If this turns out to be a very slight piece, I hope that, in the spirit of the (Jewish) season, you will forgive me. This has been a busy few weeks, what with Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and my brother and sister-in-law arriving for the first time in three years (blame that three-year absence, principally, on Iran and, equally, His Majesty’s Foreign Office, with its guidelines on foreign travel making travel insurance unobtainable for much of the time).

Anyway, they are now in Israel, and we hosted them last Shabbat, which was wonderful. We had a lot of catching up to do, but we managed to cover a reasonable amount of the agenda. Other opportunities are planned for later.

The plan was that, after Yom Kippur, I would be able to devote today to writing this week’s blog post. However, I had to go and select my lulav and etrog this morning, and then, after exercising and before showering, it seemed only sensible, as well as very much approved by tradition, to at least start ‘erecting’ our sukkah. As I have mentioned (‘gloated’, some might say) before, our pergola functions as our sukkah roof, and the house wall, the public shelter wall, and our dividing wall with our neighbour provide the required three walls for the structure to qualify as a sukkah. All that I need to do is remove and replace a single line of slats from the pergola, and, by that act, I have fulfilled the obligation to erect a temporary dwelling.

Bernice and I discussed my going onto the roof of the pergola, as I did last year, to remove the slats, since our pergola is very high and not reachable by our ladder. Inspired by the increased walking I did when we lent our car to Micha’el and Tslil during their month in Israel, and appalled by how out of shape I was, I started a daily regimen of exercises for the senior citizen. Combined with keeping up the walking, this means that I now feel in slightly better physical shape than a few months ago. We’re not talking Kevin Spacey in American Beauty here, but a little less couch potato.

In light of this, and much to my surprise, Bernice agreed that I could go up on the pergola roof, and, if I felt comfortable, I could do the raising and lowering of slates required. I agreed that, if I felt at all unsure, I would swallow my pride and come down. In the event, both the pergola and I turned out to be in better shape than might have been the case, and I breezed through the operation in a few minutes.

Even so, all those odd jobs have a way of adding up, and, by the time we sat down to breakfast, it had actually become brunch. I planned to start writing immediately afterwards, my only problem being that, as seems to be happening with increasing frequency lately, I had no ideas for a topic. In the spirit of the age, I gave the handiest AI on my phone – Copilot – my blogsite address, and asked it to read my posts and suggests a topic for today. Within seconds, I had a list of eminently sensible topics, all very accurately reflecting the flavour of my posts. However, and, perhaps, unsurprisingly, the list was rather uninspired and uninspiring, I find myself hoping that this is a reflection more on CoPilot’s limitations than on the unimaginativeness of my blog.

Just as I was about to lock myself in the office and sit in front of the blank laptop screen, Bernice reminded me that I have a routine specialist appointment tomorrow, and the specialist will want to see my latest blood test results and compare them to the previous numbers. I find the most useful way to present this to the specialist is to create an Excel spreadsheet with the two, or even more, sets of results side by side.

Fortunately, it is easy to download an Excel of each separate blood test result from our health fund’s website, and to combine those separate files into a single sheet. Of course, since the nurse filled 11 separate phials of blood last week (a personal record for me), I had to download 11 files and combine them into one sheet, which took a little time. I then faced the problem that my last couple of sets of tests (the specialist likes to see a full history) did not cover all of the tests I did this time, so I had to write a formula to allow me to match the relevant values on the spreadsheet. I know, of course, that AI could do all of this for me. I also know that it would take me a number of frustrating iterations to find a way to express clearly what I wanted from AI. I will, I suppose, have to face that learning curve at some time in the future, but early this afternoon didn’t really feel like that time.

Creating the Excel also presented another challenge. The test results online are presented in Hebrew format, reading from right to left. Name of test/Result/Normal range (or, rather, Normal range/Result/Name of test. The Excel generated by the site is, curiously, displayed from left to right. (If the one or two of my readers who can explain to me why this is so, they are welcome to try, but I don’t promise to stay awake.) I wanted to switch this to display from right to left. This is straightforward in Excel, but it raises some interesting questions. If you are displaying for a Hebrew reader a range of normality, should the minimum be on the right, so that it is read first, or on the left.

This is a question I first wrestled with when I started running the British Council’s English Language learning centre in Jerusalem. We were advertising evening courses. In a Hebrew-language advert, should a course that runs from 7 to 9 on Sunday (ימי א’) evenings be presented like this:

ימי א’ 19:00-21:00

or like this:

ימי א’ 21:00-19:00

If your eye is reading from right to left, it seemed to me natural to start with the starting time; in other words, to put the starting time on the right, so that the eye sees it first.

