Before we get down to business today, one quick piece of housekeeping, which is more Flaubert than Diderot.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the walking stick that I was then using (I now have a silent stick), which ‘makes a rather audible tap on the pavement as I saunter to shul. I’m seriously contemplating acquiring a matching red and green parrot to wear on my right shoulder, and teaching it to say: ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’

The other evening, I happened to be in Rehovot, walking along a suburban street, when I was tapped on the upper back. Turning round, I discovered nobody there. Feeling a little puzzled, I turned back again and carried on walking. A couple of seconds later, I felt another tap. Turning my head (but, not, this time, my body), I discovered a red-beaked, green-bodied parakeet perched calmly on my upper back. I pride myself on not being, by nature, of a nervous disposition, but on this occasion I was prepared to make an exception. The moral of today’s lesson is, obviously, ‘Be careful what you wish for!’

And so to Diderot, the great 18^th Century French encyclopaedist and philosopher. The French, they say, have a word for it…although exactly what ‘they’ mean when they say it I am not entirely sure. They surely cannot mean that French vocabulary is richer than English: the word-count in the two languages’ vocabularies is estimated to be about 130,000 and 500,000 respectively.

In addition, French vocabulary is confined almost exclusively to words from the Romance languages, whereas English has the twin major tributaries of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. I sometimes suspect that the saying saucily refers to an era when French literature was more sexually explicit in its vocabulary than English – ‘where English has a row of asterisks, the French have a word for it’.

Either way, there is no doubt that there is at least one situation for which the French have a word – or, rather, a phrase – and the English can only translate it and recycle it; no original equivalent exists in English. That phrase is l’esprit de l’escalier, sometimes translated as staircase wit. The phrase was coined (or, at least, the scenario to which it alludes was first described) by Diderot, speaking, one senses, from the heart.

In his Paradoxe sur le Comédien, Diderot describes attending a private dinner party, at which a remark was made to him that left him speechless at the time, because, he explains, “a sensitive man, such as myself, overwhelmed by the argument levelled against him, becomes confused and [can only think clearly again when he] finds himself at the bottom of the stairs”.

In this case, “the bottom of the stairs” refers to the architecture of the kind of mansion to which Diderot had been invited. In such houses, the reception rooms were always one floor above the ground floor. To have reached the bottom of the stairs means to have definitively left the gathering.

I can easily sympathise with Diderot. Many is the time that I have thought of the perfect riposte in the car driving home….or the next morning…or, indeed, six months later.

Which, I guess, puts me in the same box as not only Diderot but also George Constanza in The Comeback, an episode of Seinfeld. You can view the relevant 5 minutes here.

Or, indeed, Humph. In one episode of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, which radio show I know I’ve referenced before, the late, lamented Humphrey Lyttleton mentioned that an interviewer said he was an “orthinologist”. Humph was on the way home before it occurred to him that the correct reply was “Not so much an orthinologist as a word-botcher”.

And here’s another tangent we can go off at (or off at which we can go, if you prefer). A not entirely dissimilar phenomenon is what is commonly referred to as fridge logic, first identified by Alfred Hitchcock. When asked about the scene in Vertigo when Madeleine mysteriously and impossibly disappears from the hotel Scottie saw her in, Hitchcock responded by calling it an icebox scene: a scene whose impossibility “hits you after you’ve gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox.”

For those last three references, I am indebted to an astonishingly well-constructed site I stumbled across, called tv|tropes, which names, explains and catalogues examples of tropes from popular media. To quote the site: ‘A trope is a storytelling device or convention, a shortcut for describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the audience will recognize. Tropes are the means by which a story is told by anyone who has a story to tell. We collect them, for the fun involved.’

And now, I’m afraid, you’ll have to hold that thought. We’ve reached a dead end. Just keep l’esprit de l’escalier in mind. We will get back to it at some point, and carry on from there.

I find myself these days musing about the reason why I keep writing this blog. More precisely, “Why on earth do I put myself (and sometimes Bernice) through this hell every week”. The answer I have come up with is, appropriately for this Franco-filled post, in three parts, just like ancient Gaul.

