The traditional question of the London black-cab driver reflects my own uncertainty. I had it all planned. This week’s post was all set to be a calm and measured philosophical reflection on the extent to which the artist’s conscious intentions determine the meaning of a work of art, all nicely inspired by a bang-up-to-date example, backed up by contributions from commentators from an earlier age. It was going to be a really class act. And then along comes ‘stuff’, and barges its way to the head of the queue, leaving me no choice but to be led by the nose.

Our story begins in the early hours of Monday, when three dark-clad and hooded figures were captured on CCTV setting fire to four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green, an area of north-west London some 50% of whose residents identify as Jewish. Hatzola is a charity that raises money, largely from the Jewish community, to finance the purchase and operation of an ambulance service that acts as a supplement to the National Health Service, providing emergency services to all local residents, regardless of race, colour or creed.

As the story developed over Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it a “horrific antisemitic attack”; Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch said that “all of us need to make it clear in our words and actions that Britain will not tolerate antisemitism”; the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan condemned it as a “cowardly attack on the Jewish community”. Meanwhile, the BBC resolutely persisted in referring to a “suspected antisemitic hate crime”. Let’s not leap to any hasty conclusions here. This may well have been just an act of random vandalism/

In the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I have a small current agenda with the BBC. In the last week, catching myself spending rather more time than is healthy listening to panels of experts on Israel radio and TV attempting, and failing, to find a path of sanity through the dense undergrowth of Trump’s announcements and Iranian conduct of the war, I have taken refuge in BBC Radio 3, which is the BBC’s radio station dedicated to classical music and, to a lesser extent, the arts in general.

Their mid-morning programme has a daily feature, The Playlist, in which the station plays a piece of music near the start of the programme, and invites listeners to write in with suggestions of follow-up pieces that they feel would go well with the starter piece, in tone, style, theme, or whatever. Over the next couple of hours, the presenter reads one or two of the emails sent in, and then, towards the end of the programme, the presenter plays three or four of the suggested pieces that the programme’s producers have selected.

Yesterday (Monday), the starter piece was In Party Mood by Jack Strachey, familiar to boys and girls of my vintage as the signature tune of Housewives’ Choice, a BBC musical request radio programme that our mothers listened to in the 1950s. You can hear it here. I immediately knew what would make a perfect pairing, and I duly sent off the following email to the BBC.

The joyful forward drive of today’s choice, and something in the confidence of the orchestration (though I lack the musical knowledge to identify exactly what) brought to mind, for me at least, the work of Leroy Anderson. Might I suggest that The Typewriter Song makes a perfect companion piece, highlighting, as it does, one of the principal options open to women who chose not to embrace housewifery in the 1950s.

David Brownstein
Ma’ale Adumim
Israel

You can watch the Leroy Anderson composition being performed here.

I was delighted, a couple of hours later, to hear my email read out on air, as a prelude to my suggestion being included in the selection to be played. It was true that I was only one of many listeners who made this suggestion, but it was my email that was read out! I have, you will note, lost none of my competitive appetite.

Actually, that last paragraph is inaccurate. I wasn’t delighted, but rather disgusted. Let me explain why. The presenter is in the habit of reading the listener’s name and location – ‘Brian from Walsall’, ‘Heather from Beaconsfield’, and so on. However, in my case, the presenter declared: ‘David writes to say that…’

I must confess that I was a little devious in writing my address as Maale Adumim, Israel. I was fully aware that I was placing the presenter in a dilemma. As far as the BBC is concerned, Maale Adumim isn’t in Israel, but rather, I imagine, in the currently imaginary state of Palestine. So, she couldn’t say: ‘David from Maale Adumim in Israel’, nor even ‘David from Israel’ either of which would concede me a point the BBC wouldn’t dream of conceding. On the other hand, to say ‘David from Maale Adumim in Palestine’ or even ‘David from Palestine’ would be ridiculous. It is not possible to live in an imaginary state. She could have said ‘David from Maale Adumim’ but then, when listeners wrote in to ask where Maale Adumim was, she would not be able to answer them.