Even though we had not been in the country many years at this stage, I already knew that the correct address for such a question, if I wanted an authoritative answer, was the Academy for the Hebrew Language, a body less draconian than its French equivalent, but, nevertheless, the ultimate authority on questions of usage and vocabulary. Unsatisfyingly, the answer I received was that both styles are used. In the end, I chose the second option as less challenging for the reader, and nobody ever questioned it.

It strikes me now that there might be situations where the expression of the time-frame might be ambiguous. If, for example, a particular medical test was conducted using a very expensive piece of equipment, of which a hospital could only afford one, tests might be carried out 24 hours a day. If a test took 12 hours, there would be no way to know whether 09:00-21:00 meant that the test started or ended at 09:00. In such a case, I suppose one would have to write: From 21:00 to 09:00, or: From 09:00-21:00

Anyway, by the time I had manipulated and sanity checked the data in my Excel, and printed out the copy I need tomorrow, it was mid-afternoon, and I still had no idea what I was going to write about today.

Which is why there is no blog post this week.

And, for those who care, the relevance of this week’s title is a line coined not by the long list of politicians who stole it at various times in the 1980s, but, apparently, by Bob Thaves, an American cartoonist of whom I confess I had never heard. In 1982, he drew a cartoon in which three characters are looking at a sign for a “Fred Astaire Film Festival”. One character says the following: “Sure he was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, … backwards and in high heels.”

With Yom Kippur behind us, it is, astonishingly, as every year, already time to wish you Chag Sameach for Sukkot, which begins this Friday evening. Weather permitting, next week’s post will come to you from our Sukkah. (At this stage, it isn’t easy to guess whether excessive heat or a rain shower is more likely to make that an unrealistic hope.)

There are weeks when I know some days in advance what I will write about in my blog. In these, idyllic, weeks, my walks to and from shul on Shabbat afford me at least 50 minutes to play with the idea and start to map out how the post will flow.

Then there are weeks when I have no idea what I will write about, until, on Monday or Tuesday, I sit in front of the laptop and wait for the muse to inspire me. While occasionally a little nerve-wracking, this is also very often exhilarating, and sometimes results in what I judge to be among my best pieces.

And then there are weeks like this week. Shabbat and Sunday were, of course, Rosh Hashana, and my mind was occupied with issues even more pressing than my blog. So it was that, on Sunday evening, I opened up my phone to catch up with the news, and discovered the news item that clearly had to be the subject of this week’s blog.

On Motzei Shabbat, 12 September, the British film NAZA won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival.

That fact, the incidental facts around that central fact, and the worldwide attention that that fact has attracted, make it impossible for me not to write about the film. In addition, I feel that the moment to write about is now, and not a few weeks down the line, even though I have not yet seen the film. I have, however, seen a two-minute trailer, and I have read a considerable number of reviews, opinion pieces, and news stories about the film and its screening, and I believe that, confining my comments to what I am able to learn from all that, I have a couple of observations to make that may be worth reading.

The film itself is British, produced by The Guardian and James Wilson’s JW Films. (Wilson is a long-time collaborator of Jonathan Glazer, the film’s executive producer.) The film’s directors – Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor – previously directed No Other Land (2024), an Oscar-winning documentary about the Israel Defense Forces and settler violence in the West Bank, To note that all of the above are long-standing outspoken critics of Israel’s policy in Yehuda and Shomron and Gaza is not to invalidate their right to make the film. I would certainly not want to live in a country where it was illegal to make a film criticising government or army policy. However, it is worth going into the cinema recognising that all those involved with the production have an agenda, and ensuring that your critical faculties are appropriately sharpened.

The film consists almost entirely of one-on-one interviews conducted by Yuval Abraham with individuals who are presented as members of Israel’s military and intelligence community, who describe the procedure the IDF follows when planning and executing targeted strikes designed to kill individual terrorists in Gaza. I have, in the previous sentence, stated that this is how they are ‘presented’, because the objective observer has to take on trust from the filmmakers that we are watching genuine personnel. This is because all of the participants appear anonymously, with their faces blurred and their voices digitally altered so that they are unidentifiable.

I certainly have no evidence that the participants are not genuine, but, on the other hand, neither I, nor anyone else, has any way of verifying their genuineness. The filmmakers ask the audience to take their word, both their claims and their conclusions, on trust. I have seen them called whistleblowers, but I would argue that that is an inaccurate term. Whistleblowers may seek protection, or go into hiding, but they do not act anonymously.

