Your starter for 10 – much too easy – is to complete the sentence quoted in this week’s title.

If you responded, immediately, “Get a hat!”, then you may want to try the bonus question: Where does the phrase come from?

I wasn’t aware (until I googled my way into this week’s post-writing) that it comes, in fact, from an advertising campaign, launched by the British-based Hatters’ Development Council in 1948. The previous year, British men had bought 5,000,000 hats. This represents about one man in four buying a new hat. While you might regard this as pretty impressive market penetration, it represented a serious decline, particularly among the under-25’s. The Council attributed this decline to the “wave of informality” since 1918. In a concerted effort to reverse this disturbing trend, the Council budgeted £50,000 over the next two years (the equivalent of over £1,000,000 a year today) to an advertising campaign built around the catchy slogan “If you want to get ahead, get a hat1”

In the short run, the campaign met with some success. However, in the last 50 years, as men’s hairstyling (and, indeed, starting in the late 50s, men’s hair) has become a major growth industry, hats have steadily gone out of fashion.

Of course, it was not unfailingly so. My late father boasted a fine selection of headgear. On workdays, especially in the winter, he wore a Dunn & Co cloth cap for driving to and from the East End to collect fresh food supplies for his shop. (I see that Dunn & Co flatcaps are available as vintage clothing items on eBay for under £20 these days.) If he was going out in the evening, he might wear one of his trilbies. On shabbat, like almost all of his contemporaries in Beehive Lane Synagogue, he wore a bowler hat. (The only exceptions were the shammes, who I almost feel I need to call a beadle, and the Honorary Officers, who all wore top hats.) As an aid to those who are unfamiliar with any of these terms, I offer this classic comedy sketch from The Frost Report.

Having viewed that, I realise this makes my father classless (or, rather, classful). Incidentally, I remember very clearly when, together with my classmates, I was completing my UCCA university application forms: the father of one of my classmates owned a shop in the same street as my father. Under ‘Father’s Occupation’ on the form, where I wrote ‘Shopkeeper’, he wrote ‘Managing Director’. Although he suggested I do the same, and, he believed, thereby enhance my chances of being offered a university place, I felt very strongly that this would be a betrayal of my father, and a belittling of what I saw as his very worthwhile occupation. Dad’s shop was a real institution in the Jewish community, and he was loved (genuinely, that is not too strong a word) by his customers.

What has brought on these musings is the turn of the seasons here. In summer, I am careful about always wearing a hat as protection against the sun. I currently have two relatively inexpensive ‘straw’ hats – one very battered and only used when gardening, the other swiftly reaching the point where I will no longer be able to wear it even for going to the local shops, at which point I will have two gardening hats, which seems a little excessive, even to me.

In addition, I have a peaked cap with a neck flap, which offers very good protection, and which I wear for my summer morning constitutional, and a fairly wide-brimmed sun hat for other informal outdoor occasions. On shabbat in summer, I wear my panama hat, which I spent a long time looking for when I was travelling for work, and eventually found in Puerto Rico. It is a genuine panama, which means, as all you trivia quizsters know, that it was made in Ecuador.

The panama is the traditional Ecuadorean ‘toca’ straw hat made from toquilla – a small, palm-like plant that is native to South America. When the Panama canal opened, there was suddenly a demand from Europeans and North Americans passing through for a lightweight sunhat. The toca fit the bill, and since then has been known as a panama. What I particularly like about it is that I can roll it up and slip it into an empty round whisky cardboard canister. Thus protected, it could travel to Singapore or Puerto Rico, in both of which it was essential wear. Unrolled and left overnight in the hotel bathroom, where it was revived by the shower steam, the hat was restored to good as new.

After decades of resistance, I eventually succumbed and bought a baseball cap. This piece of headgear’s only redeeming feature, in my eyes, is that it can be slipped into a back pocket (where, I would argue, it looks considerably more elegant than on someone’s head). I usually wear this only when going to the supermarket, since, with any other hat, I have to remember to pick it up from the trolley when we get back to the car.

This last week, winter arrived in Maale Adumim. (It then left again, but I believe it will be back at some point.) This means a whole other set of headgear. For my morning walk in winter cold (when I can steel myself for it) I sport a woollen bobble cap. For everyday wear I have a classic flat cap, which will, for me, forever be associated with Dad. I also have a suede-like water-repellent, lightweight beige cap, which is slightly more up-market.

