I inherited far too few of my parents’ many admirable traits, but one thing I am very grateful to my father for passing on to me is the Brownstein sleeping gene. If I wanted to add up the number of times in my life I have had to count sheep after failing to fall asleep within a few minutes of laying my head on the pillow, I could count them on the lambs of one litter. (Actually, on the rare occasions when I can’t drift off, I don’t count sheep. Instead, I play through an imaginary England Test cricket innings, which is usually more entertaining, and always more successful, than the real thing.)

However, I seem recently to have encountered a number of stories that threaten to disrupt even my sleep pattern. Since misery loves company, I thought I would, this week, share some of them with you, on the off chance that you’ve been looking around for something to make you feel really depressed.

First, a podcast referred me this week to a Substack article offering an insider’s view of the future of AI that, while being far from sugar-coated, does actually offer some guidelines on how to avoid being totally crushed under the wheels of the AI juggernaut. Rather than borrowing from the article (as I like to think of it) or plagiarising it (to be more accurate), and thereby failing to do it anywhere near justice, let me just give you a link to it. The article is very readable, and while, as I say, it pulls no punches, it does also offer what seems like very sound advice for those who are still (if, conceivably, not for as long as they think) in the workforce. So, pour yourself a stiff drink, and, if you haven’t already encountered it, settle down to read: “Something Big Is Happening”.

Next, the Sports pages of the Times of London. No, this is not going to be a bewailing of the inadequacies of England’s performance in the T20 World Cup. First, I realise this is a niche topic; furthermore, T20 isn’t real cricket anyway. In addition, any disappointment I feel is tempered by the knowledge that Australia, England’s arch rivals in all things cricket, haven’t even qualified for the next round of the competition, the Super 8 stage. This is a huge comfort.

What I really find depressing about the paper’s sports pages is that they are full of not-sport stories. One day it will be Sturla Holm Laegreid, the Norwegian biathlete, exploiting his live television interview shortly after winning a bronze medal at the Winter Olympics to confess that he has been unfaithful to his girlfriend. He had already confessed to the girlfriend, in private, and she had left him. By what journalistic criterion does this qualify as a news story? And even if we are currently living in a universe where the Winter Olympics biathlon bronze medallist’s lovelife is deemed newsworthy, then the story certainly does not belong on the sports pages.

Perhaps even more incomprehensible, because it is not even prurient, was today’s story about Coco Gauff, a black American tennis player ranked fourth in the world, who in a set of less than fluent answers, presumably in a press conference, stated her opposition to Trump’s recent deployment of ICE in Minneapolis. Is this a sports story? No. Is it a news story? Only if you believe that Coco Gauff has something insightful to contribute to the debate. If she has, she appears to be keeping it close to her chest. Her grandmother is apparently a civil rights figure who, in 1961, became the first black student to integrate her Florida high school. However, pedigree alone is not a sufficient qualification for Gauff.

This story followed on the heels of British-American skier Gus Kenworthy who posted an image purporting to show a urine script of ‘f*** ice’ in the Milan snow. I have to say that the neatness of the calligraphy (consider, for example, the perfect flow control required to render the dot above the ‘i’ in the picture below) leads me to suspect that the image was the equivalent of ‘airbrushed’, even before I added my censorship. So, this was not a sports story, not a news story, and almost certainly not a true story.

However, my prize for the week’s most depressing story was the publication of a report in Britain highlighting how increasing numbers of children are entering the education system in a state of unreadiness. Among the areas of unreadiness highlighted were personal hygiene, with one primary school reporting that 50% of children of the pupils in reception and nursery (ages 3–5) are not toilet-trained, and some are unable to state their own full names. An increasing percentage are also unable to interact socially at an appropriate level for their age.

The immediate consequences of these statistics for Britain are dire. Countless thousands of class-contact hours a year have to be devoted by teachers and teaching assistants to toileting, cleaning and dressing children, rather than to the curriculum’s age-appropriate education. These hours are disproportionately lost in schools whose pupils come from disadvantaged homes. Any hope of levelling up is destroyed in such an environment.

Above all, I can’t stop thinking about the home lives these children have been living for the years before they first come into the state system. The opportunities that have been lost to help them develop their innate intellectual, emotional and social abilities; the passivity of their early childhood; the stultifying lack of stimulation they have experienced.

I have been reminded in the last six years in my own family what an amazing time early childhood can be. To see how readily children respond to stimulation and how rich their potential is; to watch the joy in their discovery of the world; to see them explore and test the boundaries of humour, storytelling, music, painting. All of this is to have something of one’s faith in human nature restored, and to manage, somehow, and against all the odds, to sleep easy at night.

