But before we get to that….

Housekeeping 1: I apologise for being, as one of my readers put it, a ‘despondent Penamacorrespondent’ last week. A couple of people contacted me clearly concerned that they might have to talk me down from the window ledge. Please always remember, dear reader, that this blog is, as they say ‘based on real events’, but might sometimes take liberties in order to create a more interesting story. It’s probably fair to say that the ‘low’ I sustained over 1400 words last week represented a low that I was in for only a few moments in real life, but I decided that it made good copy.

Housekeeping 2: Last Monday morning, I was able to get through to TAP on the phone. I explained the situation, and was assured that I could request a refund on our entire ticket (both outgoing and incoming flights). The rep explained to me that, if I requested the refund on the phone, I would incur a service charge, but, if I did it online, there would be no charge. So, I naturally hung up and attempted to request a refund online. However, at the critical moment, the website informed me that I could not complete the process online and I should contact the carrier.

I phoned TAP again, and, astonishingly, was again connected within seconds. I told the whole story again, and the rep was happy to process my request. When I asked about the fee, and pointed out that TAP was directly responsible both for causing me to request the refund and for forcing me to request it by phone, the rep assured me that there would be no fee. So, it looks like a good result. Now ask me whether we have received the refund yet….Not yet. Watch this space. The opera isn’t over till the fat lady sings.

Nor, indeed, is the musical – of which Bernice and I have seen two in the last couple of weeks: one on the big screen and the other on the stage. These were two very different experiences, for a number of reasons, and I have found myself thinking about the nature of the musical, and how I feel about it.

Our first outing was to the cinema, to see Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story. (Spoiler alert: he still dies in the end; she still doesn’t – of which more later.) Bernice had been very keen to see this, while I was a little less sure. I found it hard to believe that the remake would be very different from the original, with its various strengths and weaknesses, and I suspected that I would not get very much new from the evening. However, I’m very glad we did go. It was an evening whose plusses, for me, far outweighed its minuses.

Let’s start with the weaknesses of the original. Roger Ebert revisited the 1961 version in 2004, to mark its DVD release, and concluded his review with the following paragraph:

“So the dancing is remarkable, and several of the songs have proven themselves by becoming standards, and there are moments of startling power and truth. West Side Story remains a landmark of musical history. But if the drama had been as edgy as the choreography, if the lead performances had matched Moreno’s fierce concentration, if the gangs had been more dangerous and less like bad-boy Archies and Jugheads, if the ending had delivered on the pathos and tragedy of the original, there’s no telling what might have resulted. The movie began with a brave vision, and it is best when you sense that vision surviving the process by which it was turned into safe entertainment.”

I think I would agree with all of that. Now, let me work through Roger Ebert’s checklist to see how the 2021 remake measures up.

So the dancing is remarkable: We both felt that the dancing was, if anything, even better this time round, especially in the outdoor scenes on the actual streets of New York. Less explicitly ‘balletic’, and more street-muscular.

Several of the songs have proven themselves by becoming standards: It’s still Bernstein and Sondheim, so of course the songs are still sensational (especially the music). Even better, in fact, because the actors all do their own singing. However, I was sorry to hear that Sondheim’s original, 1961-risqué lyric was not restored. Anita, looking forward to a night of passion with Bernardo, still sings

He’ll come home hot and tired.
Poor dear!
No matter if he’s tired
As long as he’s near.

rather than, as originally written:

He’ll come home hot and tired.
So what!
No matter if he’s tired
As long as he’s hot.

There are moments of startling power and truth: Here, the new version adds several extra layers. The social context of the Puerto Rican and Polish gangs is fleshed out with multiple pieces of back-story; there is a very real sense of the whole extended Puerto Rican community. All of the dialogue has been newly written by Tony Kushner, and, largely through this process, the film becomes darker, richer; it becomes less of a vehicle for knee-jerk sympathy than the original, and a slightly more nuanced discussion of the urban reality of about-to-be-redeveloped Upper West Side.  