First, never say to someone who is competitive by nature: ‘I bet you can’t keep your hand in that flame for 10 seconds’. If possible, even avoid such sentiments as: ‘I don’t know how you manage to run 10 miles every day.’ So, my thanks to those who say similar things to me about my blog…I think.

Second, I read somewhere that one of the best ways to stave off Alzheimer’s is to challenge yourself mentally. I am particularly interested in retaining what mental faculties I have. I assume we all are, but I bet I’m more passionate about it than you are, because Bernice has made it very clear that, the day I succumb, she will ‘lockdown puppy’ me. In other words, she will drive me to the Jerusalem Forest, ask me to get out the car to have a look at the rear passenger-side tyre, which seems to have something wrong with it, and then drive off.

Unfortunately, crosswords and other logical puzzles, however convoluted and obscure, are apparently not enough to keep the brain active, because they do not unsettle you. I suppose I could have Bernice strap me into a chair from which she will release me only when I have completed The Times Cryptic crossword, and then set a timer for a crossbow-bolt to fire directly at my heart in 30 minutes’ time.

However, that seems like a lot of trouble to go to. I reckon that being reduced to a nervous wreck at 5pm on Monday when I still have no idea what to write about, and only finishing proofreading and uploading my blog at 8:58am on Tuesday, when I am publishing at 9:00, represents a sufficiently high stress level to keep dementia at bay.

However, these are reasons why I continue writing the blog; they do not explain why I continue to enjoy writing the blog.

To explain that, I have to go back to Diderot, after a short detour to take in Oscar Wilde. I watch The Importance of Being Earnest, and I am dazzled by the brilliance of the wit. The entire play is a string of sparkling jewels. At the same time, it is very obvious that a tremendous amount of work went into it. Wilde painstakingly revised the play, refined the speeches, tightened the action. The end result has the intricate multi-faceted richness of a Fabergé egg.

A blog, on the other hand, is more like a Picasso sketch: apparently improvised, intuitive, clean-lined. I have come to the conclusion that the blog is the perfect medium for me. In it, I can appear to be spontaneous: it all, so it seems, just pours out. However, what is wonderful is that I can revise, refine, find the perfect expression, while still, I hope, maintaining the illusion of spontaneity. Basically, I feel like Diderot playing the part of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, reliving the same day over and over until I get it right.

Of course, now that I have shown you how the trick works, the magic is gone. I’m going to have to ask you to forget everything you have read this week, and we’ll start next week with the illusion intact. Do we have a deal?

Meanwhile, here’s someone who always seems to have the perfect comeback.

One of those long, rambling, Errol Garner intros today, so you might want to get a cup of tea before we start.

Today’s subject is horticulture (or more specifically, arboriculture), and I toyed with a couple of titles that I then rejected, including: I am Boring, We Arboring (too laboured), and eventually decided on Matters Horticultural. This almost immediately put me in mind of Modern Major General, the party-piece patter-song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. (If you don’t know the song, you can see it performed here…and then you might feel you need to read the lyrics here. Incidentally, the ‘encore’ verses of this particular performance were, in the best G&S tradition, written specifically for this Stratford, Ontario production.)

Those of you who do know the song will not be surprised to learn that, since I thought of the title, I haven’t been able to get the blasted tune out of my head. This then set me thinking about the term – fairly recently coined (in English) – for a tune that you can’t get out of your head: earworm. I was then struck by this word and did a little Google research, the results of which I thought I might share with you. This led me to embellish the title of today’s post so that it now (almost) matches the metrical pattern of the song.

We’ll just wait here a second for the stragglers to catch up. All on the same page? Right!

Earworm, I discover, is a direct borrowing (first spotted in a 1978 novel) from the German for earwig, Ohrwurm, which (in Germany) has been used in this sense for about 70 years. Presumably, the intended metaphor is that some tunes crawl into your ear and nestle there, so that you cannot dislodge them, exactly as earwigs do. That, of course, is where the earwig gets its name from in English – its tendency to invade the human ear

Except, I now discover, that old wives’ tale isn’t where the earwig gets its name from. The Romans called the earwig auricula, from the Latin for earlobe, because they would dry earwigs and grind them to a powder which they then used to treat diseases of the ear. The entire folk myth of earwigs having a habit of invading the human ear evolved as a false explanation of the name.

