It’s been a week of pleasant surprises, starting with the weather, which has continued to be bright and sunny, with clear blue skies. Indeed, in the two weeks since our arrival, we have still not seen any rain, and, on Wednesday last week, the temperature peaked at an incredible 14^oC. Our house stays naturally cool, which is a blessing in summer but less so in January, particularly since the temperature at night falls to around 0-1 ^oC. At least, during the day, when the sun climbs over the house and shines directly into the back garden, from around 11 o’clock, we have something of a suntrap.

I’ve actually been proving my bread dough outside, very successfully. (When people ask me what aspects of life in Britain I miss in Israel – and even more so in Portugal – “The airing cupboard” is my standard answer. Not only is it perfect for bread dough, it is also the ideal environment for warming pyjamas and drying bath towels between showers.)

We’ve also unexpectedly enjoyed the generosity of neighbours, although I’m not entirely sure that ‘enjoyed’ is the right word. A couple of days after we arrived, a lady who lives round the corner arrived on the doorstep with a gift of a large shopping bag full of tangerines and a few oranges. We feel obliged to include a clutch in our breakfast fruit salad, squeeze several fruits every morning for fresh juice, and grab one every time we walk past the bowl in the kitchen. Nevertheless, we were still only two-thirds of the way through emptying the bowl when I answered a knock on the door a few days later to find the same lady offering another large shopping bag full of citrus. If only I had the Portuguese, I might have plucked up the courage to say the equivalent of “That’s very kind of you but we haven’t actually worked our way through the last lot you gave us”. As it is, my Portuguese only runs to “Obrigado”, which is how we ended up with a second industrial load of citrus.

Tslil assures me that most people in the village refuse to accept these gifts, because everyone has their own citrus tree. This particular lady probably knows that we only have a small and not very prolific satsuma tree in the garden, and also knows that we are now a household of five rather than three, and so she insists on showering us with gifts.

A third large shopping bag arrived on Friday, so I’ve been googling recipes for tangerine fritters and satsuma surprise, but I now basically despair of ever reach the bottom of the bowl.

Added to this, we have our own lemon tree, which grows close enough to the house to allow fruit to be picked from the balcony leading of the kids’ bedroom as well as from the garden itself. It is currently full of fruit, and so, since we arrived, I have made lemon curd and lemon ice-cream, and Tslil and Tao baked a delicious lemon cake for my birthday lunch on Shabbat. (This cake was, as Tao conspiratorially informed me a couple of days before my birthday, a surprise!)

My birthday was actually full of surprises, and not only for me. In the morning, nobody alluded to my birthday, but this was more or less what I had expected. We have developed a tradition in the family, over the decades, of ignoring birthdays until we have the time to celebrate them. So, for example, when we were working, we would wait to wish Happy Birthday and give cards and presents until we sat down to dinner together.

This Shabbat, around noon, Tslil came into the salon and said: “I haven’t wished you Happy Birthday yet!” When Bernice heard this, she almost collapsed, because, although she assures me that she had been aware of my birthday all week, she had in fact completely forgotten on the day itself. I’m trying to comfort myself with the fact that her average over the last 50 years is still 98%, which must be a pass mark.

Fortunately, the others hadn’t forgotten, and I received a lovely card, decorated beautifully by Tao, who, Micha’el assured me, had also decided on the exact wording of the heart-warming message inside.

The greatest surprise of the week took place outside the China shop. We were, of course, unable to get through the week without a couple of visits to the China shop. On this occasion, Bernice and I had popped down to pick up a bolt for the front door, some socks for Micha’el, and a connector to attach a hose to the bidet…and thereby hangs a tale.

You may remember that, during our last visit, we arranged for the bathroom to be renovated, and, a couple of weeks after we left, the job was completed…or, to be more precise, not completed. In the time-honoured tradition of British workmen, Mark the plumber and Eric the tiler had finished the job on schedule, other than connecting said hose to the bidet tap. They assured Micha’el that they would, when next at the building supplies store 30-minutes’ drive away, buy the requisite connector, and return to complete the job.

