Poised as we are, halfway between a brief trip to Budapest and a longer trip to Portugal, I find myself thinking even more than I normally do about how totally unsatisfying an experience commercial air travel is. We flew to Hungary with Ryanair, and were warned by more than one person about what a dreadful experience we would find it. The fact is that the dreadfulness of the experience was almost indistinguishable from the dreadfulness of flying British Airways and Singapore Airlines, which are probably the two ‘best’ airlines I have flown. The fact is that the differences between the airlines are comparable to the difference between being hanged by the neck until you are dead using a polyester or silk noose. I’ve never actually experienced either, but I suspect any nuanced difference would be lost on me under the impact of the entire experience.

You don’t need me to list for you the many individual inconveniences, annoyances and frustrations of air travel – but you will I hope indulge me as I pick out just a handful of my own favourites.

Last December marked the 22^nd anniversary of Richard Colvin Reid boarding an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. On that flight, in an action that sounds as though it comes straight of The Goon Show, he attempted to detonate his boots by setting light to them with a match, having previously packed them with 10 ounces of explosive. Here we are, 22 years later, and select passengers are still being singled out in security lines at airports and asked to remove their shoes and have them inspected, despite the fact that, as far as anyone knows, in the intervening 269 months, not a single person has ever attempted to replicate this fiendishly cunning plot.

We should, I suppose, be grateful that Reid did not conceal the explosives in his underpants, but nevertheless you will agree that the authorities’ continued expectation that terrorists will replicate this particular modus operandi seems to be baseless, and is more about ticking boxes and covering rear ends than preventing disasters.

Then there is the issue of liquids. When we flew from Israel to Hungary, we were able to take bottles and thermoses of cold and hot water on board with us. From Hungary to Israel, of course, we could only take up to 100cc of any liquid in a clear container in a clear bag. At one point, I thought this was because, possibly under some feng shui influence, liquid explosives are somehow mysteriously rendered harmless when they travel from East to West, and are only unstable when travelling from West to East, but apparently this is not the case.

Aggravating as such inconveniences are, if I had to pick what is really rotten about air travel, I think it would have to be the passengers’ total surrender of control of their situation. We are, from the time we check in, entirely at the mercy of the airport and airline authorities. We have no choice but to do as we are told, and there is no way we can influence our situation.

This is, naturally, a particularly daunting prospect for those who pride themselves on being able to seize control of any situation. We actually had front-row seats for a demonstration of this on our flight to Budapest.

The processing at Ben Gurion airport was very efficient, and our flight began boarding only a few minutes later than scheduled. The boarding process went smoothly; the usual confusions over seating were sorted out quickly; space was found in the overhead lockers. I settled back in my seat, switched my phone to airplane mode and settled down to tackle The Times Cryptic Crossword.

At first, nothing happened. And then, nothing continued to happen. We all waited for the pilot to instruct the crew to lock the doors and for the plane to start reversing out of its parking bay. However, all was silent and still.

After perhaps 15 minutes, the captain’s voice came over the tannoy, informing us that the immigration authorities were refusing one passenger permission to board. The airline was attempting to resolve the situation; the pilot apologised for the delay and thanked us for our understanding.

Over the next 15 minutes, it is fair to say that certain elements among the passengers became a tad restless. In particular, a couple of would-be alpha males took it upon themselves to sort the situation out. In turn, two or three of them marched purposefully to the front of the plane to explain to the cabin steward that it was unreasonable to expect 239 passengers to wait while the fate of the 240th was being weighed scrupulously in the scales of justice. The cabin steward, no doubt more used to these situations than the passengers, explained that that wasn’t how the airline saw it, and that heaven and earth were being moved at that very moment to resolve the situation.

To my astonishment, all of the protesting passengers very soon realised that they were on a very unfair playing field, where there was absolutely no point in their attempting to influence events or persuade by the force of their arguments. There was, unsurprisingly, a certain amount of muttering, grumbling and posturing as they made their way back to their seats, but make their way back to their seats they did.

In the end, an hour or more after our scheduled take-off time, the airline accepted that it would not be able to resolve the problem with the authorities. After another fifteen-minute delay while the non-passenger’s case was removed from the hold, we eventually took off 90 minutes late. We actually made up about 20 minutes during the flight, but the whole business was, of course, a considerable annoyance, adding, as it did, to the length of an already long day and stealing, as it did, time from our holiday. I have been known to declare, in the past, that the holiday begins when you get on the plane, but that certainly wasn’t the case this time.