Incidentally, the wig of earwig comes from an Anglo-Saxon word for insect, beetle, worm, and the English word wiggle almost certainly comes from this root.

OK. That’s enough etymology…and, come to think of it, enough entomology as well. Time to get to the actual topic of this treetise (apologies).

I was never particularly interested in gardening. I grew up in a house with a front garden that was largely paved, except for a number of flower beds that were home to rose-bushes that were my parents’ pride and joy. They produced vast, damask-petalled roses whose scent was sometimes so over-powering that it put you in mind of a six-year-old who had been playing with her mother’s perfume bottle.

In the back garden, a line of giant sunflowers against the garage wall stood like a firing squad that had just been brought to attention. The garden itself was grassed, bordered with flower-beds that sported flowers of which I can remember nothing other than this. My brother and I would play garden tennis, with deckchairs propped on their sides for a net Sometimes a loose ball, or a clumsy foot, would crush a bloom. When that happened, it was best to keep a low profile.

When Bernice and I lived in Wales, I couldn’t really get excited about gardening. There was a very brief period when we started a vegetable garden, but it quickly seemed like a huge amount of work just to feed the local community of slugs, and I soon lost interest.

Over the last 20 years, I have watched our tree grow, until it is now 4 metres tall (and will really need trimming after we have harvested this year), with a span of 2–3 metres. I have also, of course, watched the annual cycle. The tree flowers very early, with the first blossom appearing during winter, making it a herald of the new season of growth in the garden. Soon, the blossom is attracting bees, and the garden is full of activity from the stillness of the early morning and throughout the day.

The first fruit starts to appear around February, and ripens around April. At a certain point (typically a week later than we should) we net the tree, to prevent birds eating the fruit. This year, what with my bad hip, we actually waited until Esther and Maayan came to see us, and then prevailed on them to clamber up ladders and gateposts and fit the net – which they gamely did

With the tree as tall as it is, we have neither the netting nor the crane and platform to cover it all, and so I draw up a contract with the birds that we will leave them all of the fruit growing more than 2 metres above the ground, on condition that they leave the rest for us. I’m not always sure they fully understand the small print, but they actually are fairly well behaved.

Harvesting usually consists of one major sweep, and three or four smaller picks. The size of the harvest varies ridiculously. One year we had about 25 fruits, but this was presumably because the tree was gathering its strength for the following year, when I harvested a total of 20 kilo 12 kilo of it on one day.

So, what do you do with 20 kilo of shesek? Well, obviously, some of it you eat, and, every year, you are shocked by the difference between shesek you buy in the supermarket – small, mildly flavoured, dryish, with a shelf life of a couple of days (and an early season price this year of up to 50(!) shekels a kilo (that’s currently about £11 or over $15 – and the shesek you pick from your tree – big, hearty, bursting with flavour and juice, good for a week. Some of it you give away, although several of our neighbours also have shesek trees, so we don’t give much away.

The bulk of the harvest I freeze to make shesek ice cream. When I started doing this, I was very thorough: skinning the fruit, removing the stalk, then splitting it open to remove the stones and the thin membrane that separates the fruit from the stones. After 10 minutes of this, and viewing the mountain of shesek still to prepare and the tiny bowl that I had so far prepared, I retreated and regrouped.

After a little reflection, I realised that there was no need to peel the fruit. I know it has not been sprayed with any chemicals, my Vitamix blender can reduce the skin to pulp in micro-seconds, and the skin intensifies the flavour of the ice-cream.

I then found, on Google, a blogger whose tree yielded 70kg of fruit; he explained that, if you hold a shesek between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, place the thumb of the other hand on the calyx (the opposite end from the stalk), and push that thumb up through the centre of the fruit, the seeds, the membrane and the calyx will all emerge cleanly from the stalk end of the fruit. I tried this. It worked! Soon, I was cleaning fruit like a fully-paid-up member of the Loquat Gutters Union.

A few of the gutted shesek I set aside for skinning and making jam. Shesek has a very high pectin content, requires no sugar to be added, and its balance of sweet and sour makes a marmaladey-apricotty jam that is excellent.