If we had been in Portugal then, I would have paid them the balance owing, less 100 euros, which I would have held back until the job was completed. However, I didn’t feel it was fair to expect Micha’el (who was holding the money) to do my dirty work, and so I told him to pay in full. Hands up all those who are not surprised to learn that Mark the cheery plumber and Eric the jovial tiler have not returned to finish the job…..Yes, I thought so.

Which explains why we were, unsuccessfully as it happens, searching for the right connector/adaptor (3/4” to 5/8” if you’re interested) last Thursday.

When we arrived at the shop, Bernice suddenly realised that, having come out without her handbag, she had no mask with her. (It is still a legal requirement to wear masks in shops in Portugal. In this part of Portugal, a lot of people wear masks in the street as well.) You need to understand that Bernice is rather like the Queen when in Portugal, in that she goes around with no money on her. I handle all that side of things. (On the other hand, she carries the passports and, in transit, the various papers that we need to travel these days.) So, I lent Bernice my mask for her to go into the shop and look for socks. She would then have the task of explaining to the shopowner that she was going to swap with me, so that I could come in to look for the bolt and connector and to pay for everything. (I’m not sure how we thought Bernice was going to explain that, but, since they had no socks in the right size, the question was academic.)

Anyway (and here we reach the point of the story, for the benefit of those of you who were beginning to despair of ever reaching it), while Bernice was inside, I was waiting outside, unmasked, pretending to study the display of artificial flowers outside the shop window, and carefully avoiding coming too close to any other pedestrians. I suddenly heard, from the road behind me, a voice call out: “Kvod Harav!” Before I had time to register how odd it was that someone should call out to me in Hebrew, let alone elevate me to the rabbinate, I turned round to see a couple of Breslov-looking hassidim in their thirties, sitting in an orange Transit van. (This is not, to be honest, a sentence I ever expected to write.) I think they were probably a little surprised to see a kippa-wearing Jew in Penamacor, but their surprise was as nothing compared to my total astonishment at seeing hassidim in Penamacor.

They stopped to chat for a couple of minutes, during which time I discovered that they are part of a community that has just bought a sizable plot of land outside a village about 10 minutes from Penamacor. Since they were stopped in the middle of the road, they didn’t have time to furnish any further details, but I shall certainly be trying to find out a little more about them. There, as they say, goes the neighbourhood.

And that’s about it for this week. As you can see, this trip has no major projects, just a daily portion of fun and games, stories and make-believe, cooking and baking, which is, after all, what we are here for.

It’s a little after eight on Sunday morning. Bernice has just gone downstairs with Tao, who has taken to joining us in bed every morning for a book or two and sometimes a matching game. They have now left me to try to dash off this week’s post before we all have breakfast and drive down to the land for the morning. All, that is, except for Tslil, who is off to a meeting of her women’s group.

Somehow, a week has flashed by since we left Ma’ale Adumim – a week in which not a great deal has happened. We haven’t ventured out of Penamacor, and have visited the local supermarket only three times (which may be a personal record: we have been known to go every day, as we suddenly realise new items we are missing). On our first visit, the day after we arrived, we were armed with half a yard of shopping list. Unfortunately, it being Monday, there was no fresh fish at all and not a huge variety of fruit and veg. However, we were still able to spend over 100 euros.

The next day we returned and Bernice chased down some more items, while I spent my usual ten minutes at the fish counter with google translate, coming away with beautiful, fresh salmon, Nile perch and sea bream. No trout, unfortunately, which will probably have to wait until we get as far as Castelo Branco.

All of this saw us through until Friday, when I popped out to top up the fruit and veg. This time I was able to find delicious strawberries and broccoli, but, astonishingly, no cucumbers, which are clearly not as popular here as they are in Israel, or indeed Britain. Tslil believes that they are a largely regarded as a seasonal veg here, and that locals use a large, dark-green variety of courgette as a winter substitute.

Apart from that, we have paid one visit to the China shop, where the owner greeted us as warmly as ever. We only needed a couple of small items, and, with a mixture of searching and sign language, we were able to track down a plate stand for the havdala dish we brought out this time and clips for kippot. (We had to compromise, and settle for clips decorated with a strawberry pattern, but nevertheless we were, as always, impressed that the shop hadn’t let us down.)

