For those of you planning to come on aliya, let me offer one observation. The speed and thoroughness of your klita (absorption, acclimation) will depend on two things above all. The first is very general. The world is divided into two groups of people: those who, when a day has gone badly, come home and laugh with their partner or friends about it, and those who, when a day has gone badly, come home and cry with their partner or friends about it.

For an oleh, in many respects things have improved greatly in Israel, since the early 50s, and even since the mid-80s, when we arrived. Nevertheless, bureaucracy is still bureaucracy, and its impenetrability for Anglos has not been helped by the fact that English has had to cede some of its place in Israeli officialdom to Russian, Amharic, and, lately, French.

So, any oleh has to be very prepared for frustrations and setbacks. The best you can do is take comfort from the fact that you are accumulating stories with which you will be able to bore your grandchildren.

It is, of course, not easy to change your character. If you are a weeper or ranter, then developing a zen approach to the vagaries of aliya and klita is not easy. In contrast, the second factor on which a successful aliya depends is much easier to control. It all depends on a five-step plan that couldn’t be simpler.

1. If you are married to a fellow English speaker, then, as soon as you come on aliya, get a divorce.
2. Start mixing with, and dating, native Israelis, preferably ones who (or at least whose family) do not speak English.
3. Get married and have children, with whom you speak Hebrew, as soon as possible.
4. Meanwhile, find a job in an exclusively Hebrew-speaking environment.
5. Lastly, find all of your friends from within the non-Anglophone community.

In this way, you will be well on the road to mastery in Hebrew, or at least to a level of fluency in Hebrew from which you can see that most of the population doesn’t speak Hebrew any better than you do.

Now, I must add a disclaimer here. I can’t actually guarantee from personal experience that this method works. What I can state, categorically, is that if there is not a single one of these five steps that you manage to nail, your Hebrew will be embarrassingly weak.

‘Embarrassingly’ is, of course, a relative term. Some of our Anglo friends think that my Hebrew is pretty good. I am reminded of the joke about the little old Jewish man (these used to be jokes about someone other than myself) who comes to his wife sporting a smart cap, edged with brocade, and with the word ‘Captain’ emblazoned across the peak. “So, Sadie, what do you think?”, he says, to which his wife replies: “Morry, by me you’re a captain, and by you you’re a captain, but by a captain are you a captain?”

I freely admit that my ambitions in Hebrew are very….ambitious. (I hesitated there about whether to write ‘were ambitious’, but I’m not too old to harbour, indeed nurture, unfulfilled ambitions). I want to have the same command of Hebrew that I have of English (even though I realise that is, at this stage, less an ambition than a delusion). We have friends who came on aliya 10 or 15 years earlier than we did, who followed every one of the five steps above, and, as a consequence, who have an enviable command of Hebrew.

I admit that my Hebrew is not bad. I had a couple of head starts. First of all, a decade in Hebrew classes three times a week, and a childhood of going to synagogue on shabbat, and actually praying much of the time, meant that I had a sound basis in reading, writing and grammar.

Next, I spent a ‘gap’ year in Israel that included three daily hours of intensive Hebrew, six days a week, for five months. In addition, while visiting Bernice’s sister Sue and her family in Israel in 1985, we decided to come on aliya the following year and I started preparations to revive the Sleeping Beauty of my Hebrew.

In preparation, I took home with me 3 weeks’ copies of the Shabbat supplement of the popular newspaper Yediot Acharonot, and a novel in Hebrew. I read and reread those supplements, and they brought back a lot of my Hebrew. The novel was less successful. I had chosen Amos Oz’s My Michael, on the basis of reading the fist page and a half in the bookshop and thinking: ‘Well, this is pretty straightforward’.

What I failed to realise, until I was back in Wales, was that the opening of the first chapter finds the narrating central character in a state of traumatic shock, and barely able to articulate. From halfway through page 2, the sentences become more complex, and the vocabulary ever richer and more literary. Round about page 5, in my very own state of traumatic shock, I finally gave up. I must confess that, although I have read some short story collections and even one or two novels in Hebrew, Oz’s work is something I still read and enjoy exclusively in English.

