I left you last week with the following closing sentence. “Something tells me I need to get a good night’s sleep if I’m going to be up to partnering Bernice in taking our threesome to the model farm and toy tractor driving track tomorrow morning.” In the event, this proved to be partly accurate and partly very wide of the mark. I had imagined that I needed my energy to keep up with the three musketeers going round a farm and pedalling toy tractors. Little did I know!

Bernice and I certainly got our good night’s sleep, in our comfortable and very quiet Airbnb. By the time we had woken, abluted, driven over to Esther and Maayan’s flat, and had a leisurely breakfast, everyone agreed that the sun was rather too high in the sky for a day at the farm with no shade. The proposed Plan B was a gymboree in the Zichron Mall, which was sold to us as a good news and bad news deal: ‘The good news is there’s efficient air conditioning; the bad news is it’s early August and the place will be full of screaming children.’

Despite the bad news, the prospect of sitting comfortably in an air-conditioned space, watching the grandsons climbing and swinging and sliding and jumping, sounded very attractive, and so we all readily agreed to Plan B. Little did I know!

After a short drive, we arrived at the mall, ‘we’ being Bernice, Tslil and myself in charge of Tao, Raphael and Ollie. Raphael led us competently through the mall to the Gymboree, and, a couple of minutes and a not unreasonable amount of money later (adults free), we were all shoeless, the kids wearing their newly-purchased rubber-dimple-soled socks, and the adults wearing the socks we had brought especially for the occasion.

Walking into the space was a revelation. Bernice and I had previously taken Tao and Ollie to a gymboree in Portugal, but this was an experience at an entirely different level. The thickness of cushioned padding around all the apparatus, the level of sound absorption, the complexity, range and sheer scale of the apparatus were all very impressive indeed. I soon discovered, however, that the afternoon was going to be a whole other good news and bad news deal than the one anticipated. The level of noise was very reasonable; such was the scale of the place that, even though there were plenty of children there, it did not feel overfull. The air-conditioning was indeed excellent.

However, while I saw many, many fathers, all of whom were at least 30 and in some cases over 40 years younger than me, sitting on the floor at the side while their children clambered over, under, through, round, along and between the apparatus, Raphael, to whom I had been assigned, had other ideas. When one of your four-year-old grandsons calls out: “Come on, Grandpa!” it would take a man even harder-hearted than me to cock a deaf’un.

Not that I followed him everywhere. He started on a cylindrical, four-storeyed installation that could be accessed through a hole I doubted I could fit through and that had a ceiling clearance at each level that barely reached my shoulders. When one of the several constantly circulating and ever-watchful attendants heard Raphael calling me to follow, and saw the sceptical expression on my face, he told me that I couldn’t manage that ascent, and that there was one round the corner that was far more adult-scale. Raphael willingly came back down and led me to the other ascent and, for the next hour, all of my energy went into keeping up with Raphael, or at least keeping him in sight.

It is astonishing how much I can still do, physically, when driven by the twin incentives of not wanting to shatter Raphael’s illusion that I can still do it, and not being able to contemplate facing Bernice and telling her that Raphael is somewhere in the two acres and four floors of the Gymboree, but I can’t say exactly where.

After about an hour, when I had settled into a rhythm and got my second wind and was feeling that I could easily handle this, Ollie joined us. (Tao, needless to say, was off in a league and a world of his own and Tslil was able to keep a much less eagle eye on him.) Eager to do everything Raphael was doing, but not always quite as capable or confident, Ollie presented me with a new challenge, of staying close enough to Raphael not to lose sight of him and simultaneously close enough to Ollie to keep an eye on him as well. Somehow, I managed to negotiate thirty minutes of being with them both, and, when the boys reached a consensus that they were ready to call it a day after a very intense 90 minutes, I could even pretend that I was disappointed to be leaving so early.

Outside again, we had sandwiches and a drink, and then the boys rode a ten-shekel automat carousel. All the boys know that, when we go to malls with them, they can sit in the cars and fire-trucks or on the horses, but neither Nana nor Grandpa is going to part with ten shekels to add the music and movement. However, on this special occasion, and with the per capita outlay coming in at less than 3.34 shekels, I pushed the boat out. Of course, nobody had a ten-shekel coin, but, these days, mind-blowingly, these penny arcade machines accept credit card payments.