In addition, on Shabbat afternoon, we took a walk down (almost everywhere is down from our house) and then up, to a spur at the northern corner of the village. Up a long flight of stone steps is what looks like a church, which however has only one small window at the side. The large metal doors are always locked, Tslil tells us. I suspect it may be a chapel of rest for a coffin before burial.

The walk was very worthwhile, because the top of the spur commands a view past the edge of the village and over the valley to the east, and, thirty yards away, a view to the west over the valley in which the kids’ land lies. We arrived there just 45 minutes before the end of shabbat, and the pinkish-purple misty evening light over the distant foothills of the Serra da Estrela was a very welcome reminder of the beauty of creation. Nothing like a dose of nature to restore one’s sense of perspective.

Our only other major outing this week was a drive down to the land, with Micha’el, Tao and Lua, the now-hulking still-puppy. We didn’t stay long, but were able to admire the cob floor of the tipee, which constituted our first surprise. When we were last here, the floor was level after the application of the last full layer of cob. There were, however, several cracks, because in the unusually dry and warm weather the cob had dried quicker than the kids had hoped.

In the last two months, they have filled the cracks and fed the cob with several coats of linseed oil. As we walked into the tipee last week…. Correction, as we bent double to duck under the entrance flap, which is more or less ideal for Tao, easily negotiable for his yoga-practising parents, and manageable for his pilates-practising nana, but a humiliating crawl on all fours for his decrepit grandfather (who nevertheless expects, after a few weeks of boot camp, to be able to limbo dance his way through)….As we went into the tipee last week, our eyes, and our feet, were met by a smooth, rock-hard floor, that nevertheless gave the sensation of having a very slight give in it. It seems to be almost as durable as concrete, but considerably warmer, and it makes the tipee feel cosy and much closer to completion.

The next stage in making the tipee completely habitable is the cob stove, which Micha’el is making good progress on. In typically symbiotic fashion, the clay soil for the cob comes from the digging out of the swales, the channels that will carry the rainwater away from around the tipee and down to the area that will need to be irrigated.

The main reason for our trip to the land today is because Tao didn’t get to spend much time there last week, and really wants to go, not least to take us on his special walk through the jungle (which the kids assure us is less terrifying than it sounds). Lua never needs to be asked twice. Spending much of the day lazing around the house (although she gets taken up to the forest for a good walk twice a day), she adores running free on the land, chasing shadows, hunting and dismembering twigs, following rabbit trails.

Micha’el may manage to get some more work done on the land today, and I may even be able to help. In addition to digging the swales, sifting the soil to produce the cob, and building the stove, the kids have been gifted what Tslil feels may be something of a white elephant – a young, but nevertheless fairly substantial, olive tree. It is, at the moment, lying on its side just off the path to the tipee, and the kids plan to plant it fairly close to where it is lying. This, of course, entails clearing a circle of land and digging a dauntingly large hole to sink the tree in. In a moment of weakness last night, I heard myself volunteering to help Micha’el in this effort.

On a walk with Tao on Thursday, we spent some time playing football on the five-a-side open-air pitch and watching the excavator and dumper-truck at the site at the top of our street where a major renovation of the police headquarters is taking place. Tao was also able to go rock-climbing on the piles of excavated gravel, as his grandpa filmed and his nana had her heart in her mouth.

Fortunately, and, again, unexpectedly, the weather this entire past week has been beautiful: sunny every day, with almost entirely clear skies and no rain. It has been cold, particularly the last couple of nights, when the temperature fell to -3^oC. Before my Canadian and Eastern seaboard US readers start sneering, let me emphasise that the significant factor in our house here is not outside temperature, or wind chill, but insulation. The difference between the outside and inside temperature is not always as great as we would like.

Having said that, the new stove we bought when we were last here does a great job of keeping downstairs cosy. (It also has eliminated the unpleasant smoky atmosphere in the salon.) Over shabbat, when we could not feed the stove, the meicham (electric urn) and platta (hotplate) warmed the kitchen, while a three-bar fire warmed the salon. It is only in the five minutes between coming upstairs last thing at night to get undressed, and slipping under the very efficient duvet, that we feel cold.