One particular decision I felt was very effective. A lot of the dialogue among the Puerto Ricans is in Spanish, and Spielberg refused to subtitle this in English. I believe the reason given was to avoid English being seen as the default, natural or superior language. The consequence of this for me is that I experienced the ‘otherness’ of the Puerto Ricans; particularly the one new ‘song’, an alternate, revolution-minded version of La Borinqueña, the Puerto Rican national anthem, comes across as remarkably threatening. It is very unsettling to be unsure whether and just how the Jets are being insulted and jeered at by this song.

Moreno’s fierce concentration: Ariana DeBose in the role of Anita is as fiery as Rita Moreno was, and that’s saying something

If the gangs had been more dangerous and less like bad-boy Archies and Jugheads: Done! The weapons the gangs arm themselves with, the fighting that is shown, the attempted rape of Anita in the final act, some of the dancing, are all uglier and more threatening this time round. Even the light and mocking comicality of Gee, Officer Krupke is made a little more serious by the trashing of a room in the police precinct building.

If the ending had delivered on the pathos and tragedy of the original: Here, sadly, Hollywood still hasn’t grown up. In 2021, much to my disappointment, the same unforgivable mistake is made as in 1961. Shakespeare knew that Juliet could not contemplate life with Romeo dead; she had to commit suicide. Hollywood thinks it knows better. I ask you: if Juliet/Maria survives, where do you see her in 5, or 10, or 20 years’ time? There is no reasonable answer to that question.

I was willing Rachel Zegler to turn Chino’s gun on herself and pull the trigger, but I’m afraid she didn’t.

Setting that one lapse aside, I heartily recommend the 2021 West Side Story. Do yourself a favour, and see it on the big screen, with the big sound system.

Bernice and I followed this, last Thursday, with a trip to see an amateur production of Annie. Now, I’m not going to lie to you. We wouldn’t have gone to see it had it not been for the fact that no fewer than three of our great-nieces were among the orphans. Now, I’m still not going to lie to you. A cold and wet early winter evening found me still hoping against hope that the Israeli government would announce an immediate Covid shutdown of all places of entertainment. But, it was not to be, and so we made the trek to Jerusalem.

The first pleasant surprise was that the theatre in the Masorti school in Talpiot is a rather splendid small theatre, with a seriously raked auditorium. We were almost in the back row, and it brought back fond memories of sitting in the gods in the West End.

I came to Annie almost as inexperienced as Maria in West Side Story. I could hum Tomorrow, and I knew that our heroine is rescued from the orphanage by Big Daddy, but that was it. Bernice had clear memories of us seeing the film together, but in the end she grudgingly conceded that she may have gone with Esther.

The second pleasant surprise was the level of professionalism of the whole production. Of course, all three of our great-nieces were magnificent, but almost everyone else was very good as well. As is always the case with this particular theatre company, a huge amount of effort had been put into all of the technical aspects. The mere logistics of dressing and making up a cast of 63 adults and children are daunting.

A creative set and spirited performances were enhanced, as usual, by a professional live nine-piece band. It’s fair to say that the performances were a little uneven, but everyone was in very good voice and a couple of the cast would not be out of place on the professional stage.

All of which makes me feel that I can offer some comments on the musical itself. Annie is set in the New York of the early 1930s Depression era. A bald account of the plot would suggest that it is very dark. At one point, our heroine wanders the streets and encounters a group of homeless people surviving by beggary and theft. Another scene shows FDR and his advisers wrestling with the nation’s economic problems.

However, the musical itself does not really take these situations seriously; they are little more than the backdrop against which the fairy-tale story plays out. I do not offer this as a criticism, but simply as an observation. Many musicals are set at a time of social upheaval and transition. Some of them are vehicles for examining and critiquing that situation. Others use the situation simply as a way to drive the plot. Oklahoma and Paint Your Wagon, for example, recreate an America settling the West. However, they do not overly concern themselves with that. Annie belongs in that group. Even the songs whose subject-matter is bleak cannot resist cute lyrics.

Prosperity was ’round the corner
The cozy cottage built for two
In this blue heaven that you gave us Yes!
We’re turning blue!

They offered us Al Smith and Hoover
We paid attention and we chose
Not only did we pay attention
We paid through the nose.