Certainly, no court of law would consider ‘evidence’ presented in such a form. Again, I am not claiming that the participants are not genuine. However, I would certainly argue that any review of the film unquestioningly talking about the ‘proof’ it presents, and accepting all of the narrative at face value, reveals a pre-disposition to believe the worst.

The same pre-disposition was demonstrated by the audience at the film’s premiere in Venice. Free Palestine banners and flags were unfurled after the screening, and the record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation the film received was surely a reflection of an audience flourishing its politically correct sensibilities. The 80-minute documentary may be good, but objectively 25-minute standing ovation good? I somehow doubt it.

I want to make two specific points. The first concerns the film’s title. This is a British production and, although all of the interviews are conducted in Hebrew, with English subtitles, the title – NAZA – is the transliteration, rather than the translation, of a Hebrew acronym. Naza is the IDF’s acronym for Nezek Agavi, collateral damage. I find myself wondering why the filmmakers chose to keep the acronym, initially incomprehensible to any potential English-speaking audience, rather than simply calling the film Collateral Damage. I have spent the last couple of days trying, and failing, to rid myself of the ugly suspicion that NAZA was simply too wonderful a gift for the filmmakers to spurn, with its twin echo of Gaza and Nazi.

The second point is a broader one. Let me accept, for the moment, that the account given in the trailer I watched is accurate. Israel deploys AI and surveillance techniques that enable the quantification of all collateral damage that can be expected to be sustained in the elimination from the air of any given terrorist target. The interviewee in the trailer states that sometimes a potential 20, 30, and even 300 civilian deaths were authorised in a single attack. On one occasion, he claims, the figure authorised was 500. (You can view the trailer here.)

The fact that even The Guardian has never claimed a civilian-to-terrorist ratio greater than 5:1 certainly suggests that the figures quoted above (20, 30, 300, 500:1) presumably apply to the killing of a very, very small number of senior Hamas leaders.

The reviews that I have read of the film take this as evidence of the indefensible savagery of Israel’s conduct of the war. Online commentators take it as evidence of Israel’s conducting of genocide against Gazans.

What this clip in fact demonstrates is that Israel follows the Geneva Convention: the international rules of conduct of conflict that Israel is a signatory to and that Israel has also adopted as domestic law. When conducting a war, countries are required to estimate the collateral damage expected to result from any action, and to make a judgement as to whether the military benefit of the action justifies the estimated collateral damage. From the testimony of the interviewee, that appears to be exactly the procedure that Israel followed. It also clearly demonstrates that Israel is not conducting genocide. A country carrying out genocide would not have a maximum authorised civilian collateral damage figure; indeed, the higher the collateral damage, the better. Such a country would have no interest in accurately estimatingcollateral damage.

There is, of course, a second discussion that needs to be had. Even allowing that the IDF (or the political leadership) considered the acceptable maximum collateral damage for each action, was their final conclusion morally acceptable? To answer that question, of course, requires knowing Israel’s assessment of the realistic potential threat of the specific target. This is not a question that the film addresses, and, if my reading of some of Israel’s official responses is correct, it is not a question to which the personnel interviewed in the film would have had the answer. The intelligence assessment of specific targets would have been beyond their rank.

It certainly seems that the moral questions that surround this whole issue are not ones that the narrow remit of the film addresses. Given the political agenda of the filmmakers, it is easy to understand why they chose the narrow remit that they did. It is also very probable that they all too correctly calculated how the film, even with its narrow remit, would be received by the audience in Venice and by far too many people around the world.

For a fuller and very thoughtful reflection on all of the issues raised by NAZA and its reception, I encourage you to listen to Haviv Rettig Gur’s analysis on his podcast, which you can watch here.

As the calendar hurtles us ever faster towards the new year that starts this Friday night, I feel as though I owe you some kind of a summation of 5786, the year we have just lived through. However, I don’t feel remotely equipped to sum up this past year, not least because I spent most of this summer not following the news but rather focussing on family matters. I realise that I never wrote about Micha’el and family’s departure. I suspect that was because it wasn’t easy to say goodbye to them all, not knowing when we would all be together again.

Since they left, Bernice and I have booked our next trip to Portugal, for mid-November to mid-December, but it will, I fear, be rather longer before all ten of us sit round a table together again. However, their almost-five-week trip gave us plenty of opportunities to do just that, and we have plenty of really good memories to cherish, and even some great photos to keep those memories fresh.

