One of the first things Bernice and Tao did after our arrival was to make a large calendar, on which Tao is marking off with stickers each day of our stay. Looking at it today (Monday), I see that we have already been here more than a week! This, of course, means that we have now known Ollie for most of his life, which is, in a sense, a bizarre thought. At the same time, he has changed considerably over the eight days we have been here, gaining weight very nicely and appearing more and more aware of, and interested in, these strange giant faces that loom over him and make strange noises at him. He no longer seems quite so fragile, or vulnerable, or lost, and Tslil, Micha’el, Tao and Ollie are already very definitely a family unit. As always, it is amazing how quickly human beings can move from being unable to imagine what life with another child will be like to being unable to imagine life without that other child.

Tao has adapted very well to his role as older brother and genuinely understands how Tslil in particular needs to share her time between Ollie’s needs and his. It is, of course, a tremendous benefit that Micha’el has, so far, been available 24/7. From tomorrow, he is planning to resume his online English teaching. Fortunately, Tao is more than happy to spend time in the company of his nana, who has a seemingly bottomless pit of stories, songs, art projects and other activities to share with him, and, failing all else, his grandpa, who has a far more limited range of age-appropriate skills. If I can only hang in there, I’m planning to come into my own around 2032, when he wants to discuss the finer points of the pluperfect subjunctive. Actually, judging by the speed with which his language is developing, he may even be ready before then.

For example, yesterday I was reading to Tao the book Queenie, a tale of a bantam hen who is saved from drowning and taken in by a family who own a dog, Bruno. Queenie sleeps in the dog’s basket until the family return her to her home farm. When I scanned the next sentence in the book, I decided it was probably too advanced for Tao, and so I said: ‘Bruno got his basket back,’ to which Tao instantly and indignantly responded: ‘Reclaimed, Grandpa!’ Silly me.

Tao’s Hebrew is keeping pace with his English, and his Portuguese is also developing. While the family were on holiday in May, Tao started watching Portuguese children’s TV, and now, every day, he is allowed a short Portuguese video. The other day, I watched Noddy with him, which was interesting for two reasons. First, it appears that, in the last 66 years, Big Ears has been declared a non-person. Presumably, any reference to him is now considered aurist. Secondly, in the course of watching for 15 minutes, the only words I could distinguish were ‘Noddy’, ‘hola’ and ‘obrigado’. When I mentioned this to Micha’el, he agreed that spoken Portuguese is incredibly difficult to distinguish; it is a language of much elision, and considerable inconsistency and counter-intuitivity in the pronunciation of certain letters and combinations of letters, depending on their position in the word. He was kind enough to say that he understood very little of Noddy. (Tslil, on the other hand, claims to understand a good half of Noddy, but then she’s not a blood relative and feels less obligation to be kind to me.)

Last week, I reported a temperature of 33 in Penamacor. Almost immediately, the temperature rose to 39, and stayed there for the rest of last week. This led me, before shabbat, to go out to buy another fan, for the kitchen. Since the air conditioner there does not have a timer, we would have had to keep the AC on for 25 hours. So I visited one of the small Aladdin’s caves that Penamacor boasts: a tiny hardware store that stocks an incredibly wide range of kitchen, camping, and home electrical equipment. As always, I had done my Google Translate homework, so I was able to ask for a ventilador. One of the boons of shopping in Portuguese in Penamacor is that the shops tend to offer no choice, and, indeed, this shop had one floor-standing fan and one table-top model. This meant that we avoided any fruitless attempts at discussing the relative merits of different models: kilowattage, number of speeds, size of sweep arc, and so forth. My only choice was white or black. ‘White’, I knew, was ‘branco’, because the regional capital is Castello Branco (white castle, so named for the obvious reason). ‘Black’, I hazarded, was ‘negro’. I decided that black would suit the house’s general decor better, and so I stuck my neck out. I now know that the correct word is ‘preto’.

As the shopkeeper took my money, we had a lively conversation on one of the few subjects that an Englishman feels comfortable discussing with strangers – the weather. ‘Muito calor’. ‘Sim, muito calor’. ‘Madrid – mais calor – quarenta e três’. By the way, please don’t be deceived. What I actually said bore little more than a passing resemblance to this correct (I hope) written Portuguese. However, the shopkeeper seemed to understand me, and we parted good friends.