West Side Story, particularly in its 2021 version, captures New York at a time of transition, and has at least some serious things to say about the impact of that transition on the local population. There are, of course, musicals that involve themselves much more deeply in similar serious questions. One obvious example is Cabaret. Another example, and one that always surprises me by the depth of its examination of real issues, is Fiddler on the Roof. These are two examples of serious musical theatre and each, in its own way, demonstrates how song can add another layer of atmosphere, emotion and context to serious drama.

And speaking of musical comedy (as we almost were):
– Do you know you’ve still got your coat on?
– No, but you sing the first verse and I’ll join in the chorus.

In any normal week, Sunday morning finds me leaping upstairs after breakfast, taking the steps two at a time, my twin titanium hips working overtime to get me seated in front of the computer with not a moment wasted, as I struggle to keep the ideas that are bouncing around my head from bubbling over before I can capture them on the screen.

Not this week. This week I have taken pains to put off the moment when I flip open the laptop, open a new file in Word, and start to write my post. I lingered in shul after the morning service today. Once I got back home, I found various ways to delay starting to dice the fruit for our breakfast, even emptying the dishwasher, taking care to count the various types of cutlery, to ensure that nothing had gone missing.

After breakfast, I disappeared upstairs to do some vital filing until it was time for us to leave for the trip I had insisted we take today to IKEA. Because we were looking for items for ourselves and also for Esther and Ma’ayan, this involved over two complete circuits of the store, and then, of course, it made no sense not to stay for lunch. As soon as we arrived home, I simply had to assemble the standard lamps we had bought for the salon.

The result of all this elaborate avoidance strategy is that it is now gone 7 on Sunday evening, and I am only now starting to write.

Why, you may be asking, this unaccustomed reluctance? I could pretend that it is purely out of consideration for you, because this will, I’m afraid, not be the usual jaunty laugh-a-minute cheerful-chappie piece, but something rather bleaker. The fact is that I’m not looking forward to writing it any more than I’m looking forward to you reading it.

I feel that over the past week this bloody pandemic has caught up with me. Let me make it clear, quickly, that neither Bernice nor I nor any of the family have caught Covid, in any of its Greek alphabet strains. No, it’s just that everywhere I look there are Covid aggravations, and it’s really getting me down.

I can actually put my finger on one specific straw that broke this camel’s back. Last Thursday, we received an email from TAP. Now, when the Portuguese airline writes to me out of the blue, it is seldom in order to tell me that I have won this month’s raffle, or that Bernice and I have been upgraded to business class. As I glanced through the email, my eye was caught by the subject – Cancelamento devido a nova variante do CoronaVírus. Even your Portuguese must be good enough to get the gist of that. The text of the message began: Operação Suspensa: Lamentamos informar que… You surely get the picture.

So, our flight from Tel Aviv to Lisbon on January 16 has been cancelled. The good news is that we are eligible for a voucher to the value of 110% of what we paid, or a full refund. The bad news is that the email makes no mention of the status of our return flight from Lisbon on February 13.

Since receiving the email, I have spent hours on the phone, trying to speak to TAP. On one occasion, I even got through to a rep; however, when he put me on hold, while he was retrieving the details of our booking, TAP’s system bounced me to their automated customer survey, asking me how satisfied I was with the way my problem had been resolved. (On a scale of 1 to 5. When are they going to invent a phone keyboard with negative numbers?) From there, I was, of course, disconnected. On Saturday and Sunday, they do no work at all (hands up if you sang that line with me), so tomorrow (as I write), Monday, will find me wasting the day trying to establish whether all flights out have been cancelled, or we can reschedule, and whether we are entitled to a full refund for the return flight that may, now, be of no use to us.

In today’s news, we learnt that Portugal is on an extended list of countries that Israel is contemplating declaring to be red, and also that the Israeli government is considering closing the airport completely for a week or two.

We would probably be a lot more devil-may-care about flying out, and risking being stranded in Portugal, were it not for the fact that Esther is due to give birth in March, and we (particularly, but not exclusively, the Bernice parts of we) feel that we must be sure of being in Israel to offer help and support and, b’ezrat Hashem, to shep nachus (something that can only properly be done in Yiddish, of course).

So here we are, faced with the task of attempting to make a decision when we are not in possession of any of the relevant facts that might inform such a decision.