When I did resume following the news, it quickly became clear that we are well into the season of celebrating Israel’s thriving democracy. In another seven weeks we face a general election, after this government has, remarkably and uncharacteristically, run its full term. In a part of the world dominated by dictatorships and coups, Israel should be celebrated as a democracy, However, the last week or so has reminded us that even that least bad of all political systems can be, at times, difficult to stomach.

Israel’s voting system is one of nationwide proportional representation. The electoral threshold is currently set at 3.25%, with the number of seats a party receives in the Knesset being proportional to the number of votes it receives. If a party fails to meet the electoral threshold, the votes it received are distributed among all of the parties that did meet the threshold, in proportion to the number of votes each of those parties received. So, if three parties contest the election, and Party A receives 65% of the votes cast, Party B receives 33%, and Party C receives 3%, the votes Party C received will be redistributed, Party A receiving another 2% and Party B another 1%.

There are a total of 120 Knesset seats, which means that a party that receives 5% of the total vote will win 6 seats.

One thing that results from this system is that, in the weeks after an election is announced and before the deadline for registering parties is reached, new political parties tend to sprout like mushrooms after rain. No end of people – retired senior military figures, successful businessmen, social campaigners, some considerably less-than-public figures –  allow themselves to be persuaded that they can expect to garner 5% or more of the popular vote, and gain a voice in the Knesset.

This situation inevitably leads to an unhealthy amount of horse-trading, with major party leaders selling realistic slots on their candidate list in return for a smaller party joining the behemoth. Many of those who offer their party’s support are more easily able to do so because they are single-issue parties, with a certain amount of ideological flexibility.

As a result, it is easier to determine, in many cases, who a minor party leader will sell his allegiance to and who he will not, than it is to know what the minor party’s position is on, say, health or education reform. You must also remember that, on what is perhaps the most important issue in Israel in 2026 (as, indeed in 1956, 1966, and most years since), there is scarcely any daylight between the party leaders. On the question of security, it is not easy to find anyone outside Israel who reads the map as Israel does, but, inside Israel, it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who reads it differently. The rest of the world talks as if the two-state solution is within arm’s reach. Israels know that it is as good as dead in the water, at least for the foreseeable future.

All of the above is by way of a background that most of you almost certainly do not need. What I actually want to talk about this week is a particularly ugly consequence of the fact that there is not a lot of ideological disagreement between many of the parties, and, therefore, little material for policy debate. If you can’t argue about issues, what’s left? Why, personalities, of course, and the last week or so has thrown up two violent character assassination attempts.

The first was from Sara Netanyahu. In many democracies, the Prime Minister’s partner is expected to play a passive supporting role, principally when hosting foreign leaders. In Likud, Sara Netanyahu is, arguably, the eminence grise, a very significant influence behind the throne. At the very least, she is a woman with strong opinions, which she voices behind closed doors and sometimes in front of them.

Last week, she was, I suspect, selected by those who are running Likud’s election campaign to drop a bombshell. She was being interviewed on Channel 14, a firmly pro-Government television channel. (The Netanyahus would not agree to be interviewed on any Israeli media outlets that were not supportive of the Government. That is definitely not their style of democracy.) During the course of the interview, she referred to the well-documented story of Yair Golan’s actions on October 7.

Golan is the leader of the left-wing Democrats party, and also a former deputy chief of staff and reservist major-general. Soon after hearing about the Hamas onslaught on October 7, 2023, around 8AM, he put on his army uniform, drove to his old HQ at Home Front command, got issued with his old rifle and ammunition, and immediately headed south in the direction of the Nova festival. Over the next hours, he was contacted by, first, his sister, and then two other separate people, all sending him pin locations of family or friends who were hiding from the terrorists near the festival site. He located and evacuated these three groups.

Reflecting on this action, Sara Netanyahu said: “When you’re a military man of such high rank, claiming that you fought on October 7, already early in the morning you were there, already dressed and ready at a very, very early hour when others didn’t know, such as the prime minister, Who is the prime minister anyway to know that a war is breaking out? Why let him know?”

There is quite a lot to unpack here. First, there is the insinuation, unsupported by even a shred of evidence, that Golan had advance notice of the Hamas attack and chose to make political capital out of that advance knowledge by contriving to arrive at the site of an attack by Hamas hordes armed only with a rifle, before significant army forces arrived. This insinuation is clearly deranged, making no logical sense at any level. Are we to believe that Golan was in league with Hamas, or that the army chose to keep information from the Prime Minister and not to act on that information by mobilizing forces, but to inform Golan?