Once back at the house, I explored the etymology of preto, which I was unable to link to any related word in French or Latin, which are my two Romance languages. (Please don’t be deceived, again; what that means is that I have absolutely no Spanish or Italian, and so the tiny smattering of French and Latin that I remember makes them my Romance languages.) I soon discovered that the etymology of preto is disputed, with two rival, and, to me, equally tenuous theories.

Some claim it derives ultimately from the Latin pressus, meaning ‘tight’ or ‘compressed’, because when it is dark we have to squint – pressing our eyes almost closed – in order to see anything. Do you buy that? I thought not.

Others believe it derives from pectus, the Lain for ‘chest’. The explanation here may be that when you keep something close to your chest, it is under your toga. What do you reckon? Me neither. OK, then, how about this, which is the last possible explanation I found? A man’s chest is hairy and therefore dark. I reckon these are getting more and more desperate.

Anyway, interestingly, in Portuguese negro is used to describe skin colour. Preto is, in Portuguese, a more pejorative term than negro, in the reverse of what is currently true in English. In the kind of linguistic complexity that makes anyone trying to learn a language despair, several football teams in Portugal that play in black and white are known not as the brancopreto (as you would expect, if you have been paying attention), but as the alvinegro. Go figure!

I’m pleased to report that this week is expected to be cooler than last, and, certainly, at 7:30 this morning, when Lua the dog and I went out for our walk, it was pleasantly warm, with a lovely breeze that stirred the wind turbines on the next ridge over. As I write this, at 6pm, it is just starting to cool again, after a 4pm high of about 34.

Not unrelated to the sweltering heat is, of course, the constant threat of forest fires. I was quite apprehensive about the drive from Madrid, because I had been unable to find online any map indicating the current state of affairs in Iberia, by area. On the motorway from Madrid, we passed signs warning ‘Significant fire hazard’, but giving no indication of what we should do with this information. I was reminded of Michael Flanders` remark regarding the similar road warning: ‘Beware low-flying aircraft’. ‘What am I supposed to do? Apart, I suppose, from taking off my hat.’ I kept one hand close to the windscreen washer lever, but I didn’t really believe that would help much in a genuine emergency.

In the event, our journey passed without incident. However, it really is no laughing matter. In fact, the day we arrived, friends of the kids, who live about 45 minutes away, in a house in the middle of a large piece of land that they have been working for two years, were resting at home. The husband and older child were sleeping; the wife and younger child were awake, when she became aware of a noise and looked outside to discover that the house was completely surrounded by fire. They managed to escape, safe and sound, in their car, and their house and other vehicle are, thankfully, intact. However, the mature orchard they bought and the market garden they have cultivated over the last two years have all been lost, and they now face the prospect of starting again from nothing.

Unfortunately, it seems that many Portuguese who own land either do not take the threat of fire seriously, or remain stoical about it. Regulations about regularly clearing brush, and leaving empty space around dwellings, are often ignored by landowners and not enforced by the authorities. I read this week that 90% of those who staff Portugal’s severely under-funded and poorly equipped fire service are volunteers. Perhaps the fires that have been raging in recent weeks throughout Mediterranean Europe will trigger some action at the level of the EU.

On a happier note, all three of our grandsons, each in his own way, have made significant progress this week. Tao, for example, mastered the roly-poly, or forward somersault. Another momentous milestone!

Last week’s post ended with a gnomic ‘Nothing more to report at time of writing’. As most of you know by now, that wasn’t strictly true, because, by the time I posted on Tuesday morning, our newest grandson was already 10 hours old. However, an editorial decision was taken not to ‘hold the front page’. This means, of course, that I have a fairly obvious subject this week, and, astonishingly, it isn’t Madrid, where Bernice and I spent the past week having a proper holiday. I may tell you more about that next week, but, for the moment, having driven from Madrid to Penamacor yesterday, there can really be only one subject this week.

Tslil and Micha’el had always planned for the birth to be at home. They found an English doula who lives locally. They also said that they wanted to have a week or two after the birth alone as a nuclear family, before any grandparents descended. Our week in Madrid was timed to end two weeks after Tslil’s due date. In the event, the due date was a week early, but, fortunately, after a week of bonding alone, both Tslil and Micha’el felt ready for us to parachute in and chip in with the family chores.