While we were in Zichron, we also spent time in the pool Esther and family belong to. Less grand than the country club, this is the pool on Kibbutz Maayan Zvi, and Esther and I had a great time with Raphael and Tao.

Apart from that, we were mostly just hanging out, in the very hot August days we have been having. Leisurely evenings on the third-floor balcony, enjoying the sea breeze that reaches Zichron, and savouring Esther and Maayan’s excellent homemade pizza, felt so special, just because we were all together with nothing special to do. We left on Wednesday evening, leaving Esther and family to go camping in the north the next day, and Micha’el and family to go to the centre for a few days of mostly visits with Tslil’s family.

Meanwhile, we came home to our big, empty house and enjoyed a very quiet Shabbat. Quiet, that is, except for a brief interlude on Shabbat afternoon, when, in less than an hour, Maale Adumim enjoyed the greatest amount of rain in a single day in August ever to fall anywhere in Israel. It came out of nowhere, with no warning, and left as suddenly, and was, in the interim, spectacular. The garden looks grateful for it; the cars, rather than being left looking mud-streaked, as is normal with unseasonal rain, gleamed afterwards; our street looked like the rapids and the new tunnel to Maale Adumim flooded.

It has been refreshing, and, for us, nostalgic, to be remarking on the weather in August in Israel. However, we now seem to be back to typical August weather, and today (Tuesday) temperatures have dropped to the seasonal norm, for a change, after what has been, until now, a very hot spell.

Micha’el and family arrived back with us today. Esther and family are arriving tomorrow, and will stay until Shabbat. Then, next Tuesday, the trip ends and we revert to our routine, doubtless cherishing the memories of a very special few weeks.

“It’s wonderful there. You’ll love it!” Over the last few weeks, I must have heard these or similar sentiments from a dozen friends and family to whom I mentioned that we had booked to go away with our kids and grandkids for a couple of nights at Nof Ginosar, a hotel on the Kinneret. To give credit where credit’s due, and to be more accurate, Esther – taking matters into her own hand and pity on her decreasingly competent father – actually made the booking, and then presented us, slightly abashedly, with a fully cancellable fait accompli. We were thrilled, doubly so when we checked the hotel out online. The only adjustment we made was to change the bed and breakfast booking to half-board, which meant that, for our entire stay, we never had to leave the hotel.

I have to say that the hotel certainly lived up to the build-up our friends gave it. Despite being fully booked (we are, after all, talking about the first week of August), and despite some 95% of the bookings being for families with children, the hotel, even the pool, never seemed overcrowded or unbearably noisy. This was partly because the hotel rooms are spread over four low-rise buildings in a fairly large, lawned campus. This means that the hotel lobby is not always packed, and the guests milling around are usually milling around in the open air.

The pool had only opened weeks earlier after a major makeover, which must have included extending the surrounding seating area to include enough sun loungers for all the guests using the pool. Between the pool, a small but imaginative climbing-frame area, the Kinneret itself, only 200 metres from the hotel, the children’s games room, and entertainment in the evenings, there was enough to keep our three musketeers busy and happy all day.

Food was very plentiful, and surprisingly good both in the range of choices and the quality of the preparation. However, the highlight of the couple of days was seeing how our three older grandsons moved from cautious exploration of each other to being a team. By the time we left, Raphael and Ollie, both four years old, were best mates, and Tao, who, in many of his social groups in Portugal is one of the younger members of the group, was embracing wholeheartedly his role as leader of the gang. Raphael clearly idolises him, and the three of them form a very solid unit.

Meanwhile, Adam enjoyed demonstrating his recently acquired independent eating skills and found the entire experience a sensory delight. He is still a constant smiler, and spent the entire time melting stranger’s hearts.

On the second day, Bernice and I took the three older boys on an open-sided bus tour of the kibbutz. Clearly attracting young families, the tour was curious in that the only child-oriented activity was a visit to the cowsheds, principally to see, and stroke, the newborn calves. None of our three felt brave enough to feed the cows, but they did stroke the calves, even Tao who, after a couple of minutes, had to escape the stench of the cowshed.

The remaining 40 minutes of the hour-long tour were taken up with explanations. One such explanation was of the national water project feeding excess water into the river that forms one border of the kibbutz, from where the water flows into the Kinneret, in an attempt to brings its level back up from its current very low measure. I found this interesting, but the three boys, with a combined age of 15, were significantly less impressed.