In an Atlanta discount clothing store, when I realised that my Shabbat hosts lived a 15-minute walk from the shul, and that the weather forecast for the coming weekend was for rain, I bought a trilby, which feels very 50s when I wear it with my now-45-year-old M&S trenchcoat. For the once-a-year deepest winter sleet Friday night walk back from shul, I have a leather, wide-brimmed Indiana Jones hat, bought on a whim at Heathrow Airport many years ago. While the wide brim ensures that no rain falls on me, and precious little on my coat, the hat has a tendency to retain the water, so that, on particularly wet evenings, by the time I arrive home from shul I can barely hold my head up.

In Kathmandu, I bought a highly decorated peacock blue Tibetan brimless cap, which I have occasionally worn on Purim and at no other time. I was also given, many years ago, a fur-lined pilot’s helmet in which I feel that I could fly a twin-engined plane to Shangri-La. Agsain, this doesn’t get much use, but it’s comforting to know that it is in my wardrobe ready to be called upon if needed.

Which, I am astonished to discover, means that I possess twelve items of headgear, not counting kippot. While I can make a case for needing hats – in the almost total absence of hair – I don’t really feel like someone who has twelve hats. Acquiring them has not been a conscious act, but rather something that happened of its own volition.

Over the years, of course, I have mislaid, or laid to rest, several other items. The only one whose loss I genuinely feel is what I would describe as a brown, corduroy, Tom Paxton cap. On relection, perhaps the period in my life when I could comfortably wear that is now behind me, and it may be just as well that I mislaid it at some point.

Meanwhile, up in Zichron, the move to winter hats has also happened. Now here’s a young man who really looks as though he’s going to get ahead.

Quick Medical Update: Relative clean bills of health have been issued all round. Bernice is still testing positive; however, since it is now seven days since she first was aware of contracting COVID, government guidelines indicate that she is free to mingle with the general population. Micha’el and Tao seem to have joined Tslil in the land of Postcovidia; poor Ollie still has rather a runny nose and occasional, though much less frequent and much less severe, cough. Esther and Ma’ayan have resurfaced; Raphael’s doctor has today announced that he appears to be clear of any infections, although he is also still suffering from a cold and cough. Horror of horrors, it appears that foot-and-mouth disease is doing the rounds in Zichron, and so Raphael has been advised to keep away from other children (seldom bad advice, in my experience – present company excepted). In short, the entire family is in a much better place this week than last, and Micha’el and family, and, indeed, all of us, are looking forward to enjoying the second two weeks of their trip even more than the first!

Editorial Aside: I thought of posting today at 11 seconds past 11:22 this morning, for obvious reasons, but decided that it would be lost on some (but certainly not all) of my readers, so we’ll stick to the boring old 9AM (my blog – my timezone).

What with one thing and Corona, our outings with Tao in the first two weeks of this visit have been very local and rather unambitious. He has become very familiar with our two closest children’s playgrounds, and we made it a couple of times to the local mall, where there is a wide range of the static children’s rides – usually cars – that can be activated by a five-shekel piece or, I was more astonished to discover than I probably should have been – by swiping a credit card. As luck would have it, we only seemed to have one 5-shekel piece on us each time we went, and both forgot to being our credit cards (at least, that’s our story and we’re sticking to it) but fortunately Tao’s imagination is sufficiently strong, and his expectations sufficiently modest, for him to be satisfied with one electric ride and four or five in which Grandpa and Nana rock the car (and, as the storyline requires, double as rescue helicopters or water-dropping firefighter planes).

However, on Monday of this week, we got to take Tao out properly, to Jerusalem, to the Train Theatre, a children’s puppet theatre that has been a part of the Jerusalem cultural landscape since 1981. The last time we went, when we took our own young children, the theatre was still in its original home, a disused railway carriage, which in itself made every visit a special adventure. Since then, how things have changed! The old railway carriage has been renovated, and converted into a children’s library, while a new complex was opened in 2016, comprising a small theatre space, an outdoor amphitheatre, a snack bar and offices, all in separate buildings that are connected underground by a larger, 140-seat theatre.

