Today (at least the today on which I am writing this – 29 January) is, I discover, National Puzzle Day (in the UK). I did not know such a thing existed until yesterday. Indeed, I suspect it is nothing more than a recent marketing invention. Even so, it gets my vote, and legitimizes my sharing with you a story I read a week or so ago.

You may well have heard of ChatGPT, although I suspect some of you may well be less familiar with its significance than others. It is basically a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with a chatbot. The language model can answer questions, and assist you with tasks such as composing emails, essays, and code. The expectation is that it will be impossible to distinguish between school projects completed by students and those written by ChatGPT. Usage is currently open to the public free of charge because ChatGPT is in its research and feedback-collection phase.

Elon Musk recently said: “ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.” Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, on the other hand, described it as “not particularly innovative,” and “nothing revolutionary”. When Nick Cave read the lyrics ChatGPT wrote ‘in the style of Nick Cave’, he summed them up succinctly: “This song sucks”. He went on to explain what he sees as the fundamental flaw in any attempt by AI to ‘create’ art.

“Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self.

“This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.”

While I might wince at its pretentious presentation (or I might not – I have a stronger stomach for pretension than most), I have a great deal of sympathy with this argument. I certainly feel that it can be applied to the creative struggles of such artists as Beethoven, van Gogh, even the likes of D H Lawrence. However, there is, I suspect, a continuum of ‘creative struggle’; if Beethoven is close to one end of it, then John Grisham, to give one example, may be close to the other end. I leave it to those familiar with his work to decide where exactly Nick Cave sits on that continuum, but if ChatGPT can write even a John Grisham novel, then that’s pretty impressive.

One mischievous fellow, taking advantage of the fact that ChatGPT is accessible by the public, decided to test its skills at solving cryptic crossword clues. He selected a Times Quick Cryptic (whose clues are considerably easier than those in The Times Cryptic – I set myself a target of solving the Quick – with, on average, about 23 clues – in under 10 minutes, and usually succeed; my target for the Cryptic (with an average of about 28 clues) is 30 minutes, and I very seldom succeed). He further selected a day when the clues had been a little easier than usual, and he chose relatively easy clues.

ChatGPT’s performance was magnificent, though not in the way its programmers would have hoped. Here is part of the conversation:

JW: From here on out, I will post cryptic crossword clues, and I want you to answer with the solution and an explanation. First clue:
1. Chap recalled skill; something frequently repeated (6)

Before I reveal ChatGPT’s answer, let me explain, for the benefit of anyone who isn’t a cruciverbalist (one who enjoys or is skilled at solving crosswords – you see what I meant above about pretension) that a cryptic crossword clue is typically made up of two parts: a definition of the answer, and wordplay that leads to the answer.

In this case, the clue begins with the wordplay:
chap = ‘man’
skill = art
recalled = an instruction to reverse ‘art’ = ‘tra’
‘man’ + ‘tra’ = ‘mantra’
and the definition:
something frequently repeated = ‘mantra’

Here is ChatGPT’s answer:

The answer to the clue is “habits” because “chap” is a synonym for “guy”, and when you recall someone’s skill, you remember it. When something is frequently repeated, it becomes a habit. “Habits” is a six-letter word that fits the clue.

This is so spectacularly wrong as to be magnificent. But ChatGPT isn’t finished.

At this point, JW gave the bot another chance with the same clue. Here is the second answer:

The word “chap” is a shortened form of “chapman”, which is an archaic term for a trader or merchant. “recalled” is a hint at the reversal of the word “trader” to get “redarat”, which is a homophone for “mantra”. “something frequently repeated” is a description of the definition of a mantra.

This is, if anything, even more magnificent. ChatGPT has arrived at the correct answer – ‘mantra’ – but the ‘route’ by which it has arrived does not, in this universe, lead to anywhere near ‘mantra’ and, furthermore, if ‘’route’ means, in this context, a logical sequence of steps, then it has not even followed a route. Apart from the arcane and correct information that ‘chap’ is short for ‘chapman’, the rest of the ‘reasoning’ is nonsense.

However, it’s worth noting that it is a particularly magnificent form of nonsense because ChatGPT has clearly learnt the nature and structure of a cryptic crossword clue. Furthermore, it has also mastered the nuts and bolts of constructing a logical argument, and those of writing a grammatically correct and syntactically sound sentence. Its sentences read as if they should make sense, and my initial reaction is that I must have the wrong brain on, and I need to change it for my thinking brain.

Of course the fault, dear reader, lies not in our brains, but in the bot. If you reverse, ‘trader’, you get ‘redart’, not ‘redarat’. ‘Redarat’ is not a homophone (nor even a near-homophone) for ‘mantra’.