I usually daven on the glazed-in balcony off our bedroom (the solarium, as the estate agent might term it). It faces NNE, so that the early morning sun streams in through the side window. In winter, it is challengingly cold, but, inspired by our shabbat davening outdoors during the first year and a half of COVID, I donned my coat, cap and gloves, and grew cosy enough to be able to doff the cap, remove the gloves, and even unzip my coat after a while.

For the most part, this first week has slipped by in a whirl of stories, cuddles, games, cooking and baking, playgrounds, catching up, and generally having a good time. Nothing wrong with any of that. And now it’s 9:40, so I really must stop here and get ready for another week full of everyday pleasures.

I’m writing these words while cruising in afternoon sunshine above the clouds in mid-Mediterranean. Yes, we’re on our way to Portugal!

There’s a good story to tell about our negotiation, over the last few days, of the various obstacles placed in our way by a range of commercial and governmental interests. However, as I said to Bernice, I can’t possibly expect you all to sit through another catalogue of bureaucratic woes, not least because, at the end of the day, we actually made it into the air.

So, let’s just say that the last three or four days lasted, for Bernice and myself, about a month, and aged us about a year. Still, no complaints. The actual airport process today was remarkably smooth; ground staff were efficient and helpful; and when we presented the printouts of our Passenger Location cards, the El Al check-in desk clerk held them aloft and announced to the passengers checking in at adjacent desks: ‘You see! This is the document you need.’ I told her that I had never been singled out as the star pupil before, and she promised that after the lesson she would give me a sweet….but did she? Did she heck as like!!

We left Israel at an interesting time, The media today are full of speculation that Bibi Netanyahu is about to strike a deal with Attorney General Mandelblit to avoid serving prison time. Since Mandelblit leaves office at the end of January, this is probably a story that will dominate the Israeli media for the next two weeks, which seems like another good reason to fly to Portugal.

COVID, principally Omicron, is spreading at an alarming rate in Israel…and, indeed, in our own community. Over the last few days we kept hearing about friends and acquaintances who have tested positive. I’m inclined to believe that the wider Omicron spreads the better. Who knows: by the time we return Israel may have achieved close enough to herd immunity for the country to decide that the pandemic is over. Yet another reason to see now as the perfect time to retreat to rural Portugal.

Even the weather decided to encourage us to leave. We had been enjoying an early winter that largely ranged from crisp and clear mild winter weather to warm and sunny, and that featured, at least in our area, only a little, occasional, mostly night-time, rain,

Then, on Friday, winter arrived, even in Ma’ale Adumim. Plummeting temperatures; thick, dark cloud; then heavy driving rain and strong, swirling winds. Staid olive trees, usually the model of sobriety, were tossing their canopies as if they were frisky fillies, and their leaves were chattering like a flock of bickering starlings. My wide-brimmed leather hat, which had spent the previous three years gathering dust on a shelf in the wardrobe, had soon doubled in weight as it drank rainwater. I realise, of course, that I am writing for a worldwide audience, and some of you in North America will be telling me that I don’t know what winter is. However, we all know that there are other factors in determining how wintry it feels. Just as the wind-chill factor can make it seem several degrees colder than it actually is, so a lack of adequate home insulation and suddenly realising that you left your really warm coat in Penamacor can have the same effect.

The end result is that my walk to and from shul on Friday evening was Dickensianly bleak.

If you are reading this on publication day, then you may know that this day is Tu b’Shvat, the 15^th day of the Hebrew month of Shvat, which is regarded as the New Year for trees. The reason why trees warrant a New Year is that there are many Jewish laws, of tithing and of enjoying the fruit of trees, that require determining which year of growth the tree is in. Tu b’Shvat marks the beginning of another year in this calculation.

The reason why Tu b’Shvat is chosen for this purpose is because it is taken to mark the transition from winter to spring. Here we come to one of the curious features of the Hebrew calendar. It is largely a lunar calendar; however, it is also a calendar that, in many of its festivals, is agriculturally based, which means that it needs to be a solar calendar.

The way in which these two are reconciled is that, in every cycle of 19 years, there are seven leap years, in which not a single extra day but an entire extra month is added. This creates an irregular pattern in which, typically, for a couple of 12-lunar-month years the Hebrew calendar edges ahead of the Gregorian, so that Pesach, for example, can end up falling in later March and Rosh Hashana in early September. There then follows a leap year, and suddenly Pesach is in mid-April and Rosh Hashana in late September.

