Just before we start, I wish to complain to the management. Raphael, Esther’s baby, has started teething in the last couple of weeks, and, while he is by no means in constant discomfort, and is still his usual sunny, smiling self a lot of the time (see below for photographic evidence), nevertheless, when it hurts, it clearly does hurt.

Now, it seems to me that, by this stage in human evolution, what is clearly a design wrinkle should have been sorted out by the manufacturer. Why has no Mark II model been launched? Where is the software upgrade? This late in the game we should be well over such teething troubles (Oh! Good heavens! These really are teething troubles.)

Having got that off my chest, I’ve checked back, and it is now, incredibly, over 10 months since I last posted about sport, so it seems to me high time to rectify that. My thoughts have, understandably, been turning to sport, what with a British triumph at the US Open Golf championship two weeks ago, a revitalized England’s hugely entertaining victory (indeed whitewash) over New Zealand in the cricket Test series, and Wimbledon tennis starting this week.

As it happens, those are the three sports I want to talk about today, because they have all been in the news recently and not, it must be said, in a very positive way. Let’s start with golf. Earlier this month, a new professional golf tour financed by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) held its inaugural tournament.

Saudi Arabia, through its PIF, has also been investing heavily in other sports – football, cycling, wrestling, boxing, Formula 1 – but it is fair to say that by and large these investments have benefitted the sportsmen and women while also benefitting, or at least not harming, their sports. However, the LIV golf tour is qualitatively different from all of these other initiatives. It seems to be threatening not just to shake up the PGA, but possibly to attempt to replace the PGA as the major force in world golf. Its only weapon, as always, is an obscene amount of money. Here’s what the PGA Tour’s commissioner had to say, when announcing a lucrative new series of PGA events:

“Let me be clear, I am not naive. If this is an arms race and if the only weapons here are dollar bills, the PGA Tour can’t compete. The PGA Tour, an American institution, can’t compete with a foreign monarchy that is spending billions of dollars in attempt to buy the game of golf. We welcome good, healthy competition. The LIV Saudi golf league is not that. It’s an irrational threat; one not concerned with the return on investment or true growth of the game.”

The Saudis have been tempting the world’s top golfers with a dual enticement. First is, of course, the money. This comes in two mouth-watering packages. There is the $255 million of prize money split between this year’s 8 LIV events (which, in itself, represents some $10 million more at each event than the PGA currently offers for its prestige events).

Then there is the appearance money. Dustin Johnson (world ranked 16) and Phil Mickelson (84) reportedly signed 4-year contracts worth $125 million each. Tiger Woods reportedly turned down a deal worth close to $1 billion. Even allowing for the fact that this would not quite be doubling Woods’ net worth, it is still a serious sum of money. However, it is certainly true that few, if any, of the players ‘bought’ by LIV actually needed the money.

The second enticement – and it is quite possible that for at least some of the players this was the more tempting – is the reduced workload. A professional golfer who plays the circuit spends a huge amount of his time on the road, living in hotel rooms and, if he makes the cut in a tournament, flying on to another destination on Monday. The entire LIV schedule is 8 tournaments in 2022, rising to 14 events in 2024. In addition, each event is played over 54 holes, or 3 rounds, as opposed to the 4 rounds of PGA tournaments.

Furthermore, each round has a shotgun start, meaning that each threesome starts its round at a different hole and all threesomes start at the same time. In PGA tournaments, players can find that they are drawn to tee off very early in the morning, or, conversely, that they finish their round only in the evening. In all, the LIV schedule is much less demanding than the PGA schedule.

Of course, the catch is that what these men are doing is, to a degree, selling their soul. They are putting themselves into situations where, in response to questions from the media about the Saudis’ human rights record, they say things like what Greg Norman said, speaking of the assassination of journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi: “Look, we’ve all made mistakes, and you just want to learn by those mistakes and how you can correct them going forward.”

Having watched some of the initial tournament (available free of charge on a YouTube channel, in stark contrast to the closely guarded screening rights for PGA tournaments), I can say that I found all of the tweaking and innovations detracted from my enjoyment. With all 48 players starting simultaneously, it was impossible to get a sense of either the course’s character or the flow of any individual player’s round.

The coverage, with a huge number of cameras, was disjointed, jumping all over the course all the time. With the (LIV-employed) commentators’ feverishly attempting to whip up enthusiasm, the whole event was a shameless self-promotion, and the televising of the PGA’s genuinely thrilling US Open tournament a couple of weeks later was the most eloquent rebuttal.