I cannot tell you how encouraged I am by the fact that, at the age of 73, I can solve crossword clues that leave ChatGPT floundering. Which is as clumsy a way as any of pointing out that today (Sunday) is not only National Puzzle Day, (and, incidentally, Adam Smith’s birthday), but also my birthday.

It’s turning out to be a funny kind of birthday. On the one hand, the wild celebration that we were planning hasn’t worked out. We were due to go to Zichron to celebrate with Esther and Raphael and, after work, Maayan; I would have been presented there with one of Esther’s stunning cakes, full of all my favourite things – probably some combination of chocolate, caramel, nuts and coffee, since you ask.

However, best laid plans being what they often are, both Maayan and Raphael have been laid fairly low with viruses, temperatures, coughs, loss of appetite, and all sorts. They are both, thankfully, doing better now, but we really didn’t want to impose ourselves on them (especially since Esther, who was also not well for much of last week, has had no time to prepare the cake, so half the point of going to Zichron was removed). We also didn’t want to risk catching anything so soon before we fly to Portugal next Sunday. (Ironically, Bernice has been laid low by a nasty cough and sore throat, but by the time you read this will probably be fully recovered.)

Instead, we are having a quiet day at home today. While I haven’t actually spent the day excitedly unwrapping my many presents, I have had a couple of very nice surprises for my birthday. Not only a nice chat with Esther, with Raphael chattering happily in the background, but also a full and spirited video rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ from Micha’el and Tao, and a slightly puzzled stare from Ollie. Add to that warm greetings on the phone from my brother Martin, who timed his call perfectly for just two minutes after Djokovic won the Australian Open. Plus a selection of warm and much appreciated WhatsApp greetings from other family members.

Then, just when I thought my day couldn’t get any more special, an SMS arrived from my health fund with a link to a little personalized video greeting that they had gone to the trouble of putting together just for me. No sooner had I watched that than an email arrived from our Portuguese bank assuring me that “Esta é uma data muito especial e queremos celebrá-la consigo.” “This is a very special date and we want to celebrate it with you”.

So I have been going around today with a warm glow. Everybody, it appears, loves me. Tomorrow, no doubt, things will go back to normal. Neither the bank nor the health fund will give me a second thought. No one will sing me songs on WhatsApp. And ChatGPT will probably complete The Times Cryptic Crossword in 43 seconds. But I’ll always have today, to treasure for the whole year.

Meanwhile, Esther managed to take a photo of Raphael before she broke the sad news that Nana and Grandpa wouldn’t be coming today, after all.

By the time you read this, it will be less than two weeks until Bernice and I fly off to Portugal again. Once again we are flying to Madrid, which, at the time of booking, was still significantly cheaper than flying to Lisbon. This time we land mid-morning and drive straight to Penamacor, where a comfortable bed is waiting. Unfortunately, we probably won’t get a chance to see that bed until many hours later, but, just as long as we can continue hitting the ground running, we’re up for it.

We booked the flight some time ago; at the same time, I booked a rental car. The price was outrageous, but, since it was less than 60% of what we had paid on our last trip, I felt we had got a bargain. (You may remember that car rental prices went through the roof because a worldwide shortage of thingamyjigs – caused either by Covid or by Ever Given getting wedged in the Suez Canal, or by the grain harvest in Ukraine, or by something else – meant that no new cars were being produced.)

Last week, Bernice and I suddenly realized that we were flying in three weeks! So, Bernice set off to hunt for all of the items that the kids can’t get in their neck of the woods in Portugal (or can’t get with the authentic flavour) – Turkish coffee with cardomam, dates, date syrup, and suchlike. Meanwhile, I reviewed our paperwork to see what still needed doing. There were three main things I had to do. One was to renew my international driving licence – which I can do at an optician in our local mall, in five minutes, for a nominal charge. Friends tell us that the licence is now valid for three years, rather than just one, as it has always been, and I plan to do that tomorrow. The second was to make sure I had a five-week supply of meds to take abroad, which, with our computerised health system, was fairly straightforward.

Finally, I had to take out travel insurance. This is usually something of an ordeal. We have an excellent insurance agent, who always finds us the best deal. However, issuing the policy involves a conference call between our agent, the insurer, and myself, in which I am asked seven or eight questions about Bernice’s medical condition, and three or four hundred questions about my own medical condition.

With each trip, answering these questions gets more complicated, both because I have usually acquired at least one new condition, and because I have usually experienced a deterioration in mental ability. Add to this the fact that anyone who spends much of her working day asking people whether they suffer from atrial fibrillation or other cardial arrhythmia tends to enunciate these medical terms (or their Hebrew equivalent) with less precision and at more of a rush than I can comfortably cope with. Suffice to say that I come out of these twenty-minute interrogations exhausted.

