I wanted to share with you a bizarre experience that I had this week, but first – since this is the season of party games – a quiz question. (Actually, of course, that isn’t quite as true of Chanukah among our circles as I half-remember, half-fantasize, it used to be in the Dickensian semi-mythical Christmases of our early married life in Wales. However, as a hook to hang the following paragraphs on, it will do.)

So, on our drive up to Zichron on Sunday this week, we passed a lorry. Technically, we passed many lorries, but this was the only one that was interesting to read. Well of course I read lorries? Doesn’t everyone? I’m the person who, as a child, could recite the complete text to be found on the back of breakfast cereal packets by heart, and who, for several decades, remembered the patent number of the World Dryer Manufacturing Company hand-dryers ubiquitously installed in 1960s and ’70s motorway service stations in Britain. Yes, I know it’s a disability, but it’s my disability, so mind your own beeswax.

Anyway, as I was saying, this particular lorry was carrying baby strollers/buggies/agolot. (These have, by the way, in case you’ve been looking in the other direction for the last 40 years, evolved beyond all recognition. I’m not sure that the early Mercury space capsules of the 1950s employed technology half as sophisticated as a modern integrated baby transporter system. But I’d better stop there; I suspect there might be enough meat on that topic for an entire post!)

The lorry carried a strange advertising slogan: ‘O.K. strollers. Oh, mama!’ In itself, ‘O.K.’ seems a slightly bizarre choice of name for a product. What self-respecting parent or grandparent of an adored newborn would be tempted to buy a stroller that described itself as ‘O.K.’? I would expect to be drawn to strollers that call themselves ‘Magnifico’, ‘Splendiferous’, and so on, rather than ‘Alright, I suppose’ or ‘Not so bad’.

Actually, I have just googled stroller brand names, and I see that they are considerably more wide-ranging in their appeal than that. On one website’s selection of the 22 best brands, I found ones that appear to:

• Advertise their country of manufacture (or, these days, probably their country of initiating outsourcing to manufacturers in China): Britax, Teutonia, Inglesina – that last being a company, by the way, that hints at coupling baby-centric Italian culture with British reliability, but is actually American).
• Go all cooey and cutesy: Bugaboo, Dream On Me, BumbleRide, Baby Jogger, Mamas And Papas.
• Target the first-time parent who must now sell the two-seater sports car and buy a sensible family car: Maclaren, Aston Martin, Grand Touring Baby,
• State clearly their priority: Safety 1^st
• Go utterly prosaic: Dorel Industries Inc, Phil & Teds
• Aim, apparently, to appeal to the parents of an unwanted child: Uppu Baby

Anyway, this lorry! The slogan was, I remind you: O.K. strollers. Oh, mama! What attracted my attention was that the designers of the slogan had decided that what it was lacking was an apostrophe, and had inserted one somewhere. Your quiz question is: Where exactly do you think they had inserted the apostrophe?

Bernice, who was driving, had not read the lorry, and so I asked her. She very shrewdly suggested: O.K. stroller’s. Oh, mama, favouring what is known in Britain as the greengrocer’s apostrophe, so named because, in the good old days when greengrocers marked up their prices every day on chalkboards, they tending to add an apostrophe before the final ‘s’ of any word in the plural.

These days, of course, most street market stalls with chalkboard pricing are staffed by PhDs who grow artisan vegetables on their smallholding, and whose mastery of the vagaries of grammar and punctuation is matched only by the excellence of their calligraphy.

Well, have you made your guess? The answer is: ‘O.K. strollers. Oh, m’ama!’ I can only imagine that someone thought that it would sound very French and sophisticated if they pretended that ‘ama’ was a form of a transitive verb, preceded by a direct object pronoun.

If I have, by this stage, completely lost you, fear not. We are now going to undergo so complete a change of subject that I cannot think of anything remotely resembling a segue, and so I shall resort to my least favourite purveyors of fine comedy: Monty Python.

And now for something completely different.

Let me tell you what happened to me last motzei shabbat.

