a tray of stuffed vegetables was a skill you had to start practising around four weeks before in order to be able to carry it off with aplomb on the night itself, all the while with a white linen serviette draped over your left forearm.

Now, in Maale Adumim, we are blessed with a backyard that is about five metres by four, walled on all four sides; it is therefore fairly well protected from the wind and outside noise. We are further blessed with a climate that allows us to eat outside for most of the year: in summer, breakfast and dinner; for some of the rest of the year, lunch.

Not long after we moved to Maale Adumim, we acquired a second sukkah, identical to the first. I then bought a couple of T-junction uprights, which enabled us to combine the two into a single four-metre-by-three sukkah, which fitted our backyard very nicely. In the years after the kids left home, erecting the sukkah became more of a challenge with each passing year, involving as it did bringing heavy rolls of bamboo schach down from Micha’el’s bedroom, and also taking the sukkah and schach-retaining planks down from their chest-high cradle in the backyard, then, after Sukkot, performing a weightlifting clean and aborted jerk to get them back into the cradle.

And so, two summers ago, when we were having the backyard turned into more of a garden, we decided to install a pergola. Not only would this give us much needed shade that would significantly extend the hours we could spend outside, but it could also double as a sukkah, solving the problem of what we were going to do when, at some point in the next fifty years, erecting a frame sukkah became too much for me.

The pergola extends over all but a metre-wide strip of the far end of the backyward; the existing walls act as the minimum three walls required for a kosher sukkah, and the wooden slats of the pergola act as schach. As an added bonus, there are no material walls blocking the light from the garden, so I now no longer need to rig up cables for lighting inside the sukkah.

These days, ‘building a sukkah’ means, for me, going up a ladder, lifting and replacing one slat from each row of slats across the entire width of the sukkah. This year, that took me 4 minutes, not counting decorating the sukkah.

Except, of course, that you have to count the decorating. Let me tell you about our decorations. Most of our friends decorate their sukkah modestly, showing impeccable taste. We have always favoured a style of decoration that I like to think of as Rococo-Gaudi. This is largely attributable to two of Bernice’s trademark characteristics. She is a sentimentalist hoarder when it comes to the children’s artwork, and she adores anything like the Blackpool illuminations. As a result, when the kids were young and came home from kindergarten every year with another one or more artwork decorations for the sukkah, these had to be added to our existing stock. Every year we would also buy another paper ball, or pomegranate, or other bauble.

I was once on business in Atlanta in early December, and found, in a Walmart, coloured, flashing Christmas lights. As I took them to the cash desk, an assistant manager came over to me, leant in, and said quietly: ‘Perfect for the sukkah.’ When I presented them to Bernice on my return home, her eyes lit up more brightly than the strings of bulbs.

One Sukkot in Jerusalem, a freak storm on the first night completely soaked our sukkah, and quite a lot of the kids’ artwork was lost. (It’s fair to say that this upset some of us less than others.) Since then, our decorations have been a little more sparse, but the untrained eye would probably not detect the difference.

A few years ago, Bernice finally allowed some further rationalization, and we put aside a lot of the decorations. However, we still have more than enough, and, to be honest, I am glad that we do. Now that we have a pergola, the only thing that distinguishes Sukkot – that makes our sukkah different from our pergola – is the decorations. We come into Sukkot having eaten under the pergola all summer; we need the decorations to make this week special.

Putting the decorations up under the pergola has presented a new challenge. We like to have paper chains and rows of small flags spanning the sukkah. I have drilled hooks into the walls at just over two metres above the ground, so that I can easily hook on the decoration strings while standing on a kitchen stool. However, with that long a span, the decorations sag in the middle. Since our pergola roof is unusually high, at 3.2 metres, I cannot attach decorations directly to the roof.

This year, I came up with a typically Heath Robinson (Rube Goldberg) solution. I tied two equal lengths of nylon fishing line onto a metal washer, which I then ‘cast’ out of an upstairs window so that it landed on the roof of the pergola close to the centre. I then climbed a ladder, screwed an eye into the central roof strut in the centre, retrieved the nylon lines, untied them from the washer, threaded them through the eye and reattached them to the washer. With the line fully extended, it dangled at an accessible height above the ground. As I put up each span of decorations, I threaded it through this loop. When all was finished, I went back upstairs and reeled in the line, until the washer reached the eye, through which it was unable to pass.

At the end of sukkot, I will let down the line, unthread the decorations, and reel the line in again, so that, for all of the rest of the year, there will be a small eye and washer on the underside of the pergola roof, which would be unnoticed by anyone if I could only resist the temptation to point them out in order to demonstrate how clever I am. The photo gives you an idea of the final effect, and also gives you a view of Micha’el’s 28-year-old, rain-damaged, hand-drawn Israeli flags.

All of which explains, I hope, why I am unsure whether to regard our pergola-sukkah as permanently temporary or temporarily permanent.

Speaking of temporary permanence, Micha’el and Tslil have posted a new video on their YouTube channel documenting the erection of their tipi (which, when I was at school, was called a teepee). You may want to view, like, comment, share, subscribe, or all of the above.

Time for a meanwhile, I think. Looks like by this time next year Tao will be ready to go up the ladder for me, although I may suggest to him that he try it without holding a corn cracker.