So she chose to present me as homeless, which prompted me to write a follow-up email:

I would be flattered to be selected for my email to be read out, and my suggestion if Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter Song adopted, this morning on Essential Classics Playlist, were I not disgusted by the fact that BBC Radio 3 feels unable (on what possible basis I can only guess) to include my address. 

I am typing this while I listen to missiles being intercepted… missiles which, if the future of Western civilisation rested in your hands, would soon be winging their way to a civilian residence near you. 

I would strongly advise you to pray to whatever supreme power you believe in that that never happens, and meanwhile to recognise and name the struggle that the US and Israel are currently engaged in for what it is. 

Yours in disgust, but, even more sadly, no surprise whatsoever

David Brownstein
Still of
Ma’ale Adumim
Israel. 

(I must confess that that bit about typing while listening to missiles was poetic licence, but I hope you won’t begrudge me that.)

Needless to say, as of writing I have received no reply, not do I expect to. I am currently contemplating how to present myself next time I write to the BBC. I might try just giving Israel as my address, to see how deep the BBC’s antipathy goes. I might, alternatively, just give Maale Adumim.

I know enough about Greek tragic drama to be aware that my feeling of occupying the moral high ground has the unmistakable sanctimonious smell of hubris. This should have made me more on the lookout for the inevitable nemesis. This arrived last night when I read about something that happened in a village called Burqa, in the Ramallah area, a very long way from Golders Green and yet, in a sense, nowhere near as far as you would expect. At about the same time as a gang of hooded thugs (possibly ideologically driven, possibly funded by Iran) were setting fire to ambulances belonging to a Jewish organisation in London, another gang of thugs (almost certainly Jewish settlers, ideologically driven) were attempting to set fire to a health clinic in an Arab village in Judea.

The symmetries here are inescapable. Some mainstream media in Britain made much of the attack on the clinic, and underplayed the antisemitic aspect of the attack on the ambulances, while some mainstream media in Israel ignored the attack on the clinic and headlined the attack on the ambulances. In both cases, a morally unjustifiable action against the innocent is lauded by its supporters as an attack on an entire group that is seen, uniformly, as the enemy.

In Britain, over the last years, it has been impossible to escape the feeling that the Muslim community, and, within it, Islamist extremists, were being given a free hand by the police and the authorities to act as they wished.

In Israel, over the last years, it has been similarly impossible to escape the feeling that the hilltop youth, and extremist settlers, have been given a free hand by the police and the authorities to act as they wished.

In both cases, this leniency seems to be politically motivated. Bibi indulges Ben Gvir; British politicians court the Muslim vote.

Having got here, I’m not sure where I go next. The irony does not escape me that I, too, am a settler, however nice the distinction the government, most of the population, and I  myself draw between ‘major Jewish conurbations’ over the green line, and outposts of a handful of families living in caravans. I know that the world’s decision, exclusively where Israel is involved, to regard land won in a defensive war as occupied, is arbitrary. I feel justified, geopolitically and culturally, in living throughout Eretz Yisrael. But that does not mean that I am not as sickened by settler violence as I am by antisemitic violence in Britain, or anywhere in the world. If we call out the one, we need to call out the other. Anything less is a betrayal of our values as human beings.

Let’s start with a quick roundup of this last week’s news from the theatre of war, which, it appears, is also the theatre of the absurd.

Item 1: Among those joining a march through London last week in support of the Iranian regime were CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Not since Queers for Hamas has an organisation shown so little understanding of the way the world is.

Item 2: Bloomberg News broke a story last week that the new supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Mojtaba Khamenei, owns 11 properties in The Bishops Avenue, an exclusive street in north London known as Billionaire’s Row. The shell company through which the properties were bought received a £36 million loan that was ultimately financed by a company that is part of a British investment company founded by businessmen of Israeli origin, Sol and Eddie Zakay, brothers originally from Ramat Gan. I feel sorry for anyone writing fiction these days.

Update: Item 2 should, it now appears, read, not “the new supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Mojtaba Khamenei”, but rather “the possibly newly no-longer supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Mojtaba Khamenei”.

Item 3: The Jerusalem Post reported that Russian officials lodged an official protest with Israel in recent days after a strike near the Iranian city of Bushehr unknowingly hit in the vicinity of Russian scientists working in the area. Repeated strikes near Russian experts were, they warned, unacceptable, and Israel must take precautionary measures. I may be wrong, but I think that’s what we call chutzpah.