For our first year in Israel, I taught in primary school, where I soon became aware of the importance of register – the style of language, the level of formality that one uses. Teaching a class of sixth graders, I used the word emesh, which had always been a favourite of mine. It means ‘last night’, and I was always taken by the fact that Hebrew managed to achieve with one word what would otherwise take two. When I used the word in the classroom, the class responded with derisive laughter. I discovered later that the word is fairly high register and a little old fashioned, and, on my pupils, it had the same effect as ‘yesternight’ might have had in English.

After that first disastrous year of teaching (which I might tell you about some other time, when I’m fully recovered from it), I worked almost exclusively in English, and, as a result, my conversational Hebrew failed to continue to develop as it might otherwise have done, At that time, almost my only regular reading in Hebrew was the weekend edition of Ha’aretz, a paper that I enjoyed principally for its arts and culture coverage.

This helped to create a situation where, after a few years in Israel, I could more or less hold my own in a discussion about Hebrew theatre or Beethoven‘s late quartets but, if I went to buy groceries at the corner store, I would find a friendly chat with the shopkeeper very challenging. Of course, as some of you know, the same is true for me in English, so maybe it’s not really a language thing at all.

This is an illustration of the fact that what we think of as command of a language is not exclusively determined by one’s knowledge of the language. It is, rather, bound up with an understanding of the culture. When I hear Hebrew stand-up, or watch a satirical show on TV, a large part of the challenge for me is that I am not familiar enough with all of the cultural references. Oddly enough, these days I have a similar experience when I listen to English stand-up or watch a British satirical show. I no longer know anything about British popular culture, and I have never fully immersed myself in Israeli popular culture.

Of course, to some extent, the same is true of language in general. Every time I go back to England, I encounter more and more vocabulary in the press and on TV that I am unfamiliar with.

The novelist Anthony Burgess left England in 1968 to avoid paying 90% income tax, and from then until his death in 1993, he lived in Malta, Italy, Monaco, Switzerland, moving whenever his outrageous outspokenness offended the local authorities or the actions of the local authorities in each country offended him.

Over those 25 years, Burgess apparently waited anxiously for the publication of each new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which he had sent out to him. On receiving anew edition, he would turn immediately to the supplement, dedicated to “the treatment of those accessions and words which have become current over the last twenty years”. In my 1979 edition of the dictionary, the supplement runs to 324 pages.

Burgess would religiously scan these pages for terms and usages he was unfamiliar with, and in this way he ensured that he remained abreast of the language and could continue to write his wonderful sweeping novels in contemporary English. (At some point, I must devote at least one post to favourite authors of mine whose first name is not John.)

On a similar theme, we have good friends whose children grew up in Israel trilingual, speaking their own native Hebrew, their mother’s native American English, and their father’s native Danish. (For most of you, that probably narrows the field to either one family or none.)

I mention this because, as the children were growing up, whenever the family visited Denmark, people found the children enchanting, because they spoke the Danish that had been current among adults when their father had come on aliya a decade or more earlier, and, in the intervening period, Danish had replaced a lot of Danish vocabulary with English. If I remember accurately, barbecue and swimming pool were two examples. From my experience, in many languages such borrowing is regarded, at least in some milieux, as chic, and sometimes even de rigueur. It’s part of some groups’ weltanschaung. Capeesh?

To return to my theme: I find myself, at this stage of my life, growing no closer to an understanding of popular Israeli culture, and, consequently, contemporary Hebrew language. At the same time, I am being left further and further behind by the developing language and popular culture of the land of my birth. At this rate, Bernice may soon be the only person I can hold a coherent conversation with, and after the last year we’re starting to run out of stuff to say to each other.

And on that happy note….

You’ll have to excuse me if I’m not my usual bubbly self this week. The truth is that I’ve just had a bit of an eye-opener and what I really want to do is crawl upstairs, bury myself under the covers and cry into my pillow, or at least lie down for a while. The sad fact is that I’ve just discovered something that makes me feel ancient.

