As I sit in front of my laptop, gazing at a blank Word document, it is 13 hours until publication zero hour, and I still seem not to have decided what to write about this week. It’s not as if there’s any shortage of possible topics. Tonight was the second night of Chanukah, and there has to be a story there. In fact, I have just stored away 300 words that are, indeed, the start of a post on Chanukah. For some reason, what I wrote doesn’t feel quite right, and I don’t think there is enough time to wrestle it into shape and then expand it tonight. I suspect the topic needs to spend more time sloshing around in my subconscious’s digestive juices.

Then, of course, there is this week’s big sporting story – Rehan Ahmed’s debut five-for and seven-wicket haul for the match at 18 years of age. (Bet you didn’t see that coming.) I imagine I will write about the transformation of England cricket’s test squad at some point, but the way their success is being sustained is making me almost prepared to risk waiting to write it until the Ashes series, so that I can extract maximum pleasure from the post, and the concomitant humiliation of my Australian readership.

Oh, and there’s another sports story I almost forgot. Having vowed to ignore the World Cup completely, I have found the drama of the tournament irresistible. However, I haven’t actually watched any of the football, so I don’t really feel qualified to write about it, although a Friday evening dinner conversation has planted the seed of an idea in my mind that, again, needs further germination. After a conversation with my brother this evening, I may even try to catch up with the final online (I can’t really believe I just wrote that). He did warn me that if I do watch it and enjoy it my expectations of what a football match should be will be so high that I will probably never find another match that doesn’t disappoint.

If I were inclined to write about politics there is more than enough going on in both my country of birth and the land that I chose to live in. However, the one is too depressing and the other is both too depressing and a can of worms that I don’t really relish opening.

I was even entertaining the idea of writing one of those much ados about nothing – this one involving toilet rolls. However, I can’t quite see how to squeeze 1500 words out of that.

Anyway, I’ve just checked back over past posts, in the hope of finding inspiration, and I’ve reread a post that ended: “Let’s take a rest, and save our last couple of days in Madrid for another time.” It occurs to me that now, an astonishing ten weeks later, may just be that ‘another time’. However, once again, I don’t really have a lot more to say about Madrid.

But wait a minute. This extended vamp has already taken me a third of the way to a post. If I devote another third to toilet rolls, which surely must be good for 400 words, that will then leave only another 4–500 for Madrid. Mission accomplished. So, with no further ado….

I may have reflected in an earlier post on the fact that when a couple are considering devoting the whole of their future lives to each other, they sometimes ask each other questions about what seem to be the important issues: Do you want to have children? What country would you like to live in? However, there are other, perhaps equally important, questions that I suspect none of us ever think to ask. In fact, it was only relatively recently that I realised the one I am going to offer you now was even an issue. Which way do you hang the toilet roll? I have never actually asked Bernice about this, but I realised a few weeks ago that she and I probably have different answers to that question. She is a wall person and I am an outward person.

Let me explain. Toilet roll holders usually consist of a horizontal cylinder onto which you thread the toilet roll. You can choose to thread the roll onto the holder so that the sheet of paper that hangs down is facing the person sitting on the toilet, or is on the other side of the roll-holder from the person. These two options are illustrated below.

It seems patently obvious to me that the correct arrangement is as in the right-hand image above. To have a single plane sheet presented to view, rather than the workings of the roll, and to have the ‘top’ sheet closer to the user, rather than further away, behind the roll, seems to me to make both aesthetic and ergonomic sense.However, unless I am much mistaken, Bernice hangs toilet rolls as per the left-hand image. This means that sometimes, if I am not paying attention, I spin the roll in the wrong direction, and roll up the paper rather than unrolling it. It also means that I have to concentrate harder in order to take hold of the paper, at a time when my concentration is focussed elsewhere.

Since I made this discovery about our domestic arrangements, I have not stayed in a hotel or Airbnb, and so I haven’t been able to check first-hand whether my feeling that the right-hand arrangement is the conventional one is accurate. I’m banking on you, dear reader, to confirm my suspicions, or, alternatively, to put me right.

Editor’s Note: When Bernice reached this point in the post (she is, of course, my first reader and vetter every week) she declared, in no uncertain terms, that she always follows the right-hand method. I can think of only three possible explanations for this state of affairs: either she is gaslighting me; or one or the other of us has a multiple personality disorder, and our alter ego follows the left-hand method; or (and this is the most worrying scenario) we have a toilet-roll poltergeist in the house.

Which brings us back, somehow, to Madrid, and our last day before Shabbat. We had booked tickets for a tour of the Royal Palace, in the afternoon. After breakfast, I wanted to explore more of the city on foot, but Bernice elected to have a recharging morning in the air-conditioned room. I set off in the hope of reaching the river, but in fact didn’t quite make it.

My walk took me through the Thai quarter. I’m not sure whether I looked particularly tense, but as I passed every doorway along one particular street, one nice young Thai lady after another offered me a massage. From there, I found my way to an avenue lined with stalls selling second-hand books, where I spent a pleasant hour deciphering titles in Spanish and leafing through glossy coffee-table artbooks.

Back in the hotel, we had a bite to eat, then made our way to the palace, where, once again, our tour was greatly enhanced by an excellent audio-visual guide accessed through a phone app. This visit was something of an exercise in humility, because the audio guide went to great pains to stress that the castle had a longer and more extravagant frontage than, had more rooms than, had more square metres of floor space than, and was altogether grander than, Buckingham Palace. Not for the first time in Madrid, I was struck by the similar heritage of British and Spanish imperial history and royalty.

After an early meal at our favourite vegan restaurant, we retired to the hotel to shower and change and bring in shabbat with a very modest Friday night meal. We spent the next twenty-five hours resting, reading, eating, sleeping, and gathering our strength for the drive on Sunday to Penamacor and our reuniting with the family.

Fast forward five months, and Raphael is certainly enjoying one of his Chanukah presents.