The cracked icing on the stale cake of this particular experience came at Budapest airport, a couple of minutes after I had connected to the free airport Wi-Fi. One of the fringe benefits that we enjoy with the travel insurance policy we take out is the following: if our flight is delayed for 90 minutes or more, we are entitled to free entry to any of a large number of airport lounges around the world. So, in Budapest airport, I received an email informing me that, because of the delay in our flight, we could use the airport lounge in Ben Gurion free of charge while we waited for our delayed flight.

This news would probably have done a better job of warming the cockles of my heart had it not been for several facts. By the time I received the message, we were no longer in Ben Gurion airport; we were in Budapest. even if we had been in Ben Gurion, as soon as we qualified for the benefit, our flight took off. Furthermore, had we still been in Ben Gurion airport, we would have been trapped on the plane and unable to enjoy the benefit. Even if we had not yet boarded, our flight left from Terminal 1, where we would have been trapped in the terminal, which has no lounges, since they are located in Terminal 3, to which we had no access.

I sometimes find it hard to imagine how air travel could be made any less civilised an experience than it currently is. However, I find it equally hard to escape a nagging feeling that I might just find out in two weeks, when we go to visit the kids.

Having said all of which, even this Eeyore readily admits that the prize at the end of the flight, just like the prize at the end of the sometimes traffic-clogged drive to Zichron, is so worth the aggravation.

We found ourselves only 15 minutes south of Netanya last Thursday, so, of course, we did what you’d expect. We went to IKEA. It was a successful trip. We found almost everything we were looking for, and one thing we had given up looking for. Loyal and attentive followers of my blog (and I know, dear reader, that you are both loyal and attentive) will remember that we had, at one point about a year ago, visited IKEA principally to buy dividers for our wardrobe sock, tights and underwear drawers. It was there that we discovered that these items had been discontinued.

As we were going round IKEA this time, we saw the very dividers we had been wanting to buy and had given up hope of ever possessing. So, I am delighted to announce that the days of my blue and black socks surreptitiously co-habiting are well and truly over.

Of course, to compensate for the delight that we felt, and to maintain the overall balance of happiness and unhappiness in the universe, our journey back home from IKEA took three and a half hours, at an average speed of just over 28 kph. Three and a half hours! Good grief! You can fly from Hungary to Israel in less time than that!

I know this for a fact, since we had indeed, only the day before, done exactly that, in three hours and ten minutes, in fact. We were flying back from a mid-week city break in Budapest. Let me share with you some highlights of our trip.

Before we went, we naturally did some online research. One of the things we knew was that Budapest is famous for its many spas, and many people make a point of ‘taking the waters’. On our trip, we didn’t actually have to go out of our way to take the waters; the waters came to us without our seeking them out. Unfortunately, they came in the form of heavy rain, which was a major feature of two of our three days in the city.

It has to be said that no city, with the possible exception of Paris, looks good in the rain. There were times during our stay when Budapest looked a little less like Vienna and a lot more like Communist Eastern Europe because of the persistent drizzle. Nevertheless, we still kept expecting Orson Welles to appear, mysteriously, in the shadows of a doorway, at any moment. (Ah the zither! What an underestimated instrument.)

Both Bernice and I regretted the fact that our proper raincoats now live in Portugal, where they get a lot of use, and our Israel coats are designed more to keep out the cold than the rain. On our second day, we managed to find, and buy, a couple of umbrellas, which certainly made a significant difference.

On our second day, we took an excellent walking tour of the Jewish quarter entitled: Nazism and World War II. I was impressed both by the local guide’s excellent English and by his explanations of details of Jewish religious practice. He was able to provide accurate and clear explanations for the non-Jewish members of the group, of whom there were a surprising number, including couples from Malawi and India.

In the course of the tour, the guide made, as expected, several references to some of the non-Jewish Hungarians (and foreign diplomats) who have been recognised as Righteous among the Nations for their efforts in saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust. However, he in no way suggested that these actions were the norm among Hungarians. He explained very clearly that the Hungarian authorities welcomed the German occupation of Hungary in 1944, and were complicit with the Nazis in their actions against Jews. He spoke in detail about the ultra-nationalist Arrow Cross party’s antisemitic ideology, independent actions against Hungarian Jews and full and enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazis.