Of course, this has been coming on for a while now: at least 16 years. When our daughter Esther first started enjoying Beatles music, I made a quick calculation. This was, let’s say, 1995, which meant that I had first started bopping to the Beatles (all right, of course I didn’t bop! I’m not even sure I know how to bop, but I can remember playing She’s Leaving Home to my mother, in the fond, but ill-considered, hope that she would agree that it was a thing of beauty and a work of genius) which means, as I was saying, that I had first become a Beatles fan about 30 years earlier.

I then thought myself back to when I was aged 12 – the age Esther was in 1995 – which would be 1962. Thirty years before that was 1932, when my parents would have been switching on the radio to give it a chance to warm up before listening to the Mills Brothers, Noel Coward, or Ambrose and his orchestra’s rendition of such popular songs as The Flies Crawled Up The Window, a song that, I must confess, had hitherto slipped under my radar. The realisation that The Beatles were, for Esther, as far distant as Ambrose for me was a chilling moment.

Bernice and I are, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, working through a collection entitled The Nation’s Favourite Poems, chosen in 1995 by listeners to a BBC television poetry programme. At the head of each work, the poet’s dates are given, and I have found it unnerving to discover that such poets as Philip Larkin (1922–1980), Stevie Smith (1903–1971) and Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) are not quite as modern as I think of them as being.

But all of this pales into insignificance in comparison with what I discovered just today.

Our story begins in 1962 (there’s that year again), when Robert Heal, a British furniture designer greatly influenced by the Danish school and its clean, linear shapes, was commissioned by Staples, a London manufacturer of mattresses, to design a range of modular shelving. His design consisted of wooden shelving supported by steel rods that slotted into the underside of the shelves and hooked onto the metal support ladders that gave the range its name – Ladderax. The range proved so successful that Heal soon added a variety of other storage units. By 1972, when Bernice and I married, Ladderax was an immensely popular and affordable storage solution. We bought a modest run of shelving and storage for our salon/lounge in Bridgend, South Wales.

At this point, I hear Bob Dylan: May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung. May you stay forever young. Bitter irony!

Then, a year later, we came to Israel immediately after the Yom Kippur War to volunteer on kibbutz for three months, where we decided that we would return to Wales, sell our house, and come on aliya the following year. In the event, we ‘postponed’ our aliya (for 12 years), but, before that happened, a local Bridgend shop was refurbishing its display units, and selling off its shop-soiled Ladderax shelving. We bought a job lot of bookshelves of two different widths and multiple ladders to add to our existing system of shelving, a drinks cabinet, a writing desk and a three-drawer chest that served us as a sideboard.

For the next 30 years, wherever we went, our Ladderax came with us. Because it is a modular system, it is incredibly flexible, and we were able to find a layout to fit our home in Bridgend, our study in Nantymoel, most of our flat in East Talpiot, and our dining room in Ma’ale Adumim.

In that last sentence, ‘we’ is something of an exaggeration. Bernice has an extraordinarily good eye for colour. She can carry a colour in her mind: on more than one occasion, she has seen earrings in a shop and bought them knowing that they were exactly the same shade as a particular outfit. I, by contrast, have to ask her whether the trousers I am wearing are blue or black.

However, every yin has its yang, and while Bernice does colour, I do layout. When we moved from the Absorption Centre to our first, three-room, flat, in Jerusalem, and took delivery of our lift, which contained most of the furniture from our eight-room house in Nantymoel, the removers refused to believe that all of our ‘stuff’ would fit into our new home. However, I had spent weeks enjoying myself with scale drawings of the flat, and cut-out shapes of the furniture, and I knew that it would. And it did!

So, for me, Ladderax was not only relatively inexpensive and endlessly adaptable. It was also (and sometimes it seemed more importantly) a wonderful construction puzzle – my very own big boy’s Lego and Meccano. Over the years, I must have filled a pack of square-ruled exercise books with trial layouts; in every case, in every home, in every room, I was able to design a layout that fitted the space or spaces we wanted to fill.