Please don’t think that this is just a moan about poor little me, or even poor little us. I’d like to crave your indulgence while I extrapolate. Our problem, writ large, is the problem faced by Naftali Bennett and his corona cabinet, by Boris Johnson, and, indeed, by every world leader. They, like us, are all being asked to decide on the best course of action when nobody honestly knows enough about the situation we find ourselves in.

For Bernice and myself, dithering for a few days, or even a week or two, is very draining, and is already making us very tense, but at least the eyes of the nation are not upon us. For our elected leaders, the situation is very much more fraught. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that for a long time we have been led to believe that modern science provides us with the tools that enable us to make scientifically sound decisions in all fields. Suddenly confronted with the clear fact that it ain’t necessarily so (a song for every occasion), we feel at best cast adrift, at worse betrayed. (A friend pointed out to me over dinner on shabbat that while this is true for part of the population, there is another part that rejects entirely the validity of all science. This certainly doesn’t help the situation.)

Initially, way back in what now almost seem like the halcyon days of early-to-mid 2020, the zigzagging of governments and the tension between politicians and scientists could sometimes raise a laugh, or at least a wry smile. But now? Lately, I look around me, and, indeed, inside me, and see only frustration, frayed tempers, intolerance, embittered skepticism. I listen to radio interviewers not attempting to conceal their anger or contempt for civil servants outlining plans currently being implemented; I see friends falling out over restrictions; I hear and read inflammatory language from those on both sides, on all sides, of the debate about how to handle the crisis, even about whether there is a crisis.

We are told that, in many cases, the long-term effects of Covid may be worse than the symptoms experienced when the virus infects an individual. I am genuinely afraid that the social effects of long Covid may be equally serious. As we approach the end of Year 2 with no end in sight, I fear for the entire fabric of society.

So, perhaps, making our way to Portugal and living off the grid in a tepee is the best thing we can do. It certainly looks nice and cosy.

So here we are, eight days before the shortest day in the year and about ten days after the earliest sunset in the year. (For those of you whose intuition is that the shortest day of the year should be the day when the sunset is latest, let me point you to the least incomprehensible explanation I have found of the phenomenon known as analemma.)

(Of course, a small but select portion of my readership should substitute ‘longest’ and ‘latest’ for ‘shortest’ and ‘earliest’ in the above paragraph, but if you think I’m going to do that for you after what you did to us at the Gabba….)

However, despite what the calendar says, the weather feels much more like autumn, at least here in Maale Adumim. In fact, as I write on Sunday, it feels like an Indian summer. (Which I just googled, incidentally, to discover that it has nothing to do with the Raj, as I always thought, and we should probably be calling it a Native American summer.)

All of which has nothing to do with this week’s topic (so don’t stop reading, even if you’ve understood next to nothing so far). It was only the thought of leaves that enticed me to precede them with ‘Autumn’, so that you would never guess just what I plan to share with you, which is, in fact, some reflections on the books I happen to be reading (or, ‘leafing’ through – d’ya geddit?) at the moment.

In the past – and certainly until I retired – I would only ever read one book at a time. At that stage, almost all of my reading was fiction. Sometimes a complete working week would go by without me finding (or, perhaps I should say, making) time to read at all. I then discovered, if I attempted to read two novels simultaneously, that characters from one would start sneaking through to the other, until I reached the point where I was no longer sure who belonged where.

Once I retired, however, I started to stretch myself, and also began reading far more non-fiction than ever previously, to the point where I now feel confident in juggling up to four books simultaneously, rarely, if ever, fumbling any of them. This feat is undoubtedly made easier by the fact that two of the books are what I am reading aloud to Bernice, and all four books are from very different genres.

Having made a conscious decision a year or so ago to read more poetry, our (theoretically daily) reading sessions begin with a poem. Perhaps, on reflection, our current volume of poetry might more accurately be called verse. My brother and I grew up with a volume of light verse first published in 1933 and, in our edition, revised in the early 1950s. It was written by literary siblings Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon.