The same was true of the account of the founding of the kibbutz, overnight, by the erection of a tower and stockade, such a construction meaning, under then Ottoman law, that the erectors could not be evicted. This particular account was soured for me by the fact that our guide, having detected my accented Hebrew and asked me where I was from originally, made me, as a representative of His Majesty’s Government, the villain of that particular foundation story. I decided not to point out to him that, had it not been for His Majesty’s Government’s Balfour Declaration in 1917, any Jewish claim to the right to resettle in the Land of Israel would have been rejected out of hand by the nations of the world.

One highlight of our stay, for me, was seeing, up close in the pool, what a competent and confident swimmer Raphael is becoming. He has taken up swimming as enthusiastically as he throws himself into everything, and it’s lovely to see.

From the Kinneret, we, and Micha’el and family, returned to Maale Adumim. After another lovely Shabbat together, they set off in our car on Sunday to stay with Esther for a few days. We followed them on Monday, in Esther and Maayan’s second car, and I am writing this on Monday evening, in the Airbnb Bernice and I are staying in, five minutes’ drive from Esther, having spent a hectic afternoon and evening in the park and at their home. When Bernice and I slipped away at 9:00PM, the three musketeers were giving an almost convincing impersonation of winding down after a pretty holidayish evening. Our bedsit certainly feels, by contrast, very peaceful.

Unfortunately, we inadvertently rather spoilt Micha’el and family’s day yesterday. On their drive up to Zichron, they stopped for petrol, and, when they had filled up, the car failed to restart. Eventually, another driver offered them a jump-start with leads, and this worked. As a result, Micha’el and Esther had to waste time today taking the car to a garage for a new battery.

I, like many of you, am old enough to remember when you maintained a battery by topping it up with distilled water, and it served you faithfully for years and years, These days, batteries are maintenance-free, cost a king’s ransom, and die, without warning, a week after the one-year warranty runs out. Exactly which aspect of that scenario represents progress evades me at the moment.

Still, I suppose I have to say that these should be our worries. I’m  certainly counting my blessings.

And now, although I am over 400 words short of my target, you’ll have to excuse me stopping here. Something tells me I need to get a good night’s sleep if I’m going to be up to partnering Bernice in taking our threesome to the model farm and toy tractor driving track tomorrow morning.

Recently, the Poetry Society of America (henceforward PSA – with apologies to all of my male readers who, like me, have a challenging prostate) canvassed more than 1,000 scholars and scribes in an attempt to find “the most beautiful word in the English language”. This being what is charmingly known in Hebrew as ‘the cucumber season’, for which the nearest English equivalent is probably ‘the silly season’, the story of this quest may well have found its way into your newsfeed, as it did into mine. There it caught my eye and triggered my curiosity, so I did some more digging.

My first question was practical: How did PSA actually conduct this search? Did they give the canvassees free range to select any word they wanted? A moment’s consideration was enough to realise that this method would be very unlikely to produce a definitive winner.

In fact, choices had to be made from a list of only 20 candidates, selected in advance by Babbel – a commercial language-learning app – and a team from PSA. The complete shortlist of 20 words presented to the voters was:

1. Aurora – A natural light display in the sky; dawn.
2. Diaphanous – Light, delicate, and translucent.
3. Elysian – Beautiful or creative; divinely inspired; peaceful.
4. Ephemeral – Lasting for a very short time.
5. Ethereal – Extremely delicate and light; heavenly.
6. Halcyon – Idyllically calm, peaceful, and happy.
7. Incandescence – Light emission as a result of being heated; glowing.
8. Luminous – Bright, shining, or shedding light.
9. Mellifluous – Sweet or musical; pleasant to hear.
10. Murmur – A soft, indistinct sound made by a person or group of people.
11. Oblivion – The state of being unaware or forgotten.
12. Penumbra – The partially shaded outer region of a shadow.
13. Petrichor – The pleasant, earthy smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell.
14. Sempiternal – Eternal and unchanging; everlasting.
15. Serendipity – The occurrence of finding valuable or agreeable things by chance.
16. Solitude – The state or situation of being alone, often peacefully.
17. Somnambulist – A sleepwalker.
18. Sonorous – Imposingly deep and full (of a voice or sound).
19. Susurrus – Whispering, murmuring, or rustling.
20. Syzygy – The nearly straight-line alignment of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system.