Actually, not in every case. In our current home, even I was unable to find a combination that would fill the space that we had, despite the fact that we had more shelving than we could use. We needed one shelf six inches narrower than the one we had.

Not to be outwitted, I sawed six inches off a shelf, lashed two pairs of short metal rods together to make two slightly longer rods, widened the grooves under the shelves into which the rods slipped, to accommodate the double metal and cord lashing, and hey presto, problem solved, with nobody the wiser.

And then, what can I tell you? Even though age cannot wither it, Ladderax, it transpired, was not like Cleopatra in all respects. True, at 30 years of age, it still looked pretty good, but there came a point where we felt that custom had staled its infinite variety. With some reluctance, we decided that we were ready for a change, and we bought new shelving and storage for the dining room. However, we couldn’t bring ourselves to have the Ladderax ‘put down’, like an old, faithful but ailing dog.

At that point we discovered one final benefit of Ladderax. With the exception of the cupboards (which you can stack on top of each other on the floor and use for storing linens), everything else can be dismantled quickly and easily (no screws) and stored flat on top of a wardrobe, for at least five years. At that point, we were delighted to find a new home for it, in the salon of one of our neighbour’s married daughters. She sent us a photo of it a month ago, and, at the age of 49, it’s still looking pretty good.

By chance, I stumbled across Ladderax on the internet today. It is being offered on ebay, for eye-watering prices, and there I see it billed as ‘mid-Century, retro, vintage, with manufacturer’s attribution mark’. I’m very sorry, but I am simply not prepared to be old enough to have furniture we bought new when we first married spoken about as if it were antique. When did that happen?

There’s really only one thing that might just break this mood of gloom and doom!

A story to start this week. A few years ago, my brother and sister-in-law invited Bernice and myself to spend shabbat with them at their flat in Rehavia, in central Jerusalem. On the Friday evening, Martin and I went to his regular synagogue when they are in Jerusalem – Hanasi.

This synagogue holds a service in the main synagogue upstairs and a smaller service in the study hall downstairs, which Martin and I both prefer. However, this particular shabbat marked a birthday or anniversary of Rabbi Berel Wein, the well-respected rabbi of the synagogue, and therefore the downstairs service was cancelled and everyone joined the main service upstairs in his honour.

There I noticed that one of the men saying kaddish (the memorial prayer recited for a deceased parent or other close relative) was a friend who still lived in the same area of Jerusalem that we used to live in. After the service I went over to say hello.

He was also spending shabbat as someone’s guest. He introduced us to his host, and I introduced Martin, and the four of us, for five minutes, shared the same route back from synagogue. In that time, Martin and I between us managed to find three connections with my friend’s host, one of which was that he was a judge in England who sat in the same court as a cousin of Bernice’s then sat in.  

Not much of a story, really, and yet….I have many times, since this incident, thought about how many separate, indeed disparate, factors had to be aligned to make this unexciting event happen.

When Martin and Adèle chose to buy a home in Israel, Jerusalem was, probably, the only serious place they considered, but they could have ended up in any one of a number of areas in the city.

Even having settled in Rehavia, they could have chosen any one of a number of synagogues to pray in.

On a normal shabbat, we would have attended the service downstairs, while my friend was upstairs.

If this friend had not lost a parent less than 11 months before, he would not have been saying kaddish.

If it had not happened, some years earlier, that he and I both lost a parent during the same period, and spent several months saying kaddish together, I would probably not have recognized his voice.

Had I not recognised his voice, I might well not have noticed him at all in the crowded synagogue.

Our two hosts might not have chosen the same week to invite us for shabbat. I would then not have met his host.

If this host did not happen to live in the same direction from the synagogue as we were going, we would not have chatted for five minutes.

There are many London courts at which he could have presided, other than the very one where Bernice’s cousin also sat.

I only knew where Bernice’s cousin presided because Bernice’s mother lived very close to the court, and she and her niece had a warm relationship. As a result, on her weekly session at the court, Bernice’s cousin would usually spend time with Bernice’s mum, a fact which I knew because we always updated with the cousin’s news..