Because of the desirability of lighting the Chanukah lights as close to the earliest permitted time as possible, I arranged with Bernice that she should collect me by car from shul after the Saturday evening service so that I would get home earlier. We had some discussion about whether she should come if the weather was good, or only if it was raining. Anyway, after the service finished, I left shul, to discover that the evening was cloudy but dry.

Bernice wasn’t waiting for me outside. I had a good look at the parked cars, but none had their lights on or engine running, and none looked like ours. This wasn’t surprising, because it was still only a couple of minutes after Shabbat had finished, and I knew that she would be setting up the lights in the chanukiyot and setting out the tray for Havdalah before she came to pick me up, if, that is, she decided to pick me up even though it wasn’t raining. I decided to save a couple of minutes by starting to walk home. I made sure to walk at the edge of the kerb, so that she would spot me as she was driving up. A couple of minutes from shul, I saw a car approach that might have been ours. However, because of the dark, and the car’s headlights, I could not be absolutely sure. The car didn’t stop, so I took a closer look as it passed. It was certainly our make and model and the same colour and, sure enough, the last three digits of the number-plate were 702, matching ours. As a clincher, the car turned right into the street where the shul is, so I turned around and started walking back towards shul.

As I turned the corner of the street, I could see the same car driving back down the street toward me, Bernice having presumably discovered that I had already left shul, As it stopped at the corner, I opened the door and jumped in. “I’m so sorry!”, I said, a little breathlessly. “I thought you would spot me as you were driving up. I…”

At this point, I looked at the dashboard, and noted, with interest, that Bernice seemed to have replaced our media screen with a less modern radio-player. Turning my gaze to the driver, I saw a bespectacled man, about my age, who said, very guardedly, in heavily accented English, struggling to keep his voice calm: “What do you want?!”

Realising that a coherent explanation would take far more time than I had, and would also involve confessing my stupidity to a complete stranger, I simply apologised profusely, opened the door and left the car as quickly as possible. The idea of asking him whether he was going my way and would mind giving me a lift didn’t actually occur to me.

Since then, I am finding it difficult to get the image of his face out of my mind. His expression was somewhere between the first trace of doubt that might pass across a person’s face as he is suddenly struck by a suspicion that the man who has befriended him in the pub might actually be a cold-blooded murderer, and the moment, much later in the story, when his last doubts are removed and he acknowledges, with absolute certainty and in a state of terror, that this ‘friend’ is planning to kill him. In the eyes of that poor driver, I could read his very real fear that he was trapped in a car with a deranged axe murderer.

I was, of course, absolutely mortified, and I wish that I could find this man again and apologise to him for disturbing him so deeply. At the same time, there was a certain thrill in seeing the trace of terror in his eyes.… I think I’d better stop here, don’t you?

When I eventually arrived home, Bernice confirmed that we had in fact agreed that if it wasn’t raining there was no need for her to pick me up. I decided not to tell her what had happened, preferring to wait and see the expression on her face when she read this week’s post pre-publication. I can confirm that it was worth the wait.

Meanwhile, in Penamacor, Ollie is perfecting his Superman.

If you need an explanation of the title of this week’s post, click the link (but only if you have a strong stomach).

As I sit in front of my laptop, gazing at a blank Word document, it is 13 hours until publication zero hour, and I still seem not to have decided what to write about this week. It’s not as if there’s any shortage of possible topics. Tonight was the second night of Chanukah, and there has to be a story there. In fact, I have just stored away 300 words that are, indeed, the start of a post on Chanukah. For some reason, what I wrote doesn’t feel quite right, and I don’t think there is enough time to wrestle it into shape and then expand it tonight. I suspect the topic needs to spend more time sloshing around in my subconscious’s digestive juices.

Then, of course, there is this week’s big sporting story – Rehan Ahmed’s debut five-for and seven-wicket haul for the match at 18 years of age. (Bet you didn’t see that coming.) I imagine I will write about the transformation of England cricket’s test squad at some point, but the way their success is being sustained is making me almost prepared to risk waiting to write it until the Ashes series, so that I can extract maximum pleasure from the post, and the concomitant humiliation of my Australian readership.