Now that we have started composting….Let me start that sentence again: Now that Bernice has started composting, the stalks and calyx and membrane and skins can all go back into the ground. Immensely satisfying!

Which only leaves the stones; even they have a role to play, and a major one at that. It transpires that shesek stones are not dissimilar to almonds, or apricot stones, and, in Italy, they are used to make a liqueur that tastes remarkably like amaretto. I collect and wash the stones. When I have a jarful, I spread them out and leave them to dry in the sun for a week, then steep them in grain alcohol, with lemon rind and a vanilla pod. After a month in a warm place out of the sun, with the occasional vigorous shake of the jar, I dilute the alcohol with water (95% alcohol is tempting, but 35% greatly reduces the risk of blindness), and finally mix with a sugar-water syrup, then filter repeatedly until the liquid is clear (or, in my case, until I can’t be bothered to filter any more).

A litre of grain alcohol yields us 3 litres of what I wittily call shisky, although the Italians call it nespolino. Careful reading of multiple sources convinced me that the amount of cyanide leeched from that number of seeds was not harmful, and Bernice has been drinking the shisky for well over a decade now, with no visible effects, other than bumping into the furniture occasionally.

A few years ago, when we ‘upgraded’ our garden, we planted a peach and a nectarine, which each produce enough fruit for us to enjoy, every year, a wonderful week of rediscovering what summer fruits are supposed to taste like. We also planted a lemon, which has not yet realised what its function in life is supposed to be. We are still hoping that, one of these days, the penny will drop, and then we will doubtless drown in lemon curd, lemon drizzle cake and lemon meringue pie. I can imagine worse fates. 

Micha’el and Tslil decided not to wait until Tao’s 50th before gifting him a tree. On his first birthday, he helped them plant an almond tree, and for his second, a Portuguese berry tree. I have no photos of that second planting, so you’ll have to make do with screenshots of Tao WhatsApping with his Auntie Esther.

I may have mentioned previously my ambition to write the Great American Novel. I just wanted to bring you up to date. I’ve finally abandoned that ambition, because I’ve made a shocking discovery.

I naturally assumed that eligibility for writing the GAN followed the same rules as eligibility for the American Presidency. “In America, anyone can become president.” (Incidentally, I like George Carlin’s take on that: “In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem.” However, I think Adlai Stevenson’s wry comment is even better: “In America, anyone can become president. That’s one of the risks you take.”)

I now discover that, all these years, I’ve been taken in by that grand statement: “In America, anyone can become president” (or, indeed, write the GAN). There was I thinking to myself: “Fair enough! I’ll get an idea for a novel, go to America, write it, and Bob Louis Stevenson’s your uncle.” Turns out that I really should have read the small print, which states: “…a presidential candidate must be a natural born citizen of the United States, a resident for 14 years, and 35 years of age or older.”

I checked up, and apparently double credit for one of those three qualifications can’t be used to cancel out another, so my 70+ years don’t help me get over the hurdle of “natural born citizen”, even if I were prepared to live in America for 14 years (and if that’s not suffering for one’s art, I don’t know what is).

So, assuming the same rules apply for the GAN as for POTUS, I’m scuppered. This seems very unfair. After all, we Englishmen have always been very ready to celebrate such great English authors and playwrights as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Jonathan Swift. We have never held their accident of birth against them.

I must confess that I find this situation very confusing. In my heart of hearts, I never really believed I would write the GAN, but until now I always assumed there was a completely different reason why this was so.

All my thinking life (I leave my readers to decide how long a period of time that may have been), I have looked at novelists with a mixture of puzzlement and awe. I know we always say that not all fiction is strictly autobiographical, but surely that’s a…. fiction. And when authors are not trawling their own psyche to animate their characters, they are pilfering personality traits and mannerisms from all their nearest and dearest.

I have never understood how novelists could dare to bare their souls, expose their foibles, and betray the confidences of their family and friends. Where did Philip Roth, for example, find the courage to write Portnoy’s Complaint, knowing that, in all probability, nobody would ever be prepared to shake hands with him again? Can you imagine his first visit to his parents after they read the novel?