One of the delights of taking a bright three-year-old out is that aspects of the outing that I might not even consider can assume tremendous importance. So, before we even parked the car, our afternoon included highlights such as driving alongside, overtaking and being overtaken by, a light-rail train, which Tao initially called a bullet train. He was deceived by the fact that the profile of the structure of the trains is not dissimilar, although we were quick to point out that Jerusalem’s light rail never reaches a speed of 320 kph, or, indeed, much more than 20 kph, although it still managed to beat us through Jerusalem’s city centre traffic.

We had also not deliberately planned our route to include travelling through two tunnels, but this feature certainly met Tao’s approval. Indeed, we almost had to double back on the way home in order to go through one of the tunnels again. Once we arrived at the theatre, comfortably early, the municipality was kind enough to lay on for our benefit a helicopter repeatedly circling overhead. I wish there were an easy way to regain, in cataracted old age, the clarity of vision and delight at the simple wonders of everyday life that a three-year-old can show you.

By this stage I was wondering whether the show itself could match these technological wonders, but I really needn’t have worried. The audience consisted of perhaps 12 two-to-six-year-olds and various parents and grandparents, which was a large enough number to create an atmosphere but a small enough number not to be intimidating. Anat Geiger-Shabtai, the storyteller and puppeteer who performed the show, was completely attuned to her audience and managed to break down any inhibitions within the first couple of minutes of what was a 35-minute story of preparing for, and holding, a birthday party.

Her puppets were ostensibly constructed from everyday discarded objects – a teapot, a bicycle seat, wheels from a toy car. The truth is, of course, that they were in fact constructed from equal parts of these objects and hers, and the children’s, imaginations.

The show was similarly constructed from equal parts of story-telling, simple (which does not, of course, mean easy) puppetry and audience participation that was inviting, inclusive, age-appropriate, and great fun.

We had been unsure how Tao would react to all of this, in his first experience of live theatre. There were a few moments of initial uncertainty – a room full of strangers; a Hebrew-speaking environment with Nana and Grandpa, who are usually exclusively English-speaking. However, after that initial tentativeness, Anat put him, and the entire room, at their ease, and he was soon completely captivated, and showing his delight in imaginative story-telling and his highly developed appreciation of humour.

I’ll stop kvelling now. What I will say is this. I know that it is a wicked thing to project our own tastes and ambitions onto an innocent child. My greatest wish for Tao, as for all of our children and grandchildren, is that they should all live, in fulfilment and contentment, the lives that they choose to live. At the same time, I hope that I am allowed to be very, very happy that, in his first encounter with the magic of theatre, Tao was spellbound. I am therefore delighted to present him with my personal award as most promising newcomer to theatre of 2022.

Meanwhile, Ollie is just starting to wander in the foothills of Mary having a little lamb, and hasn’t yet really made up his mind.

This has been, for the family, seven days of ups and downs.
Michael, Tslil, Tao and Ollie have been with us since very early last Tuesday
morning, after a traumatic time at the Israeli embassy in Lisbon. Just to
remind you: the Israeli passports of both Tslil and Micha’el had expired, and
currently the Israeli Government is not issuing new passports at all. The waiting
list for a new passport is obviously very long, and the kids were unable to
renew theirs.

Although Israel usually requires that its citizens enter
and exit Israel on their Israeli passport, in these extenuating circumstances
citizens who also hold a foreign passport are being told to travel on it. This
includes Micha’el, but not, unfortunately, Tslil. So she required a laissez
passer (a temporary travel document allowing foreign travel), which the embassy
was prepared to issue not more than three days before travel, on presentation
of all the relevant documentation.

When the family arrived for their appointment at the
embassy last Monday morning, they were required to deposit their bags,
including, understandably, their phones. They were allowed to keep one bag with
everything they needed for the baby. However, the bag they had packed with
snacks and games for Tao, anticipating a long wait, they were required to
deposit. The security staff assured them that they would find, inside, a
playroom with games and toys. What they actually found was a table with a few
sheets of paper that had already been drawn on and a few crayons.

The kids had also been hoping to register Ollie’s birth
with the Israeli authorities, as legally required. However, the list of
documents that the embassy demanded to see included at least one that does not
exist in Portugal, so this is a battle they will have to continue fighting when
they have regained their strength.

After a succession of further examples of lack of
consideration, the family eventually emerged with the travel document Tslil
needed. From that point, their journey to Israel was considerably smoother.