Item 4: A British Government minister, explaining today why Britain was reluctant to send military support to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to shipping, emphasised: “Let’s be clear that it is dangerous. There are civilian ships in the Strait of Hormuz that are being fired on by the Iranians.” I had assumed that that was a substantial part pf the reason why Trump was asking for support from the British navy, but maybe there’s something I’m missing here.

Speaking of which:

Item 5: Ari Larijani, who it appears was actually running Iran, was eliminated by Israel in a precision strike on his home. Does he not follow the news? Arguably, Israel could have tracked him down wherever he attempted to hide, but choosing his own apartment to ‘hide’ in made killing him the equivalent of me playing Hide and Seek with my three-year-old grandson Ollie a year ago, when he was two.

Update: Larijani was apparently hiding in what he believed to be a ‘safe house’. It transpires that this was just another of his mistaken beliefs. (It’s not easy keeping up with all the breaking news in a developing story.)

Enough of this. Time, I think, to bring you up to date on our week, with a few siren stories.

At the end of last week, my niece shared with the family group that her boys had worked out how to tell whether our early warnings of possible attack would convert to sirens instructing us to take shelter. Typically, the heads-up arrives 5–7 minutes before the siren. However, we receive far more early warnings than sirens. This is because, when a missile firing is detected, an immediate assessment is made of the target area. This assessment is necessarily vague, and so large areas receive alerts. A few minutes later, a much more exact calculation is made of the missile’s target area, and only the settlements, or quadrants of cities, within that smaller area, receive a siren.

Maale Adumim is within the large area of Judea, which stretches north into the centre of the country. As a consequence, when the centre of the country gets a warning, all of Judea gets the same warning. When the target is narrowed down, only the towns and settlements in the north part of Judea receive a siren. Our great-nephews had observed that, when Jerusalem as well as Maale Adumim gets an early warning, then Maale Adumim always gets a siren. When Jerusalem does not get an early warning, Maale Adumim does not get a siren.

Naturally, we do not rely blindly on the accuracy of this observation, but it has so far proved correct. What this means in practical terms is, that if Jerusalem has also received an early warning, we put on our shoes and stay close to the front door. If not, we carry on with what we were doing before the alert, and listen out for, but do not expect, a siren.

The only time this system failed was when I failed to spot Jerusalem’s name in the list on the app. Having assured Bernice we should not expect a siren, I was as surprised as she was when we did. I now check even more carefully than previously.

Bernice observed, last Friday, that if the Iranians had any sense, they would send over a volley of missiles about an hour before Shabbat, when probably half of the country is showering, Sure enough, later that day, I had just stepped into the shower and was soaking wet when the alert sounded. I nipped out of the shower, checked my phone, saw that Jerusalem had not received an alert, and decided to carry on showering. Fortunately, we did not receive a siren, and I was able to complete my ablutions undisturbed.

We did have sirens over Shabbat, and, when we stepped into our public shelter, we found that it was virtually standing room only. One set of neighbours had two married children and four grandchildren with them over Shabbat. Another family had a set of grandparents staying with them. Another family had two married children and five grandchildren over. It was all very convivial.

By contrast, yesterday, when a gradual return to school had begun, of one family (two parents, four pre-teen children), only the husband and the two youngest children arrived in the shelter. This is a family who always come to the shelter, at any time of day or night. When we asked about the rest of the family, the husband explained that the two older children were in school. And the wife? With a sheepish smile, he admitted that she had stayed home.

I certainly know of some people who refuse to use their public shelter, and find what shelter they can in their own home, despite the insistence of the authorities that this is an unsafe and risky option, and despite the chilling video of the damage that a direct hit, and even of a substantial piece of shrapnel, can do to an unprotected home. Almost certainly, the longer the war goes on, the more people will weary of interrupted nights and disrupted days, and will decide to take their chances.

Meanwhile, a couple of items I caught on the radio in the last few days. First, a discussion about how many missiles constitute a salvo. Clearly, a single missile is not a salvo, and ten missiles are, but what about three, or two. There appears to be no clear official decision on this. And don’t tell me it’s only semantics. There is nothing ‘only’ about semantics.