Out of the kindness of their hearts, the insurers this time waived the general health statement signed by our family doctor that they normally require. All they really demanded was my credit card details. As always, Bernice’s medical insurance is costing a modest sum, and mine? Well, let’s just say that whatever I save on the international driving licence won’t cover it!

At this point, I reviewed our car rental contract, and was struck by just how much we were paying. I decided that it was worth checking to see whether I couldn’t get a better deal. After all, with car rental these days, everyone knows it is always possible to cancel up to 48 hours before your rental begins and get a full refund. So, I checked online, and found an equivalent rental (which we shall call B2) for about 2500 shekels less than our existing booking (B1). I naturally booked B2, then went back to B1 to cancel it. Which is when I discovered that, contrary to what everyone knows, if I chose to cancel B1 I would be charged a modest cancellation fee, and issued a refund in the form of a voucher, redeemable against one or more car rentals, over a period of 24 months. I was rather miffed about that, not least because it tied me to this booking agency probably for another three bookings, until the voucher was fully redeemed.

At the same time, I realized that I had no real choice. Having failed to read the small print when I originally booked B1, I had to bite the bullet now, by searching on the original booking agency for the best deal (B3), cancelling B1, booking B3 through the original booking agency, using part of the voucher, then cancelling B2.

Which is what I did. Cancelling B1 was easy. I was then able to find exactly the same deal with the same rental company as I had used for B2, and so booking B3 was also straightforward, until I came to the Payment screen. I applied the voucher number, and then spent five minutes watching the little mouse circle rotate gracefully. At that point I decided that I would utilize this dead waiting time in cancelling B2, which I proceeded to do. After I had completed the cancellation, I was taken to a screen that asked me why I was cancelling. I decided that I did not want the company to think there was anything wrong with their side of the deal, so I wrote a sentence explaining that I had discovered I had a voucher which I wanted to redeem.

I then returned to B3, where the circle was still rotating gracefully.

Please excuse what reads like an interruption but will, as you will discover, fold seamlessly into our story. My phone seems to have entered its teenage years, and now wilfully* and at random ignores my wishes. Its latest trick was to define, in Settings, to cancel the call ringtone. This has meant that I have missed a number of calls. (If any was from you, I apologise.) I have now changed the setting, but, at the time I am writing about, I had not yet discovered the problem. I simply thought I had missed calls. My policy, when I discovered a missed call, was to return it only if it was from a number I recognized.

Back to the main story. After another few minutes of watching the circle rotate, I decided to use the time to sort out, on the phone, an administrative detail that I needed for a medical appointment that I have made for just after we return from Portugal. (When people ask what I do now I am retired, I don’t like to say that my principal hobby is medical appointments: researching, making, gathering paperwork for, attending, following up on and reporting back to my family doctor on them.) I called, navigated my way through the automatic system, and was informed that I was fourth in the queue. Ten minutes later, I was down to second in the queue, and the circle was still going round.

At this point, my phone informed me that I had an incoming call. I didn’t recognize the number, but decided that I had plenty of time to take it. (Don’t tell me that men can’t multitask! I can sit around waiting simultaneously for at least two things to happen, no sweat!) A pleasant young man with what sounded like a Spanish accent asked me if I was David Brownstein. I guardedly confirmed the fact. He then said: ‘I see that you have just cancelled a booking with us and you are trying to book again. Let me help you. I’ll make the booking for you, deduct the correct amount from your refund voucher, and arrange for the balance to be credited to your credit card!’ I tried to conceal my astonishment and delight, and assured him that this would be wonderful. I confirmed that I could simply cancel the attempted booking of B3, where the circle was still rotating, and he would do the rest, sending me a confirmation email.

And that, dear reader, is what happened. I less than gracefully exited B3, and, within a minute, received a confirmation email for B4, followed by the actual booking voucher. The confirmation email stated that the processing of the refund of the balance on the voucher would take two or three days, to which Bernice said: ‘Yeah! Sure! Let’s wait and see.’

Then, on Friday, I received another email, stating that the refund had been processed, and I should expect to see it on my statement a few days later. And, lo and behold, this (Sunday) morning there it is!

This, of course, is where the interruption six paragraphs ago becomes relevant. If I had not been already on another call when the agent phoned, I would not have realized he was phoning, because my phone would not have rung. If I had not been on a call where I was queuing, I would not have taken his call, because I did not recognize the number. If I had not taken his call, it is very possible that the circle would, at some point, have finished going round, my B3 would have been completed, and we would now be left with a voucher with a considerable sum of money tied up on it.

Which explains this week’s title. Some days, the saying has it, you’re the windscreen, and some days you’re the fly. Today we are undeniably a windscreen. Hope your week goes as well!