Sweet dreams,

I’ve spent the last four days trying to think of a topic for today’s post, and failing completely. Only just now, as I sat facing that blank white rectangle in the centre of the laptop screen, did I realise the reason for the blank white rectangle in the centre of my brain. There is an obvious topic for me to write about; it is one that I have been thinking about a lot in the last few days. However, it’s a bit contentious, and a lot serious, and I don’t quite have the necessary moral courage today to accept the challenge it represents. However, at some point in the near future it will probably loom so large that I will no longer be able to avoid it. Watch this space!

Well, if that doesn’t guarantee decent reading stats for the next week or two, I don’t know what will. Meanwhile, I’m forced to dredge up and recycle something I first mentioned in a blog post four weeks ago. You will doubtless remember that, when writing about our new lounge suite, I said:

“We confirmed the choice of fabric from the swatch book (Note to self: research the etymology of ‘swatch’ – such a wonderful-sounding word)”

I did, indeed, the very same week, research the etymology of ‘swatch’, and now, as a public service, I’m going to save you the trouble of doing the same.

Our journey begins in 16^th Century Northumberland (not an obvious tourist destination), where ‘swatch’ was a dialect word meaning: ‘a countercheck of a tally’. Now, if only we knew what a tally is, and what, indeed, a countercheck is, in this context, we’d be sitting pretty. As it is, we have traded one obscure word for two, in what doesn’t convincingly feel like progress.

So, let’s tackle ‘tally’ first. We all know, from our mastery of medieval Latin, that ‘’talea’ means: ‘a cutting from a plant, a, rod, stick or twig’. (Interestingly, in Greek. ‘talis’ means ‘a marriageable girl’, with, perhaps, the same associations as ‘Twiggy’ in English.)

In medieval times, it was common practice to record debts by a system of notches cut into a stick (the size and spacing of the notches indicating the size of the debt). This stick was known as the tally. In time, the sum indicated by the notches also came to be known as the ‘tally’. After the notches were cut, the tally would then be split lengthwise in two, so that each half retained the notch marks. One half, the master, would be kept by the creditor and the other half, the countercheck, would be given to the debtor, as a record of the debt. At any time, and particularly when the debt was to be settled, the debtor and creditor could lay their sticks side by side, to check that the two halves matched, thus avoiding any argument about the size of the debt. If one of the two parties tampered with his stick, in an attempt to cheat the other, then, obviously, the two halves would not match, or, as we say, they wouldn’t tally.

By the 1610s, in Yorkshire, the word ‘swatch’ had been borrowed and applied to ‘a tally attached to cloth sent to be dyed’. Presumably, this tally was simply a copy, on paper, of the original retained by the customer ordering the dyeing. This adaptation is an indication of the advance of literacy.

By the mid-1600s, a further meaning had developed: ‘sample piece or strip of cloth cut off for a pattern or sample’, which is, of course, more or less the normal modern meaning.

In a later development, the size and shape of swatches led to the term being borrowed by knitters, with a rather different meaning. In knitting, a swatch is a sample piece of knitted fabric used to determine the gauge of a project. It helps ensure that the finished garment fits correctly and is of the desired size. To create a swatch, you typically knit a small square (often 4×4 inches) using the same yarn and needle size as your project. This allows you to compare the gauge of your swatch with the pattern gauge, ensuring that your finished piece will match the designer’s specifications.  

One of the sources I looked up online including a graphical representation of the frequency of usage of the word ‘swatch’ over time. When I first looked at this graph, I was puzzled as to the astonishing increase in use of the term starting around 1988.

However, a few moments’ reflection were all that was needed for me to realise the explanation. In the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese companies such as Seiko and Citizen used quartz technology to threaten Swiss dominance of the watchmaking industry. In response, in 1983, Ernst Thomke, Elmar Mock, and Jacques Müller established a new company to produce trendy, Swiss, quartz watches to appeal to the younger market, and called the company Swatch. It is this company’s success that is responsible for the uptick in the graph above.

It is amusing that a name that was doubtless intended to sound modern and trendy should also be a word with such a long pedigree. The moneylenders of early-16^th-Century Northumberland could have no idea that their neologism would enjoy a new lease of life 475 years later. Such are the vagaries of vocabulary.

It takes the moon approximately 29.531 days to orbit the earth once. It takes the earth approximately 365.256 days to orbit the sun once. This means that it takes the moon 6,939.7703125 days to orbit the earth 235 times. And it takes the earth 6,939.864 days to orbit the sun 19 times.