An aside: It’s incredible how much cultural background you need in order to understand immediately the social significance of such things as personal or street names in England. To give just one example. A British TV sitcom of the 1960s starred Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques, who lived in Sebastopol Terrace, Acton, London. The Siege of Sebastopol (1854–5) was a major campaign in the Crimean War. Over the next 40 years, London grew 500% in area. This meant that, in every new district, large numbers of names had to be found for new streets. Crimean War victories were an obvious candidate for commemoration in this way. By 1960, the houses in these new districts were 80 or more years old. As a result, ‘Sebastopol Terrace’ was a recognizable shorthand for a rundown street of Victorian houses in a neglected area of London. Similarly, all three names ‘Herbert’, ‘Eleanor’ and ‘Farjeon’ together place the siblings firmly in the upper-middle classes of the first half of the 20^th Century.

The book of verse we grew up with was Kings and Queens, which offered, for each of the English (later British) monarchs from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth II, a one-page poem summarizing the highlights of the reign. These poems captured, mostly wittily, the popular perception of each monarch. If provoked, Martin and I are still capable of boring people at parties with recitations of the half-remembered verses.

Martin saw, and bought me for my last birthday, a follow-up volume, Heroes and Heroines, which dissects in a similar fashion such diverse figures as Robin Hood, Napoleon, Pocohontas and Florence Nightingale. Currently, Bernice and I are reading a poem a day as an amuse bouche before we read a chapter of a novel. Like so many sequels, Heroes and Heroines does not always reach the heights of Kings and Queens, but it is nevertheless a very enjoyable read, and I have learnt what Lady Hester Stanhope – who was previously just a name to me – is famous for.

The novel we are currently three-quarters of the way through is Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, whose central characters are an illegal Chinese immigrant in New York and her son. The novel is written from the viewpoints of both the mother and the son, and it movingly and powerfully explores the very real emotional and material hardships that many immigrants face. It is clearly very thoroughly researched, but never feels didactic, and the author’s control over how and when the elements of the story are revealed is masterful.

However, the first 280 pages have been almost relentlessly bleak. Indeed, Bernice feared that there would no redemption. I, on the other hand, have been waiting in expectation of a happy ending, and, in the last 20 pages, we both feel that we can see a faint pink glow that suggests that the sun may eventually shine again.

We have both been reflecting on the fact that almost all the novels we have read lately (and much of the non-fiction) ranges between depressing and gut-wrenching. It seems to me that this is not just a question of the narrative. In many Dickens novels, almost all of the storyline is bleak; however, there is a relish in the storytelling that lifts the spirits. That celebration of the form sometimes seems to me to be missing in contemporary literature.

As a counterweight to this, I started reading Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language. I am a great fan of Bryson (who isn’t?), both in his explicitly comic (Notes from a Small Island) and his more ‘serious’ (The Human Body) modes. I must admit that I initially found Mother Tongue a little plodding, with somewhat of a shopping list of examples and observations. I wonder whether that is because I know considerably more about the English language than I do about the human body. (Mind you, I know considerably more about most things than I do about the human body, even my own.) However, I am now warming to it rather more. Bryson is certainly a master of the casual comic aside, and, at his best, breathes real life into dry facts and statistics.

My fourth current book – designated as shabbat reading – is Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z”l’s last book, Morality. Let me lay my cards on the table. If there exists, at this moment, a more important book, a more enlightening book, a book better able to make sense of what ails the Western world in these troubled times, and to offer hope for our future, then I am not aware of it.

What makes this book so special? There are, I believe, a number of elements. Rabbi Sacks was both an academic philosopher and a deeply religious man. This combination gave him both the perspective to recognize, and the tools and vocabulary to analyze and discuss, the moral challenges of our age. Plagued (or blessed) with insomnia, he read very widely and voraciously, enabling him to bring a wealth of wide-ranging and relevant classic and contemporary sources to the discussion. A man of great modesty and intellectual honesty, he was incapable of subordinating the facts to his position on any issue. Above all, perhaps, he possessed what just might be the greatest gift an intellectual can have. He could see clearly to the heart of an argument, and was able to explain and discuss profound ideas in language of absolute clarity and simplicity.

In Morality’s 23 chapters, each only 10 or 20 pages long, Rabbi Sacks revisited several themes that had long been at the centre of his understanding of Judaism and its contribution to the world – family and community as opposed to the individual, covenant as opposed to contract, guilt culture as opposed to shame culture, choice as opposed to fate. In Morality he fused these and other elements into a single, unified approach to understanding and addressing the challenges of the modern age.

