But first, the announcements.

Last Friday morning, our younger grandson (I rather like the sound of that), who up until then had been known only as the baby (or, by his three-year-old cousin on Maayan’s side, as Jo-Jo), was brought into the covenant of Avraham and given the name Raphael (not, under any circumstances, to be shortened to Rafi, as Esther (not, under any circumstances, to be shortened to Esti, as David (not, under any circumstances, to be shortened to Dave, as my late mother always made very clear) made very clear) made very clear). Raphael, as you can see, comes from a long line of people whose names are not to be shortened. (Whether his cousin will be allowed to continue to call him Jo-Jo is still under discussion.)

The name Raphael has no familial significance; it is, rather, the name that Esther and Maayan increasingly felt, during that crazy week between his birth and his brit, belonged to him. Esther and Raphael continue to do well, thank God, and they and Maayan are starting to get used to their new life together. Thank you all for your many good wishes, expressed publicly, in comments on last week’s blog, and privately. The wonderful thing about good news is that, when you share it with others and see them take pleasure in your joy, it simply redoubles your joy.

The brit itself was held in Esther and Maayan’s home; we were only 10 adults and one child (not counting a baby and a mohel, of course) just the mothers, grandparents, and two of Maayan’s siblings and their spouses. The quiet intimacy of the occasion seemed very fitting, to be honest. We brought some gooey cakes, and Maayan’s parents provided the savouries, including cheese and wine. I cannot recommend too highly having at least one of your children marry the daughter of a Frenchwoman who enjoys the pleasures of the table.

And now to this week’s other big story. As we were celebrating Raphael’s birth, I was also witnessing the death throes of my laptop. It has been showing signs of its advanced age (only five years, for Heaven’s sake!) for some months now, and I have been googling and YouTubing patches and workarounds and solutions.

First, booting and shutting down started taking a little longer, and then the laptop’s response time in general started to become a little sluggish.

Next, the battery started playing up: the laptop would show 50% of battery left, and would then shut down suddenly. I eventually bought and installed a new battery, which represented, for me, an achievement the equivalent of assembling a precision Swiss watch while blindfolded. When I switched the laptop on after installing the battery, and it didn’t explode, I kept waiting for the Cape Canaveral control centre to break out in applause and whoops.

Then I started having problems with internet connection. The laptop started failing to recognise any Wi-Fi signal. The ‘solution’ I found was to carry out a network reset and reboot, something I ended up having to do sometimes two or three times a session. Eventually, I started connecting my phone by USB cable to the laptop and using my phone as a hotspot, which worked okay, although, for some reason that I never really understood, in this configuration the laptop was unable to recognise the network printer. (If you happen to understand why this happened, please don’t feel a burning need to explain it to me.)

Last week, the laptop refused to shut down, looping round to a reboot every time.

It was around this time that I started feeling like one of those frogs that is prepared for the dining table by being boiled alive. Popular legend has it – at least among those who enjoy eating frogs, but not, I suspect, among vegetarians – that, if you gently lower the frog into a pot of cool water, then gradually increase the temperature, the frog easily adjusts to each increment, and never actually notices as the temperature reaches boiling point. At no point in the gradual decline of my laptop was the extra work (the extra workaround) that I was now required to do so burdensome as to make me stop and think that it was unacceptable.

Finally, last Wednesday morning, I was unable to switch the laptop on. I spent three frustrating hours following a couple of helpful YouTubers (one probably from West Africa and the other certainly from the Indian sub-continent) who offered the six things you can try before you have to bite the bullet and clean or replace your hard drive. I tried all six. None made the slightest difference, although in one or two cases the laptop toyed with me, pretending that something momentous was about to happen before admitting failure. Since cleaning or replacing the hard drive would involve losing all of my applications, I felt I had reached the point where I really needed to call in someone who knew what they were doing.

This, incidentally, is a point I reached with household plumbing some years ago. After the second occasion on which my attempting to fix a small problem had resulted in the need to call in a professional to fix the now larger problem my attempt had created, and after our plumber had assured me that his foreign holidays are all sponsored by people like myself, I vowed never again to boldly go round the bend. The humiliation of discovering how easily the problem is fixed is no worse than the humiliation of having to admit that my efforts have made the problem much worse, and I no longer have to get filthy dirty and/or soaking wet as a prelude to humiliation.