It so happens that this year is a leap year. In two weeks’ time a leap-month will be added. This means that, this year, Tu b’Shvat is close to being as early as it can be in the solar year. As I walked to shul on Friday, with the freezing rain driving horizontally into my left ear, I wondered in what sense this could be considered to be two days before the end of winter.

Then, as I walked back from shul, with the freezing rain driving horizontally into my right ear, I started to see that this can serve as a reminder that we cannot take the patterns of the natural world for granted. The uniqueness of the Jewish calendar accentuates this, and makes it clearer for all to see; but we all know, even following the solar calendar, that we can have an Indian summer, that we must ne’er cast a clout till May be out (don’t strip off a layer of clothes before June), and so on.

Perhaps the period in the Jewish year when we feel this most strongly is the period when we throw ourselves on the mercies of Nature most explicitly. In Sukkot, when we move out of our houses and into our booths. I know this doesn’t hold true in Montreal, for example, but in Israel, Sukkot can bring almost any weather. There are years when we have to retreat from the sukka because the sun is relentless. And then there are the years like one of our first Sukkot in Maale Adumim, when the heavens opened halfway through our first night meal, and the storage compartment under the sofa bed became a swimming pool in a matter of minutes.

Experiences like these remind us that we are not the masters of Nature, and that Nature possesses the force to nurture us or destroy us. Such reflections serve to curb any hubris we might otherwise feel, and make us appreciate all the more sweetly the bounty of Nature when we are privileged to enjoy it.

P.S.: It’s now 7:45 here (here being in a very warm bed in a very cold house in Penamacor) or, in other words, 45 minutes past posting time. Since my body, despite its long day yesterday, thinks it’s 9:45, I can no longer attempt to get back to sleep. So I thought I would send the blog out.

We landed on time and were swiftly through the airport rigmarole and driving across Portugal on a very dark but still and dry, though cloudy, Portuguese night. We arrived around 10:15 local time, and, after the warmest of welcomes from the kids’ dog Lua, who clearly remembers us, and a brief catch-up with Micha’el, we collapsed into bed.

However, since Tao has not yet crept into our bedroom this morning, and we haven’t yet had a chance to see him since we arrived, you’re going to have to wait to see him as well. No pictures this week, I’m afraid.

P.P.S.: Just as I was about to post, someone wandered into the bedroom, so you, and we, have struck it lucky.

Goodness me, what a hectic few days we currently find ourselves in the middle of. We had just about reconciled ourselves to not getting out to Portugal, when Israel last week moved Portugal, together with a generous handful of other European countries, as well as the whole of Africa, from the group of Covid red countries to the group of orange countries.

Fairly soon afterwards, Israel removed even the US and the UK from the red list – in effect, cancelling the red list. This sounds like good news to start the week, doesn’t it?

(For those of you who think this actually is good news, let me point out that all it actually means is that Israel is just as red as these countries, and there is therefore little point in closing our borders to them.

For those of you who think that is actually bad news, I’m going to stick my neck out and say that the whole world catching the Omicron variant may be the best outcome at this stage. Please feel free to tell me I don’t know my as-ymptomatic from my ebola. But I don’t believe the free world can sustain this level of alert for a lot longer.

There was an interesting article in The Times (ToL, not NYT, but you’d guessed that) last week that suggested the pandemic will be over when we decide we’ve had enough of it dominating the news. You probably can’t read the article here, because The Times guards its articles for subscribers, but here’s a brief extract:

“We are on the next stage now,” Krastev says. “Which means trying to understand a world where we are not focused so much on the pandemic. It doesn’t mean that nobody is going to be infected, nobody is going to die, but suddenly your life is not dominated by this fear.

“I think this is how pandemics fade away. It is partly about disease statistics, but not simply that. Suddenly the experience of the pandemic loses centrality. There was a moment when people met, the only questions they asked were, ‘Have you been infected? How are you affected?’ That’s not the case any more. Even when you talk to people that are sick at this very moment you don’t have that kind of urgency. Fear is a very intense emotion, it can’t go on for too long.”)