Then yesterday, one of the two co-presenters on the morning news programme began by saying: “Forget about divisions between religious and secular, Jews and Arabs, Ashkenazi and Sephardi. In the current situation, there are only two meaningful divisions in the country: between those who have a safe room inside their homes and those who have to go outside to a public shelter; and between those who have pre-teen children and those who don’t.” That statement rings very true. I am deeply envious of those who can sleep in their safe room and have a relatively undisturbed night, and I am full of admiration for those who manage to make it to the shelter with their large families of young children, time after time.

Finally, presumably in an attempt to calm those who can’t sleep for worrying about the war, Israel TV is rerunning, at midnight every night, all of the seasons of the very popular thriller series Teheran, about an undercover Israeli agent in Iran. Just the thing to settle the nerves, I would have thought.

I am pleased to announce that I have managed to complete writing this post with no interruptions from the East. This means I can now relax and prepare for the drive up to Zichron tomorrow. Wishing us all a quiet week and may we hear good news.

Well, here comes Tuesday again, and it finds me, again, facing a blank computer screen. That probably sounds a bit weary and edging on despair, but the truth is considerably more uplifting. I was reading a piece by the journalist Max Hastings yesterday, in which he described his feelings on rereading, at the age of 80, the letter that his father, the author Macdonald Hastings, wrote to the three-day-old Max at the end of 1945, and gave to him when he turned twenty-one. In the article, Hastings recalled his father giving him a piece of advice when Max was a teenager: “Embrace the challenge of a blank piece of paper”.

Hastings continues: “I could not then understand his meaning, but I do now. Every time I open a screen, I feel a thrill at filling it with words that somebody may want to read.” I’ll drink to that; or, rather, I would, if I were not slightly apprehensive that this war is driving me to the bottle a little more than can be justified medicinally. In a normal week, Bernice and I open a bottle of wine for Shabbat. If we are hosting for one meal, we open two bottles. Depending on which of our friends we are hosting, we may finish the two bottles over Shabbat. (You know who you are.) If we are dining à deux, we will enjoy a moderate glass each with each of our two main Shabbat meals, usually leaving enough for dinner on Sunday, and sometimes even a half-glass each on Monday, evening.

Apart from that, and a generous whisky for me and a small shisky (loquat liqueur) for Bernice for Kiddush on Shabbat morning, Bernice has a dry week, and I might have a small bottle of home-brewed beer with a plate of humous, techina and a pitta for lunch one day.

Last week, we certainly indulged at the Purim seuda (festive meal), if only, so we claim, to the extent required by Jewish law. A fellow guest, who, in our circles, qualifies as what Adam Montefiore (wine critic of the Jerusalem Post and scion of the famous family) describes as a feinshmecker, brought two excellent wines. He also brought two of the renowned cocktails mixed by his own fair hand, both rum-based, and simple politeness required that we taste both.

The week before, we had actually felt obliged, faced with an excellent sea bream fried to perfection by Bernice on the Monday evening, to open a midweek bottle of wine, which saw us nicely through until Shabbat, when we could open another.

When I suggested, last night, that we might consider doing the same again, Bernice issued a stern veto. So, I can state categorically that this war is not driving us to drink.

All of which, I realise with a shock, was a huge detour from the subject at hand, which was the thrill Max Hastings feels every time he faces a blank screen. I do identify with that, even if the thrill is occasionally accompanied by a certain sinking in the pit of my stomach as I realise I have no idea what to write about.

Which is almost the position I was in 535 words ago, and look how well I’ve done without actually having to decide on a subject for this week. Of course, we all know what I ‘ought’ to write about is the situation, or, rather, ‘The Situation’. If you are one of my more astute readers (and, of course, all of my readers are, by self-selection, more astute), you will recognise the above 600 words as nothing more than avoidance behaviour masquerading as bonhomie. The time has come for me to beard the lion in his den.