So, at lunchtime on Wednesday, I called a computer technician who came highly recommended. In an unexpected development, I did not have to explain to her where we live, which is in a one-way street at the very edge of one of the older areas in Maale Adumim. If you don’t live there, you never pass the street, and many people don’t know where it is. However, this lady happens to live in the street off which our street runs, so she needed no directions, and arrived within five minutes of my phone call.

Unsurprisingly, none of her quick fixes worked, and so my laptop went off on the equivalent of a gurney. She was able to copy all of my data, in preparation for a re-installation of Windows. All she needed from me (and you’ll find it hard to imagine the depth of the irony in that word ‘all’) was a complete list of the applications I had installed on the laptop, together with usernames, registration codes and passwords.

I mentioned this to a number of people the following day, so I think I can imagine the expression on the faces of at least some of you as you read that last sentence. (Some of you will, of course, be looking very smug. If you value our friendship, don’t tell me who you are.) How lucky I am that I now have a mobile phone on which I can access my Gmail account, and how doubly lucky I am that I never delete emails. By searching by name for the apps I could remember, and then searching for ‘software’, ‘download’, ‘registration’, ‘application’, I was able to locate emails for almost all of the software that I had bought.

How trebly lucky I am that my passwords are always predictable. I was able to remember virtually all of the ones I needed.

So, while we drove up to Zichron to visit ‘the baby’ (as he was then known) on Thursday, I spent a couple of hours trying to remember whether I had forgotten any vital applications in the list that I sent the technician. We stayed overnight in Zichron, and, by the time we arrived back home after the brit, the backup was complete and the reset had started. After shabbat, the technician phoned to say that everything was ready. This morning (Sunday), I have been test-driving my rejuvenated laptop, which is now noticeably faster and not at all quirky.

I have managed to reinstall three or four applications that I had forgotten about, and everything is looking good. Well, as good as it looked before. It would have been wonderful if it had been possible to copy back all of the data, all of those thousands of files in their hundreds of labyrinthine folder structures, in a slightly more methodical configuration. Unfortunately, I am still confronted by the coral reef of data that has sprung up over the years on my laptop. The technician did a wonderful job, but she is not, sadly, a miracle worker.

My takeaway from all this, of course (and you might want to make it yours as well), is to keep, in my sock drawer, a written list of all my applications, registration codes and passwords, ready for the next time something similar happens, as it doubtless will. Norton 360 LifeLock, with its password vault, is a wonderful thing, but, if I can’t reinstall Norton without the password, it’s not a lot of use.

Amidst all this excitement, we only managed to squeeze in a short video call with our big boy this week, but, as you can see, it was long enough for him to be totally absorbed, as always, in a story his Nana read. Meanwhile, I finally managed to catch our little boy with his eyes open.

As many of you will already know, Bernice and I doubled out grandparentitude this past week, when Esther gave birth at Laniado Hospital in Netanaya to a baby boy whose beauty is indescribable. It is a mystery to me how he can look so much like a Brownstein and simultaneously be so heart-stoppingly beautiful, but he manages it effortlessly.

If ever there was a week for arguing that some of the best things in life come in small packages, then this week, for me, is it. Which is just as well, because, for a couple of reasons that needn’t concern us here, this week’s post is a very small package. It was originally much longer, but my most important reader, Bernice, in a first for her, rejected my first two attempts. She was, of course, quite right to do so. Neither of them worked.

So, let’s cut right to the chase. We’ve spent most of the last three days in Netanya marvelling at the miracle that is a new life. At how, within the space of a day or two, this small, slight bundle can make such huge strides towards becoming an autonomous human being. Simply to see the changes from one visit to another, a mere 15 hours later, is remarkable. To watch the first stirrings of a personality: to see frustration, tenacity, contentment. To watch expressions drift across an already fully animated face, and wonder what he can be dreaming of. To see him bunch one fist under his cheek, for all the world like his late great-grandfather.