The birth went very smoothly, and was, if anything, even quicker than Tao’s. For the first week, their circle of friends rallied round, dropping in with meals and making sure the dog, Lua, got her regular walks. As Micha’el pointed out, having such helpful neighbours is not that unusual, but when these ‘neighbours’ live on plots of land 20 or 30 minutes’ drive away, it means a lot that they are happy to make the effort.

Now that we have arrived, the friends are taking a step back, but at least one has already said: “In a month, when your parents leave, that’s when you’re really going to appreciate some help, so we’ll be ready.” It is wonderful that they have made such good friends, many of whom also have young children.

And it’s not only friends that have reached out. Word of the birth somehow reached the head of the Community Council in Penamacor, who contacted Micha’el and said that he would like to meet him. So, Micha’el dressed in one of his two smart outfits, pulled back his hair, and went to meet him. The official expressed great interest in Tslil and Micha’el’s story, and very much welcomed a new baby being born in the village. He was also very interested in helping them, and Micha’el even returned home with an invitation to a party next week.

Soon after we arrived, Tslil and Micha’el made a final decision about the baby’s name. Unlike his big brother, who makes his way through life with a single, three-letter name, the baby is going to have a name in English/Portuguese and a name in Hebrew! While I’m sure nobody will believe doting parents and grandparents, we are all agreed that he is already, at just under a week old, showing considerable physical strength. They have therefore chosen the name Ollie, short for Oliver, primarily because ‘oliveiro’ is ‘olive tree’ in Portuguese: solid, strong, rooted in the earth, and native to Portugal. His Hebrew name is Sol, with its echoes of the sun (he was born on a blazing hot day in July), and also ‘soul’ and ‘sole’, which are two concepts that resonate with the kids.

So what can I tell you about Ollie Sol Orlev, on the basis of 24 hours’ acquaintance? He is a very placid child. Even when hungry, he does not get upset, but just gets the message across by loudly sucking his fist. He is infinitely snuggly, and is very comfortable being cradled or shouldered by a standing or (big bonus here) sitting grandfather. Asleep, he is blissfully peaceful; awake, he is calmly interested in whoever is talking to him.

As for Tao, in the five months since we were last here he has progressed from having a large vocabulary to being a genuine conversationalist. He is fond of a cuddle, but still insists on “No kissing!” He has the energy of a three-year-old (unsurprisingly), and this first day has been just a little over-excited by our arrival. We flatter ourselves that it is not just the gifts we bear (on our own and others’ behalf) that excite him, but also our company. He is as helpful as ever, explaining things to us, taking us round the supermarket, suggesting we put music on the radio in the car, and choosing, from the various options, Brahms’ First Symphony. What’s not to love?!

The weather in Penamacor is about 10 degrees cooler than Madrid (33 instead of 43), but the house is not quite as cool as our aparthotel. However, the air conditioner in the kitchen (which, I had been led to believe when I first viewed the house, did not work) is actually very efficient, and at the moment, sitting at the kitchen table typing this at 5:00 p.m., I am very comfortable. Sadly, our bedroom has no air-conditioning, but last night neither Bernice nor I needed any rocking, and everybody slept on this morning, thankfully.

This afternoon, several members of the household also enjoyed a siesta, something which the Zichron grandson hasn’t yet really mastered. This gave me the chance to write my blog. However, everyone has now woken, so I have to cut this short and get back to burdensome grandfatherly duties. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

I suspect this post is going to take rather longer for me to write than normal, because of the circumstances in which I am writing it. You see, I’m going to have to stop writing every couple of minutes, in order to pinch myself. At 11:10 this (Sunday) morning, Bernice and I drove away from home in Maale Adumim. Less than six and a half hours later, we were seated on a Boeing 737 as it lifted off from Ben Gurion airport, and we are currently cruising above the Mediterranean, winging our way to Madrid.

At no point in those six and a half hours did I actually believe that we would take off: the media have been full of stories of El Al flight cancellations to various European destinations, and friends have been kind enough to share with us horror stories of flights being cancelled, in one case after the passengers had been sitting on the plane for over an hour.