I must confess that the straightforward honesty of this account was both refreshing and surprising. Nevertheless, even this did not prepare me for an even greater surprise the following day, when we took another walking tour. This one was a general introductory tour of the city.

In the course of this second tour, we were taken to Szabadsag (Liberty) Square. There we saw and learnt about the Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation. The memorial was approved in a closed cabinet session, and erected during one July night in 2014, to mark the 70^th anniversary of the March 1944 German occupation of Hungary. Budapestiek (inhabitants of Budapest) woke up one morning to discover this monument.

The plan to set up the monument was heavily criticised by the Jewish community, and also by opposition parties and Budapest civil society, as soon as it was announced. Those opposing it contended that it was aimed at distorting the nation’s role in the Shoah and absolving the Hungarian state and Hungarians of their active role in sending some 450,000 Jews to their deaths during the occupation.

Protests against the monument began in central Budapest on the very day it was erected. The protesters in Szabadsag Square formed a live chain that included several MPs, among them past and present leaders of the Hungarian Socialist Party, the leader of the Democratic Coalition and the co-chair of the Dialogue for Hungary party.

Democratic Coalition leader Ferenc Gyurcsany said Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was “falsifying the Holocaust” by getting a monument “confusing the murderer and the victim” erected “under cover of the night.” He accused Orbán of dishonouring all Jewish, Roma and gay victims of the Shoah, and added that it was “characteristic of the regime that it did not dare set up the statue of falsehood during the day.”

Initially, the opposition campaigned for the monument to be removed since it “fails to serve objective and peaceful remembrance, and attempts to deny the responsibility of the Hungarian state.” However, when these attempts failed, the opposition took another, innovative, approach, one which has effectively transformed the installation into “a memorial to the arrogance of the Hungarian government”. The entire 30-metre stretch of path in front of the statue is lined with photographs and documented accounts of Hungarian victims of the Shoah. A large QR code is displayed, that links to a site that declares, inter alia: “Did you know? Between 1920-1945 600,000 Hungarian people were outlawed, robbed and sent to death by the Horthy authorities. Not the Germans! This statue is a lie!” The authorities appear to have decided that their most prudent policy is to tolerate this protest, and they have done so for the last nine years.

I had a conversation with our guide, a young man who has dual Canadian-Hungarian nationality but who has spent most of life in Budapest. He explained that the bulk of support for Orban is in the provinces. Budapestiek are typically more liberal and more left-wing, as well as better educated and more affluent, than other Hungarians. When I asked whether the average Budapesti ‘buys into’ the monument, he assured me that, since Hungarian schools teach the truth about Hungarian complicity with the occupation and the Shoah, nobody is fooled by the monument.

I suspect that part of the motivation for the vehemence of the reaction to the monument is socialist opposition to the right-wing government of Viktor Orbán. Nevertheless, the fact that our tour guide chose to include this monument, and the concomitant readiness to accept the fact of Hungarian complicity, are very impressive to experience first-hand, not least because this is not a readiness echoed, in my experience, in many East European, nor even some Western European, capitals.

This fact alone made Budapest, for me, a surprisingly much more comfortable city to visit than Warsaw or Vienna. Although, in advance of our visit, I had decided that I would not wear my kippa in public when in Hungary, in the event I wore it all the time, and attracted no attention whatsoever. We both felt Budapest to be a safe city to walk in, by day or night, and a very friendly place.

Indeed, there was only one fly in the ointment of our trip. I apologise in advance to the half or more of my readership for whom the next couple of paragraphs might as well be written in Hungarian.

(Just a quick aside. I have now spent time in Helsinki, Istanbul and Budapest, and I have yet to be convinced that Finnish, Turkish or Hungarian are anything more than gibberish spoken to disconcert foreigners. During a week in Helsinki, the only word I ‘recognised’ was ‘apteekki’ for ‘pharmacy’ (presumably related to ‘apothecary’). Incidentally, the Turkish and Hungarian equivalents are ‘ekzane’ and the even less plausible ‘gyógyszertár’.)

Budapest is one of the trendiest cities in Europe. Many abandoned buildings in the Jewish quarter have been converted into so-called ‘ruin bars’, indulging the Hungarians’ fabled love of food and drink and having a good time. The area has also been given character by the municipally-sponsored street art. We were proudly shown one magnificent mural portraying the Match of the Century, 70 years ago.