I make that ten facts aligning to produce the result that we discovered this connection. If any one of these links had been missing, the connection would have remained undiscovered.

So, what do I make of this story, and why do I feel that there is a point in sharing it with you?

Let me say first that I do not believe there is a great significance to the connection, nor that this alignment was the conscious working of a prime mover, or the cosmos, or kismet, or karma, or fate. I do believe that it was a coincidence, even though I am aware that, as an orthodox Jew, I am treading a narrow path saying that.

Consequently, I suspect that this kind of alignment has the potential of happening all the time. In the last couple of decades I have experienced at least two other similar chance discoveries. (Don’t worry – I’m not going to inflict them on you; I may presume on your forbearance, but I’m not going to push my luck to that extent.)

This leads me to a kind of conclusion. I wonder whether we spend our lives accidentally and randomly doing what Pre-Cog (kind of clairvoyant but not quite the same) Agatha gets Tom Cruise’s character to do intentionally in this memorable scene from Minority Report.

In other words, when we bend down to tie a shoelace, we miss the current cycle of the pedestrian crossing lights and therefore arrive late at the restaurant and just miss seeing….who? And so on and so forth. The forests of our lives are strewn with the dried-up pods of seeds that never germinated, because we were looking the other way.

Even when we act deliberately, we really have no way of knowing what the outcome of that decision will be. Our lives are constructed from the decisions we make at thousands upon thousands of successive splits in the road, each of which leads us down a particular route.

The problem (or perhaps the magic) of this lies in the fact that, whenever we reach a decision point, there is no way that we can make a truly informed decision about how to decide. Doubtless many of you have already been thinking of Robert Frost since before the beginning of this paragraph. For the benefit of those who slept through American Poetry 101, Frost put it much better than I ever could.

The one turning-point that we always speak about at home, and that Bernice is convinced of, is the following. I spent most of my last two years in secondary school being very active in a Zionist youth movement, and to some extent (that’s coded language for almost totally) neglected my studies. (I feel my children have reached the age where I can say this, and my grandson hasn’t yet reached the age where I can’t.)

As my A-level final exams grew closer, I failed to work seriously, and, at a certain point, more or less gave up making an effort. (I did, however, complete some fine jigsaws and played a lot of excellent bridge.) This is largely because my study habits and self-discipline were very poor.

Had I studied for those exams, I might well have won a place at a good university (two good universities thought so), and the likelihood is that Bernice and I would not have married, and I would not have known her wonderful parents, and Esther and Micha’el would not have been born, and Tslil and Ma’ayan would not have come into our lives, and Tao would not have been born, and…and…and my head hurts.

And apparently, it’s never too early to enjoy the chance encounters that life sends your way!

Author’s Note: This is another of those weeks when you need to exercise a little patience if you want to know what the topic is. Take comfort in the knowledge that the ability to cope with delayed gratification is a sign of maturity.

This week we range far and wide, from the Washington DC Metro to the Bridgend Recreation Centre in South Wales, and then to Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. Coupled with the title, that’s just about the most obscure clue for this week’s topic. I’m not even sure Bernice will get it.

It occurred to me on Friday night, as I lay in bed musing over possible topics for this week, that I really needed a strategy that would provide topics for multiple weeks, since the British strain seems likely to set our progress in fighting Corona back several weeks, if not months. (Incidentally, I understand from my brother Martin that the British strain is called the Kent strain in Britain, in what looks to me suspiciously like an attempt on the part of London to absolve itself of all responsibility. One wonders whether South Africans speak of the Jo’burg, or Brazilians of the Belo Horizonte strain.)

After a little thought, I came up with an idea. So, as things stand at the moment, the plan is that, at intervals of a few weeks, I am going to talk about a number of different musical instruments. (I have to tell you: the idea sounded much more exciting late Friday night in bed than it does in the cold light of Sunday morning, sitting on the page and staring at me.)

First big question: which instrument do I start with? I eventually opted for the violin, for a number of reasons, none of which is that it is my favourite instrument. It actually isn’t, although I’m not entirely sure why not. I suspect that the violin can produce a wider range of colours, of textural diversity, than any other instrument; a vast amount of the greatest music ever written was written for solo violin, or for chamber ensembles prominently featuring the violin; very many of classical music’s most striking, engaging, eccentric characters were and are violinists.