Meanwhile, here’s the latest from Penamacor, where Tao is hard at work, digging to Australia. (The next time Tao is featured, I won’t have to ask Micha’el to send a picture – I’ll be able to take one myself, God willing. How much better can things get!)

*Note to American readers: we spell it ‘wilfully’ in Britain, however wrong it looks to you.

We start with some unfinished business: I had a couple of interesting discussions last week, of matters arising out of my reflections about the ‘responsibility’ (if any) of a film-maker to stick to the facts. (And I do believe this is a responsibility particularly of film-makers: the medium itself always feels to me documentary, in contrast to, for example, the theatre – but that’s a topic for another post (which I think I may have written two years ago).) Let me just share a couple of points that emerged from one or two of those discussions.

Although Spielberg appears to argue that The Fabelmans is very faithful to the facts, should we perhaps be warned by that choice of family name – ‘fable-man’?

I suggested last week that Bernard Delfont’s descendants might want to sue for the misrepresentation of his character in Stan and Ollie. It has been pointed out to me that English law does not recognize defamation of character of the dead, because defamation, whether it is libel or slander, is a personal action which cannot be assigned or brought on someone’s behalf. The reason for this principle is quite simple: defamation is an act or statement that damages a person’s reputation and, once you are dead, you are taken not to have a reputation in legal terms that is capable of being damaged. So there! Contrary to popular opinion, you should apparently speak ill only of the dead.

Perhaps I’ll leave the last word on this to Prince Harry: not immediately relevant, but I believe it captures this particular moment in time: ‘My memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there is just as much truth in what I remember, and how I remember it, as in so-called objective facts.’ Very post-modern! The trouble for me, dear reader, is that, as someone who tends to bang on a bit about artistic truth, I have an immense amount of sympathy for that sentiment, despite my best efforts not to. Of course, where Harry got it wrong was in the classification of the 400-page brick that he has just thrown through the window of Buckingham Palace.

We read last week that Spare broke all records for first week sales in British publishing, becoming the best-selling non-fiction work in British publishing history. And, of course, there’s the rub: it’s patently not a work of non-fiction. What Harry has written is an autobiographical novel, based on his memory, his subjective experience, of his life, and telling his truth. All very legitimate: all he needed to do was change the names, and he could have been up there with James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – and D H Lawrence – Sons and Lovers. Had he taken that path, winning the Booker Prize could have been his path back to Britain. What a missed opportunity!

More unfinished business: Israel’s internal political situation is not, you may have noticed, more settled than two weeks ago, when I gritted my teeth and went all serious. Part of me feels I really should revisit this topic today, but, to be honest, I prefer to channel my inner ostrich and bury my head in the sands of something of no significance whatsoever.

So, with your indulgence…

Bernice and I received a gift from friends this week, the Book Lover Magnetic Poetry Kit. This is a box of 200 small fridge magnets, each with a single word printed on it. (We actually received two gifts: the other was a set of silicon muffin cases. Our friends were at pains to stress that each of the gifts was to be shared, but we all know who’s going to bake the cakes and who’s going to rearrange the words, don’t we?) The bizarre idea of the magnetic poetry kit is that you should use the word tiles to build a text – on your fridge or any metal cabinet.

I say ‘bizarre’ because, if you were setting out to write a poem, you probably wouldn’t start by restricting your vocabulary to 200 words chosen by someone else. And yet, and yet…

The day after receiving the gift, I found myself spilling the tiles out onto the dining room table and starting to play. (By the way, if you are given a set of these yourself, allow plenty of time for what I have lightly dismissed as ‘spilling the tiles out’. The rubber-backed magnetic tiles stick to each other in convivial clumps and need to be separated, spread out and, in many cases, turned over. Bearing in mind that the tile that displays the word ‘a’ is only 8mm by 8mm, this is a fiddly job, particularly if, like me, you are blessed with short, stubby fingers.)

Anyway, ten minutes later, having had a chance to gain a superficial familiarity with at least some of the 200 words spread before me, I cast about for inspiration. Speaking as someone who has spent many an hour staring at a blank sheet of paper, I can say that the tiles did not take very long to work their strange alchemical magic.

I believe I have written before about the fact that, as a twelve-year-old schoolboy, the most dreaded sentence I ever heard from my English teacher was: ‘You can write an essay on any topic you want.’ This was for me always the signal for my mind to drain of any thought whatsoever. What I wanted to hear the teacher say was something like: ‘I want you to write a story that includes a 60-watt lightbulb, a ferret with a wooden leg, and a bowl of custard.’