It is at times like this that I am struck by the mirror-image of the cliché scientist’s astonishment at the act of faith involved in believing in a deity whose existence is not scientifically provable. I am always amazed that there are people who can look at a newborn baby over his first few days and have such faith that this miracle could be achieved other than by an all-powerful shaping hand.

One more fact which the whole family thinks is fairly remarkable. On Thursday, not only did our newcomer turn 0, but his big cousin, Tao, turned 3 – on the very same day. What an act of kindness to a grandpa who still has only one birthdate to remember!

That’s just under 400 words, rather than the 1500 that is my norm. If a picture is worth 1000 words, then here’s an easy way to boost the word-count.

…and when you spot a navel, what do you do? Why, contemplate it, of course, especially if it’s yours.

Bernice and I are now just entering the home stretch of Shuggie Bain, which I know I have referred to previously here. We are 372 pages into the book (over 85% of the way through) and, let me tell you, up to this point, the comment of the reviewer in the Telegraph (India) suggests to us that she was reading and reviewing a different book entirely. She writes of ‘…the exhilarating experience of reading this…novel’.

It is certainly a beautifully written book, but the rawness of the emotion and the ‘grind of poverty and the suck and drag of addiction’ make it a very tough read. Very far from exhilarating. Indeed, inhilarating, one might say. I’m hanging in there, but I suspect if Bernice were reading this by herself she would have given it up 100 pages ago, and asked me to finish it and tell her what happens.

I remarked a couple of days ago to Bernice that I could not imagine sharing with an agent, then a publisher’s readers, let alone a broad reading public, a manuscript that so clearly draws on, and so honestly examines, this particular lived experience of the author. I have always been a fairly private person, with Bernice my only confidante for the last half-century…and there are things I don’t even tell her. (But don’t tell her that!)

It then struck me that this blog business has, using some mysterious alchemy, seduced me into revealing far more of myself than would ever have been the case otherwise. This manifests itself in various ways.

David 1.0 would have sworn Bernice and Micha’el to secrecy over the fiasco of getting our rental car stuck in the ditch – What happens in Penamacor stays in Penamacor, as we swingers say! David 2.0, on the other hand, can even laugh when a niece leaves outside our house, as an eloquent tribute, a copy of Duck in the Truck, a children’s book that centres on efforts to free duck’s truck after it gets stuck, one day, in the muck.

David 1.0, on the rare occasion when he had anything medical to talk about, never shared it beyond closest family. David 2.0 – and this may partly be because familiarity has bred contempt, or at least blaséness (blaseur? blasitude?) – has no such inhibitions, and will, metaphorically, show you his scars at the drop of a hat – or, indeed, a trouser.

So what is it about the medium that encourages this openness, this sharing of concerns and passions, this readiness to expose myself (there’s that flasher again) in ways that, a few years ago, I would have found it hard to imagine?

One answer, I suppose, is that, when I am blogging, I am performing the act of revelation in isolation. I am not sitting in the same room as the people to whom I am baring my soul. I cannot even hear them breathing at the other end of the telephone. Instead, I am simply facing a blank screen that is incapable of doing anything more than reflecting back to me my own words. At the time of composition, the confession is simply thought made manifest to me.

Add to that the fact that changing that screen from a mirror to a conduit requires nothing more than one mouse click on the Publish button. Such ease of transition is seductive, and gives no hint of what the consequences will actually be.

Finally, I am not present (even at the other end of a phone) at the moment when those to whom I am baring my soul actually see my bare soul. If I ever learn of their reaction, it is mediated through time, and, more often than not, through the computer again, reaching me in the form of comments. The entire exchange is distanced, sterilised.

I am also very fortunate in that my entire readership is made up of people who are pre-disposed to me. (If I’m wrong there, please don’t feel a duty to disabuse me. As a precocious schoolboy debater, I once spoke passionately in favour of the motion that ‘This house believes it is better to know that one lives in the darkness than to believe falsely that one lives in the light’. I’m not sure I’d pick the same side now; there’s a lot to be said for the warm comfort of illusion,)

Bloggers with a wider public readership face a potentially more antagonistic readership; mainstream as well as social media commentators run the risk of being humiliated or even cancelled. In two years, the worst that has happened to me is that I have had my knuckles rapped for buying fruit at Rami Levy. My shoulders are narrow, but broad enough to bear that.