If you are concerned by the path Western society seems to be taking, and if you are looking for one book to read to make sense of what is happening, and to suggest how current trends might be reversed, then I cannot too highly recommend Morality as that book. Its subtitle is ambitious – Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times – but this only reflects Rabbi Sacks’ optimism and his overwhelming belief in man’s capacity for good. To read the book is to feel simultaneously saddened by all that the world has lost with his death and gladdened that he managed to leave us so rich a legacy of thought.

I pray that society will adopt his recommended approach, and thereby make the world an even better place for Tao to grow up in.

Meanwhile, Tao is channeling his energies into helping seal the cob floor of the tipee with linseed oil: repairing the world one coat at a time.

Castelo Branco is the major city of the district in which Penamacor is located. The municipality has over 50,000 inhabitants, and is home to a polytechnic college, and some manufacturing industry, providing components to the car industry. When we first visited, the city also boasted at least two strictly vegetarian restaurants, both of which we sampled.

The more modest establishment traded under the name Namaste, which won it no prizes for originality. (A quick Google research reveals that in almost any self-respecting town in England you will find a Namaste restaurant.) It was a no-frills establishment, offering, each day, a different set menu with no choices. The food was tasty, if relatively unexciting, and incredibly good value for money. The ambience was relaxed and casual, and the decor was similarly laid back, offering an eclectic choice of chair styles and cutlery.

All of that last paragraph is written in the past tense because, sadly, Namaste became one of the victims of Covid-19. On this last trip, however, we found that, as is so often the case, another similarly modest establishment has sprung up. Eschewing the Indian vibe of its predecessor, this trades under the unabashed name Fast Vegan, and what they say is what you get. When we went en famille to Castelo Branco, we planned to eat at the other, rather more up-market, vegetarian restaurant, but, in the event, my navigation brought us to Fast Vegan Café.

This was a slight disappointment because Michael and Tslil had explained to Tao the concept of choosing one’s meal from a range of dishes offered on a menu, and he was rather intrigued by the prospect of this novelty. However, Fast Vegan offered, again, a no-choice menu (with the exception of dessert). Fortunately, the main dish of the day was rotini (or pasta twirls, as I have always called them) in a vegan Bolognese sauce, accompanied by a simple but very fresh salad, all of which Tao heartily approved of, as, indeed, did we all.

The day out had begun with a visit to the municipal park, which boasts a very good adventure playground as well as a small wooded area, a cafe and several feature fountains. The plan had been for us to split up after lunch, with the kids going shopping for work clothes at a large outlet, and Bernice and I shopping for bathroom accessories at a nearby store. In the event, Tao was fairly exhausted from the park, and we all agreed that we would call it a day after lunch.

This meant that the following day Bernice and I returned to Castelo alone, to complete our shopping. After a successful morning, we drove into the centre of the city and went in search of the other, posher, eating establishment – Restaurant Mãos de Horta, which sounds to my ear considerably more enticing than Fast Vegan Café. Incidentally, I just Google translated Mãos de Horta; it apparently means ‘Hands to the Vegetable Garden’. Then I googled Mãos de Horta in the hope of finding out what ‘hands to the vegetable garden’ is supposed to mean. I came across a book of the same name, which is a ‘How to’ book for Portuguese aspiring backyard vegetable gardeners.

This turned out to be in the same location as the restaurant we had eaten in for my 70^th birthday: another story of a restaurant closing and another opening.

Online, the previous evening, I had established that the restaurant was open from 12 noon until 2AM, Tuesday to Saturday, with live music and what I am unreliably informed is a ‘funky vibe’ in the later evening hours. We reasoned that at 2PM, when we planned to arrive, the vibe, if there was one, would be rather more subdued. Unfortunately, the previous evening was Monday, so we were unable to phone to confirm those opening hours. However, we decided to take our chances.

We approached the restaurant door through a very pleasant outdoor terrace, where tables with linen tablecloths were warmed by autumnal early afternoon sun. This looked promising.