Then, there is the further conclusion. If I know that this story is nonsensical, then so does the Likud campaign manager. If he allowed Sara Netanyahu to launch the story, then he (or if Sara acted without consulting him, then she) must have contempt for the intelligence of the undecided voters, and must believe that they will, on the basis of this ludicrous accusation, vote for Bibi.

Golan responded by demanding that Sara Netanyahu issue an unequivocal public apology within 24 hours and arrange for financial compensation to be donated in full to survivors of the Nova music festival. He further announced that, if she does not comply, he intends to sue her for defamation.

Sara reportedly rejected Golan’s demands, and issued demands of her own. She reportedly called on Golan to publish a public apology and clarification within 24 hours and pay NIS 100,000 shekels in compensation within 48 hours.

Bibi, meanwhile, was quick to release a video, stating: “I do not think there was a betrayal on October 7. There was a major failure. All the signs were there, and they decided, based on a miscalculation, not to anger Hamas — not to wake me up and not to attack in advance. That was a failure, but it was not a betrayal, and my wife also did not say there was a betrayal. That is simply nonsense.” One more cynical than I would claim that this video was the premeditated and choreographed follow-up to Sara’s punch.

One more Machiavellian than I would claim that, on a day when the news included the failure of multiple water desalination plants in Israel and rising energy prices, Sara Netanyahu ensured that the lead news story would be one that eventually drew everyone’s attention to the theory that the defence establishment deliberately kept from the Prime Minister the suspicions of a planned Hamas attack, fearing that he would order pre-emptive action at the Gaza border.

While we were still recovering from this story, ex-Prime Minister and opposition party leader Naftali Bennett endorsed a Haaretz report that, days before the attack, the premier received a personal warning from United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed about Hamas’ plans.

While Bennett offered no explanation as to how he knew the story was true, he went on: “Netanyahu bears personal and direct responsibility for the failure that led to the deaths of thousands of Israelis on his watch. He did not go to the field, did not warn the heads of the security system, did not prepare Israel for the attack, and did not convene the cabinet.” Instead, Bennett alleged, Netanyahu continued strengthening Hamas by transferring more funds and promising additional permits for Palestinian workers in response to outside pressure.

In a certain light, I should perhaps celebrate the fact that I live in a democracy where the press, and an ex-prime minister, can freely accuse the Prime Minister of such a colossal error of judgement. As the same time, I must surely bemoan the fact that the public standing of the Prime Minister is such that the newspaper and the ex-prime minister can believe such a thing of the prime minister. (Or, at least, claim to believe it.)

All in all, these last days have left me with a foul taste in my mouth. I can only hope that 5787 brings the country fresh, idealistic, political faces. I wish all my readers a happy and healthy New Year. May you find in this period an opportunity for spiritual refreshment, and may we all sleep safe in our beds in this coming year.

Last week, I kept you waiting until the final paragraph of the post before explaining the cryptic title: ‘How Much does a Hole Cost?’ This week, I am changing this around, and starting with the explanation of the title, and then going on to explain its significance to this week’s topic.

My late father, as many of you know, owned a delicatessen and grocer’s shop in the large Jewish London suburb where we lived. The shop was a well-known and well-loved part of the community, as the long queues outside the shop on a Sunday morning demonstrated. There were, I am sure, two main reasons for this: first, the delicatessen items that my father sold were second to none.

All of his specialist items came fresh, daily, from suppliers in London’s East End that he had grown up with, and Dad was a master slicer of smoked salmon. When we buy smoked salmon in the supermarket these days, and discover that 200 grams yields 4 slices (or, more accurately, wedges), I cry. Dad would have conjured at least eight wafer-thin slices out of the same 200 grams, allowing you to savour the flavour without being overwhelmed by a fatty texture.

Similarly, even on a good week, the shmaltz herring I buy in the Machane Yehuda shuk – Jerusalem’s street market – is no match for the shmaltz Dad sold, and though I don’t do a bad job of cleaning and slicing the fillets, I know I’m barely fit to wash up Dad’s herring knife.

The second reason for the popularity of the shop was Dad’s broad smile and genuine pleasure in greeting and serving people. My brother told me last week that just recently a woman he does not know, on hearing his surname, recalled how much she had enjoyed shopping at Brownsteins and what a lovely man my father was (and that’s almost forty years after Dad retired).