Now, there’s an interesting idiom. I thought you might like to know the origin. When David, the shepherd boy, appears before King Saul in Samuel 1, Chapter 17, and volunteers to fight Goliath, Saul rejects David, saying: “You are a lad and he is a man of war from his youth.” David then tells Saul: “When the lion…would carry off a sheep,…I would…strike him down and rescue it. And if he would rise against me, I would seize his beard and strike him and kill him.”

So, here, finally, is me, bearding the lion (having managed to waffle for 725 words). However, I am not going to talk geopolitics. Instead, let me just tell you about our war. From now on, this is much more for my readers outside Israel, than for those of my readers in Israel, who have probably had similar experiences over the last nine days to myself.

With an extraordinary sense of timing, halfway through that last paragraph, the heads-up alert from the Home Front sounded, preparing us for a potential full-blown siren in the next few minutes, after which we will have 90 seconds to reach our shelter. I will pause here, to put my shoes on.

This is, however, not the app that captures most accurately the spirit of the nation. That would be the one for which I have captured a screen (below) in English, which gives you a statistically calculated answer to the burning question: If I go for a shower now, what are the chances that I will be interrupted by an alert?

On a more personal note, the timing of the war was unfortunate for us. Before I explain why, let me emphasise that we, particularly in comparison with others, have nothing, literally nothing, to complain about. While others face the tragic loss of life from missile attack, the trauma of injury or a near miss, the disruption, financial loss and upheaval of property damage, the hardship of having a parent, spouse or child called up yet again for another tour of reserve duty in the North, the loss of earnings in a disrupted economy, the disruption of education for children who have only briefly known normality since before COVID, our not being able to go to Zichron last week was a mere annoyance.

Thankfully, we felt, and Esther agreed, that we should go up this week, and on Monday we drove up. The weather was glorious, the road was significantly less crowded than usual, and we reached Zichron in good time, with no hiccoughs. We had a great few hours with Esther, Maayan, Raphael and Adam. Raphael was full of three-year-old’s energy; Adam managed to throw up twice over Bernice and twice over me; and we wouldn’t have missed any of it for the world.

Our journey home was slightly more eventful; at one point we had an alert, but no siren. The instruction, in the event of a siren, is to park the car, distance yourself from it, lie down and cover your head with your arms. Since we grew up in an era when American children were drilled in sheltering against a nuclear attack by crouching under their school desks, this seems like a perfectly adequate defence against a half-tonne ballistic missile. We were also advised yesterday that, if you can’t escape your vehicle, you should wind down the windows and lie down on the floor. None of the reviews I read before we bought our car mentioned this as a design flaw of the Kia Picanto, but the fact is that an adult can lie down in a Kia Picanto only by parking right next to another Kia Picanto and removing the two touching doors, although, technically, that is lying down in two Kia Picantos.

More significantly, Micha’el and the family were due to arrive in Israel this Thursday, for a two-and-a-half week visit. Yesterday, Micha’el finally cancelled that trip, which we are all hoping will be rescheduled for later in the year.

At the same time, my brother and sister-in-law were due to come to Israel for a six-week visit, spanning Pesach. We planned to join them, and their sons and families (from Israel and England) for the first three days of Pesach. Now they have had to accept that they won’t be here for Pesach. This would have been only the second seder that Martin and I have shared in the last 53 years, and it is a real shame that it is not going to happen. Everyone else may, I suspect, be secretly relieved – two old men reminiscing about childhood Seder nights is probably as unforgettable an experience for others as it is for us, but in a subtly different way.

Not being able to be together with Micha’el and family, and, even more importantly, Micha’el and Tslil not seeing their siblings and their children, our grandchildren not getting to know their cousins, Tslil not seeing her parents and grandmother, and at the same time not getting to be with Martin and his family, are real disappointments. However, we are trying to keep it in perspective. We already have our next trip to Portugal booked for mid-June to mid-July, and maybe Martin and Adèle will come later.

Meanwhile, we just had another alert, and this one, for the first time here in Maale Adumim since Shabbat, was followed by a siren, and, once we were safely in the shelter, one of those explosions that sounds considerably closer than it probably is. You see us here in good spirits, waiting for the all-clear. Just before that, I remembered that I had not saved this post to the cloud before going to the shelter. As I remarked to Bernice: “If the house gets bombed, I’ll have to write the entire post again.” Thankfully it didn’t, so I didn’t. Round here, that qualifies as a good day.