When we arrived at the door, it was closed but unlocked, which we took to be a good sign. Inside, there were no customers, and no staff in sight, which we took to be a bad sign. And yet, a recording of a very easy-on-the-ear jazz piano trio was playing in the background, which was surely encouraging. When a pleasant young man appeared behind the well-stocked bar in response to my ‘Hola!’, our spirits rose. However, when he explained apologetically that they had just closed for lunch until 6PM, our spirits fell again.

Rather uncharacteristically, I decided that I wasn’t prepared to fold in the face of what might be a bluff. I knew that the alternative to a meal on a sunlit terrace, washed in jazz piano, was a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate, and a couple of handfuls of peanuts and almonds, sitting in the car. I put on my most pitiful face and asked whether there weren’t any crumbs from the floor that they could offer us. The young man immediately disappeared to ‘ask the chef if there was anything he could do’ (Hurrah!) and returned a minute later, looking, again, a little apologetic (Oh no!) and explained that the only thing the chef could offer was the set menu of the day. (Yes!!) Without even asking what that was (there are few disgusting surprises that a vegan restaurant can offer), we gleefully accepted, and stepped back outside to choose a table.

Over the next 40 minutes, we enjoyed a delicious, if luridly purple, beetroot soup, followed by a main course that consisted of four separate dishes on a single rectangular plate. The presentation was unflashy but very tasteful. A mound of thin spaghetti with peanut and leaf in a beet sauce; a fresh-tasting mangold salad; a cylinder of plain perfectly boiled rice topped with a chewy mushroom sauce; a salsa-topped salad crowned with one perfect fresh raspberry. The dish was a delight to the eye and then the palette. Each of the four dishes offered a combination of contrasting and complementary textures and flavours. Taken together, the four presented a very rich and varied meal. Bernice chose to accompany this with mint tea, and was brought a proper china pot that yielded four cups. I chose a refreshing iced tea.

Bernice passed on dessert, but I was tempted by one of Portugal’s typical custardy dishes, which was fine but unexciting, and an excellent espresso. As we waited for the bill to arrive, we played our usual game. ‘What would you expect to pay for that meal in a similar restaurant in Israel?’ This was not an easy question to answer. The standard of food presentation that we had enjoyed, the fine linen and tableware, the easy charm of the waiter, tend to be found in Israel only in restaurants that are more up-market than this one ostensibly was. However, since all of those apparent peripherals actually contribute significantly to the pleasure of the dining experience, it is not unreasonable to take these factors into account when ‘pricing’ the equivalent meal in Israel.

This is, of course, a game that we play with marked cards, because we are smugly confident that, in inland Portugal, we are going to be pleasantly surprised by how cheap the meal will actually be. However, in this case, the degree of our surprise surprised even us, if you follow me. For 21 euros, the two of us ate a meal that would, we reckon, have cost us at least 65 euros in Israel. We also came to the conclusion that, although the restaurant had changed, the chef almost certainly had not, since the style and the considered presentation of the food, coupled with the delicate flavourfulness of the meal, reminded us of the meal we had eaten in the same location 20 months earlier. We are fairly sure that this is a case of rebranding to reboot as Portugal emerged from lockdown. Unfortunately, the waiter could not confirm our suspicions, since he had only arrived in the city, and started working in the restaurant, a couple of weeks earlier.

At this point, I hope that at least some of you are puzzled by the apparent dissonance between my enthusiastic review of the meal and the contemptuously dismissive title of this week’s post. Well, the time has come to tell you more of the dietary preferences of the kids’ dog, Lua. She has a regular diet of dogfood and water, which she eats with what seems more a sense of duty than real pleasure. On the other hand, she will turn metaphorical somersaults for fish skin and bones, which, sadly, the kids never provide her with. Fortunately, while we are there, we eat fish regularly. If, on our return in January, she remembers us and greets us warmly, I for one will not be fooled; I can recognize cupboard love when I see it.

Lua’s other favourite treat is dairy. She will lick a butter wrapper or a yoghourt carton so clean that you could eat your dinner off it, as it were. However, on our first expedition to the supermarket on this last trip, we accidentally bought vegan yoghourts. Almost everyone was perfectly happy with them, but when Bernice tossed a finished carton to Lua, she took one sniff and walked away in disgust. She is a dog that (hands up those Brits with long memories) can tell Stork from butter….without even tasting it.

Tao, thankfully, is a considerably less fussy eater.