Turning now to cricket, I must admit that, despite initial reservations, I have been almost won over by the limited overs format. While nothing will ever replace the multi-faceted and labyrinthine unfolding over 5 days of a Test match, I can enjoy a 50-over international. T20 (20 overs) is a bit bang-crash for me, especially with the fireworks, cheerleaders and blasting music of the IPL, the Indian League.

Then, last year, England launched The Hundred (20% shorter than T20 and faster flowing) with its sacrilegious tampering with over lengths, and my blood boiled. Now, I have discovered that since 2017 there has been another new, even shorter, format: T10, with games lasting 90 minutes, or approximately 1/20^th of the length of a test match. This is ADHD cricket, and I want nothing to do with it!

I have also, over the years, had to suffer people tampering with tennis. The rot really started when the tie break was introduced, initially at the US Open in 1970. However, the latest development has nothing to do with tie breaks. The Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) rulebook states: “Players shall not receive coaching during a tournament match. Communications of any kind, audible or visible, between a player and a coach may be construed as coaching.”

The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) has, for the last couple of years, allowed coaching other than at Grand Slam tournaments, The issue came to the forefront at the 2018 U.S. Open, when Serena Williams’ coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, acknowledged trying to send her a signal during the final. The umpire penalised Williams, who reacted very strongly to the penalty. Also, in the Australian Open semi-final this year, Stefanos Tsitsipas was penalised for a coaching violation by his father, and failed to win a single game after the penalty.

The fact is that hand signals and other clandestine coaching are used all the time during Grand Slam tournaments, but are only very, very rarely penalised, and there is now a growing movement to legalise what is being practised anyway. It has now been announced that, at this year’s US Open, coaching will be allowed in both women’s and men’s matches. The announcement included the following statement: “In addition to ensuring consistency across the sport for the benefit of players and fans, the trial aims to create additional points of intrigue and insight to enhance the fan experience”.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I’m opposed, for a couple of reasons. First, this will not ensure consistency. Top players travel with a permanent coach. Players lower down the pecking order cannot afford that luxury. However, that is not my major objection. There is something dramatic about seeing a player, between games, sitting at the umpire’s chair, wrestling alone with his or her inner demons.

I can still remember Arthur Ashe, in the 1975 Wimbledon final, meditating at his chair, eyes closed, head back, and beating brash, extrovert, wonderful Jimmy Connors with his deliberate, ‘safe’, play, taking the pace off the ball. He certainly did not need any coach.

Other players read notes for inspiration (‘Watch the ball.’ ‘Run down every ball.’ ‘Have fun.’) or cut themselves off from the distractions of the crowd by covering their head with their towel. Pete Sampras, in his final Wimbledon final, read a letter from his wife; Jim Courier once read a novel! I think that watching the isolated player is all the intrigue and insight I need to enhance my fan experience, thank you very much!

And now, as promised, a smiling Raphael, who seems blissfully unaware that he will probably grow up in a world where tennis matches consist of 5 sudden death points, cricket matches involve one ball per batsman per innings, and golfers play just one hole, for $10 million per shot. I also offer you a rather more serious Tao, who may be starting to realise how sport is, tweak by needless tweak, changing for the worse.

This last week, our younger grandson turned three months. It scarcely seems credible. Heavens, I can remember when he was only a day old, and now here he is, already a quarter of the way to his first birthday.

Meanwhile, we are only four weeks away from seeing our older grandson (three years and three months this last week) and, please God, his about-to-be baby brother, in Portugal. All of our arrangements and bookings are more or less in place, and it is now only a question of holding our breath and waiting to see whether we are prevented from flying by a new, improved, wave of COVID-19, or the inflammatory heatwave that is currently raging through Spain, or the escalating industrial action by El Al pilots, or Russian-invasion-induced aircraft fuel shortage, or possibly abduction by alien lizards or the earth being hit by a giant meteor.

I actually went onto Google Maps this morning to check whether forest fires have closed any of our intended driving route from Madrid to Penamacor. I was, to be fair, motivated largely by curiosity as to where exactly the affected region is in Spain; it seems to be, reassuringly, a hundred or more miles north-west of Madrid. Bernice, on the other hand, is spending an unhealthy amount of time following the vagaries of the industrial dispute between El Al management and pilots. I’m honestly not sure what state we will be in after another three weeks of this obsessive behaviour.