The owner of the Airbnb they stayed at in Lisbon, with whom
they had left their luggage, coordinated with them, and met them at the airport
with their luggage. In the airport, as the parents of a four-month-old baby and
a three-year-old, they were given priority treatment at every stage, and
whisked through the various checks and processes with the minimum fuss. Tao, in
his buggy, slept through virtually the whole process and woke up just a little
time before they were due to board.

The plane left late but landed on time. Tao slept well on
the flight, and Ollie, apart from one momentary cry, didn’t make a sound
throughout the flight, even on take-off and landing. In Israel, the recommended
taxi driver we had booked met them, not exactly as planned, but after a rather
anxious delay..

Although everyone was fairly wiped out, as much as anything
by the anxiety over the uncertainty of being able to fly, and by the long trip
from Penamacor to Maale Adumim, they were more or less recovered by the middle
of the week. Except, that is, for Tao, who had been nursing a cough and been
feeling run down for a couple of weeks, and who was also scratching some spots.
The kids had suspected chicken pox, but the doctor they took him to in
Penamacor did not offer a diagnosis. We were able to take Tao to the doctor
here, who was fairly confident that he had, indeed, been fighting chicken pox,
and seemed to be over the worst.

Then, early on Thursday evening, Esther, Maayan and Raphael
arrived, after a horrendous almost three-hour journey. They soon revived when
they reunited with Micha’el, Tslil and Tao and met, for the first time, their
newest nephew. While I was adjusting to the new reality of our ridiculously
large home for two bursting at the seams after these waves of invasions, Tslil,
feeling very tired, put herself to bed early – which seemed to me eminently
sensible.

On Friday, we all left still poorly Tslil in peace while
we, and Bernice’s sister and two nieces and their husbands, gathered at my
mother-in-law’s grave to mark her yahrzeit (which was, in fact, a couple of
weeks ago. However, the first date that worked for everyone was last Friday).
From the cemetery, everyone came back to us, neatly picking their way between
the activity floormats, teething rings, toys and games. It was a lovely
opportunity for Ollie’s great-aunt and uncle and first cousins once removed to
meet him. They were all suitably captivated, and he was his usual smiling and
placid self, as, indeed, was Raphael. Tao is at a considerably more discerning
age, but also enjoyed himself.

After the extended family left, Tslil took a rapid flow
COVID test and tested positive, to nobody’s particular surprise. So, while she
stayed in her bedroom upstairs, and Micha’el and all ferried Ollie and food and
drink to her and Ollie and empty cups and plates from her, we (two aunts and
two grandparents) kept Tao occupied and entertained and fed and watered, with
Micha’el and a very poorly-feeling Tslil stepping in at those critical points
where even an adored Nana is no substitute for Ima, or even Abba.

The joy of having everyone with us for Shabbat was,
naturally, less than complete, with Tslil suffering alone upstairs. However, it
was wonderful to see Raphael watching Tao’s every move in adoration, and Ollie
watching Raphael’s every move similarly. By the time Esther and Maayan were
packing up, Raphael and Ollie had bonded beautifully.

To look at them now, they seem so disparate in size, abilities
and age (eight months and four months); we have to keep reminding ourselves
that, in a matter of a year or so, that gap will shrink into insignificance and
they will, we hope, grow up feeling close to each other. Even if they live
geographically apart, we will have to make every effort to bring them together
as often as possible.

It was also wonderful, as always, to be together with our
children and their spouses: to watch Esther and Micha’el ganging up on Bernice,
so that I could take a break; to see them enjoying their own, and each other’s,
children together. Shabbat was over too quickly, but it was a lovely day.

Now, as I write this, it is Sunday. Tslil is feeling a bit
more human, but it looks very much as though Ollie may have COVID, and he is
not at all happy. To round off an eventful week, after Esther and family had a
long drive home yesterday, we learnt today that Maayan has also tested positive
for COVID. While she does not seem to have terrible symptoms, she is suffering
badly from seasonal allergies, so she really didn’t need this in addition.

An update on Monday: Tslil seems to be more or less over
her COVID, but Ollie had a terrible night last night with an awful cold and
coughing, and Tslil and Micha’el got very little sleep. Tao, today, has been
wiped out; after an early start and a brief outing to the park with Grandpa, he
has spent most of the rest of the day sleeping.

If I say that this has been a wonderful week, I will not be
lying. If I say that we had all hoped for an even more wonderful, and less
stressful, week, I will, again, not be lying. What we are all praying is that
this string of illness will soon be behind them all, and we, and they, will be
able to enjoy the rest of their stay with no qualifications.