I have a friend who writes occasional opinion pieces for the Jerusalem Post, and whose personal blog has been taken up by another online platform. He asked me some time ago whether I fancied trying to follow the same route, to attract a wider readership. It did not take me long to decide that I actually didn’t. I’m not sure my skin is thick enough to hold up under a lashing from people I don’t know. It’s also true that I find the prospect of writing for an anonymous audience daunting.

Whenever I write, I always have one or other of my readers in mind, readers whom I know well and whose reactions I flatter myself that I can imagine fairly accurately. I am not sure how one goes about writing for an unknown readership.

But, if I’m going to be completely honest, I suppose that primarily I write for myself. Writing in general is, I am sure, a very egotistical activity. Writing explicitly about oneself is even more so. When I started this blog, I told myself that I was performing a service for friends and family who wanted to hear about the kids’ and our experiences in Portugal. Fairly soon, some of the output was unconnected to Portugal. Now, probably a good 50% of the pieces are my musings about life in general.

If I stop to think about it, I am astonished that you all find this worth reading. When I discover that a particular one of my friends or family is a regular reader, that is usually even more astonishing. Naturally, I consider myself a witty and erudite commentator, but I find it remarkable that such a broad cross-section of my circle agree at least sufficiently to read the blog regularly.

Reading back over what I have written, I discover that it is even more self-centred than usual. If I get away with this, then I will be even more surprised than usual. In return for your conspiratorial silence if I don’t actually get away with this, I promise to look for a more objective and concrete subject next week. Meanwhile, if you have been, thank you for reading. (There’s a 10-point bonus if you can name the BBC radio presenter I misquoted there.*)

On a different note, Thursday this week (Purim) will be Tao’s third birthday. Here he is planted his almond tree on his first birthday and all dressed up his second birthday. For his third birthday, his other grandparents – his savta and saba – are coming to visit him.

*10 points if you identified John Ebdon. (I dredged up the John, but had to google the Ebdon.)

On Shabbat morning, I was invited by one of the gabbaim to lead the shacharit service in synagogue. This is something that I have been doing, off and on, since my days in the children’s service in Beehive Lane shul 60+ years ago, so any hesitation I may have had before agreeing was only along the lines of: ‘I wish more people arrived earlier on shabbat morning, so that there was a bigger pool to choose from.’

When I lead the tefilla, I am always careful to read from the large-print siddur on the lectern, to reduce the chance of making any mistakes, even though by this point I know a lot of the service by heart. However, when it came to the end of shacharit, and I went up to stand in front of the ark and take the sefer torah before carrying it around the shul, I was in a position where I could not quite see the siddur. There are two verses which the leader recites and the congregation repeats, the first of which, Sh’ma Yisrael, must be the best known verse in the whole of the liturgy. The second verse is only a little less familiar. I must have recited it several thousand times in my life.

However, when it came to this second verse, I found that I simply had no idea what the penultimate word – ‘Kadosh’ – was. I stood there, struck dumb, unable to focus on the siddur behind me and to my side, and feeling devastated. Some prompting from around me put me back on track, but the experience was shattering.

Reflecting afterwards, a number of things struck me. The first was that nobody made any reference to my temporary freeze. This was, I assume, out of consideration for my feelings, but also, I suspect, because the thought passing through other people’s minds was: Is this incipient Alzheimer’s?

The second thing that struck me was that I suspected this was passing through their minds because it was certainly what was passing through mine.

The third thing was that I was over-reacting, and momentary memory lapses, while they do come with the years, are not necessarily Alzheimer’s. A reassuring rule of thumb I read recently was that if you go upstairs to your bedroom for something, and when you get there you can’t remember what it was you wanted, that’s ‘just’ a sign of age. If, on the other hand, you go upstairs and can’t remember which room is your bedroom, that’s a sign of Alzheimer’s.

