You’ll have to excuse me if I’m not my usual bubbly self this week. The truth is that I’ve just had a bit of an eye-opener and what I really want to do is crawl upstairs, bury myself under the covers and cry into my pillow, or at least lie down for a while. The sad fact is that I’ve just discovered something that makes me feel ancient.

Of course, this has been coming on for a while now: at least 16 years. When our daughter Esther first started enjoying Beatles music, I made a quick calculation. This was, let’s say, 1995, which meant that I had first started bopping to the Beatles (all right, of course I didn’t bop! I’m not even sure I know how to bop, but I can remember playing She’s Leaving Home to my mother, in the fond, but ill-considered, hope that she would agree that it was a thing of beauty and a work of genius) which means, as I was saying, that I had first become a Beatles fan about 30 years earlier.

I then thought myself back to when I was aged 12 – the age Esther was in 1995 – which would be 1962. Thirty years before that was 1932, when my parents would have been switching on the radio to give it a chance to warm up before listening to the Mills Brothers, Noel Coward, or Ambrose and his orchestra’s rendition of such popular songs as The Flies Crawled Up The Window, a song that, I must confess, had hitherto slipped under my radar. The realisation that The Beatles were, for Esther, as far distant as Ambrose for me was a chilling moment.

Bernice and I are, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, working through a collection entitled The Nation’s Favourite Poems, chosen in 1995 by listeners to a BBC television poetry programme. At the head of each work, the poet’s dates are given, and I have found it unnerving to discover that such poets as Philip Larkin (1922–1980), Stevie Smith (1903–1971) and Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) are not quite as modern as I think of them as being.

But all of this pales into insignificance in comparison with what I discovered just today.

Our story begins in 1962 (there’s that year again), when Robert Heal, a British furniture designer greatly influenced by the Danish school and its clean, linear shapes, was commissioned by Staples, a London manufacturer of mattresses, to design a range of modular shelving. His design consisted of wooden shelving supported by steel rods that slotted into the underside of the shelves and hooked onto the metal support ladders that gave the range its name – Ladderax. The range proved so successful that Heal soon added a variety of other storage units. By 1972, when Bernice and I married, Ladderax was an immensely popular and affordable storage solution. We bought a modest run of shelving and storage for our salon/lounge in Bridgend, South Wales.

At this point, I hear Bob Dylan: May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung. May you stay forever young. Bitter irony!

Then, a year later, we came to Israel immediately after the Yom Kippur War to volunteer on kibbutz for three months, where we decided that we would return to Wales, sell our house, and come on aliya the following year. In the event, we ‘postponed’ our aliya (for 12 years), but, before that happened, a local Bridgend shop was refurbishing its display units, and selling off its shop-soiled Ladderax shelving. We bought a job lot of bookshelves of two different widths and multiple ladders to add to our existing system of shelving, a drinks cabinet, a writing desk and a three-drawer chest that served us as a sideboard.

For the next 30 years, wherever we went, our Ladderax came with us. Because it is a modular system, it is incredibly flexible, and we were able to find a layout to fit our home in Bridgend, our study in Nantymoel, most of our flat in East Talpiot, and our dining room in Ma’ale Adumim.

In that last sentence, ‘we’ is something of an exaggeration. Bernice has an extraordinarily good eye for colour. She can carry a colour in her mind: on more than one occasion, she has seen earrings in a shop and bought them knowing that they were exactly the same shade as a particular outfit. I, by contrast, have to ask her whether the trousers I am wearing are blue or black.

However, every yin has its yang, and while Bernice does colour, I do layout. When we moved from the Absorption Centre to our first, three-room, flat, in Jerusalem, and took delivery of our lift, which contained most of the furniture from our eight-room house in Nantymoel, the removers refused to believe that all of our ‘stuff’ would fit into our new home. However, I had spent weeks enjoying myself with scale drawings of the flat, and cut-out shapes of the furniture, and I knew that it would. And it did!

So, for me, Ladderax was not only relatively inexpensive and endlessly adaptable. It was also (and sometimes it seemed more importantly) a wonderful construction puzzle – my very own big boy’s Lego and Meccano. Over the years, I must have filled a pack of square-ruled exercise books with trial layouts; in every case, in every home, in every room, I was able to design a layout that fitted the space or spaces we wanted to fill.

Actually, not in every case. In our current home, even I was unable to find a combination that would fill the space that we had, despite the fact that we had more shelving than we could use. We needed one shelf six inches narrower than the one we had.

Not to be outwitted, I sawed six inches off a shelf, lashed two pairs of short metal rods together to make two slightly longer rods, widened the grooves under the shelves into which the rods slipped, to accommodate the double metal and cord lashing, and hey presto, problem solved, with nobody the wiser.

And then, what can I tell you? Even though age cannot wither it, Ladderax, it transpired, was not like Cleopatra in all respects. True, at 30 years of age, it still looked pretty good, but there came a point where we felt that custom had staled its infinite variety. With some reluctance, we decided that we were ready for a change, and we bought new shelving and storage for the dining room. However, we couldn’t bring ourselves to have the Ladderax ‘put down’, like an old, faithful but ailing dog.

At that point we discovered one final benefit of Ladderax. With the exception of the cupboards (which you can stack on top of each other on the floor and use for storing linens), everything else can be dismantled quickly and easily (no screws) and stored flat on top of a wardrobe, for at least five years. At that point, we were delighted to find a new home for it, in the salon of one of our neighbour’s married daughters. She sent us a photo of it a month ago, and, at the age of 49, it’s still looking pretty good.

By chance, I stumbled across Ladderax on the internet today. It is being offered on ebay, for eye-watering prices, and there I see it billed as ‘mid-Century, retro, vintage, with manufacturer’s attribution mark’. I’m very sorry, but I am simply not prepared to be old enough to have furniture we bought new when we first married spoken about as if it were antique. When did that happen?

There’s really only one thing that might just break this mood of gloom and doom!