It may be because of my personal relationship with the instrument, which was short-lived but traumatic. I was actually praised for my performance of a Paganini violin concerto on stage to a paying audience in one of England’s most distinguished theatres….Well, not the entire concerto: just the slow movement….Then again, not the entire movement: just part of it…three bars, to be exact….And, to be fair, the only person who knew that it was a Paganini violin concerto was me (and that only because I knew that’s what I had been practising, and not because the tune was recognisable).

Let me give you a context. The amateur dramatics group that I was involved in in the 80s in Nantymoel, the South Wales mining village we then lived in, was fortunate enough to win through to the British finals of a one-act drama competition, with a farcical piece entitled Hidden Meanings. Please don’t feel bad that you’ve never heard of it. I played the role of a man obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, and the play opened with me playing the violin.

Much of the humour of the play lay in the character’s total unsuitability to inhabit the persona of Holmes, ranging from his complete lack of powers of logical reasoning to his very poor violin playing. We had a good friend who is a fine amateur violinist, and he foolishly agreed to lend me his violin and give me a quick lesson or two. I practised for hours, determined to put on a convincing performance as a barely competent fiddler, and my performance won praise from the adjudicator at the finals. Unfortunately, what he praised it for was my amazing ability to play so excruciatingly badly.

This experience left me with redoubled admiration for the technical skill of the violinist. To extract a single, pure note from this fiendish instrument seems to me to require great talent: to play Paganini’s Caprice #1 at all I find remarkable; to play it in 1:34, as Itzhak Perlman does here is scarcely credible; to make it sound like music, as he does, wonderfully and effortlessly, is to run the risk of attracting rumours like that which surrounded virtuoso Paganini himself, that he (or his mother) had sold his soul to the devil in order to play so fiendishly well.

Yet neither I, nor even Perlman, was one of the violinists I actually wanted to talk about today. (How about that: a sentence about violinists where I come before Itzhak Perlman; pinch me, somebody.) Three of them are great virtuosi who Bernice and I were lucky enough to see without having to travel very far from home. Indeed, we could have walked to hear Kyung Wha Chung give a recital in the hall of our local recreation centre, in Bridgend. As a young woman, she was an incredibly intense performer, as you can see from the last minute of the first movement of Schumann’s Violin Sonata #2, starting at around 16:20.

On the evening we heard her, she chose to play Bach’s Partita #1. What none of us realised was that the ‘concert’ hall shared a wall with one of the centre’s squash courts. Two or three minutes into the Bach, two players started a game, and the sound of the ball hitting the back wall came clearly though to us. To her credit, the soloist did not walk out, but soldiered on. How she managed to maintain her total concentration, absorption and intensity, I don’t know. Even so, it was an unforgettable experience, but not really for the reason we had hoped.

The strongest contrast to that level of almost painful intensity came around the same time, when we travelled only a little further afield, to hear Isaac Stern play the Beethoven Violin Concerto. This concerto has an unusually long introduction from the orchestra, about three and a half minutes, before the soloist begins playing. For all of that time, my eyes were on Stern, and I could scarcely believe what I was watching. For the entire time, he stood quietly on stage, for all the world like a man casually waiting for a Number 16 bus.

Then, a second before his first entrance, he raised the violin to his chin in one fluid movement, raised his bowing arm in another, and began producing the most tender and beautiful music. He was probably then in his early 60s, and the contrast between his matter-of-fact, ‘just another day at the office’ demeanour on stage, and the exquisite beauty of the music he made that evening has stayed with me for decades.

The last, and youngest, of this trio, is Joshua Bell, who Bernice and I were lucky enough to see in Jerusalem with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra – a very generous 60^th birthday present. He was playing Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, which I must confess is not one of my favourite pieces: I find its whimsy a little wearing after a while. His performance, however, was mesmerising. There certainly seems to be something about the violin, more than other instruments, that attracts the showman and exudes raw, sensual charm. From Paganini to Nigel Kennedy, violinists have generated an electric charge that is palpable. Bell is nowhere near such an outrageous showman, but he is certainly a superstar, and, on the basis of our experience that evening, that stardom is well deserved.