Knowing this (at a cognitive level), why is it, then, that when I have a memory lapse my immediate thought is that it might be Alzheimer’s? I don’t believe this is just my Eeyorism. The answer, it seems to me, is that Alzheimer’s is so front and centre in modern consciousness. On the radio, in podcasts, at the cinema, in literature, and, of course, in the presentation of medical science in the media: Alzheimer’s is everywhere. Because we are kept aware of it, we are on the lookout for it. It is far from unimaginable.

Which brings me to the geo-political elephant in the room – an elephant that has reached such a size that, if I want to continue to ignore it, then, to paraphrase Roy Scheider in Jaws, ‘You’re gonna need a bigger room’. I’ve never been one to follow current affairs with the enthusiasm or assiduousness with which I follow some of the arts, Wimbledon, or The Times crossword, but even I feel there is something a bit bizarre in a blog that doesn’t mention what is going on in Ukraine. So here’s a partial take.

I would suggest that the reason why the world finds itself in this crisis is precisely because, for much of the Western world, it is unimaginable (or at least it was until two weeks ago). When I was growing up the world was very different. 1950s American schoolchildren practised ‘duck and cover’ drills where they sheltered under their desks. However practical a protection that would have been against a nuclear attack, one significant effect was to foster, in the public at large, the belief that America was facing an enemy that might conceivably attack, using even nuclear weapons.

Then, in 1962, the Cuban missile crisis greatly strengthened that belief. Then, in Britain, the BBC produced a chilling pseudo-documentary – The War Game – depicting a nuclear war and its aftermath. Although it was made in 1965, it was judged by the BBC and the government to be too horrifying to be screened. It was shown in some cinemas and at film festivals in 1966, but was not shown on television until 1985.

The early 60s also saw the release of both Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Sidney Lumet’s very different but equally powerful Fail-Safe. These were only two of the many, many Hollywood films dealing with the prospect of nuclear war.

In this climate, the public in the West, and their leaders, were sustained in their belief that the Soviets would contemplate nuclear war. Any decisions about what action to take in the face of threatened aggression were shaped by that belief.

In the last couple of decades, on the other hand, and until a couple of weeks ago, the public in the West, and their leaders, appeared to believe that any confrontational belligerence on the part of Russia was unimaginable. We no longer lived in a world like that. Certainly Russia no longer represented an ideology opposed to that of the West. We now lived in a world of globalisation and post-modernism.

So, when Putin stated in an article last summer his position regarding Ukraine, and restated it in the months since, the West chose to believe that the situation could be rescued through diplomacy. The Guardian quoted a US intelligence official in mid-February likening the West’s tactics in handling Putin to “dealing with a kidnapper holding hostages in a booby-trapped building. The first aim is to keep the kidnapper talking.” The hope was that a professional negotiator, or a sympathetic family member, perhaps a member of the Russian army, could talk the highly strung kidnapper round and make him realise that whatever his grievances, this is not going to work out well for him in the long term.

It seems clear to me that this was not the situation. The argument that Putin is irrational reflects a failure to grasp reality not on the part of Putin, but on the part of the West. Putin is not highly strung or unbalanced; his was a cool and calm calculation. and the West lost an opportunity to make him realise that he had miscalculated the naivete of the West. (Except, of course, he hadn’t; he had calculated it pretty accurately.)

It does, at least, seem that the leaders of the free world (as I guess we need to start calling it again) have been fairly quick to recalibrate their assessments of the situation, and it may even be that a resolution will come through a combination of painful actions. The Ukrainians will need to continue their resistance, sustained by whatever aid the free world is able to give without risking escalation. At the same time, the West will need to impose and maintain far-reaching sanctions that will need to hurt the West if they are to cripple Russia. In time, these sanctions that may also create a reality in Russia that somehow weakens Putin’s hold on power, or even makes him realise that there is no way he can emerge victorious from this endeavour.

If that looks to you like wishful thinking, then the alternatives seem to me too bleak even for Eeyore to contemplate.

Meanwhile, as the man said, ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t buy any green bananas.’

No! I can’t end there. Here’s a reminder of more innocent days, last July.