If I tell you that I haven’t managed to take a single
photograph since they arrived, you may not believe me, but it’s the truth. So
here’s a photo taken when Raphael was eagerly looking forward to meeting his
cousins for the first time.

So the election results are well and truly in, and now we in Israel wait with bated breath to discover what Macchiavellian schemes Bibi is planning to ensure that he ends up with a workable majority coalition in which none of his coalition partners have any real power and he is able to advance his own private agenda unimpeded. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, Bernice and I wait with bated breath to discover whether Micha’el and family will arrive in Israel safe and sound this week. Watch another bit of this space.

All of which means that I am free this week to write about something of no consequence whatsoever. The only trouble is that my head is full of speculation about the makeup of the coalition and the allocation of the various government ministries. At the same time, it is full of wondering and worrying about the myriad things that could go wrong in Portugal and prevent the family arriving. All of that leaves me with very little mental capacity for thinking about a light and trivial topic for this week’s post. Those of you who have seen me over the last few days may have found me unusually preoccupied, The fact is that in four days of hard thinking I have drawn a complete blank.

Well, not exactly a complete blank: I did toy briefly with the idea of writing about coincidence, which I believe I have touched on before. The fact is that I have encountered two coincidences in the last two days – which you must admit is a bit of a coincidence. Did you know that Richard Owen coined the word ‘dinosaur’ in 1841? It means ‘terrible lizard’, which is a pity, becaue dinosaurs, we now know, were not related to lizards, but there you go. I learnt about Owen in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I was reading over Shabbat.

A couple of hours later, I was reading the latest edition of the Jewish Review of Books.(Technically, this is not the latest edition, but, in fact, the Spring 2022 edition; however, since the magazine takes time to reach my mailbox from the States by snail mail, and since I am habitually one edition behind in my reading, it’s my latest edition.) Anyway, in this, of all unlikely periodicals, I read a reference to the fact that Richard Owen coined the term ‘dinosaur’, which, as you are aware, I knew already.

Then, this afternoon, I was due to call my brother for our weekly chat. So as not to disturtb Bernice, Esther and the sleeping Raphael, and since the weather was a delightful 25^o, I went out into Esther and Maayan’s garden. Finding a hammock in the shade of their treehouse, I eased myself onto it, displaying an agility I was not at all sure I still possessed, and settled down for a relaxing chat. (Unfortunately, when it came to dismounting from the hammock 30 minutes later, much of that agility seemed to have deserted me – but that’s a different story.) Life, at this point, felt pretty good. When I got through to Martin, he told me that his flowerbeds were starting to form pools of water after a night and day of ceaseless rain. At that point, I decided it would be kindest not to mention my precise, almost idyllic, location.

Now, I reckon I lie in a hammock, on average, once every, oooh, seventy years. So I was more than a little surprised when Martin, whose younger son’s birthday it was that day, described the card they had sent him; it apparently featured a man relaxing in a hammock. Not exactly The Twilight Zone, I know, but nevertheless….

However, in the end I decided that I had no idea what to make of these coincidences: what lessons to draw from them; what light they shed on the nature of human existence. So, I’ll leave them to one side and talk instead about nuts naked and dressed.

It seems to me that over the years it has become more difficult to find nuts (both tree-nuts and peanuts) sold in their shells. Before we go any further, let me clarify my terms. I will use the adjective ‘shelled’ to mean ‘having been shelled’, in other words ‘with their shells removed’. I will, similarly (by which of course I mean ‘oppositely’) use the term ‘unshelled’ to mean ‘having not been shelled’ in other words ‘still in their shells’. I do realise that one could make a strong case for the opposite meaning: ‘shelled’ could be used to mean ‘having a shell’ (as in ‘a shelled crab’) and ‘unshelled’ to mean ‘not having a shell’. It has long struck me as one of the minor delights of English that it boasts a number of such terms that lend themselves so delightfully to ambiguity.

As I was saying, it has become more difficult to find unshelled nuts. I suspect this is a question of catering to the perceived preference of the consumer. Well, let me tell you, the producers and retailers have misperceived the preference of this particular consumer. As far as I am concerned, shelling nuts is not only one of life’s hitherto unsung pleasures; it also has health and economic benefits. Anyone who has to crack a walnut, hazelnut or brazil before eating it is guaranteed to end up eating fewer nuts, which both saves money and, since nuts are criminally moreish, guards against over-indulgence.