A considerable chunk of my leisure time over the last five decades has been spent contemplating writing fiction. It strikes me that, if I’d put half the effort into writing that I’ve put into thinking about it, and avoiding doing it, the world (or, at least, my filing cabinet drawers) would be richer by several execrable novels and a couple of slim volumes of unreadable poetry.

What has always held me back has been an almost total lack of self-belief. A few of you, who really know me, will not be at all phased to read that last sentence. I suspect, however, that many of you will be rather surprised. I offer in evidence of my condition this song by Flanders and Swann, whom I haven’t referenced in far too long.

This lack of self-belief is not a sound basis on which to build a career as a writer, for two reasons. First, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone will be the least interested in what I have to write. (I often don’t think I’ll be all that interested myself.) I am repeatedly amazed when friends tell me they enjoyed my last post or article for the shul magazine. (Amazed and delighted, so don’t feel you need to stop telling me.)

Secondly, I felt really uncomfortable exposing myself to my readers, and lacked the self-confidence to write only for myself, not really caring how others would receive it.

Careful readers may have noticed the shift in verb tense over those last two paragraphs, from present to past. The surprise is something I still experience every week; the discomfort is now almost completely behind me. The fact is that, to my absolute astonishment, I have found, over the 17 months that I have been writing this blog, that I have become more and more freely able to talk about my innermost thoughts and feelings.

Of course, almost all of the time I write about these things in a flippant tone; but I have long warned people that the things I discuss seriously seldom mean very much to me, but the things I joke about are the ones I really care about. So don’t let the lightness of touch fool you.

Several times over the last months, I have finished writing and editing a post, and then read it through one final time and been amazed that not only do I think it’s not half bad, but in addition I am comfortable about sharing all this with what may not be a large readership, but, more tellingly, is exclusively not an anonymous readership. I find myself wondering how it is that I am comfortable with this.

When I put that question to Esther, she said that she felt this simply reflected a change that I have undergone over the last eight years. Esther and Micha’el are both convinced that my diagnosis of bladder cancer caused me to reflect and recalibrate in all sorts of areas, and that feeling more comfortable with myself is part of this change.

I don’t reject that idea, but I also have been wondering whether something in the medium itself encourages this openness. This blog is a complex thing. On the one hand, I can reach a large audience immediately and effortlessly; composing and posting the blog could hardly be easier. At the same time, the medium makes the entire process remarkably impersonal, sterile. There is no personal contact; indeed, my readership is completely invisible to me. I suspect that there is something of the church confessional in this setup: author and reader are each isolated in their own cell; the grille between them allows the message to be transmitted, but prevents any other contact.

I find that there is also, in this experience, something of diving into a swimming pool on a cool day. Getting in is not easy, but once you are in, it quickly becomes comfortable. Every week, clicking the Publish button takes a little effort: there’s always a moment’s hesitation, as I stand at the end of the diving board. However, by the time the first reaction comes back, I’m feeling much more at ease.

So, please keep those reactions coming, and I’ll do my best to keep up this dance of the seven hundred veils.

Meanwhile, some people are engaged in much more healthy and much less cerebrally complicated outdoor pursuits. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t lent Micha’el my copy of the novel Holes. It would be child slavery if Tao didn’t beg to be allowed to help.

Whenever I get together with the group of friends that I was in Israel with on a year programme 53 years ago, there is one member of the group who always reminds us of his rule: each of us is allowed to show just one photo of their grandchildren, and to talk about just one of their medical conditions. As regular readers will know, I hardly ever break the first rule, and, until now, I have attempted to avoid completely boring you with details of my physical state. (My mental state, on the other hand, I regard as the natural habitat of the blog.)

However, today I do plan to talk about one of my medical conditions (and, Heaven knows, there’s lots to choose from). I do this purely to explain why you received notification of this post an hour earlier than usual. The reason for this is that, at precisely 09:00 IST, I expect to be sitting in the office of my orthopaedist, listening to him telling me that yes, he agrees, the time has come for me to have my right hip replaced, to match the left, which I had done about 7 years ago.

When I first saw the orthopaedist, 18 months ago, he suggested a range of treatments aimed at deferring the inevitable carpentry. (For carpentry is exactly what hip replacement is, if we’re going to call a spade a spade….or, in this case, a saw, a chisel and a mallet. I had the surgery under an epidural, which meant that, despite the best efforts of Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites through my earphones, it still sounded as though I was in a carpenter’s workshop. This time, I plan to take Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.)