I’ve referenced Joshua Bell mainly to retell, for the benefit of those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the interesting story of the Washington Post experiment. When Bell was in Washington in 2007 to play a single concert, he was persuaded by the Washington Post to busk anonymously in a busy arcade just outside L’Enfant Plaza Metro station during the morning rush hour. This turned out to be a 45-minute recital, on a 3.5-million-dollar Stradivarius violin, by a man who, at the time, played to capacity audiences in major concert halls, commanding an average ticket price of $100.

The busk was filmed, to see how many of the commuters and others passing by recognised him, or even stopped to listen. In the event, of over 1000 people, only seven people stopped to listen: one for nine minutes, one for three minutes, and each of the others for a much shorter time. Only one person recognised him, and spoke to him at the end of the ‘recital’; a few others, when interviewed later, had been struck by the quality of his playing. With this handful of exceptions, Bell was completely ignored. He made about $40 in the 45 minutes.

So, what are we to make of this? Many people use it as an example of the importance of mindfulness, of being aware of what is going on around you, of being in the moment. This is undoubtedly a nice-sounding lesson to draw, but I am not sure how fair it is.

There is another famous experiment, which I will not describe for fear of influencing the result for anyone who doesn’t know it, but which involves counting the passes between basketball players. What that experiment demonstrates is the human ability to concentrate on what is judged to be important at any given moment, rather than to be receptive to all that is going on.

I believe that most of the passers-by were thinking about and preparing for the working day ahead of them, worrying about other family members, or simply concentrating on not colliding with other commuters. Personally, I don’t want the driver of the bus I am on to be smelling the roses, but rather to be watching the road.

One interesting, but probably not surprising, point is that at least two of the seven who did stop were musicians, albeit amateurs, and recognised immediately the quality of the playing. For some people, music is always important.

This story reminds me of two other busking incidents. In the 1990s, a flood of aliya of Jews from Russia brought with it many fine professional musicians. (A popular joke at the time ran: ‘How can you tell a Russian orchestral conductor? He’s the one walking down the steps from the plane not carrying a violin case.’) The Israeli authorities greatly expanded music education in primary schools, to accommodate some of this influx, and this gave both of our children, among many others, their first steps in music-making.

It also strengthened Israel’s existing orchestras, and gave birth to more than one new one. My violinist friend who I mentioned earlier once told me that a friend of his, who plays in the IPO, said that, had he not auditioned before the 1990s, he would never have got a place in the orchestra.

Ben Yehuda Street is the main pedestrian precinct in central Jerusalem: it has, for over half a century, been a favourite spot for buskers. Walking down the street on an errand from work one weekday morning, I heard a busking cellist performing Bach’s first unaccompanied cello suite. I like to think that I would not have walked past Bell, because that day in Jerusalem I stood mesmerised for 20 minutes. I only heard the cellist that once, under appalling acoustic conditions, but I still remember it as a wonderful performance.

My final busking story suggests that my friend Stuart Nemtin, whom I met on my post-school year’s youth leadership course in Israel, is a finer violinist than Joshua Bell. As an activity one evening, half of us were required to spend the entire evening in Central Jerusalem, in full view, trying not to be detected by the other half, who were looking for us. Stu dressed as a beggar, took his violin, and busked all evening. Not only was he not detected; he made enough money, as he put it ‘to keep him in cookies for the rest of the year’ (which I calculate to be considerably more than $40 in 2007).

Just in case you’re still worried by that misquote in the title this week, my version of Old King Cole (celebrating the violin talents of myself, Perlman, Chang (or should that be Kyung), Stern, Bell and Nemtin) continues:

              He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl
              And he called for his fiddlers six.

Tao may still be a little young to handle violin bowing, but, surrounded by his father’s instruments, he is taking his first musical steps.