Anyway, immediately after Portugal was taken off Israel’s red list, family and friends started WhatsApping us with the good news. We slept on it, and, the following morning, we discussed whether we wanted to book again and risk another disruption (even before feeling in our sweaty palms the full cash refund from TAP for our cancelled trip – hold that image). It didn’t take us long to realise that the answer was a fairly resounding ‘Yes!’

Esther then sent me a link to a string of short break return flights to Lisbon from El Al, priced as if they had fallen off the back of a 707. Needless to say, when I actually went online, there was no way to negotiate a longer trip at the same kind of price. Nevertheless, I was able to book. We are due to depart next Sunday, as planned, and return a few days earlier than originally planned.

In the space of a couple of hours, I was able to do everything. I booked the flights. I then took out travel and medical insurance, which thankfully did not involve any long phone interrogations, or declarations from our doctor, because our last trip was recent enough for all the approvals to still be valid.

Finally, I booked a car. After our experience with a puncture last time, I was looking for an alternative to Europcar, and found one that was a little cheaper, had an even better customer rating, and also offered pickup from the airport. The company is not a name I recognized, and I won’t be surprised if, when we arrive in Lisbon, the desk handling this company’s reservations will, in fact, be the desk of one of the big boys – Europcar, Sixt and the rest.

My suspicion is that the rental car setup in Lisbon is the same as what I am convinced is true of the stonemasons at the main cemetery in Jerusalem. As you drive towards the main cemetery gates, you pass a parade of 10 or 12 stonemason’s yards, offering a wide choice. I am prepared to bet that, if you were allowed to walk through the reception area of one of these, and out the back door, you would find that there is just one stonemason’s yard, and all of the dfferent shopfronts are, indeed, just a front. See the Beatles film Help for another example.

As I was booking our flight, I discovered that TAP and El Al appear to have, eminently sensibly, merged their flights. We are, in fact, booked on TAP, which, of course, means that we could have requested a voucher from TAP rather than a cash refund. Heigh-ho! Oh! While we’re speaking of that, let me bring you up to date on the cash refund.

A couple of days after a rep on the phone had opened the refund request for me, I searched online, using the Case ID he had given me. However, I was unable to locate the request. So I phoned TAP to clarify. After 20 minutes waiting on the phone, I got through to another rep, who was able to confirm that the previous rep had not, in fact, submitted the refund request! (No, I don’t know why, either.) While I waited on the phone, this second rep created a new case, with a new Case ID. The following day, after 20 minutes waiting on the phone, I got through to yet another rep, who was able to confirm that the second rep had, this time, submitted the refund request!

Then, last Thursday, just a day after I had made the booking, two emails from TAP arrived in my Inbox: one for my ticket and other for Bernice’s. The message heading in each case was: TAP Reembolso/Refund – Voucher. I immediately started composing in my mind the enraged conversation I was going to have with the TAP rep (who, I already knew, would be unable either to help me or to pass me on to a supervisor who could help me). ‘I have an email from you expressly stating that I can request a full cash refund, not just a voucher!’ (As my brother later pointed out, they stated that I could request it, not that they would grant the request.)

However, when I read the actual email message, I found it contained, in each case, a voucher for ₤56.14. (Please don’t ask why a Euro-based company selling a ticket to a shekel-based customer prices the ticket in sterling. I do know the answer, but your time is too precious.) ₤56.14? Where on earth did they get that figure from?

After a couple of minutes, the penny (or, in this case, 11,228 pennies) dropped. After our June 2020 flight was cancelled, TAP gave us each a voucher for 110% of the cost of the ticket. We redeemed those vouchers against our October 2021 ticket purchase, and there was a remaining credit balance of ₤56.14 on each voucher. When we booked our original January 2022 tickets, we redeemed that balance. (Don’t worry; I have a slide for this that will make it clearer.)

Now, TAP have astutely said: ‘Wait a minute. We’re not going to cash that voucher in for you. Do you think we were born yesterday? We’ll give you back the voucher!’ I hope and believe that they will refund the balance in cash. Bernice, who is becoming, with regard to TAP, Eeyorier the longer this saga goes on, thinks we’ll never see the money. I’m decidedly Pigleter in this regard.