After only a few moments of letting my eyes wander over the vocabulary spread before me, I noticed a ‘through’ and a ‘step’…and I was off. Twenty minutes later, I was able to transfer to our metal front door the following poem (untitled, for reasons that will become clear later):

Now, I know it’s not Milton, or Auden, but I think it works, despite the extraordinary limitations imposed. (Full disclosure: as the more eagle-eyed among you will have spotted, my kit does not contain the word ‘door’, which I felt was absolutely needed, so I improvised it from ’do’ and ‘or’. I do recognize that this is cheating, and, indeed, is only one step away from creating a poem using words built from only the 26 letters of the alphabet, but I hope you will allow me this one indulgence. I promise, henceforward, I will play by the rules.)

I feel that I learnt a couple of things from this first attempt. Most significant is that the combination of an active and racing brain, open to boundless opportunities, and 200 tiles, with words chosen by someone else, is extremely powerful: the very limitation helps to control the febrile imagination in a constructive way.

Of course, I’m not sure it would have worked with Robin Williams, the febrility of whose imagination was completely uncontrollable. Here he is not being subdued by Johnny Carson in 1987. (Parts of this interview are a little more explicit than Johnny, or his producers, would have wanted, so some of you may prefer not to click the link.)

The second feature of the kit is that it lends itself to the creation of shape poems. In case you’re not familiar with the concept, here is The Mouse’s Tale (d’ya gettit?) from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

The fact that the tiles can be moved so easily makes it easy to use variable spacing, and to experiment with different patterns of layout.

Finally, the process of ‘creating’ a ‘poem’ from the tiles requires you to focus on each individual word. Every word involves a search through the array on the dining-room table, and that makes the selection of each word a very conscious process.

At this point in my musings I started worrying about the criteria the manufacturers had used for selecting their final list of 200 words. So, I laid the tiles out again and started documenting them (I know, I know! I really do need to get out more. Still, I do all this stuff so that you don’t have to; it’s a form of public service.)

Here is the table of 194 unique words (six of them appear on two tiles each). You will see that they include 10 tiles with common suffixes (and one prefix) to help form verb tenses and plurals. The process of taxonomy is not entirely straightforward, because there are, in English, so many homonyms and so many words that can function as more than one part of speech.

One of the things that emerges from this list is that, to justify the label of Book Lover in the branding of the tiles, a hefty chunk of the nouns are book words, many of which do not particularly lend themselves to poetry: library, book, volume, spine, chapter, page, fiction. In addition, many of the subject areas that are most widely represented in poetry have been entirely neglected: there is no mention of nature in this list. Also absent is any reference to family relationships, which meant that there was no way I could call my poem To a Child, which is probably what I would have chosen.

If you find yourself at a loose end this week, you might like to consider what your list of 200 essential words for writing poetry would be…or you might not. It’s not in the exam.

Meanwhile, in Portugal, Ollie, at six months, faces challenges even more daunting than composing a poem using only 200 words selected by someone else. (Don’t adjust your volume; this is a silent movie.)

But first: When I promised, last week, to write about something light, and fluffy, “perhaps a piece on different ways of threading laces in shoes.”, I thought I was joking. Yet, a quick google reveals that lace-threading is indeed a thing. If you want to jazz up your footwear, see whether any of the 24 (count them!) lacing methods illustrated in this video speak to you. I certainly plan to be adding some of these to my repertoire!

In the end, I decided instead to write on the duck test, which I want to turn on its head. The classic duck test states: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. Fulfilling the three conditions is probably sufficient. I want to ask whether fulfilling the three conditions is also necessary.

In other words, can you be a duck if you don’t look like one, or if you don’t swim like one, or if you don’t quack like one? I’m not asking this literally, you understand. I can easily imagine a duck with one leg, or laryngitis, or even a decoy duck disguised by its fellows as a 12-bore shotgun. That would still indubitably be a duck…

Editor’s Note: I’m starting to feel the real subject of this week’s post drifting inexorably away. Time, I think, to call a spade a spade.

Bernice and I watched, last week, a gentle film called Stan and Ollie. If you haven’t seen the film, I’d be grateful if you’d spare two minutes and twenty-three seconds of your life to watch the official trailer, because it will give you a context for what I’m talking about.

In a nutshell, Stan and Ollie focusses principally on the relationship between Laurel and Hardy during a theatre tour of Britain that they undertook at the end of their professional careers in the early 1950s. We both came away from the film asking the inevitable question: ‘How accurate was that? Is that what really happened?’

Having thought about this question a little more over the last few days, I have come to the conclusion that this is actually three questions; there are basically three areas in which a film such as this can be accurate.