While that last scenario probably represents something fairly close to the innermost circle, the particular hell that air travel currently seems to aspire to become also includes several outer circles, less dire, but still a long way from looking like any sane person’s ideal Sunday afternoon. So, we were fully expecting to experience a slow death by queuing today, having heard horror stories of three- and four-hour queues, stretching out of the airport terminal entrance.

If any of you are Britons who have never visited Israel, then you may well be thinking to yourselves: ‘Well, I can think of many worse ways to while away a few afternoon hours than standing quietly in a queue making new friends, discussing Wimbledon and trading a cheese sandwich for a scotch egg.’ If that’s what you’re thinking, then let me disabuse you.

A queue in Israel is nothing less than a field of play on which a deadly serious contest is fought. Points are awarded for queue-jumping, ideally without being detected by those whose place you usurp. However, if you are detected, you can gain extra points by bluffing – ‘I just want to ask one quick question’; ‘I was actually in the queue here, but I just went to help an elderly gentlemen who was having breathing difficulties’– or, if that fails, by imposing your greater force of personality on the (usually native-English-speaking) wimp whose place you have taken: ‘No! You’re wrong! I definitely joined the queue ahead of you’.

If the competition seems to be lacking sufficient liveliness, then the referees (those ‘managing’ the queue – cashiers, receptionists, stewards and suchlike) are expected to stir things up, either by shouting at the competitors indiscriminately, or by siding with the most blatant queue-jumpers.

Bearing all that in mind, Bernice and I had very low expectations of today. Advised by the travel authorities to arrive at the airport four hours before our flight departure time, we arrived, as planned, and as per Bernice’s insistence, five hours before. Our first experience was slightly ominous. There is a vehicle checkpoint at the entrance to the airport, which is often busy. However, today there were longer queues than I have ever seen. Of course, we are at the peak of the Israeli summer holiday season, so this was not completely unexpected. At least the traffic was flowing fairly smoothly through the checkpoint, and we soon arrived at the terminal, where we were pleased to see that the queue did, at least, not start outside the building.

When we first arrived, our flight was, unsurprisingly, not yet displayed on the departures board. However, after only ten minutes, it did appear (which, of course, totally vindicated Bernice’s insistence on our arrival time). As a result, we were about tenth in the queue for check-in, and the process, from security questioning to checking in luggage and receiving boarding cards, took only 15 minutes.

The queue for screening hand luggage was very, very long, and that leg of the process took 40 minutes. However, everyone in the queue was very well behaved, probably because most were in a holiday mood. In addition, the queue was excellently stewarded, and all of the staff did all they could to make the process as efficient and calm as possible,

This stage of the queuing included a priority queue for the infirm; when Bernice shuffled over to ask whether, as a couple in their 70s, we qualified, she was politely told that the minimum age for qualification was 80. I wanted to ask the steward whether, if we were still queuing when I turned 80, we would then be allowed to upgrade to the priority queue, but Bernice advised against it.

The hand luggage check itself was the most efficient I have ever seen at any airport. My two titanium hips of course set off the metal detector, as they always do. However, since I had previously removed my watch, belt, wedding ring, keys, change purse, phone, glasses and kipa clips, we were able to complete the personal frisk swiftly. Passport control (biometric, with no human involvement) was almost instantaneous, and then there we were in the departure lounge.

We needed to select some kosher wine to last us the five shabbatot of our trip, and the queue for the duty free checkout was the least ruly of the whole day, with many passengers playing the supermarket trick of one traveller holding a place in the queue with a trolley containing one bottle of whisky, and the other traveller foraging for perfume, cigarettes, toys and chocolate, and scurrying back to the trolley every few minutes with another treasure.

However, by this stage, we knew that we would have plenty of time to kill, so we were no longer stressed. Indeed, we had time for a leisurely lunch at Aroma before sauntering to our gate for a final wait in Israel. The flight was called almost on time, and, apart from a couple of ugly arguments with passengers whose carry-on cases were clearly too large for the luggage bins, and who were required to hand over the bags to be stored in the hold, boarding passed without incident, and, as I say, we were soon airborne, and winging our way to Madrid.