The only comfort I can currently take from the whole sorry state of the world is that, if our trip were to be cancelled, we would not then have to shlep from the airport two cases weighing, at current projections, somewhere between 22.7 and 23.0 kg each, two pieces of hand luggage weighing probably around 12 kg each, and two coats whose pockets will doubtless be filled with all sorts of additional ballast.

There will, eventually, I fear, come a time when we will no longer be physically capable of lifting this luggage over the lip of the rental car boot, and we will then, presumably, have to do a lot more shopping in Portugal and shipping from Israel, or possibly look into renting a sled with a much lower cargo-bed than a car, and, rather appropriately, driven by a team of reindeer.

But to get back to the grandsons. The wonderful thing about going up to Zichron every week to spend the day with Esther and Raphael is that, at his age, every week we see very obvious developments. Some, to be honest, are more welcome than others. This week we found Raphael sucking his fist and drooling, so it seems that teething (or, perhaps more accurately, pre-teething) has started.

On the other hand, every week he seems to have added at least one more sound to his vocal repertoire; the stories he tells us grow more interesting every time. We also noticed this week that he is experimenting with variations of intonation. Clearly, living in a house where music is an almost constant presence is already influencing him.

Watching this week-by-week miracle of how much Raphael is absorbing so quickly, and with such apparent ease, I am constantly struck by the fact that I seem to have slept through my own children’s babyhood. Bernice has photographic recall of this period; she can instantly list illnesses, behavioural differences between the kids, early-manifested likes and dislikes, sleeping and feeding patterns, favourite toys and songs.

I, on the other hand, can state with absolute certainty that Esther was born first, and in Wales, whereas Micha’el was born next, and in Israel. Beyond that, I remember how verbal Esther was from a young age, and how Micha’el did not speak until very late. (At the time, we didn’t realise what halcyon days they were; once he started, he didn’t stop…and still hasn’t.)

And that’s about it. I know that Bernice was home with the kids 24/7, and I was out hunting sabre-toothed tigers and waiting in line in Government offices, but nevertheless….So, I’m trying to make up for it with the grandchildren. I already know that Tao was born first and…

This week’s WhatsApp video call with Tao was interesting. (It’s interesting every week, of course, but…) We have settled into a routine: we start by chatting about what he has been doing or plans to do. In a very short time, Tao tires of this and asks whether he can have a story. Bernice has always pre-selected four books: typically three that he knows and one new one.

The rules allow Tao to choose what order he wants the books in. Until now, he has always chosen first the books he knows. Bernice and I then read a book each, in turn. We then have a musical intermission, where we sing a song together; this is followed by the other two stories and, if we are lucky, a catch-up chat with Micha’el and/or Tslil.

This week, Tao uncharacteristically chose to start with a book he did not know: John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat. This happens to be a great favourite of ours, although it is rather darker than most. It deals with selfish and selfless love, with John Brown, a dog, being initially unwilling to share his owner with the cat that appears outside the window, but eventually recognizing how much Rose wants to adopt the cat, and letting the cat in. It is an uncluttered story, told in simple, strong prose, with the message left implicit, and the book is beautifully illustrated. I would have judged it to be a little old for Tao, but was very happy to read it.

When we had finished, to our astonishment, and for the first time ever, Tao asked whether we could read it again. (This was actually just as well because, the first time, we had inadvertently turned over two pages at once, and missed out one page.) I find myself wondering what, in the book, spoke to him so strongly that he wanted to hear it again immediately. Whatever it was, it is further evidence of his love for books, and it makes my heart leap.

Speaking of leaping, after one more book we took our usual mid-call break for a song, which in this case was about swimming. Rather than singing, Tao insisted on spreading a sheet out on the floor as a swimming pool and jumping from the sofa into the pool…repeatedly. Shortly after that, the call rather fell apart, and we never got to read the other two books.

While reading on WhatsApp is wonderful, it is rather artificial, particularly since our technique is for the reader to sit behind the phone while the page-turner sits in front of the phone and shows Tao the pages. This of course means that the reader is getting no immediate feedback of Tao’s engagement or otherwise with the story. I simply can’t wait until we can read with Tao in the traditional fashion, with him sitting on my lap and instantly conveying every squirm of delight or moment of frozen rapt attention.

Meanwhile, there is a broad consensus in the family that, whereas both of the boys have inherited my nose, their smile is, in each case, entirely their own.

You may remember…. Who am I kidding? You almost certainly won’t remember that last week’s post dealt with the fact that, to quote a wise man (me) ‘what increasingly passes for progress these days… is actually nothing other than sales generation.’ Vance Packard, over 60 years ago, coined the term ‘planned obsolescence’ to describe what was even then a disturbing trend.