Looking at the list, a couple of features immediately struck me. The first was that the meanings of at least half of the words are associated with pleasant experiences, and none of them, with the possible exception of ‘oblivion’, has unequivocally unpleasant associations. It was no surprise, therefore, to learn that the organisers deliberately selected “phonetically and semantically beautiful words”.

A not-so-brief aside: I felt compelled to add the qualifier ‘possible’ to the penultimate sentence above, because I was suddenly reminded of Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-Eaters’. ‘

There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.
Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro’ the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.”

[Note also how effortlessly I have worked the newly obligatory reference to The Odyssey into this week’s post.]

This conscious choice of the organisers raises the question: To what extent does our perception of how beautiful a word is depend on the associations of its meaning, rather than its sound? Do you find a word like ‘miasma’ beautiful, even though it means ‘a foul, unhealthy atmosphere’? How about ‘putrescent’? It is interesting that, for me at least, the aesthetics of a word concern its meaning as well as its sound. Curiously, the branch of linguistics and psychology that studies the subjective pleasantness or unpleasantness of a word is known as phonaesthetics, a coining that seems to focus exclusively on the sound of the word, and ignore its connotation.

Incidentally, from the results of the survey, it would seem that most people find a combination of L, M and S sounds particularly beautiful: one might even say, mellifluous.

My second observation is that the list is packed full of words with classical roots. 12 of the 20 words come from Latin, and a further 7 from Greek (some of those via Latin). Only one comes from another language: Persian. You will of course already know from a blog post reference of mine from June 2020 that this particular word is ‘serendipity’.

I must confess to finding something rather elitist and pretentious – or perhaps I should say high-minded – about this propensity or, perhaps, bent – towards classical etymology. What, I find myself protesting, is wrong with words from Anglo-Saxon roots? Are they somehow inherently less beautiful? Or is this, rather, a case of cultural snobbery. Matt Brogan, executive director of the PSA, pointed out that: “One of the paradoxes of language is that it is easier to hear the distinctive music of a language you don’t know than one you do,”, and perhaps the PSA’s bias reflects the fact that, despite almost a millennium of influx of French and Latin vocabulary, native English speakers still feel more at home with Anglo-Saxon roots.

In a bid for the recognition of the beauty of Anglo-Saxon roots, let me offer you ‘gloaming’ (meaning twilight or dusk) and ‘gossamer’ (literally, a fine, filmy substance consisting of cobwebs spun by small spiders); ‘heartfelt’ and ‘wanderlust’.

Two final observations, before we get to the award ceremony.

First, a quarter of the words describe a particular quality of light. The presence of light, in all its multitudes of varieties and shades throughout the day and night, is arguably the greatest single beauty of the natural world, and the list reflects this.

Second, there is, for my money, one glaring odd man out in the official list of 20 words. Lacking a single L, or M, brutally scientific, with a single, repeated, harsh short vowel sound, how ‘syzygy’ made the list is beyond me. It means (as if you needed me to remind you) ‘the nearly straight-line alignment of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system’, which is a concept that almost totally lacks romanticism. You have to love that ‘nearly’: syzygy represents a failure. Neither the connotation nor the sound holds, for me at least, any beauty or music. I suppose, as my title proclaims, that beauty is indeed in the ear of the hearkener.

And now, the envelope, please, and a drum-roll might be in order.

In third place, with 10% of the votes from the over 1,500 poets, writers, and language enthusiasts, was ‘mellifluous’, describing ‘something sweet, smooth or pleasant’ (appropriately enough).

Just ahead, with 12% of the vote, came ‘ethereal’, meaning ‘otherworldly’ (also a beautiful word). I must agree that the softness and length of all three consonantal sounds and the lilting rhythm of the word make it a strong contender.

And the winner, with a whopping 17% of the vote, was ‘diaphanous’, meaning ‘characterized by such fineness of texture as to permit seeing through’. (The word, it has to be said, has more beauty than the clomping definition I offer here. Perhaps it would have been better to define it as ‘translucent’.)

What you do with this information is, as always, entirely up to you. If I have caused you, this week, to linger for a moment and smell the linguistic roses, or even the semantic coffee, then I consider that as mission accomplished. If I have also helped you to forget, for a brief moment, the lamentable state of the world, all the better.

By this time next week, we will have been bonding again, first away and then at home, with the kids and grandkids, and I may well have some tales to share. Until then, stay well, stay sane, and stay cool.