This was, of course, the moment in 1953 when the myth of English national football supremacy died. The world’s number one ranked team, on a run of 24 unbeaten games, beaten at home only once in history, the inventors of the game: of course the England team didn’t take Hungary seriously as opponents before the game!

Hungary won 6–3. Our guide pointed out to us that the only non-royal buried in Budapest’s magnificent St Stephen’s Basilica is Ferenc Puskas, the legendary star of that 1953 team. The basilica contains, we were told, two relics: the miraculously undecomposed sacred right arm of King Stephen, and the sacred left foot of Puskas.

To dispel the bitterness of those still fresh wounds, here are Tao and Ollie on holiday on a boat ride (to be honest, they look a bit as if they need convincing they’re having a good time, but Micha’el assures us everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves) and Raphael greeting Nana again enthusiastically after our holiday.

It is, we readily admit, our own fault. More than a decade ago, Bernice and I started an annual subscription to the Cameri theatre in Tel Aviv, where we saw an impressive range of modern and classic straight and musical theatre, including original Israel works and works in translation. We eventually decided that a journey home of an hour or more was getting too much, and so, when our local cultural centre offered a theatre subscription, we happily signed up.

Without a doubt, it is wonderful being able to walk out of the theatre and arrive home after a ten-minute stroll (or a six-minute power-walk – Bernice and I have never really agreed about how to translate ‘a steady walking pace’ into kilometres per hour). In addition, in the first years of our subscription, we enjoyed several memorable productions. Every year, each of six or seven of the mainstream Israeli theatre companies brings one production to Maale Adumim.

In those first years, there was a good balance of serious and comic drama. However, in the last couple of years it feels as though the balance has tipped towards comedy – and for the most part ‘comedy’ means the slapstick that seems to go down very well with our local audience. In fairness, we are not really in touch with a lot of local popular culture or some modern slang, and this means that we miss a certain amount of the humour. Even allowing for that, slapstick and farce are simply not really our scene.

The other disadvantage of this particular subscription is that each production comes to Maale Adumim for one performance only. Since we aim to be in Portugal three times a year for a month, this sometimes means that we are unable to see a play that we would like to see, and are forced to take a second choice, or to miss out altogether.

Anyway, as we walked home from the last production, when, once again, we had sat stony-faced among an audience of people screaming in delight and struggling to breathe through their laughter, we both decided that enough was enough, and that we had to find another way to feed our habit of live, serious theatre. Enough light, frothy, mindless comedy: let’s see something we can get our teeth into.

After six years of calling me every six months, I had finally persuaded our contact at Cameri that we would never be renewing our subscription. However, I also get a call every year from the Khan theatre in Jerusalem, where we had a subscription many, many years ago. This year’s call, as luck would have it, came a couple of days after Bernice and I had had the conversation, and we decided that we would transfer our allegiance back to the Khan.

For those of you who don’t know it, the Khan is situated in a renovated 19^th Century Ottoman travellers’ inn (or khan). The renovation has retained the architecture and atmosphere of the original site, and the theatre includes an inner courtyard with some seating as you wait to be admitted to the auditorium, a foyer with a modest bar, and two stages: a ‘large’ hall that seats 269, in a stone-walled, -domed and -pillared space that is intimate but airy and has a unique atmosphere, and a small hall that seats 69. Situated just behind the First Station, the theatre is a short walk from a large car park and, on a good night, we can be home in 25 minutes.

The theatre boasts a very talented permanent company of actors, and produces four or five new plays each season, as a well as maintaining a repertoire of 10 productions from the classic repertoire. We have already seen two productions at the highest level, the second of which we saw this past week. It was Early in the Summer of 1970, a monodrama adapted from the novella by the Israeli novelist and peace activist A B Yehoshua, who died 11 months ago.

This is the story, recounted by an Israeli high-school Bible teacher, of his adult son returning to Israel in 1970, with a wife and young son, after several years in academia in the United States. Shortly after his return, the son is called up for reserve duty during the War of Attrition. Not long afterwards, the father is informed that the son has died in action. The play focuses on the father’s reaction to this news, his breaking of the news to his daughter-in-law, and the details of identifying the body, which proves very complicated.

