Blogger’s Note: There’s esoteric and then there’s just impenetrable. Having googled and discovered Prima Donna, I couldn’t resist enlisting it for my title, but I won’t pretend I was familiar with it before. It is, apparently, a Dutch cheese, closely related to Gouda but with notes of Parmesan. This week’s title is therefore a Rigolettoish rendering of ‘Somebody moved my cheese’. If you’re waiting for an explanation of Rigoletto, or Gouda, then you’re probably here by mistake. If, on the other hand, you suddenly feel you must listen to the aria in question, let it not be said that I don’t anticipate my readership’s every last wish. This is, I’ll have you know, a class establishment.
Regular readers will know that I am not one to let himself be troubled by the vicissitudes of daily life. I’m always ready to make lemonade at the drop of a lemon and I cut the bread in half before I freeze it, so that there’s never a risk of it going a bit Saint Agur bluish before we manage to finish it. In other words, ours is a kitchen where half a loaf is not just better than no bread; it’s ideal.
Blogger’s Note: Two paragraphs and already three cheeses named. If you think you’re detecting a theme here, you’re completely wrong.
So, no, I take the rough with the smooth, roll with the punches and whistle while I work. But, my goodness, this has been a tough week. Scarcely a single cheese has been left unmoved.
For starters, here’s a handy tip: if you listen to Reshet Bet of Kan, Israel radio’s news and current affairs station, don’t drive through Ma’ale Adumim. As you approach Ma’ale Adumim from Jerusalem, you find that you need to retune from 95.0 or 95.5 (which of the two is stronger seems to depend on wind direction) to 95.2. In Ma’ale Adumim itself, this gives good reception in most of the city, although Mitzpe Nevo is, in this as in so many things, a bit of a law unto itself. Poised as we are on a ridge running between Jerusalem and the Judean Desert, our ears are competed for by Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian stations. However, 95.2 will serve you pretty well within MA.
Or at least it did until last week, when, suddenly, the signal became weaker in various locations, including our street, and 95.0 and 95.5 became louder. If this reflects a permanent change, then it may well turn out to be a good thing, since it will render obsolete retuning to 95.2 on entering the city and from 95.2 on leaving. However, where was the memo from the broadcaster? I can’t be doing with these unannounced changes.
Note to Bernice (the rest of you can skip this paragraph): Are you listening? I can’t be doing with unannounced changes.
Then, the following day, I bent down to retrieve my ground coffee from the freezer. (Yes, I pre-grind my beans once a week, and keep the ground coffee in the freezer. I know at least one of my readers needs smelling salts at this point, but there it is.) I opened the middle drawer of the right-hand side and there the little Tupperware container wasn’t.
It was mere seconds after that, as I staggered, distraught, around the kitchen, that Bernice blithely informed me that she had needed the room in that drawer and had therefore moved the coffee to the drawer below, without telling me. Even as I typed that last sentence, I needed to pause to breathe deeply into a brown paper bag. (I wonder, incidentally, about people who don’t bake their own bread and store it in brown paper bags – more, to be honest for the frisson of nostalgia than for any reason connected with keeping the bread fresh. What do these people breathe into when they need to calm down?)
Then I discovered that America may not be named after Amerigo Vespucci, who set foot on what was to become known as American soil in 1498. However, it was John Cabot who first explored, and set foot on, coastal North America, a year earlier, under the commission of Henry VII, King of England. Cabot’s sponsor in Bristol was Richard ap Americ ( a good Celtic name). The continent may well be named after Richard rather than Vespucci.
Why should we favour Richard over Vespucci as the origin of the name America? One good reason is that one cannot imagine the Medicis, Vespucci’s patrons, being ecstatic when he returned from ‘discovering’ the New Word, and proposed naming it after himself, a mere navigator.
On the other hand, we have the evidence of a humanist, Martin Waldseemüller, who, in 1507, reprinted the “Quattuor Americi navigationes” (“Four Voyages of Amerigo”), preceded by a pamphlet of his own entitled “Cosmographiae introductio,” and he suggested that the newly discovered world be named “ab Americo Inventore…quasi Americi terram sive Americam” (“from Amerigo the discoverer…as if it were the land of Americus or America”).
On the third hand, Richard ap Americ was the man who paid for Cabot’s voyage. Arsenal still play football in London, but their new stadium is known as Emirates Stadium. ‘Follow the money’ is a reasonable working practice in these cases.
Anyway, if my further research confirms the Cabot theory, then this will be right up there with the revelation, several years ago, that bears don’t actually hibernate, a fact that still has me occasionally waking up in a cold, gaslighted, sweat.
To round off what has been a very tough week, while we were out in the car yesterday, we saw a teenager with mauve hair. A little disturbed, if not in the least surprised, by the warmth of Bernice’s admiration of this, I tentatively inquired whether she was considering something similar herself. She pointed out, very fairly, that when, a couple of decades ago, she had wanted to dye her hair aubergine, I had expressed my opposition. (2024 David is, of course, shrieking: “And just what do you think it has to do with you?” Unlike John Osborne, I tend to look back mostly in acute embarrassment.)
In response, the best I could think of by way of belated apology was: “You shouldn’t really have married me, should you?”. I’m not sure exactly what response I was expecting, or indeed hoping for, but whatever I was expecting was a bit wide of the mark. What she actually said was: “If I’d known you were always going to be a miserable old ****, I wouldn’t have.”
Blogger’s Note: I feel I must explain that **** represents a word much less shocking that what you are probably thinking, although more shocking than Bernice’s Mum, z”l would have thought.
Since then, 18 hours have passed, and we’re still together, so I expect our marriage will survive this particular hiccough. I know that the lesson to take from this is not to ask a question to which you are not prepared for the answer. I also know that I won’t take this lesson. I also know that Bernice didn’t really mean what she said. And I also know that she meant every word.
What is a mystery to me is how somebody who knows so much can feel so often as though he doesn’t know anything, and as soon as he does know something, somebody moves his cheese. Ah! Sweet mystery of life!