As I was pondering what to write about this week, it struck me that there was at least one more excellent example of one step forward, two steps back that I had originally planned to discuss, but had eventually left out, and, also, that there were a couple of follow-ups to last week’s post that I could easily bring up.

It then occurred to me that if, in a constant search for a new topic, I discarded a perfectly good topic from last week that still had lots of wear in it, I would be committing the same offence as the plastic packagers of batteries and the manufacturers of Velcro-fastened sandals.

So, in the interests of saving the planet, and to avoid appearing a hypocrite, I offer you a recycling of last week’s post.

First, let’s revisit the sandals. Lots to report here. I adopted the suggestion of my friend Joe in a comment he made last week, that I comb the Velcro to remove the fluff. Sadly, my last comb was sent for recycling decades ago. However, we still have, for no good reason, a nit comb, and so I have been dutifully combing my sandals. (Fortunately, I have a spare couple of minutes in the morning that I don’t need to spend combing my hair.) I must say, the Velcro is now sticking better, and it is a comfort to know that my feet will no longer face the threat of being attacked by lice. Thank you, Joe!

However, this feels like a short-term solution, and so on Sunday, as part of an exhaustive and exhausting day’s shopping in Jerusalem, I decided to pop into a long-established family shoestore in the city centre, to ask whether they had any sandals with a buckled heel-strap.

Of course, just before walking in I had to consult Google Translate to discover that the Hebrew for a buckle is ‘avzam’. Armed with this nugget, I walked in, and the first person I saw was, I assumed, a little boy whose mother had brought him in because he had grown out of his sandals.

I had to revise this assumption when he asked whether he could help me. I asked my buckle question, wondering whether he would even know what a buckle was. I was smugly gratified to note that he couldn’t answer my question, and had to ask the owner, who advised him to show me the Shakespeare model from the summer catalogue.

While I was trying to think of marketing puns for a Shakespeare sandal (I couldn’t come up with anything better than Two Gentlemen of Veruca, which can’t be easy to put a positive spin on), the infant found the catalogue and showed me the sandal, which did, indeed, sport a fine buckle. Before even bothering to ask to try it on, I asked the price. On discovering it was 450 shekels, I feigned a sneezing attack and beat a hasty retreat.

If past experience is anything to go by, I will hunt unsuccessfully elsewhere for a few weeks and then make my way back, wearing a mask this time so as not to be recognized, try them on, fall in love with them and buy them. (Oh! An-toenail and Cleopatra.)

And so to yet another backwards advance. Imagine, for a moment, that you have recently bought a new car. After a few weeks, when the weather suddenly gets much hotter, you decide you should really check the air pressure. So, when you are next filling up, you drive on to the air-pump, tooty down (that’s another wonderful Welsh word, particularly favoured in South Wales, that rhymes with ‘footy’ rather than ‘booty’, and that describes squatting, while sounding much more affectionate and less ugly than ‘squat’.)

You tooty down, as I said, by the front passenger tyre and search for the air valve. After a minute of fruitless searching, you decide to move to the rear passenger tyre, so you painfully pull yourself up by the door handle, wondering how South Wales miners were able to tooty down effortlessly for hours on end, well into their 70s) but on the rear tyre, as well, there is no air valve to be seen. Eventually, you call over an attendant, and, rather embarrassedly, explain your predicament. ‘I can’t seem to find the air valves.’ He looks at you as at a very young child, and calmly explains: ‘That’s because there aren’t any.’

‘What do you mean?’
‘There aren’t any air valves.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the tyres on this car don’t have them.’
‘But then, how can I check the tyre pressure?’
‘You can’t.’
‘So how do I know if the tyre needs more air?’
‘The tyre goes flat.’
‘Anod how do I top up the pressure then.’
‘You can’t.’
‘So what do I do then? I can’t drive on a flat tyre.’
‘You buy a new tyre.’

I realise that this sounds completely surreal. I couldn’t really believe it myself as I was typing it just now. But think for a minute. This is exactly the stunt that the manufacturers have pulled on us, except they have pulled it not with tyres but with batteries.

Decades ago, you always carried in your boot three topping-up liquids: a bottle of water for the cooling system, a can of engine oil, and a bottle of distilled water, bought from the garage for a few pence, for topping up the cells of the battery. Dutifully unscrewing the cap of each of the six cells and carefully topping each one up made even me feel like a bona fide car mechanic. At some point, the six caps were replaced by a single bar with the six caps affixed, and removing and replacing the caps became a simpler task.