‘And why Madrid?’ you ask. I’m glad you asked. Since we last flew, TAP has stopped flying from Israel, and now offers only a code-share on an El Al flight. El Al is the only carrier that still flies direct to Lisbon, and I suspect they would like to drop the flight, and concentrate on their more profitable North American routes and flights to more popular European destinations such as London. It will of course be easier for them to justify axing the route if they can demonstrate that it is not popular, and they have come up with a smart way to create a lack of demand. For a return flight to Lisbon, they now charge over $1200, which is as much as or a little more than they charge for some transatlantic destinations.

El Al flights to Madrid, however, are less than half that price, which is why we are flying to Madrid. The drive to the kids is almost an hour longer than from Lisbon, but it is, by all accounts, a very attractive drive. We decided to take advantage of this change of plan, and have a week in Madrid before crossing the border. This also means that I ought to feel more rested before the drive.

All of which means that next week I might have something to say about Spain’s treatment of the Jews – as a change from Portugal’s. We will, by then, have reached Portugal as well, so I can bring you up to date on Tslil and Micha’el and Tao. Who knows, I may even have some extra family news to share with you. But for now, I’m going to stop here and start worrying about whether our luggage is currently flying to Madrid as well.

Quick update on Monday evening. We, and our luggage, moved fairly swiftly and uneventfully through Madrid airport and arrived at our hotel in good time. Nothing more to report at time of writing, so the usual two photos this week: Tao enjoying a good story, and Raphael just enjoying.

This week’s offering is rather a gallimaufry, a mish-mash or confused jumble of various things. I am passing it off to you as a considered and polished thing, but you will probably already have deduced that, like many a hash or ragout, it basically consists of whatever scraps I was able to find lurking in the corners of the fridge of my mind. And none the worse for that, say I.

Incidentally, while no one seems too sure what the etymology of gallimaufry is, a best bet is that it is derived from two Old French verbs – galer and mafrer – meaning to have fun by eating well. As lifestyle choices go, that seems pretty sound to me.

So, we start today with a little housekeeping. Let me bring you up to date on the Velcro front. (I know some of you have been losing sleep over this.) Last week, quite by chance, Bernice was in our local mall and happened to bump into one of our friends – one of you who never bothers to read my blog but just jumps straight to the photos.

This friend was on her way to the cobbler. I thought the cobbler had closed his business, but it transpires that he has, in fact, simply relocated from a totally unsalubrious cubby-hole near the toilets to a rather grander broom-cupboard strategically close to the entrance from the car-park. The point of this story was that our friend was picking up a pair of sandals on which the cobbler had replaced the original Velcro.

You can imagine how my heart leapt when Bernice relayed this news to me. The very next day, I dropped off my sandals, and, within an hour, they had been given a new lease of life, for a price that makes an annual refreshing, should that prove necessary, a viable proposition. Of course, while this was yet another piece of evidence that we live in what may well be the best of all possible worlds, I was reminded that very evening that the world is still not perfect.

Bernice usually retires to bed before me, and is often asleep by the time I go upstairs. The tenacity of my new Velcro is such that I now have to go out of the bedroom to rip open my sandals, for fear of waking Bernice. Still, this is a small price to pay for regained podal security.

Our cobbler is, I believe, a Russian, and as I stood just outside his tiny workspace waiting to be served, his country of origin and the semi-ordered clutter of his workshop put me in mind of another Russian artisan in Maale Adumim.

For years, the city was served by a watch repairer – Gregory – whose tiny workshop was a heaving mass of watch straps, glasses, hands, winders, screws and clips. He was the living embodiment of the old joke about the widow who, going through her late husband’s suits, finds a receipt from the cobbler for a pair of shoes that her husband took in to be repaired two years previously. When she takes the receipt to the cobbler, he looks at it, then hands it back to her, saying: ‘They’ll be ready tomorrow.’

If Gregory told you your watch would be ready on Tuesday, then, when you came to his shop on Tuesday (or, indeed, Wednesday or Thursday), he would tell you that it would be ready in an hour, and it would be! However, he was blessed with such an impish sense of humour, and such irrepressible good spirits, that you could not get annoyed.

When he collapsed and died suddenly a few years ago, it seemed that everyone in Maale Adumim was in shock. Even those of us who knew him only from a handful of brief interactions over the counter of his shop felt that we had suffered a personal loss. His death was a reminder of how far-reaching an impact any individual can have in making the world a slightly better and more friendly place for everyone.