Welcome to this week’s post Mark II.

For the first time in a very long time, I actually had a really good idea for this week’s post, andI even wrote it. This is how it started:

Dateline: Friday, 27 February, 2026

As the gardener left yesterday, Bernice remarked: “Well, when Iran retaliates, at least the garden will be looking tidy.” No, don’t ask me; I have no idea. However, I am fairly sure that Iran will indeed retaliate, because I am fairly confident that the US (and, possibly, Israel) will attack this weekend, or, at the latest, and with historic irony, on Tuesday, which happens to be Purim, when we celebrate our last unequivocal victory over a Persian extremist who wanted to annihilate us.

Where, you may be wondering, does my confidence come from. From my remarks last week, you would infer, correctly, that it does not stem from an in-depth analysis of Trump’s public statements. It comes, rather, from my feeling that I am just starting to wash the car. Let me explain. If ever the country is in the grip of a drought, I always like to wash the car as a public service, quietly confident that, if I do wash the car, it will rain the next day. Unfortunately, living as we do in Maale Adumim, sometimes what arrives overnight is not rain but a sandstorm, which just goes to prove that man proposes and so on.

In the present case, the car I am about to wash is in fact the blog post I am about to write. Having really struggled the last couple of weeks before finally coming up with a topic at the eleventh hour, this week, indeed a couple of days ago, something happened which prompted me to say to Bernice, once we had both stopped laughing: “Well, at least I now have a topic for next week’s blog.” Shortly afterwards, it occurred to me that, rather than running the risk of forgetting the planned topic by the time I sat down to write the post, I would write it early, and enjoy a stress-free Shabbat, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. This was beginning to look like a win-win situation, until it suddenly struck me that something might happen between now and Tuesday of such significance that I would be forced to scrap the planned post and write a new one.

Of course, the only obvious candidate for ‘something of such significance that I would be forced…’ is war with Iran. So, if it happens, you can blame me. Or, possibly, thank me. We’ll have to see how it pans out.

…..

Dateline: Monday, 2 March, 2026

Well, we all know how that panned out, don’t we?

And, if we are talking about irony, that line above about me enjoying “a stress-free Shabbat, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday” has certainly come back to bite me, hasn’t it? Indeed, Shabbat, Sunday and the start of Monday have all proven so much the opposite of stress-free that I turned to Bernice this morning and said: “I really can’t run with that blog post, can I?”, and, much as she would have liked not to have to, Bernice agreed with me.

Which is why Monday morning finds me writing a new post, this time about ‘the situation’, and filing the other one away for a rainy day. It is a good enough story that it will keep for that other, rainy, but simultaneously sunnier, day.

Meanwhile, let me tell you about my week so far. For the second week running, I woke early enough on Shabbat to get to shul for the start of the service, which meant that at 8:15, when the first siren sounded, I was already deep in the first part of the service. A friend who had kept his phone on, and on him, for just such an eventuality, informed me that the siren was ‘merely’ a signal that Israel had launched an attack on Iran and was anticipating retaliation, rather than a warning of incoming missiles. Nevertheless, our service moved from the upstairs sanctuary to the downstairs hall. I don’t personally feel this is any safer, since our shul is built on a hill and both the upstairs, with its entrance to the west, and the downstairs, with its entrance to the east, are actually on street level, and both spaces have a lot of windows.

Bernice and I, and a couple of close friends, stayed to hear the Torah reading and, specifically, this week’s special reading of Zachor, the passage in which we are commanded to remember Amalek and what the Amalekites did to the Children of Israel, attacking them from the rear after they had crossed the Reed Sea after the Exodus. It is a cliché that every year, every week’s Torah reading has a particular relevance to the current events of that week. Never has the truism been truer than this week, since Haman, the villain of the Purim story, is both identified as a descendant of Amalek and recognised as the political leader of the Persian empire who sought the total destruction of the Jews. Not for the first time it strikes me that not believing in God must require a tremendous act of blind faith in the face of all the evidence, but we won’t get into that.