And then, suddenly, batteries were sold that had no removable caps, and we discovered that we were no longer able to top them up. The reason, we were told, was because the battery no longer required topping up; it would run, we were encouraged to believe, forever.

Except, of course, it doesn’t. Instead, it waits for the first wet November evening when you are 100 kilometres from home on an isolated and unlit stretch of the Jordan Valley road, and, if you are foolish enough to stop the car to hop out for a bathroom break, you find that the car won’t start again. Of course, the battery cannot be repaired. It is a sealed unit. You have to throw it away and buy a new one (which comes in considerably more expensive than a few bottles of distilled water, let me tell you).

Is there any logic in this, other than maximizing battery sales. And if that is the only logic, how long do you really think it will be before you are sold your first no-maintenance tyre, which never loses air,…until it does? Exactly.

(Ah! Awl’s Well that Ends Well and The Taming of the Shoe.)

I’ve just discovered another benefit of recycling last week’s topic. I already have a new topic for next week! Watch this space.

Finally, in the spirit of this week’s post, I am tempted to reprint last week’s photos of our two grandsons, but I couldn’t do that to you. So, instead, here are two brand-new holiday snaps (from two separate holidays).

I don’t know about you, but I seem to have spent a lot of my life repeating the mantra: Life’s too short. Whether it is washing up as you go along, or cleaning out the boot of the car, or staying in touch with people I used to be friendly with but drifted away from (none of whom, I rush to add, are reading this blog), I have always been very ready to conclude that life’s too short to bother with that; I have far more important things to do…such as sorting my blue socks from my black, or completing today’s Quordle.

Numbered in recent decades among the things I believed life was too short for was foot care. I can offer two arguments in my defence. First, the concept that my feet needed taking care of was novel to me: for my first four or five decades, my feet seemed perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. They didn’t bother me, and so I saw no reason to bother them, Second, just at the time that my feet started to become an eyesore, I was seeing less and less of them, because they seldom peeked out from under the cover of my corporation. When I did start to notice them, the simple solution was to wear closed-toed sandals, and spare the world’s sensibilities.

Then, a couple of years ago, Bernice started expressing a reluctance to share a bed with my feet, and I decided to give them a long, hard look, I found that I didn’t actually want to share a bed with them either, and so, overcoming a certain Neanderthal instinct that footcare was a sure sign of a testosterone deficiency, I booked myself in for a pedicure. Discovering that what I wanted was called a medical pedicure offered me a comforting figleaf.

Over the following months, my life was transformed. My chiropodist was able to assure me that her footstool was constantly occupied by the deformed toes of countless men of a certain age dragged to her treatment room by their disgusted wives. Within a short time, I was able to see genuine improvement in the condition of my feet. As a bonus, once I had managed to more or less control the extreme ticklishness of my tootsies, I found the pampering care very soothing.

After many months, the condition of my feet was so improved that I felt able to once again unveil my toes to a waiting world, and so I treated myself to a decent pair of open-toed sandals. Since I live in sandals for about eight months of the year, I looked for a sturdy and well-made pair. In one of our local shops, I found just what I was looking for. The shop manager – a man almost my age – was wearing an identical pair and told me how reliable, hard-wearing and comfortable they were. I was convinced, and, always a good sign, decided to go home wearing my new sandals, and carrying my old, closed-toed ones.

For the rest of that season, I scarcely took the sandals off, and I couldn’t wait to start wearing them again this spring. After a long, hard spring, summer, autumn, they were showing little sign of wear: the soles are hardly worn, and the beige leather has resisted scuffs reasonably well. So, as soon as the season turned, I resumed wearing them, as my toes revelled in their newly regained freedom.

However – and you surely knew there was going to be a ‘however’ – after I had worn them for a couple of days, I discovered that the Velcro grip that secures the heel-strap started working loose. I would be striding down the street, only to discover that one sandal was flip-flopping off my foot. No matter how firmly I clamped the Velcro tightly closed again, it would keep working loose. When I complained to Bernice, she pointed out that this always happens with Velcro after a time. The hooks of the one piece of Velcro keep latching onto random little pieces of loopy fluff floating around, leaving insufficient hooks free to actually latch onto the loopy piece of Velcro. I bowed to her greater experience, reflecting, as it did, the hard-won world-weary wisdom of a woman who spent much of the last decades of her working life refastening the Velcro straps of twenty-five four-year-olds’ sandals.