Guided by the orthopaedist, I had a short course of Feldenkrais, which served principally to confirm what I had long known – that I spend my days walking around blissfully out of touch with, indeed almost completely unaware of, the state of my body. Quite how unaware I was, I discovered when I had a 24-hour Holter ECG heart test shortly after being diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. (Incidentally, for years I thought it was called a halter test, because the recording device is carried on a strap round the neck. Fortunately, I resisted pointing out to any medical staff that they were all misspelling the name, because I then discovered that the test was devised by, and named after, experimental physicist Norman J. Holter.)

When the technician attached the apparatus and briefly ran it to test it was working, she said: ‘Is your heart-rate always like this?’, to which I replied, in my blissful ignorance: ‘Like what?’. When I saw my cardiologist later, he informed me that I had reached, at one point during the 24 hours, a maximum of 230 heart beats per minute, which is usually accompanied by total unconsciousness. In my case, it was accompanied only by total unawareness, which, they tell me, is not the same thing at all.

So, the Feldenkrais was not a total success; I felt a little like someone with severe hearing loss being asked to comment on the second theme in a Schubert string quartet. Parallel to that, I underwent a course of acupuncture, which pierced both my skin and my scepticism, followed by a brief course of physiotherapy.

Although this multi-pronged attack gave me some relief, the pain still flared up occasionally, and, at one point, I started using a stick/cane. While this made walking easier, it did nothing for my equanimity. Several times, on the bus into Jerusalem for treatment, strapping teenage boys would fail to offer me a seat, which really depressed me. Occasionally, women and men in their 80’s would offer me their seat, which depressed me even more.

Around this time, we celebrated Esther and Maayan’s wedding. As a precaution, I took the walking stick to the wedding, but left it in the boot of my brother-in-law’s car, because I was not keen for my day to be spoilt by a constant stream of solicitous enquiries. Unfortunately, I didn’t explain to my brother-in-law that I had left it there intentionally, and he spotted it and very kindly brought it to me. The expression of shock on my cousin’s face confirmed, for me, that I would rather hop all day than walk around with a stick. Fortunately, I had a very good hip-day and really didn’t need the stick.

After a while, I found that the daily stretching and strengthening exercises that the physiotherapist had given me hurt considerably more than the hip, and (I admit shamefacedly), I gradually gave them up. I then enjoyed a year or more of very little pain, and I learnt to adjust to the restricted mobility. Summer was much easier: once the colder weather came, and I had to allow an extra five minutes for putting on socks every day, life became more challenging.

Over the last month or so, I have felt less convinced that I can rely on the hip, and, although I still suffer very little pain (unless I have to spend two hours changing the kitchen back after Pesach – but how often does that happen!), I have started using the stick again, particularly for the uphill walk to shul on shabbat, a walk which I used to describe as taking 12–15 minutes, but now takes 20–23 minutes.

The first time I used a stick, I borrowed a sober dark-brown one from Yad Sarah, the Israel-wide charity that lends out a full range of medical equipment. This time, I have started using my late mother-in-law’s stick. This has a rather jazzy paisley design in red, orange and old gold, on a vibrant green background. I feel I am of an age when I can start seriously cultivating a certain understated eccentricity, and this seems like a good start. (I can remember, as a child, playing with my grandfather’s walking stick, and rather fancying I cut a Fred Astairean figure.)

Unfortunately, the rubber ferrule (the cap on the bottom of the stick) must be wearing a bit thin, and it makes a rather audible tap on the pavement as I saunter to shul. I’m seriously contemplating acquiring a matching red and green parrot to wear on my right shoulder, and teaching it to say: ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’ Walking has been reduced to a choice between no stick and stick: that is, between Boris Karloff in Frankenstein and Robert Newton in Treasure Island.

Speaking of parrots, and other pets (effortless segue, as ever– how do I do it?), the family in Portugal has just acquired a new member. Lua is only 4 months old, so she looks as though, as she gets older, she’s going to need wide open spaces: it’s just as well that the kids plan to spend more time in the tipi on their land.