Without revealing any more of the story, let me turn to the production. It starred Yehoyachin Friedlander, a very fine veteran member of the company, whose swan-song this production is to be. It was staged in the small hall, which we had never been in before. The intimacy of the space, and the closeness of the actor to all of the audience, intensified what was already sure to be an intense theatrical experience. From the moment he stepped out on stage, and appeared to focus his eyes on each member of the audience, Friedlander held us rapt for an hour.

During that hour, we explored, through his mesmerising performance, themes of loss and bereavement, the relation between fathers and sons, the peculiarly Israeli situation of parents repeatedly sending their children to die in wars that seem never to end. It was a spell-binding performance, on a stage furnished only with a chair, a table, a Bible and vases of white lilies. Spell-binding, and, at the same time, utterly un-self-conscious. Regular readers will know that I am a sucker for coups de theatre; I thrill to a great theatrical performance. Here, in this tiny space, there was nothing ‘theatrical’ about Friedlander’s performance. It was so understated as to appear completely natural – which is surely the greatest theatrical trick of all.

At the end of the hour, we left the theatre totally drained, and drove home wondering whether comedy was such a bad idea after all.

I should mention that we have also, in the last month, watched a streamed (English) National Theatre production. Prima Facie is about a successful barrister whose career and life are destroyed after she is raped by a colleague at her chambers. This is a bravura monodrama performance, but, once again, it is a draining and bleak evening of theatre.

And then last night we went to the cinema to see The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. If you haven’t read the book, and intend seeing the film, I should insert a spoiler alert here.

Let me attempt the briefest of summaries.

Harold Fry, a retiree, receives a letter from Queenie, an ex-work colleague, who has cancer and is in a hospice 500 miles away. He writes her a brief, feeble note and goes to post it, has second thoughts, and walks to the next post box, and the next. He phones the hospice from a call box and leaves a message. He is coming and she should wait, stay alive while he walks to her. A girl at the petrol filling station where he stops for a snack says something that acts as a catalyst for his nascent project. He tells her he is on foot, delivering a letter to someone with cancer. ‘If you have faith, you can do anything, ’she replies.

As he walks, he reflects: on his marriage to Maureen, with whom he shares a house but, it seems, no intimacy or meaningful relationship and on his son David, from whom he is apparently completely estranged.

As his walk across England, his pilgrimage, progresses, he encounters a string of characters, many of whom respond to his apparent simple decency with honesty, understanding and a willingness to help. He also becomes something of a celebrity, eventually attracting a train of ‘fellow pilgrims’, from whom he ultimately breaks free under cover of night to continue his walk alone.

His walk across England is also marked by his sudden realisation of the beauty, and gradual understanding of the nurturing quality, of the nature that surrounds him, a beauty he has somehow not been aware of previously. “Who knew!’, he murmurs as he looks over a rolling landscape. In an astonishingly eloquent cinematic scene later in the film, when Maureen’s rage breaks through her prim reserve, she rips down the net curtains that have tastefully dressed every window in their home, and we suddenly see an equally beautiful landscape that they might always have admired from their bedroom, were it not for their oh-so-English net curtains.

As the film progresses, we gradually learn, through very short (often dialogue-free) scenes, of his inability to express a connection to David from birth, of David’s troubled adolescence and young adulthood, ending in drugs, alcohol and suicide. It becomes clear that Harold is walking in part to confront, or make amends for, his own feelings of guilt and inadequacy and failure to act.

At the end of the film, Harold reaches the hospice, where Queenie has survived, against medical odds, apparently waiting for Harold’s arrival. She is, however, not able to communicate. Harold’s platitudes at her bedside are as shallow as his original note to her was. However, just before visiting her, he finally surrenders to his anguish over David’s suicide, and breaks down in tears. Immediately after his visit, Maureen arrives, and, in a final scene, they sit together on a bench facing the sea, barely communicating, but finally holding hands.

When we first came out of the cinema, I admit to feeling a little cheated. Over the next half-an-hour or so, in talking about the film with Bernice, I realised that my disappointment was due solely to the fact that I had been anticipating a more uplifting conclusion, to match what I remembered from reading the book. Instead, what the film gives us is a final small gesture of intimacy between Harold and Maureen. Rejecting the perhaps glib happy-ever-after conclusion of the novel, the film instead suggests that this pilgrimage has brought Harold, and Maureen, not to a successful resolution of their horrific family history, but to a point where they can begin working towards that resolution.