On paper, this device ticks lots of boxes. It is a simple, basic technology, elegantly packaged in natural material, Unfortunately, in too short a time, it proved to be not a device for cracking nuts, but a device to be cracked by nuts. Eventually, the cracker met a nut tougher than itself, and it was the side of the bowl that cracked under the pressure, and not the nut.

Even before then, this nutcracker proved unsatsfactory. The mechanism placed too much machinery beween the operator’s hand and the nutshell. I found that all sensitivity was lost and it was extremely difficult to move beyond the point of the first crack in the shell without reaching the point of rupturing the shell and crushing the nut.

Such is my love of the pursuit of the perfect shelling that I am happy to spend a couple of hours shelling nuts for the whole family. If you share my enthusiasm for eating nuts, but get no pleasure from shelling them, I am available for small intimate gatherings as a service to friends. (Oranges, pomelos and mangoes also peeled.)

Meanwhile, as of the time of writing, the kids in Portugal have reached Lisbon, where they are staying overnight prior to their flight.

P.S. The kids took off a bit late, and landed a bit early, and arrived at our doorstep, weary but well. The parents, who haven’t slept since Heaven knows when, have both crashed, which means Bernice and I have full unmonitored access. Excuse me while I just turn a cartwheel or two in relief and joy.

P.P.S. Bibi’s machinations have begun, but not ended. Wiser heads than mine have counselled waiting and seeing, and accepting that, part of the social contract when you live in a democracy is that you have to accept that the people decide. I may reflect more on this later…or I may not, if something more urgent comes up, such as a revolutionary new method of shelling nuts, for example.

As Bernice set off for coffee with a friend last week, I found myself marvelling, not for the first time, that she is able to maintain so many friendships, and that she is happy to invest time and effort in nurturing them. I reckon that life is considerably simpler if you can count your friends on the fingers of one hand…and that preferably a hand belonging to a sloth.

When I first thought of a subject for today’s post, I initially rejected it, for the obvious reason, but then realised that I should embrace it, for the same reason: after I publish it, and you read it, I will probably lose a number of friends. Besides, I find that I really cannot bring myself to write about anything else on this of all days, and so, I present… my take on the Israeli general election (for which the polls opened less than two hours before the publication time of this post).

It goes without saying that this is just my personal view: a view, I must add, that is offered with the caveat that I have never taken as much interest in politics, or involved myself in the political life of the country, as a responsible citizen living in a democracy should. Quite apart from any disagreement you may have with my beliefs or conclusions, you may well take issue with my representation of the facts.

Please feel free to respond – although I hope that we can keep any discussion in the Comments way above the gutter level of the Comments usually offered on political issues in the Times of London. Please also bear in mind that by the time you give me the benefit of your political wisdom, I will already have cast my vote, and I may not have another opportunity to exercise that right for, oooh, maybe as much as six months!

Just a very quick background for anyone not overly familiar with the Israeli system. It is a nationwide closed-list proportional representation system, with, this time round, 20 parties submitting lists of candidates to compete for the 120 seats. Any party (or alliance of parties) that gains less than 3.25% of the vote (representing, in effect, 4 members) sends no members to the Knesset.

Percentage turnout remained in the high 70s until 2003. Over the last four elections (held over a period of less than three years!), turnout averaged just under 70%. None of these elections produced a result that allowed a long-term viable coalition government to be formed. Now read on.

How does one (or, rather, how do I) pick a winner from a field of 20 parties? This is a multi-step process. The first three steps are, for me, always the same, regardless of the specific parties running in any given election.

Step 1: Eliminate the parties that are too far out there for me to relate to. (Ed. Note: It’s my process, and I get to decide what constitutes too far out there – for me.) This time round, these include Fiery Youth, a party led by a 20-year-old protest candidate known for TikTok videos.

Step 2: Eliminate the parties that I judge will not reach the electoral threshold. I know that this is a difficult step to defend as set policy:  if everybody who didn’t vote for Party X because they didn’t think it would reach the threshold voted for Party X, it would reach the threshold. This step is made easier for me because I have yet to encounter a party that I do not think will reach the threshold and whose policies I very closely and strongly identify with.