Speaking of etymologies (as we were, briefly, five paragraphs ago), my nephew Saul sent me a link this week to a New Statesman article about the ongoing work on the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. What made him think I might be interested in this I can’t imagine, but nevertheless….

Among the many revelations in the article that I found fascinating, one in particular took my fancy. You may be aware that the method by which the OED was first compiled was by the general public being invited to submit to the editors, for any word that they came across in their reading, a postcard-sized piece of paper giving the word, with a reference to the work in which it was found, and its perceived meaning. The public responded with enthusiasm, in their thousands, and, as a result of the millions* of submissions, the OED documents, for any word, the first recorded use, and the development in meaning of that word over time.

One such word is astirbroad, which appeared in the 1885 edition. It is an adverb meaning ‘stirring abroad’ or ‘moving from place to place’ and the citation given was from a book printed in 1643: ‘The grasshopper…singeth astirbroad; the cricket at home’. However, when an editor came to revise the entry in 2019, it was discovered that the word was actually a typo: the typesetter 370 years earlier had dropped the word ‘stir’ into the middle of the word ‘abroad’ in error. However, it is OED policy that once a word has appeared in the dictionary, it is never removed, even if the original entry was an error. And so, ‘astirbroad’ is a word, albeit an obsolete one, in English.

This OED policy seems to me eminently sensible, because English is littered with words that were originally errors. ‘An apron’, for example, is etymologically linked to a ‘napkin’. ‘Nap’ means ‘cloth’; a ‘napkin’ is a small cloth, and ‘an apron’ was originally ‘a napron’. Over time, the ‘n’ of ‘napron’ moved across to the word ‘a’. Once a mistake has been adopted by a critical mass of people – or immortalized in the OED – it cannot be ‘corrected’.

The policy also seems to me to be a powerful metaphor. It is never possible to take back a word said or an action carried out in ill-considered haste. We can strive to make amends for our mistakes, to apologise for our slights towards others, to declare our linguistic miscoinings obsolete, but we cannot remove them from the OED of life.

If that’s all a bit heavy for you, let me say that Bernice and I have now finished reading Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling. We had been warned that Bryson is rather curmudgeonly** in this book, but we in fact found him just as delighted by the eccentricities of life in the British Isles as he was in Notes from a Small Island. What resentment he expresses over changes for the worse in the decades since he first arrived in England we found that we whole-heartedly share.

It was, however, possibly a bad choice for reading aloud. As I am reading I, naturally, look ahead to the next line, to prepare for speaking it. With this particular book, glancing at the next line, on far too many occasions, left me helpless with laughter and unable to spit the words out without repeatedly corpsing. This meant that Bernice’s enjoyment of the book’s humour was, I fear, considerably less than mine, although she was almost completely understanding about my complete helplessness.

It was, we found, both a very funny and a very generous-spirited book, in its celebration of all that is best, and its mocking of all that is worst, in life in 21^st Century Britain. For our next read, we have selected The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which has the virtue of being, at least in its first 50 pages, totally devoid of laugh-out-loud humour.

Meanwhile, in Portugal Tao is raising Micha’el’s head to new heights of tonsorial elegance, and in Zichron Raphael is working on raising his own head.

* This is not hyperbole. The submissions continued for decades, and peaked at over a thousand a day.

** I wanted to give you the etymology of ‘curmudgeonly’. I’d like to tell you that it is derived from Holland’s 1600 translation from Livy, in which he renders the Latin ‘frumentarius’ (corn-merchant) as ‘cornmudgin’; the word then acquired its present meaning since corn-merchants are notoriously discontented with how the vagaries of the weather (or, indeed, geopolitics) play havoc with the price and supply of corn. Unfortunately, the OED gives the first recorded use of the word as considerably earlier than 1600.

Let me try again. I’d like to say that ‘curmudgeonly’ is an anglicization of the French ‘coeur méchant’ meaning ‘’wicked heart’, but, sadly, this is now dismissed as a false folk etymology.

It transpires that the etymology of ‘curmudgeonly’ is unknown, which seems to me strangely unsatisfying. Still, as I already mentioned, this can be the best of all possible worlds while still not being perfect.