Oh, and there’s another sports story I almost forgot. Having vowed to ignore the World Cup completely, I have found the drama of the tournament irresistible. However, I haven’t actually watched any of the football, so I don’t really feel qualified to write about it, although a Friday evening dinner conversation has planted the seed of an idea in my mind that, again, needs further germination. After a conversation with my brother this evening, I may even try to catch up with the final online (I can’t really believe I just wrote that). He did warn me that if I do watch it and enjoy it my expectations of what a football match should be will be so high that I will probably never find another match that doesn’t disappoint.

If I were inclined to write about politics there is more than enough going on in both my country of birth and the land that I chose to live in. However, the one is too depressing and the other is both too depressing and a can of worms that I don’t really relish opening.

I was even entertaining the idea of writing one of those much ados about nothing – this one involving toilet rolls. However, I can’t quite see how to squeeze 1500 words out of that.

Anyway, I’ve just checked back over past posts, in the hope of finding inspiration, and I’ve reread a post that ended: “Let’s take a rest, and save our last couple of days in Madrid for another time.” It occurs to me that now, an astonishing ten weeks later, may just be that ‘another time’. However, once again, I don’t really have a lot more to say about Madrid.

But wait a minute. This extended vamp has already taken me a third of the way to a post. If I devote another third to toilet rolls, which surely must be good for 400 words, that will then leave only another 4–500 for Madrid. Mission accomplished. So, with no further ado….

I may have reflected in an earlier post on the fact that when a couple are considering devoting the whole of their future lives to each other, they sometimes ask each other questions about what seem to be the important issues: Do you want to have children? What country would you like to live in? However, there are other, perhaps equally important, questions that I suspect none of us ever think to ask. In fact, it was only relatively recently that I realised the one I am going to offer you now was even an issue. Which way do you hang the toilet roll? I have never actually asked Bernice about this, but I realised a few weeks ago that she and I probably have different answers to that question. She is a wall person and I am an outward person.

Let me explain. Toilet roll holders usually consist of a horizontal cylinder onto which you thread the toilet roll. You can choose to thread the roll onto the holder so that the sheet of paper that hangs down is facing the person sitting on the toilet, or is on the other side of the roll-holder from the person. These two options are illustrated below.

It seems patently obvious to me that the correct arrangement is as in the right-hand image above. To have a single plane sheet presented to view, rather than the workings of the roll, and to have the ‘top’ sheet closer to the user, rather than further away, behind the roll, seems to me to make both aesthetic and ergonomic sense.However, unless I am much mistaken, Bernice hangs toilet rolls as per the left-hand image. This means that sometimes, if I am not paying attention, I spin the roll in the wrong direction, and roll up the paper rather than unrolling it. It also means that I have to concentrate harder in order to take hold of the paper, at a time when my concentration is focussed elsewhere.

Since I made this discovery about our domestic arrangements, I have not stayed in a hotel or Airbnb, and so I haven’t been able to check first-hand whether my feeling that the right-hand arrangement is the conventional one is accurate. I’m banking on you, dear reader, to confirm my suspicions, or, alternatively, to put me right.

Editor’s Note: When Bernice reached this point in the post (she is, of course, my first reader and vetter every week) she declared, in no uncertain terms, that she always follows the right-hand method. I can think of only three possible explanations for this state of affairs: either she is gaslighting me; or one or the other of us has a multiple personality disorder, and our alter ego follows the left-hand method; or (and this is the most worrying scenario) we have a toilet-roll poltergeist in the house.

Which brings us back, somehow, to Madrid, and our last day before Shabbat. We had booked tickets for a tour of the Royal Palace, in the afternoon. After breakfast, I wanted to explore more of the city on foot, but Bernice elected to have a recharging morning in the air-conditioned room. I set off in the hope of reaching the river, but in fact didn’t quite make it.

My walk took me through the Thai quarter. I’m not sure whether I looked particularly tense, but as I passed every doorway along one particular street, one nice young Thai lady after another offered me a massage. From there, I found my way to an avenue lined with stalls selling second-hand books, where I spent a pleasant hour deciphering titles in Spanish and leafing through glossy coffee-table artbooks.