If you could devise a calendar that measured time in lunar months, then adjusted the calendar to allow 235 months in 19 solar years, then, every 19 years, that calendar would be synchronised with the solar calendar.

The Hebrew calendar is just such a solar-lunar calendar. The length of the month is determined by the orbit of the moon. Some months are always 29 days long, some are always 30 days long, and some are sometimes 29 and sometimes 30 days. In addition, every so often (in 7 years of every 19-year cycle) an extra month is added to the year. In this way, the calendar ensures that the festivals fall at the same approximate time of year every year, and, using the fine-tuning described in the last sentences, the Hebrew calendar and the Gregorian solar calendar are synchronised.

Last week I celebrated my 76^th birthday, and, since 76 is 4×19, last Thursday was both my English and my Hebrew birthday. Sometimes the synchronicity is a day out, because of the effect of the irregular Gregorian solar leap-years (every 4 years, but not when the year is divisible by 100, unless it is divisible by 400). However, this year the synchronicity was exact: 29 January fell on 11 Shevat, just as it did in 1950. (For the purpose of this argument, I am assuming that I was born before sunset on January 29. There’s nobody left alive to ask and my brother only remembers that he was playing toy soldiers with his big cousin on the landing of our aunt’s home at the time. He can’t remember whether it was light out.)

To cut a long (76 years and 5 days, at the time of writing) story short, this year I completed four cycles, and that feels like some kind of milestone. I can already almost glimpse 2045, and my 95^th birthday, through the haze on the horizon of the next 19 years.

As if this were not enough to lead to some reflection on the transience of life, these last few weeks have brought a heavy burden of loss.

First, we heard of the death, in a freak work accident, of someone who was a couple of years older than Bernice and myself when we were all teenagers in Hanoar Hatzioni. Even though we had not seen him for many decades, the news of his tragic death came as something of a shock.

Far more painful were the next two deaths, in our closer circle. The first was that of the husband in a couple we became friendly with when they arrived in Maale Adumim from America about a decade ago. Although we had not been in close touch since they moved to Ramat Bet Shemesh a couple of years ago, we, in common with almost all their friends, felt close to them, mainly because of the incredible warmth in which they both bathed everyone they met. The husband suffered painfully with ill health for decades, but you never heard him complaining. Indeed, you never saw him without a smile on his face, and, typically, a joke on his lips. He died far too young, defeated eventually by the disease that he had refused to let define him for so long.

Also last week, my cousin’s wife was taken by a cruel cancer that made her last months a constant struggle to maintain her wonderful spirit. ‘My cousin’s wife’ fails to convey how much a part of the Brownstein family she became almost immediately and remained, over the 52 years since she ‘married in’. Her humour, her warmth, her generosity were always her signature, and she leaves a great emptiness.

Between these two deaths, I learnt that someone I was in Israel with on a year programme 58 years ago had died. We had met again at our programme’s 50^th reunion, and, in fact, Bernice and I shared breakfast with him on the day after the reunion ended, when almost everyone else had already left for home. He was a gentle, quiet-spoken and delightful man.

The sequence of these four deaths, one seemingly leading to another, and all leading up to my birthday, perhaps inevitably led me to reflect on my mortality. It is difficult to escape the sobering fact that, going forward, I can only expect to hear more and more of the same sad news, until the moment when I become the news item. The trick of fooling myself that I am still 18 years old is proving more and more difficult to accomplish.

And yet, at the same time…

I sat in shul a week and a half ago, watching the rows in front of me fill with the sons, sons-in-law and grandchildren of our dear neighbours, marking the Shabbat Chatan of their middle son. To see four generations of the family praying together, to wonder at how tall some of those grandsons are, while remembering their mother as a 9-year-old; to see a granddaughter whose father’s brit I can clearly remember; to remind myself that this family was celebrating not only a wedding, but also the birth of three new grandchildren in the preceding couple of weeks; all of this was to be reminded that just as there are always some stepping off the escalator, there are always, always, others stepping on at the bottom and beginning the long ascent.

And, if I need a reminder even closer to home, I only need to travel up to Zichron, as we did yesterday, and to hold in my arms a stirring, snuffling, warm, smiling (I swear he was, honestly) bundle of vibrantly actual and infinitely potential life. Still feeling his heft in my arms, I am today anchoring myself to the knowledge that, while mortality is individual, immortality is familial, communal, and thereby the stronger force. I can sense the haze lifting just a little on the horizon. I’m feeling ready to take on this fifth cycle!