So, we’re booked and now desperately getting ready to go. This involves a certain amount of scrambling. Bernice has been conducting her grand tour of Maale Adumim toyshops, and has tracked down everything, including little people and picture dominoes. She has also gathered together the disparate items on our food shopping list to go, which includes items Tslil misses and items I want for baking, and Bernice for cooking, that are either unobtainable or of unclear kashrut status in Portugal: vacuum-packed dates, caraway seeds, balsamic vinegar, yeast; that kind of thing.

In her brief spells at home to rest from this running around, Bernice has been clicking away with the needles, in order to finish the sleeveless sweater she is knitting for Tao.

And what, you ask, have I been doing while Bernice is engaged in all this activity? Well, I’m glad you asked. Last time we were in Portugal, Tao and I spent a lot of time on the floor, devising increasingly complex structures from Magnetiles and Duplo. Just before our flight, we built an airport, with an immigration desk, luggage carousel, passenger steps, luggage van and trailer, and a magnificent aeroplane with passenger and luggage compartments.

When we first arrived, as this was the first time I had ever seen Magnatiles, Tao was much better at this than I was. By the time we left, I was starting to realise the impressive versatility of Magnatiles, and I was able to more than keep up with Tao. I do realise that it’s not a competition, and I do know that there is something pathetic about a grandfather in his 70s comparing his performance with that of his grandson who is not yet three years old.

However, just in case at some point in the future it does become a competition, I want to make sure that I don’t let myself down. After all, Tao will have been practicing for the intervening two and a half months.

So, I’m spending my time sketching out some ideas on paper, and practising getting down onto, and back up from, the floor, with the minimum of moans and creaks. What with that, and counting the hours until we fly, I’ve barely had time to write this post!

Lots of ground to cover today, so let’s get started.

First up: I took a certain amount of (albeit muted) flak from one or two people the other week when I made a passing reference to the fact that Esther is pregnant. They were surprised that Bernice and I had not told them earlier that Esther and Ma’ayan are expecting; Esther is due in mid-March. So, my first New Year’s Resolution for 2022 is to tell people earlier when we are expecting a grandchild.

This is actually very exciting, because this is a resolution which I am able to keep, within the first week of the new year. I’m delighted to tell you that Micha’el and Tslil are also expecting. Tslil has just completed her first trimester, so we are looking forward to somewhere in early July. 2022 is already shaping up to be a busier, and better, year than 2021.

If we’re already talking about Micha’el, Tslil and Tao, then you might like to know that they have a new, 30-minute(!) video on their YouTube channel, which will take you through the whole process of what they have been doing on their land over the last year or more, with a particular focus on all the work involved in erecting the tipi. (As you can see, I still can’t decide how to spell ‘tepee’. I must say, using a variety of spellings makes me feel rather Shakespearean.) You can find the video here. (And for those of you who are less interested in teepees than in Tao, he features as well.)

But, getting back to resolutions, the end of January will mark four years since I retired – or approximately 9500 working hours, but who’s counting? Reflecting on those four years, I remembered the witty little ditty I composed for my farewell party at work, in which I shared some of my plans for retirement. I’ve just revisited the poem, and I’m afraid it looks remarkably like all those New Year’s resolutions I used to make before I made a New Year’s resolution not to make any New Year’s resolutions (which is, unsurprisingly, just about the only New Year’s resolution I had ever kept until just now).

I planned, for example, to finally read Ulysses. I dutifully bought the book, although I did not help my chances by choosing, from the various options, the Oxford edition that reproduces the original 1922 text, typographical errors and all. What I hadn’t realised until the book arrived was that this copy also faithfully reproduced the original font, in its original size. This makes the actual physical task of reading, in your 70s, just a little more of a strain. If there’s one thing you don’t need as you wade through Ulysses, it’s a little more of a strain.

This volume also boasts multiple aids to reading, prepared by the scholarly Jeri Johnson: a 50-page introduction, three appendices, and 218 pages of explanatory notes. A point can be reached where the distinction in meaning between ‘reading aids’ and ‘reading impediments’  becomes blurred.

Not content with that, I also bought, as recommended, Harry Blamires’ excellent The New Bloomsday Book, and then, when I found a second-hand copy of Anthony Burgess’ legendary guide to Joyce’s work, Here Comes Everybody (albeit hiding under its American title of ReJoyce), how could I resist it?