Jim Broadbent is completely believable as Harold, in all his tortured anguish and guilt, his impracticality, his basic decency, his gradual opening up. It is not difficult to understand how such an innocent man was completely unable to meet the challenge of David’s troubled life. Penelope Wilton is just as convincing as the wife who has lived with her own secrets and guilt, maintaining a veneer of propriety that Harold’s actions force her to abandon, and, ultimately, making her peace with him and seeking his forgiveness.

A measure of the film’s integrity is that it invited me to reflect, very seriously, on my own experience of parenting. That a story that is so far removed from my own provoked those reflections is, I think, a tribute to the honesty with which the film has been made. As Bernice observed, the fleeting scenes between Harold, Maureen and David were searingly honest and heart-breaking and utterly convincing.

But I hope you will understand that the next thing, indeed the next three things, Bernice and I want to see are something along the lines of Toy Story 5.

On a lighter note (not difficult, you’ll agree), I’m not sure what was absorbing Ollie this week, but Raphael was enjoying a water day in the garden and Tao was being treated on Zoom to one of Nana and Grandpa’s lolly-stick puppet shows. This week was The Three Little Pigs, with a proper happy ending…unless of course you happen to be a wolf.

[First, an almost public service announcement. The film adaptation of the novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry has opened in cinemas in Britain and Israel – and quite possibly elsewhere that I don’t know about. Early reviews have been largely very positive. Bernice and I plan to see it this week, but I already know I shall be in tears long before the end. While I can’t quite give a personal recommendation yet, I can tell you neither of the two leads – Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton – is capable of giving a bad performance. In addition, the film stars the English countryside at its finest, which, alone, is surely worth the price of admission. As if that were not enough, one of the co-producers is my cousin, and I can assure you that if she is satisfied with the film then you are very unlikely to be disappointed.]

Under normal circumstances, nobody’s mind is broader than mine when it comes to questions of British and American English usage. I will often be found manning the barricades in defence of ‘defense’. I once even dived into very choppy waters to argue for the legitimacy of ‘dove’. When I discovered only a few weeks ago that a ‘jumper’ is understood by Americans to be a pinafore dress rather than a sweater, I didn’t jump, or even break into a sweat. I have spent many hours explaining to pedants that the English language is not the private property of the British, and that there is no single ‘correct English’, but, rather, a variety of correct Englishes.

However (you must have felt a ‘however’ looming up, surely; you probably even heard those staccato strings that warn you it actually isn’t safe to go back into the water), however, as I say, there are just one or two American usages that (and you might feel this is illogical and inconsistent) stick in my craw. I’m not proud of this (well, not usually), but I thought I would explore one with you today. This particular usage is eminently timely to visit in this of all weeks. Indeed, this past week has been more or less the first legitimate opportunity for 70 years.

I first encountered ‘coronate’ as a verb a year or so ago, on the lips of an American rabbi whose lecture series I subscribed to. While he was extremely erudite and eloquent, there were a number of words that he mispronounced. I suspected that this was because he had only ever read them in books, and never heard them spoken aloud. This probably reflected the fact that most of his formal education was within the Jewish world, and his considerable secular knowledge was gained primarily from reading. I was reminded of the passage in Richard Llewellyn’s novel about a South Wales mining community, How Green Was My Valley, in which the narrator recalls how as a sensitive and academic young boy he was humiliated by his teacher for pronouncing ‘misled’ as ‘mizzled’, having only encountered it in his reading. The irony there, of course, is that having, as a young child, a reading vocabulary that exceeds your listening vocabulary is probably something to be admired, rather than mocked.

(Incidentally, in trying to find the actual text of that extract from the book, I stumbled across the fact that although Richard Llewellyn always claimed to be a miner’s son born in St David’s who worked down the pits at Gilfach Goch, where his novel was set, he was, in truth, born in Hendon, London, the son of a publican, and didn’t go near Wales until he became famous. You can read the whole sorry story here.)

As so often happens in this world of coincidence, within a week of hearing the original rabbi speak of kings being coronated, I heard two other Americans commit what I was starting to realise I could not simply dismiss as an error. A little research was sufficient to establish that ‘to coronate’ is a verb used in modern American usage even more often than ‘to crown’.