Step 3: Eliminate the parties that I believe represent exclusively a specific consistuency, at the expense of other constituencies, and whose constituency I do not consider myself a core member of.

These three steps, this time round, eliminated 13 of the parties. (You might want to amuse yourself by guessing which parties those are.) The remaining steps address the particular circumstances of this specific election.

For me, the blight over this election, as he was over the previous four, is Bibi. This time around, there are two clear issues around Bibi. The first is that I believe, in the current political, security, social and economic situation, the healthiest way forward for the country would be as broad a coalition of parties as possible. The last year has shown that this is not an impossible dream, although, given the slenderness of the last coalition’s majority, and the size of some MK’s egos, the last government proved unsustainable in the long term.

Unfortunately, there is no chance of a coalition including all of the largest parties because none of the centre-left and left parties will contemplate joining a coalition with a Likud party led by Bibi. Since Bibi has spent his entire time at the helm of Likud stifling any potential successor, the party has no charismatic candidate for successor, and all of those in positions of influence in the party are Bibi yes-men (and yes-women).

If the election results in a government coalition led by right-wing Likud and including (as it would) the extreme right-wing Religious Zionism alliance led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, then it seems clear that Bibi will further his personal agenda. The first item on that agenda is to make the criminal case against him go away, by passing legislation outlawing such cases against a sitting Prime Minister. The second, and, in my eyes, even more worrying, item is to increase executive power, by passing legislation such that if the Supreme Court blocks any Government legislation, the Knesset will have the power to ‘reject’ the Supreme Court’s decision by a simple majority of 61 votes. That seems to me a move that would seriously endanger Israel’s democracy, by removing one of the pillars of the principle of checks and balances.

On a personal note, Esther and her wife, Maayan, are currently jumping through the many, many bureaucratic hoops set by the Government to enable Maayan to be formally recognised as the adoptive parent of Raphael, to whom Esther gave birth seven months ago. Last week, they were warned by their lawyer that, if a right-wing coalition is formed, the process is liable to become even more difficult, protracted, unsympathetic and obstuctionist. The religious right-wing parties’ hatred of the LGBTQ community is no secret.

All of which explains why I will not be voting for Likud or Religious Zionism.

For those of you who are still reading, the next step is a bit painful. At one point, I greatly admired centre-right Ayelet Shaked, for her work as Justice Minister. However, she seems to have demonstrated a lack of the political awareness that a leader needs, and to have become very leaden in the last months. She has, I’m afraid, lost my confidence.

This leaves five parties, which can be described broadly as left and centre. As will be clear, if I don’t want a Likud-led coalition, the only alternative is a centrist-Yesh-Atid-led coalition. It is possible to argue long into the night as to where I should place my vote for it to be most effective in ensuring the outcome I want. Until I few days ago, I considered voting for centrist National Unity, believing (or perhaps only hoping) that, if Benny Gantz flipped again and joined a right-wing coalition, he would be a moderating force within that coalition. This belief probably represents the triumph of optimism over experience.

In the end, however, I decided to keep things simple. If I want Yair Lapid to have as strong a coalition as possible, then the best foundation to that is to have a Yesh Atid that is as strong as possible. I honestly believe that, in the Israel of 2022, the most pressing problems that Israel faces, at home and abroad, can best be addressed by a left-leaning, centrist, broad-based Government.

As Sherlock Holmes almost said: ‘When you have eliminated all which is unacceptable, then whatever remains, however unexpected, must be the best solution.’

If, against all odds, that is what I wake up to on Wednesday morning, then perhaps it will be followed fairly soon by the Likud Knesset rank and file finally showing some backbone and forcing Bibi to retire. I do, of course, acknowledge that a far more likely outcome is a right-wing coalition led by Bibi (my personal bet is a coalition bloc of 63 members), and then I do fear for the country’s short-term future. This, I suppose, means that, astonishingly, a hung Knesset and the prospect of another election in a few months doesn’t look like the worst result.

As I pointed out to someone last week, every time we have an indecisive election result, it at least pushes us a little closer to deciding that the electoral system itself needs to be revised, which may be the only long-term path out of this chronic stalemate. The discussion as to what form that revision should take will have to wait for another time.

To the four of you still reading, I thank you for your perseverance, and promise you (God willing) something considerably more upbeat next week!

Meanwhile, we can at least end on a positive note. Raphael can’t decide where to put his cross, but he has at least put down lots of noughts.