We all left hastily immediately afterwards, and our friends, who live towards the fashionable end of our street, invited us to join them for refreshments. As we finished our drinks, a ‘proper’ siren sounded, and we made our way to their communal shelter, shared, as ours is, between their ‘terrace’ of five houses. After ten minutes, following what were the rules of engagement the last time we faced missile bombardment from Iran, we all dispersed, and Bernice and I made our way home.

Through the rest of the day, and the night, we suffered several more raids, in each case preceded by a ‘heads-up’ from the Home Guard, warning us to stay close to, and prepare to enter, our shelters. We also gradually realised that the rules had changed, and this time we were required to stay in our shelters until the Home Guard sent a clear message that we could come out.

Bernice and I decided that this time round we would take our chances at home, rather than having to dress and put on shoes during the night and go outside to the public shelter accessed from our neighbours’ garden. Tragically, a man of 105 died of a heart attack yesterday while making his way to a public shelter, and many others have suffered more and less serious injuries on their way to the shelter.

It is not easy to explain this decision. We rationalise it as follows. Our home includes an extension added by the previous owners. This enables us to sit in our upstairs hall, under the original external wall, which is now an internal wall (a strong structural point), by the stairwell (a strong, structural point), in a space with no windows and closed doors between us and all external walls. Our step-count is also enhanced by having to climb our stairs. Listen, you take what you can!

If our house takes a direct hit from a half-tonne ballistic missile, the effect, as we saw yesterday in the tragic attack on Bet Shemesh, would be no worse than if our public shelter takes a direct hit. If (the far likelier event) debris from a hit falls near the house and we suffer a shock and shrapnel, then I am confident it will not penetrate to our inner sanctum. Anyway, what are the chances that anything will fall in Maale Adumim – he writes after two large fragments fell a kilometre away and a humongous missile casing fell about as close, causing a boom which slightly dented even our joshing bonhomie for a moment or two. We had by then grown used to the sound and window- explosions, which we are hearing far more of in Maale Adumim than we did last June.

The Home Front app on my phone allows me to monitor in real time the alerts and attacks in Zichron Yaakov as well. Esther and family have the luxury of an integral safe room that doubles as a spare room in their flat, and they are sensibly sleeping there during this period, which means they get a considerably less disturbed night. The degree to which Raphael has, reportedly, adjusted to the situation is wonderful, and simultaneously slightly depressing, depending on how you look at it.

I went to the Health clinic yesterday morning to fill my prescriptions. I didn’t bother to make an appointment, fondly assuming that nobody else would be venturing out. As I walked up to the clinic, the sirens sounded, and I spent my first 15 minutes there in the fairly large shelter, which was packed out. When we received the message that we could leave the shelter, I found I was 18^th in line for the pharmacy, and it was taking the pharmacists a ridiculously long time to open up, so I gave my number to an older man who had arrived after me, and went home to make an appointment for later. When I returned for my 4:40 appointment, the pharmacy was empty. I had obviously caught the panic-buying morning rush earlier.

My regular bridge competition yesterday morning was cancelled, but I did play yesterday evening at the home of a friend, locally. She has a safe room in her apartment, but, when the early-warning siren sounded as we were about to leave after an enjoyable couple of hours, we all agreed we would drive home rather than staying. In the event, the early warning did not lead to a siren instructing us to take shelter. (This often happens, since the early warning frequently comes before our defences have been able to determine what exact part of the country the missile is heading for.) I got home safe and sound.

Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, where many people in older neighbourhoods do not have safe rooms or even communal shelters close to their homes, many people have apparently been sheltering in the recently opened Tel Aviv and suburbs light rail, which runs underground for much of its route. While I am not old enough to remember it, footage of people flocking down the escalators on Saturday night’s television news put me in mind of the Blitz, when London Underground stations were pressed into identical service.

Until now, touchwood, tu-tu-tu, spit twice and turn round three times, we have not had a meal or a shower interrupted by a siren. Just sleep. As the above doubtless shows, living in Israel means taking all this sort of thing in your stride as part of daily life. Some might argue that that has to be a very unhealthy way to live. I think I would argue the opposite….but ask me again in a week.

Meanwhile, stay safe, Purim Sameach (we’ll be hearing the megila in a neighbourhood shelter – that’s a first) and may we all, by next week, have good news to share.