I made a noble start. I read Johnson’s 50-page introduction, then decided, on the basis of recommendations online, to tackle the novel not from Page 1, but, rather, by cherry-picking the more accessible chapters first. I started at the end, with Molly Bloom’s famous monologue (whose driving rhythm I rather unfairly hampered by flicking to and fro between text and notes).

After another chapter, I decided that I would actually prefer to read from beginning to end, and managed to negotiate four or five chapters. This involved prepping from Burgess and Blamires, and keeping one finger in Blamires’ notes and another in Johnson’s, while reading the text.

Around this time, I discovered RTÉ Radio’s 1982 dramatisation of Ulysses. Broadcast to celebrate the centenary of Joyce’s birth, it is widely regarded as the definitive adaptation of the work. It is faithful to the text, being basically a dramatized audiobook, rather than an adaptation, with actors taking the parts of the narrator and the various speaking characters.

Having come across it, I wrestled for a couple of weeks with the philosophical question of whether hearing a book read constitutes reading the book. Having decided that it did – good heavens, I have read several books this last year to Bernice, and she certainly qualifies as having read them – I now find myself liberated.

I am ingesting Ulysses through my ears rather than my eyes, in a far more authentic Dublin accent than my imagination could ever conjure. (I’m currently reading Shuggie Bain aloud to Bernice – another laugh-a-minute novel – and my working-class Glasgow accent makes even me wince.)

I highly recommend the experience of the radio dramatization. The Irish national broadcaster RTÉ offers a very spirited performance of the book, with very few distractions from the words themselves. You might want to pay it a visit (as long as you have 29 hours and 45 minutes to spare, for that is its total running time). At this rate, 2022 may well be the year of War and Peace, if I can only find an unabridged reading.

Another of my self-assigned post-retirement projects was to explore in depth Schubert’s Winterreise – Winter Journey, a cycle of 24 songs for voice and piano that reflect on the last stage of life and the movement towards death. (Oh yes! We love our light comedy!) It took me a long time to grow fond of classical song, particularly for male voice. Decades ago, I bought Bernice a CD set of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert lieder, including Winterreise. It is only in recent years that I have started listening to it.

I then learnt about the phenomenon that is Ian Bostridge, an Oxford history professor, who transitioned from academia to professional singing in his thirties, bursting onto the scene with an acclaimed Wigmore Hall performance of Winterreise (a work which has fascinated him since his youth). He is a very dramatic performer, fully playing a character rather than simply singing the song.

So, I downloaded Bostridge’s Winterreise, and also bought his highly praised study of the work, Schubert’s Winter Journey – Anatomy of an Obsession. (You may be detecting a pattern here: ‘first buy a book’ is the part of every project that I can manage without any difficulty.) I fully intended to work through the cycle, song by song, comparing Fischer-Dieskau’s interpretation with Bostridge’s, and accompanying each song with the relevant chapter from Bostridge’s book.

I still do fully intend to do that, and in fact I’m tempted to make that a 2022 resolution. If I aim to explore one song every fortnight, I should finish the cycle by the end of the year.

As I talk about it here, part of my heart soars at this exciting prospect. Bostridge writes beautifully: his translations of the poems are poems in their own right, and his exploration of his own reflections is fascinating. In addition, the two singers, Fischer-Dieskau and Bostridge, have such contrasting styles that listening to them in tandem will be a wonderful way of helping me determine what I feel is the essence of each song.

At the same time, another part of my heart sinks. I can’t escape the feeling that I am setting myself up to disappoint myself again. I am reminded of Che Guevara’s words (although I may have slightly misread the quote):

“The resolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”

But who knows? Perhaps 2022 will be the year when I really, finally, manage to shake the resolution tree hard enough for lots of apples to fall.

Either way, 2022 is a year I intend to embrace with both arms. (Can you embrace with one arm? I wonder how Nelson managed with Lady Hamilton. But I digress.) Whatever! I close by wishing you all a wonderful 2022. May you always feel confident in your own skin; and remember: what looks like a pile of dirt might turn out to actually be fine-sifted soil perfect for your tipi floor.