Back in the hotel, we had a bite to eat, then made our way to the palace, where, once again, our tour was greatly enhanced by an excellent audio-visual guide accessed through a phone app. This visit was something of an exercise in humility, because the audio guide went to great pains to stress that the castle had a longer and more extravagant frontage than, had more rooms than, had more square metres of floor space than, and was altogether grander than, Buckingham Palace. Not for the first time in Madrid, I was struck by the similar heritage of British and Spanish imperial history and royalty.

After an early meal at our favourite vegan restaurant, we retired to the hotel to shower and change and bring in shabbat with a very modest Friday night meal. We spent the next twenty-five hours resting, reading, eating, sleeping, and gathering our strength for the drive on Sunday to Penamacor and our reuniting with the family.

Fast forward five months, and Raphael is certainly enjoying one of his Chanukah presents.

They’ve gone and left us. In fact, they’ve all gone and left us. As a surprise for Esther’s birthday, Maayan booked a week’s break in Naples, home, so they say, to the world’s best pizza and espresso (they being the Neapolitans, but nevertheless…).

Apart from the espresso, my strongest memory of my own week-long conference in Naples, over 30 years ago when I worked for the British Council, is the fact that at least 50% of the people I saw walking in the street were carrying a car radio cassette player. I initially assumed (O, the innocence of…if not youth, then middle age) that there was a city-wide sale on. It was only later that I realised that any parked car with a player in it would be broken into and the player stolen.

I also remember that, in a week of looking, I saw only two cars that did not bear the scars of a minor collision. Rather sad that these are my strongest impressions of Naples, but there you go. I’m sure that the girls will come back with much more evocative memories.

So, after seeing Micha’el, Tslil, Tao and Ollie off at the airport on Wednesday, we wished Esther, Maayan and Raphael bon voyage on Thursday at the end of our weekly visit, and we now face a week at home with only each other for company. I must say it feels rather strange, after the last month. We spent the next few days getting the house back to normal, with a curious blend of reluctance and a feeling of restoring order. (I’ll leave you to decide the exact mix of that blend in Bernice and myself.)

All of the toys and books that we keep here, together with a few new gifts that were too bulky for them to take, have been packed away in the cupboards. (Actually, not all: I am keeping out the magnetiles, because I am determined to finally build a stable regular icosahedron out of the equilateral triangles.) Mattress and feeding chair have been returned to the generous friends who lent them. Bedding and towels have been washed and dried, folded and put away. The cot, floor mat and collapsible bath have been folded up and stored. (In our defence, when we renovated the kids’ bathroom and got rid of our old bath we did not have any grandchildren, nor foreseeable prospects of any.) The car seat borrowed from the girls is now back in Zichron.

That last item wasn’t quite as easy as I make it sound. When we needed to instal it, at the beginning of the kids’ visit, I watched the first seven minutes of the forty-minute explanatory YouTube video, then delegated the job to Micha’el. When it came to detaching it, Maayan and I spent ten minutes wrestling with it until I admitted defeat, accessed the video and discovered that all that was needed was a click on two discreet buttons.

Our home once again feels both ridiculously large for our needs, and eerily quiet, particularly between ten o’clock every evening and six the following morning. The last month has been a reminder (more for Bernice than myself, I have to confess) that people are designed to raise children in their early adulthood, and not at our age.

One day last week, Bernice and I took Tao to the Jerusalem zoo. The last time the kids were here, Bernice had taken him by herself, because I was not well, but this time I was able to join them. We all had a great time, not least because Tao knows his own mind and is very happy to tell you which animals he wants to see and when he wants to go on to the next enclosure.

Before we went, he had explained that he wanted to see the tortoises. As luck would have it, there are tortoises in an enclosure close to the entrance to the zoo, and they had just been brought lettuce leaves, so they were (to the extent that tortoises are able to be) extremely active. An added bonus were the stone sculptures of giant tortoises that Tao could ride on.

We managed to walk all the way to the top of the zoo, spendiong a very long time admiring the very active penguins, and less time watching the very much less active big apes, bears, lions and elephants. The only really lively larger animal was the Syrian leopard, and since his activity consisted of compulsively pacing his enclosure, we found that rather unsettling.