The first area is cultural background. Much of the film is set in England in 1953, and the filmmakers have taken great pains (as they usually do these days) to recreate the period. Of course, there will inevitably be some armchair expert on the period who watches the entire film in slow motion, checking every frame for accuracy, and who then delights in commenting online. You know the kind of thing:

‘At 16 minutes and 23 seconds, we see an Austin A40 Somerset drive past a newsagents shop. The Somerset clearly has two-tone bodywork, indicating that it is one of the limited edition of 500 saloons that Austin produced in 1953. The sandwich board outside the newsagents displays a headline: STALIN DIES! This places the date as Friday, 6 March, 1953, two days after Stalin’s death and a day after Russia released the news of his death to the rest of the world. However, the limited edition Somerset only went on sale on Monday 6 April, 1953. This egregious error completely ruined the film for me! Do film studios no longer employ anyone to check the accuracy of what they portray on screen?’

Watching an accurately recreated cultural background is usually great fun for anyone who lived through the period in question. ‘We had a radio exactly like that!’ ‘Remember buying butter from a large block?’ It is, of course, much less important for anyone who didn’t live through the period. It is also something that sometimes gets noticed only when a blatant error is committed.

A second level of authenticity is the accuracy of portrayal of real people. In this respect, Stan and Ollie is an incredible accomplishment. In a prosthetic body suit and with three hours in the make-up department every morning, John C Reilly takes on the form of Oliver Hardy. With more modest prosthetics and make-up, Steve Coogan does the same for Stan Laurel.

Vocally, and in their body movements and mannerisms, both actors bring the comedy duo to life with uncanny accuracy, while seeming entirely natural. They are even able to recreate on camera classic Laurel and Hardy routines and dances.

So, the film spares no effort of time and attention to detail in bringing these two comedy giants to life and placing them in a world where every detail rings true. And yet…and yet….Having gone to all that trouble, having ensured complete authenticity, the film then tells a story that distorts the truth (or at least the truth as presented in the published account of their career together, written by someone who was very close to both of them).

Let me give you a brief rundown of some of the liberties the film takes with the truth (spoiler alert). Three successful tours of Britain are condensed into one tour that begins very unsuccessfully. Hardy’s heart attack is moved to the end of the tour, whereas in reality it cut short the third tour after its opening night. Their wives accompanied them on their tours, whereas in the film they only join them at the end. Laurel’s wife at the time was a quiet personality; in the film, her character is swapped for that of one of his earlier wives, who was very strident.

Furthermore, the Robin Hood film that, in Stan and Ollie, they believe they are about to make in England, and that is basically the reason why they are embarking on a theatre tour of Britain at this point, was merely an idea at an earlier point that never reached the stage where they expected it to be made.

The film builds to a major argument between San and Ollie, who, in real life, never argued. Their personal relationship is altogether close and affectionate throughout the film, whereas in real life their relationship was much cooler and more professional. In the film, Laurel, after Hardy’s announcement that he is retiring after his heart attack, is persuaded to continue the tour with another comic. (In the end, he backs down as the curtain is about to rise on their first appearance together.) This is a fabrication. Laurel refused categorically to even consider appearing with anyone else.

And so on and so on. So, my question is: Is this in fact a film about Laurel and Hardy? It looks like the historical period, and they move and sound like Stan and Ollie, but if they don’t quack like the historical characters did, then is it a duck?

Actually, I think there’s another way to phrase this question. Would it have been better to make a film about a fictional double act. Why call them Laurel and Hardy? Why ‘burden’ a touching story of an onscreen and offscreen partnership with the added weight of mimicry of Laurel and Hardy?

I am reminded of the story of Peter Schaeffer writing Equus. While Schaeffer was being driven by a friend through the Suffolk countryside, the friend pointed out a riding stables and told Schaeffer that it had been in the news recently when a teenage stable-boy blinded twenty-six horses there, seemingly without cause. This story fascinated Schaeffer, but what is interesting is what he didn’t do with it. He made no attempt to research the story or attempt to find out what lay behind it.

Instead, with no knowledge of the incident beyond that one simple fact, he set himself the dramatic goal of creating ”a mental world in which the deed could be made comprehensible”, as he later explained. The result, Equus, is a beautiful, thrilling, profound play that probably shares none of its plot with the actual facts, apart from the criminal act itself, and that exists independent of anything that actually happened.

Would it not have made sense for the makers of Stan and Ollie to behave more like Schaeffer? If it is the relationship between the two men that interests them – and it clearly is – and if they are going to treat real events with contempt, then why burden themselves with anchoring the film in actual real people. It is not as though Laurel and Hardy have historical importance, as Shakespeare’s characters in his history plays (for example) have, so that his plots are an attempt to reshape history as an expression of loyalty to the Tudors.

Of course, the price that would be paid in this case is that we would be deprived of a very talented recreation of the comedy duo, a dazzling double performance. It is also true that much of what the writers and director can assume we know of Laurel and Hardy need only be very hastily sketched; the film can very quickly move to the twilight of their careers, where its interest is focussed.