At this stage, I reached for my trusty Complete Oxford English Dictionary, to discover, as I already suspected I would, that the first recorded usage of ‘coronate’ as a verb was in 1603, which means that this is something that the Pilgrim Fathers stowed away in the hold of The Mayflower as a neologism (‘to crown’ having been used in English since 1175). As with so many other words, usage diverged over the years in an America and a Britain that had relatively little day-to-day interaction with each other for 200 years, the Americans favouring ‘coronate’ and the British ‘crown’.

I think that what I find unpalatable in this particular American usage is that it prefers the longer, more formal, Latinate word to the shorter, more homely, Anglo-Saxon one. Even as I type this, I realise how inconsistent I am being, since, when I turn from the verb to the noun, I far prefer Johnny-come-lately Latinate ‘coronation’ (1388) to Anglo-Saxon ‘crowning’ (1240). All I can say in my defence is that the noun represents the whole shebang: the entire two-hour ceremony in Westminster Abbey, in front of a congregation of 2,200, plus the journey back to the Palace, accompanied by 4,000 service personnel, along a route lined by an additional 1,000 service personnel and tens of thousands of spectators, a domestic viewing audience of 20 million and a global audience of 300 million. I feel that warrants a Latinate, formal noun.

To crown the King, on the other hand, is to gingerly place the 2.08-kilogram St Edward’s Crown on the royal head, to jiggle it a little, and carefully centre the subtle mark added to avoid what happened at Elizabeth’s coronation, when the Archbishop of Canterbury apparently placed the crown back-to-front on her head. To crown the King is a simple physical act involving just two people. It seems to me appropriate that the simple action be captured in a simple word.

I can’t actually remember the last coronation, although our family was one of the many in Britain that bought their first television set especially for the occasion, and I assume I watched it, aged almost three-and-a-half, together with over 20 million others in the UK. It is estimated that an average of 17 people were gathered round the nine-inch screen of each TV set in Britain, making even watching the event on TV a communal act.

Bernice and I both felt that, having failed to pay much attention last time, we really ought to watch this time, and so, on Saturday night, we sat down to watch the Coronation of the Day highlights from the BBC. After 10 minutes of some rather-too-precious pre-match talking heads, we switched to the unedited coverage, and judiciously used the fast forward at strategic moments. This meant that we may have missed one or two unscripted moments, but we certainly got a sense of the whole extraordinary sweep.

At this point in the post, I planned to offer a critique of the coronation as an event. However, as I started to write, I found that I was doing little more than rehashing the old familiar arguments for and against the monarchy while at the same time making a few cheap jokes that seemed to me to jar with the awe and solemnity with which King Charles himself clearly faced the day. So let me just say that whether you view the elaborateness of the ceremony, and the extraordinary names and arcane symbolism of its various elements, as preposterous or profoundly moving almost certainly says more about you than about them. The simple fact is that Charles became the 40^th monarch to be crowned in Westminster Abbey, in a line going back 957 years, to 1066. The major elements of the coronation ceremony have remained unchanged for over 600 years. You may find that ridiculous; you may find it inspiring. You can probably guess which side of that argument I am basically on, but I won’t bore you further.

Meanwhile, in our own personal dynasty, No 2 is trying out the throne, No 1’s gaze is on higher things, and No 3 didn’t even turn up this week. Thus it is in most families, I suspect.

Now that we have moved the clocks forward, Shabbat afternoon is a much longer thing than it was a month ago. The major impact this has on us is that it means our conversation with our good friends when they drop by on Shabbat afternoon – as they habitually do, I’m delighted to say – can progress beyond catching up with each other’s week, and move on to matters more philosophical.

Which is exactly what it did this week, when Bernice asked: “If you could go back to your 18-year-old self, and make career and life decisions that would mean you were likely now to be much better off materially, what decisions would you change?” (Incidentally, you may be interested to know that most of those present decided that they would not be prepared to make any compromises in terms of a satisfying working life in order to gain materially, and the rest of us admitted that we still had no idea what making a sound financial decision would look like.)

We all agreed, eventually, that we had many, many blessings to count (principally our wonderful respective families – even those members of them who have chosen to take themselves and our grandchildren far away, a choice that would be more incomprehensible if it were not the identical choice that we all made when younger). Nevertheless, I do find myself from time to time musing how wonderful it would be to win the lottery. I would, of course, probably increase my chances of winning if I ever bought a ticket. If I were to buy a ticket, this week would undoubtedly be the week for me to buy one.