When Tao told us that there were no other animals he wanted to see, we rode back down on the zoo ‘train’, which he claimed to remember from his last visit. I’m sure it did not match the train ride from Castelo Branco to Lisbon, along the Tagus valley, with which the kids started their trip to Israel, but Tao seemed enchanted.

However, the highlight of the day – even better than the previous day’s pizza that he enjoyed cold (we know how to show a three-year-old a good time) while watching the penguins – was the climbing park. Here we were delighted to see that, since our last trip to Portugal, Tao has become much more comfortable in large public spaces, interacting with children he doesn’t know.

The zoo was hosting a number of school trips that day, and this climbing park, comprising mosaic sculptures of a variety of real and imaginary animals, with integral tunnels, climbing nets and slides, was full of very loud, very boisterous, Israeli children, from eight to eleven years old. To our surprise, Tao happily went off, and, while he clearly favoured those animals with fewer children on them, he was happy to join them, and played for the best part of an hour, until he said that he was ready to go and, in the time-honoured fashion, fell asleep in the car on the way home.

We planned, but failed, to transfer him asleep into the house. We were anxious about how he would react when he realised his parents were not there. (They had needed to go to the airport to part with an exorbitant amount of money in return for a passport for Tslil – the passport that the Israeli embassy in Portugal had not issued because of industrial action, and that she had been unable to receive from the Interior Ministry in Maale Adumim, because of incompetence, we suspect.) In fact, he was not at all worried by their absence, which obviously made us feel very relieved.

Then, all too soon, after twenty-four hours of washing, drying, sorting, packing, making sandwiches, and after a last dinner together (well, almost together: Tao was exhausted and asked to go to bed almost as soon as we sat down), it was time for us to travel in convoy to the airport. Tao travelled in our car, which we were thrilled about. (We were also thrilled that, when I asked him if he was looking forward to going home, he said he wanted to stay with us – although we know that he was also missing his regular routine.)

By the time we all met up outside the airport, Ollie was, naturally, fast asleep, which made parting from him easier, to be honest. As always, it is a great comfort to know that our next trip is already booked (from early February, for a month as usual). We have seen tremendous development in Ollie in his month here: in terms of, for example, both movement and verbalisation; we think that his cousins on both sides have been an inspiration to him. We’re quite sure that he will, in two months’ time, be a different child again, and we’re already allowing ourselves to get quite excited about seeing his progress. As for Tao, it will be very interesting to see him in his new gan (nursery) environment.

Meanwhile, we have to get through the next week without a visit to Zichron. We are comforting ourselves with the knowledge that we should at least be able to resume our own regular reading routine, with something even more gripping than Thomas, The Tank Engine.

At least we have lots of great memories, and photos.

For the last seven years before our aliya, Bernice and I lived in Nantymoel, a mining (now an ex-mining) village almost at the head of the Ogwr valley, which is the next valley to the west of the more famous Rhondda valley. Our house (Bethel Cottage, opposite Bethel chapel: we lived in Bet El before coming on aliya – much the safer option) perched on one side of the valley, with a magnificent view of the forested other side of the valley.

Of course, this being a South Wales valley, ‘view’ was an accurate description only a small percentage of the time. As we used to say: ‘If you can’t see the other side of the valley, it’s raining; if you can, it’s about to rain.’ The first mountain that the Atlantic rainclouds rolling in from Newfoundland encountered was the Bwlch, just north of Nantymoel, so we could expect about 300 days of rain a year. When the sun shone, of course, the scenery was beautiful.

Both Bernice and I worked down the valley, she in the market town of Bridgend, and I in a village a little further west. When we first moved up the valley from Bridgend, where we had lived for the first seven years of our married life, it took us a long time to realise that ‘up the valley’ and ‘down the valley’ were two different climate zones. Spring reached Bridgend several weeks before it crept up the valley to Nantymoel, and for much of the year Bridgend was significantly warmer and drier. We would set off in the morning wrapped up against the cold, and spend the journey shedding layers of clothing.

I mention all this because it was a phenomenon that I had not encountered again anywhere else, until last week, when we took the kids and grandkids away for 3 days in an Airbnb in the Golan: more specifically, the Northern Golan, which I had not realised made a difference. Bernice and I drove up alone last Monday , leaving Maale Adumim around noon, and enjoyed a very warm and sunny drive up the Jordan Valley road, which has, thankfully, signficantly improved since last time we took it.