At the same time, if the characters had been fictional, we would also have been spared a fairly ruthless and, from what I have read, unjustified character assassination of the theatrical impresario Bernard Delfont, who certainly comes off as the almost Victorian melodrama villain of Stan and Ollie. (Hal Roach doesn’t fare much better!) If I were a descendant of Delfont, I think I would want to sue.

So, bottom line, I am grateful to the makers of Stan and Ollie for giving us a little piece of movie magic. At the same time, I’m not sure that the kneejerk disclaimer that the film is based on real events, but that certain incidents and characters have been changed for dramatic purposes, really cuts it. When the portrayals are this accurate, they add, for us, an authenticity to the events that persuades us unconsciously, at least while we are watching, to forget the disclaimer and take the story at face value.

Now here’s someone not prepared to rest on his laurels… or his hardys. When I told Raphael how much my readers enjoyed his performance on the bell three weeks ago, he readily agreed to play an encore.

Editor’s Note: Those of you who read last week’s post will be relieved to hear that, after driving the car to shul last Friday afternoon, I then remembered, on Saturday evening after shul, not only that I had taken the car but also, more remarkably, where I had parked, so that I arrived home on time with no mishaps whatsoever. Positive thinking is all about acknowledging one’s small triumphs. Thank you for listening.

I write to you this week in a fairly depressed state. I have been witness, over the last couple of weeks, to a number of events that have saddened and worried me. But first, a little dry factual background.

I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of Israel’s rather convoluted system for calculating, after the votes have all been counted, the allocation of seats between parties. Suffice to say that the Israeli electoral system is a fixed-list direct proportional representation system, with an electoral threshold and using the Bader-Ofer (known to the wider world as the Hagenbach-Bischoff (de-Hondt)) method of allocating excess votes to parties and also to alliances of two parties that have agreed in advance to pool their excess votes. All clear so far?

All of the above is designed, principally, to reduce the number of parties represented in the Knesset, and to create a smaller number of larger parties. In this election, of the 40(!) parties that contested the election, 13 received enough votes to gain at least one seat, but, because of the electoral threshold, only 10 will actually sit in the Knesset. The system also tends to have the effect of favouring the larger parties, for reasons that I won’t go into.

After all the votes were counted, and the complex calculations carried out, the final result looked like this, for the four parties that went on to form the coalition.

Party	Votes	% of Valid Votes	# of Seats
Likud	1,115,336	23.41%	32
Religious Zionism-Otzma Yehudit	516,470	10.84%	14
Shas	392,964	8.25%	11
United Torah Judaism	280,194	5.88%	7

There are a couple of points that I want to emphasise here. Obviously, this coalition can be characterized as a right-wing religious coalition; however, each of the constituent parties has a very different interpretation of what religious means, and also what right-wing means.

Those of us brought up in a two- or three-party system are used to a situation in which, even though a wide range of positions are represented in any given party, there is usually a broad recognition within the party of a consensus within which everyone is happy to work. I would argue that the previous government, whose range of parties was arguably wider than that of the present government, nevertheless created a unity of purpose by recognizing, and focusing on, the consensus.

In the current government, by contrast, it became very clear as negotiations progressed between Likud (whose leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, was charged with attempting to form a government) and each of the other parties, that none of those other parties had any intention of compromising on its narrow and small constituency’s partisan agenda.

For those of you who are balking at the word ‘small’, let me point out that the Religious Zionism–Otzma Yehudit list (a list formed from three parties whose leading figures are Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Avi Maoz) won just under 11% of the vote, and has under 12% of the seats in the Knesset.

Similarly, the two ultra-orthodox lists (Shas and United Torah Judaism) together won under 15% of the vote, and ended up with just 15% of the Knesset seats.

All of which makes me upset to hear supporters of Smotrich or Ben-Gvir speaking about them representing the will of the people. They, and the ultra-orthodox parties, are in the coalition only because they are the parties that are prepared to sit in a Government led by Netanyahu as Prime Minister, and because when their 32 seats are added to the Likud’s 32 (each 32 seats representing under 27% of the vote), the total is 64.

I have no doubt at all that Bibi would be much more comfortable forming a government with the ultra-religious parties and, for example, Benny Gantz’s National Unity party, a centrist party to the left of the Likud, which would offer him the possibility of being able to temper both ultra-religious extremism because of the need to keep Gantz in the government, and centrist-left policies, because of the need to keep the ultra-orthodox sweet.

To watch the Government coalition being formed was a painful and nationally humiliating exercise. None of the other parties in the coalition trusts Bibi an inch, which is a tribute to his serial treachery in forging coalitions in the past. (Smotrich was even caught on microphone calling Netanyahu ‘a liar and the son of a liar’.) These parties insisted in having all of their demands met up front and in writing (although it has to be said that, on past form, that may not be any guarantee of good faith). So we watched a parade of blatantly ad hominem laws rushed through even before the government was formed.

