But first, the announcements.

Last Friday morning, our younger grandson (I rather like the sound of that), who up until then had been known only as the baby (or, by his three-year-old cousin on Maayan’s side, as Jo-Jo), was brought into the covenant of Avraham and given the name Raphael (not, under any circumstances, to be shortened to Rafi, as Esther (not, under any circumstances, to be shortened to Esti, as David (not, under any circumstances, to be shortened to Dave, as my late mother always made very clear) made very clear) made very clear). Raphael, as you can see, comes from a long line of people whose names are not to be shortened. (Whether his cousin will be allowed to continue to call him Jo-Jo is still under discussion.)

The name Raphael has no familial significance; it is, rather, the name that Esther and Maayan increasingly felt, during that crazy week between his birth and his brit, belonged to him. Esther and Raphael continue to do well, thank God, and they and Maayan are starting to get used to their new life together. Thank you all for your many good wishes, expressed publicly, in comments on last week’s blog, and privately. The wonderful thing about good news is that, when you share it with others and see them take pleasure in your joy, it simply redoubles your joy.

The brit itself was held in Esther and Maayan’s home; we were only 10 adults and one child (not counting a baby and a mohel, of course) just the mothers, grandparents, and two of Maayan’s siblings and their spouses. The quiet intimacy of the occasion seemed very fitting, to be honest. We brought some gooey cakes, and Maayan’s parents provided the savouries, including cheese and wine. I cannot recommend too highly having at least one of your children marry the daughter of a Frenchwoman who enjoys the pleasures of the table.

And now to this week’s other big story. As we were celebrating Raphael’s birth, I was also witnessing the death throes of my laptop. It has been showing signs of its advanced age (only five years, for Heaven’s sake!) for some months now, and I have been googling and YouTubing patches and workarounds and solutions.

First, booting and shutting down started taking a little longer, and then the laptop’s response time in general started to become a little sluggish.

Next, the battery started playing up: the laptop would show 50% of battery left, and would then shut down suddenly. I eventually bought and installed a new battery, which represented, for me, an achievement the equivalent of assembling a precision Swiss watch while blindfolded. When I switched the laptop on after installing the battery, and it didn’t explode, I kept waiting for the Cape Canaveral control centre to break out in applause and whoops.

Then I started having problems with internet connection. The laptop started failing to recognise any Wi-Fi signal. The ‘solution’ I found was to carry out a network reset and reboot, something I ended up having to do sometimes two or three times a session. Eventually, I started connecting my phone by USB cable to the laptop and using my phone as a hotspot, which worked okay, although, for some reason that I never really understood, in this configuration the laptop was unable to recognise the network printer. (If you happen to understand why this happened, please don’t feel a burning need to explain it to me.)

Last week, the laptop refused to shut down, looping round to a reboot every time.

It was around this time that I started feeling like one of those frogs that is prepared for the dining table by being boiled alive. Popular legend has it – at least among those who enjoy eating frogs, but not, I suspect, among vegetarians – that, if you gently lower the frog into a pot of cool water, then gradually increase the temperature, the frog easily adjusts to each increment, and never actually notices as the temperature reaches boiling point. At no point in the gradual decline of my laptop was the extra work (the extra workaround) that I was now required to do so burdensome as to make me stop and think that it was unacceptable.

Finally, last Wednesday morning, I was unable to switch the laptop on. I spent three frustrating hours following a couple of helpful YouTubers (one probably from West Africa and the other certainly from the Indian sub-continent) who offered the six things you can try before you have to bite the bullet and clean or replace your hard drive. I tried all six. None made the slightest difference, although in one or two cases the laptop toyed with me, pretending that something momentous was about to happen before admitting failure. Since cleaning or replacing the hard drive would involve losing all of my applications, I felt I had reached the point where I really needed to call in someone who knew what they were doing.

This, incidentally, is a point I reached with household plumbing some years ago. After the second occasion on which my attempting to fix a small problem had resulted in the need to call in a professional to fix the now larger problem my attempt had created, and after our plumber had assured me that his foreign holidays are all sponsored by people like myself, I vowed never again to boldly go round the bend. The humiliation of discovering how easily the problem is fixed is no worse than the humiliation of having to admit that my efforts have made the problem much worse, and I no longer have to get filthy dirty and/or soaking wet as a prelude to humiliation.

So, at lunchtime on Wednesday, I called a computer technician who came highly recommended. In an unexpected development, I did not have to explain to her where we live, which is in a one-way street at the very edge of one of the older areas in Maale Adumim. If you don’t live there, you never pass the street, and many people don’t know where it is. However, this lady happens to live in the street off which our street runs, so she needed no directions, and arrived within five minutes of my phone call.

Unsurprisingly, none of her quick fixes worked, and so my laptop went off on the equivalent of a gurney. She was able to copy all of my data, in preparation for a re-installation of Windows. All she needed from me (and you’ll find it hard to imagine the depth of the irony in that word ‘all’) was a complete list of the applications I had installed on the laptop, together with usernames, registration codes and passwords.

I mentioned this to a number of people the following day, so I think I can imagine the expression on the faces of at least some of you as you read that last sentence. (Some of you will, of course, be looking very smug. If you value our friendship, don’t tell me who you are.) How lucky I am that I now have a mobile phone on which I can access my Gmail account, and how doubly lucky I am that I never delete emails. By searching by name for the apps I could remember, and then searching for ‘software’, ‘download’, ‘registration’, ‘application’, I was able to locate emails for almost all of the software that I had bought.

How trebly lucky I am that my passwords are always predictable. I was able to remember virtually all of the ones I needed.

So, while we drove up to Zichron to visit ‘the baby’ (as he was then known) on Thursday, I spent a couple of hours trying to remember whether I had forgotten any vital applications in the list that I sent the technician. We stayed overnight in Zichron, and, by the time we arrived back home after the brit, the backup was complete and the reset had started. After shabbat, the technician phoned to say that everything was ready. This morning (Sunday), I have been test-driving my rejuvenated laptop, which is now noticeably faster and not at all quirky.

I have managed to reinstall three or four applications that I had forgotten about, and everything is looking good. Well, as good as it looked before. It would have been wonderful if it had been possible to copy back all of the data, all of those thousands of files in their hundreds of labyrinthine folder structures, in a slightly more methodical configuration. Unfortunately, I am still confronted by the coral reef of data that has sprung up over the years on my laptop. The technician did a wonderful job, but she is not, sadly, a miracle worker.

My takeaway from all this, of course (and you might want to make it yours as well), is to keep, in my sock drawer, a written list of all my applications, registration codes and passwords, ready for the next time something similar happens, as it doubtless will. Norton 360 LifeLock, with its password vault, is a wonderful thing, but, if I can’t reinstall Norton without the password, it’s not a lot of use.

Amidst all this excitement, we only managed to squeeze in a short video call with our big boy this week, but, as you can see, it was long enough for him to be totally absorbed, as always, in a story his Nana read. Meanwhile, I finally managed to catch our little boy with his eyes open.