Looping round the east coast of the Kinneret, we continued north and noticed that the weather was getting chillier and less sunny as we climbed. When we arrived in cold and windy Alonei Habashan, 15 kilometres west of Katzrin, we were very glad that we had brought our winter woolies, coats and hats. Our hostess advised us that, if the weather was bad, and we wanted to tour around, we should head south, into what would undoubtedly be better weather.

In the event, we did not venture terribly far. With two babies and a three-year-old, it seemed more sensible to be a little less ambitious in our plans. We had hoped that we would be able to eat out or order in, but it had become clear over the week before our trip, when we (or, more accurately, Esther) did more intensive research and spoke in detail to our hostess, that there were few kosher options, and none that delivered to Alonei Habashan. We therefore brought supplies with us for all our meals, and everyone pitched in over the course of the couple of days of pizza and pasta.

Those of us who drink agreed that, if you bring sufficient supplies of decent wine and home-made beer, home catering is always delicious; those who are more abstemious enjoyed the fresh fruit and orange juice; Tao’s Nana found supplies of chocolate biscuits, and the two babies enjoyed business as usual. Esther and Maayan brought a delicious soup and their excellent blend of coffee. When Bernice and Esther discussed quantities, a few days before we went, Esther erred on the side of caution (by which I mean over-catering). When Bernice and I went shopping, we both added to that error.

The result was, of course, that at the end of our stay, we had enough food left over to be able to set Esther and Maayan up for hosting Micha’el, Tslil and the boys (I do like the sound of that: ‘the boys’) for a couple of days, while Bernice and I were able to travel home considerably less weighed down that we had been on the journey up.

The property we rented was a fairly large house, with more than enough bedrooms, three bathrooms, a large, covered porch area that the kids used a lot and gardens that we didn’t use. The best feature of the house was the downstairs living area, which was open-plan and large, enabling us all to be together with Tao playing at one end with the tiny pieces of Playmobil that were among the many toys and games available, while the two babies could be safely on the floor well away from the chokables. At the same time, all six adults could sit confortably on the slightly shabby but confortable sofas, beanbag and easy chair.

On our last day, we woke to a very thick mist. Two-thirds of us ventured out in this in two cars, to visit Aniam, a moshav with a small ‘artists’ village’ featuring a parade of art and craft workshp-showrooms. This was only 17 kilometres from where we were staying, but, as we drove down the mountain, the mist thinned until we eventually dropped below it. Having left on a cold, dark, dank winter’s day, we arrived at Aniam to be greeted by warm sunshine. A couple of the showrooms had some very attractive ceramics, and Bernice and I were even able to find a souvenir of our time away.

As is always the case, we needed to ignore the fact that the shop boasted dozens of similar items, and imagine the piece we were thinking about in isolation. On our honeymoon in Majorca, we bought wooden figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. In this case, the shop boasted serried ranks of identical figures, stretching to the horizon like the terracota army: literally hundreds of cloned Men of La Mancha. Fortunately, we managed to persuade ourselves that, taken in isolation, one pair of figures would look attractive, rather than cheap and touristy. 50 years later, we are still very fond of them.

In all, our Golan mini-break was very enjoyable. It was lovely being away with the kids, and especially seeing the three boys interacting with each other. Raphael and Ollie, in particular, seem to get along really well, and are both more interested in each other than is often the case at their ages. Sadly, we have few opportunities to be all together, so it was a wonderful couple of days.

From Zichron, Micha’el and family went to Tslil’s parents for Shabbat, so Bernice and I had three days at home by ourselves, before they returned on motzei shabbat, and we moved into their last three full days before they set off for the airport. The COVID-laden start to their stay here has meant that this trip has been in a sense shorter than hoped.

However, we know how lucky we are that we can all be together for a whole month and still, at the end, be on speaking terms with each other. Some members of the family find this a lot easier than others, but I promise that I do try my best. Meanwhile, a few holiday snaps, including the long awaited formal family portrait of all nine of us – three households, three generations.