Which is as Errol Garnerish an intro as there is (see my blog post from 17 December 2019 if you haven’t been paying close enough attention) to sharing with you what a lucky week I have had these past seven days. Five events have made this a very fortunate week.

First of all, exactly a week ago, I accurately predicted the winner of the competition to find the nation’s favourite song for the 75^th anniversary (see my blog post of 25 April 2023 if you haven’t been paying any attention at all). Not only did this produce a delicious feeling of smugness in itself, but it also meant that, since Thursday morning, every time I have read a story reporting the results and explaining why the winner was such an appropriate choice (four articles so far), I have had an even more delicious feeling of rapturous smugness at having scooped most major Israeli media outlets. I really don’t pay me enough!

Second, on Yom Ha’atzma’ut itself, I watched, as I usually do, the World Bible Quiz for Youth. This is usually a humiliating affair for me, since I manage to get right only a handful of questions, and am left feeling in awe of the book-learning of Jewish teens from around the world. This year, typically, as the original field of 16 (whittled down from hundreds of applicants in non-televised rounds over recent months) narrowed to 8, then 4, then 2, most of the contestants from outside Israel fell by the wayside. Atypically, 6 of the last 8 remaining contestants, and both of the finalists, were girls.

The winner only answered one question incorrectly over the entire quiz. Of the four questions I answered correctly this year, one was the question that she answered incorrectly. (“What was the first recorded occasion on which David cried?” I’ll print the answer below, to give you the opportunity to feel as smug as I.*)

The third incident actually took place two weeks ago, and is a little less dramatic, but it is proving for me to be an ongoing game-changer. One of the biggest advantages of stopping eating meat (for Bernice, at all; for me, at home) is that we now have enough kitchen cupboard space to accommodate our year-round and our Pesach dishes. Changing over requires only some condensing of the everyday, and bringing some of the Pesach stuff down from the less-accessible cupboards to a more convenient level.

We have a fairly deep double cupboard above the fridge, which is difficult to access because the fridge protrudes. We have always used this cupboard to store trays and other items that are too wide for an ordinary cupboard, as well as a number of items that we rarely, if ever, use: a teak meat carving board, knife and fork (a wedding present, and too good to get rid of), a pizza stone, and so on. Our other deeper cupboard, which is a single cupboard above the oven and microwave, houses the wide Pesach items (Seder dish and so on).

As we were packing away after Pesach this year, it suddenly occurred to me that the double cupboard is very under-utilised, since we have, over the years, passed on and otherwise retired several items we never used. On the other hand, all of the Pesach cupboards are jam-packed. I therefore switched the contents of the two deep cupboards, allowing me to relieve the jam in the other Pesach cupboards, and also making more readily accessible such items as the Havdalah mats, which are now no longer above the fridge. I am torn between congratulating myself on my astonishing vision and creativity, and wondering how it can possibly have taken me 10 years to think of this rearrangement.

Fourth, just when I thought I had exhausted ways of using up our shesek (loquats), which will have yielded about 10 kg by the time I harvest the last crop this week, Esther came up with another. In addition to the jam, the chutney, the ice-cream and the liqueur – and, of course, the fresh fruit itself, particularly juicy and sweet and flavourful this year – I am now attempting shesek vinegar.

I’m delighted to report that the bubbles and clouding, which should, according to the recipe, begin after one and two weeks respectively, were already visible after one and two days respectively, and are now very well advanced, which means, I hope, that I should be able to bottle before we take a mid-week break in Budapest in mid-May. As with my sourdough starter, I have been struck by how full of bacteria and microbes our home is. Let me stress that this is a good thing.

Lastly, when I turned to Bernice 90 minutes ago and confessed that, despite thinking of little else for the last two days, I still had absolutely no idea what I was going to write about this week, she said: “Well, whatever it is, after the last couple of weeks it had better be something light!” and hey presto, by a trick of literary alchemy, by the time I got upstairs I knew exactly what I was going to write about.

So, if this week’s effort has left you singularly unimpressed, please blame Bernice.

*When it became clear that Saul’s anger at David was not to be assuaged, Jonathan shot the arrows as a sign for David, and David fled. Before he left, the two embraced and wept. (Samuel 1, 20:41)

Meanwhile, in the tradition of King David, all of our grandsons seem to be music-makers.
(I could segue for Israel, couldn’t I!)