As yet unperturbed, I revisited our local shoe-shops, in search of a pair of sandals with a heel-buckle. What I quickly discovered is that there ain’t no such thing. In the name of progress, the labour-saving, instant-close, one-handed-fasten Velcro strip is the only option available.

I am old enough to remember the period when Velcro first took off commercially, which was not until just after the patent taken out by George de Mestral in 1958 expired in 1978. It was in 1941 that he had first been intrigued by the way that burrs stuck to the coat of his dog and to the fabric of his own clothes, and, under the microscope, seen how the hooks of the burr attached to the loops in the fabric. But before he could produce Velcro commercially, he first had to develop a new machine to duplicate those loops and hooks.

The fashion industry, to de Mestral’s disappointment, spurned the new product as bulky and ugly, and the first commercial application of note was in astronauts’ clothing, Velcro being so much easier to fasten and unfasten than buttons or zips when wearing thick gloves. Gradually, other non-clothing applications were discovered, such as airline-seat headrest anti-macassars. In 1984, demonstrating its properties was still considered enough of a novelty to be legitimate content for The David Letterman Show. It was around this time that manufacturers of both children’s clothing and toys and games started using Velcro more widely.

And now, at least in my neck of the woods, Velcro has beaten out the opposition in men’s sandals, despite the fact that it breaks down after a year, and leaves you with no option but to buy a new pair of sandals. You can’t clean the fluff off the Velcro. You can’t even take your sandals to a little, old, balding shoe-repairer, with an off-white full-length apron, a workshop that smells of leather and glue, a beautifully shaped and aged wooden last, a mouthful of tacks, a delicate hammer and a pair of half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose.

It strikes me that this is just one example of what increasingly passes for progress these days, when it is actually nothing other than sales generation. We bought a new ceiling fan with integral light fitment for our salon a while ago. After a few days, we decided that we really needed a stronger light, and so I removed the glass shade to check what kind of fixture the bulb needed to be. I discovered, to my horror, that, rather than a bulb, the light was provided by an LED unit. This unit resembled a small section of the console of Apollo 11, and so, when we next needed an electrician, we also asked him to take a look at the ceiling fan, and tell us what we needed to buy. He removed the shade, took one look, and informed us that it was a sealed unit that could not be replaced. So, we decided to live with subdued lighting. Fortunately, the ceiling fan itself is both elegant and efficient.

When, a few weeks later, the LED unit first faded and then, after a couple of days of grudging intermittent illumination, finally died, we realized we would have to return the entire unit to the shop to be exchanged under guarantee. The wiring, of course, was far from straightforward and I am no longer as devil-may-care as I was when, near the start of our married life, I snipped through a live wire with pliers and sent myself recoiling across the room. So, replacing the unit would inevitably involve paying an electrician to remove the unit (250 shekels), driving an hour to Rehovot (where, for reasons that I won’t go into here, I bought it in the first place), arguing with the store (‘You’ve been using this light, haven’t you!’), eventually, if I was lucky, getting a replacement, driving an hour back home (50 shekels in petrol for the round trip), paying an electrician to refit the unit (250 shekels), and expecting to have to repeat the whole sorry procedure every few months thereafter.

In the end, we just went to IKEA and bought two standard lamps (75 shekels each). We now have the ability to vary the room lighting almost infinitely (with each lamp having an upward general light and an adjustable reading spot-lamp); I can have enough light to read without Bernice feeling that she has stumbled into a marijuana greenhouse. In addition, we have saved ourselves 400 shekels, and a trip to Rehovot. Best of all, these lamps use light bulbs, which can be replaced even by me at minimal risk of electrocution,

I could go on, and talk about batteries, which used to be sold individually, and now come in ‘handy’ packs of ten, or, if you are really lucky, five, which means that you can attempt to open the pack without ripping it, fail, because the handy, improved, see-through plastic cannot be opened cleanly, take out the one battery you need, discover that the pack is not resealable, and put it in the kitchen drawer where two batteries will roll out of the unresealable pack and hide until next Pesach in the back left-hand corner of the drawer, one of the other batteries will corrode in the condensation of the kitchen, and the last one will frustratingly turn out to be an AA when you next need an AAA, or, for the sake of variety, an AAA when you next need an AA.

Clearly, ‘handy’ is a word the meaning of which has changed in the last few decades.

However, there are still some things that come in small, and even not so small, packages, and that are the very best.