Sunday morning was the busiest time of the week in the shop. Despite Britain’s restrictive Sunday trading laws at the time, Dad was allowed to open to sell fresh perishable foodstuffs on Sunday, and, between 8:00 and 1:00 on a Sunday there would be a constant stream of customers.

Every week Dad bought the same range of bread: brown bread (rye, with caraway seeds), black bread (like a pumpernickel), bulkas (a brioche-like loaf), platzels (known in Israel, inexplicably, as bagels, rather than as bialys), beigels (that’s how we spell them, east of the pump – Aldgate pump, that is, a historic former water pump dating from 150 years ago and notionally considered to mark the Western edge of London’s East End), knot rolls. Dad would buy the same quantities every week, but, on some weeks, he would sell out, while, on other weeks, he would be left with a pile of unsold bread.

The staff always had a superficially convincing explanation for bread sales. If the weather was good, and the bread sold out, it was obviously because everyone was going on a picnic. If the weather was good and bread sales were poor, it clearly meant people were out for the day and planning to eat out. If, however, the weather was bad and sales were good, it was a sign that everyone was staying in and needed to eat at home. Finally, if both weather and bread sales were bad, then obviously, knowing they could not be out in the open air, people were planning to drive to a restaurant to escape being trapped at home.

Dad’s explanation was much more scientific. Bread sales on a Sunday, he maintained, were a complete mystery: unpredictable and inexplicable. Given the size of his Sunday customer base, that seems statistically plausible.

All of which serves to explain why, in our family, any unpredictable outcome always invites the comment: “It’s like bread sales on Sunday.” Well, let me tell you that your response to last week’s post was like bread sales on Sunday.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much, if any, response to the post. Aside from it being a niche subject, it would, I assumed, exclude the distaff side of my readership. I also, in my naivete, was not expecting any of my readers – the majority of whom are closer to my age than my children’s – to disagree with the sentiments I expressed. However, to my astonishment, it proved to be a post that provoked a larger and quicker response than any of my posts has for some time. Clearly urination is a topic close to your hearts (though anatomically closer to your kidneys and bladders).

If you check back on my website to see whether anyone has left a comment (don’t worry; I am not deluded enough to imagine that anybody actually does this), you will know that three people commented publicly. It is true that only one exposed his preferred underpant technique for urination. The other two made more general and less personal comments, but nevertheless.

However, no fewer than four people wrote to me privately, within a couple of hours of the post going public. In addition, one reader linked to my blog in his own weekly blog post, and he tells me that the only response he received to his post last week was a comment on my post. Clearly, with my choice of subject matter last week I touched a nerve – metaphorically, I hasten to add – and I would like to share, under the veil of strict anonymity, some of their insights.

One friend told me that her husband calls underpants with no front opening ‘uncircumcised’. I love the fact that that is not only a neat and accurate practical description; it also offers a moral judgement on the heathen items themselves.

Another friend, who revealed that he has always pulled down the waistband, offered the rallying cry: ‘Free Willy!’, a slogan that suggests an advantage of the pulldown method that hadn’t previously occurred to me. The pulldown does, I accept, offer freedom of movement, and may therefore be more convenient and comfortable. It also, I now realise, makes hands-free urination an option, which may, one can only hope, account for the staggeringly high proportion of public convenience users who choose not to wash their hands after urination.

This very morning, after exercising, I uncharacteristically went to the toilet before changing out of my drawstring shorts and no-front-opening underpants. (I have just started exercising daily after a long period of couch potatodom and, when exercising, I wear the holeless underpants that I bought by mistake years ago.) In the light of all that I have written and read on the subject in the past week, I decided to try the pulldown method. While I cannot imagine adopting it other than when exercising, and other than in the privacy of my own privy, I will concede that I did feel a certain element of ‘Free Willy’.

Which is slightly unnerving. The conviction with which I set out my position last week should certainly not allow me to experiment with pulldown, let alone see any merit in it. I am left wondering which other of what I take to be my foundational beliefs can be so easily undermined. Can I really have been on this earth 76 years and still not know where I stand on urination? It seems I can no longer feel the solid ground of self-knowledge underfoot. Perhaps Mr Bean really is funny and Lord of the Rings is a great work of literature. I certainly hope not, but I’m not quite as certain as I was a week ago.

And on that unsettling note I think I will leave you for another week. But, just before I go, let me share with you a link to a video sent to me by a reader, which, I hope, will put this topic to bed for good: the gentleman’s definitive guide to urination techniques. You can view the utterly respectsble video here.