The most outrageous is probably the blatantly-called Deri law, which amends the Basic Law that previously prevented a person convicted of an offence involving moral turpitude from being appointed as a minister within ten years. Because Deri resigned from the Knesset, he avoided the need for the court to rule on the question of moral turpitude.

He then negotiated a plea bargain, admitting a string of tax offences and accepting a fine and a suspended prison sentence. The law has now been amended to prevent only a person who has actually served a prison sentence for such a crime from serving as a minister. (Of course, Deri served a prison sentence after earlier conviction for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, but that was over ten years ago!)

So, Deri will now serve for two years as Vice Prime Minister (unfortunate terminology, it has to be said), Minister of Health and Minister of the Interior and Periphery, and then become Minister of Finance. I genuinely don’t know how to follow that statement!

Leaving aside the unashamed brazenness of Deri himself, I am, to be honest, more disgusted to see the depths to which Netanyahu is prepared to drag the name of the Israeli state in order to form a coalition. I wish I could escape the conviction that his over-riding aim is simply to secure the quashing, out of court, of the criminal case against him, but, so far, I haven’t succeeded.

This is, perhaps, the moment to remind you of Ambrose Bierce’s definition of ‘politics’ in his The Devil’s Dictionary: ‘Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage’. (And he was talking about parties contesting an election, not parties coming together to form a coalition!)

I honestly believe that Bierce’s definition does not apply to Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. They are, I fear, something altogether more frightening: ideologues. Smotrich is now Finance Minister and a minister within the Defence Ministry, with increased control over settlement and other policies in Yehuda and Shomron. He has a long history of statements that it is very difficult not to categorize as racist; he is also a self-declared, and was an activist, homophobe.

He has attempted to excuse some of his more outrageous statements by arguing that he ‘responded inattentively’. Whatever qualities one looks for in a minister within the Defence Ministry, ‘inattentive responses’ are not, to my mind, among them. I would also be looking for ideology to be balanced by pragmatism.

I turn now, with heavy heart, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, who will serve as the country’s national security minister in an expanded version of the public security portfolio, with unprecedented control over Israel’s police. Ben-Gvir makes no secret of his admiration for Meir Kahane, the cofounder of the Jewish Defense League who was convicted of terrorism in America and who served one term in the Knesset before his party was banned for its racist position.

Ben-Gvir is also known to have had a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. (He apparently removed the portrait after he entered politics.)

Of all the things that have saddened me over the last weeks, the most personally upsetting has been the number of people in our modern orthodox Jewish religious circle that have not expressed outrage or even undue concern over all that has happened in the process of forming a government. They would, I believe, argue that the end – achieving a religious Zionist government (if you can classify the incoming government as either Zionist, given the disproportionate influence of the ultra-orthodox parties within it, or religious, given that the majority Likud is a traditional, but not religious, party) – justifies the means by which it is achieved.

My conviction is that the moral and ethical price that will be paid by the government, and ultimately the nation, in achieving that end is far too high. There comes a point where sacrificing your principles for the sake of advancing your principles is a pointless exercise.

Nothing in Netanyahu’s actions over his last five terms as Prime Minister gives the slightest hint that he shares the views of Smotrich or Ben-Gvir about the direction the state should move in the areas of Jewish-Arab relations, religious-secular relations or the LGBT+ community. I am sure that he believes that he will be able to control and rein in their excesses. I have seen enough of his political nous over the last decades to sustain a hope that he will be able to. (Bernice does not share my very cautious optimism.)

I suspect that Netanyahu’s game plan is to keep the coalition together long enough to legislate for the changes necessary to make his trial go away. In the meantime, it can almost be guaranteed that the security situation will deteriorate. He will then plan to tie Smotrich’s and Ben-Gvir’s hands until they threaten to leave the Government. He will not relent, and, when they leave, he will turn to Benny Gantz and invite him, with his 12 seats to join the Government, for the sake of national unity.

Gantz was, of course, enticed into a previous Netanyahu government on the same premise, with the promise of alternate prime ministership. Whether he will allow himself to risk being humiliated in this way a second time I do not know. However, if Netanyahu pulls that off, he will have proved himself Israel’s greatest prime minister – at least in the Machiavellian sense – and he will find himself exactly where he wants to be, at the centre of a coalition whose extremes he can moderate in the name of maintaining the Government.

Next week, I promise something light and fluffy. Perhaps a piece on different ways of threading laces in shoes. Meanwhile, I can only hope that the public world our grandchildren build will be an altogether better place. Now there’s a big ask!