One of my favourite jazz pianists is Erroll Garner, not least because of his playfulness, which showed itself best in the elaborate solo intros he loved to weave, especially when playing a live concert with his trio. These intros were often very free-flowing, modulating through unexpected sequences of keys, often featuring such frequent and bewildering changes of rhythm and melodic line that they sometimes barely sounded like music. At a certain point, after he felt that he had teased both his bassist and drummer, and also the audience, enough, he would slide effortlessly into a classic melody from the Great American Songbook, and a ripple of applause of recognition would glide through the audience. Of course, repeated listening to these intros – knowing in advance what the song is – unlocks, for me, at least some of the mysteries of the initially impenetrable intro, so that I can enjoy the joke with him.

As I write these words, I am listening to Erroll Garner playing The Way You Look Tonight. You can hear what I’m talking about here, but please then hit the back button to return to this page, and to find out where my own elaborate intro is leading.

I owe my late mother-in-law an apology. (I actually owe her several, but there’s one I’m prepared to share with you.) Betty Joseph z”l left her home in England at the age of 87, and came on aliya (to live in Israel). After staying with us for a year, she moved into her own flat a couple of miles from us, and lived very happily until a few months into her 91^st year. She was in many ways very independent, and made several new friends and led an active social life on top of the time she spent with her daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. However, we could never persuade her to go to the corner shop if she ran out of milk or bread. We used to nag her about this: “You know what a carton of milk looks like….The shopkeeper is very friendly….It’s only two minutes down the road.” Well, Mum (and here’s where we segue smoothly into the actual song), now I get it. I understand your hesitation. I shouldn’t have criticized you until I was standing in your shoes.

Which I was, on the Wednesday morning of our first week in our new home in Portugal. Having koshered, cleaned and equipped the kitchen, we set off with Micha’el to a large supermarket 40 minutes’ drive away in Fundao, to buy food. (This took Bernice and I back 45 years, to when the French-owned Carrefour opened several hypermarkets in Britain, one of them in Caerphilly, a largish South Wales town about 40 minutes’ drive from Bridgend, where we were then living. The Carrefour hypermarket was the only construction of importance to be built in Caerphilly since the castle was completed in the 1270s, and we would drive over excitedly every two weeks or so to do our major shop.)

We were armed with a download of the Lisbon Jewish community’s list of kosher products and guidelines, which we hoped would make our task easier. Of course we didn’t expect provincial Fundao to have the range of products that can be found in Lisbon…and we were right.

You all know what it is to walk into a large supermarket you have never been in before; you have no idea where anything is, and it takes you a considerable time to get your bearings. Because of the layout (high-sided, narrow, parallel aisles), you have to walk through every single aisle to know what is there; you cannot find any high ground from which you can survey the entire shop and spot the frozen food cabinets or jam and marmalade section.

Add to that the fact that we barely had any vocabulary in Portuguese, and even Micha’el, who was very convincing in most situations, found that food was not one of his areas of linguistic strength.

Add to that the fact that we had no idea what products looked like. If you are from Israel, and therefore looking for flat packets of 50 individual sheets of baking paper, you will never notice the rolls of baking paper on the shelf, and will assume they are just more aluminium foil or cling film. If you are looking for whole chickpeas in a can, you can easily miss the array of glass-bottled chickpeas.

Finally, add to that the fact that we had no knowledge of Portuguese culinary preferences. For example, we triumphantly came home with flour for bread-baking, only to be gently told by Tslil that almost all flour in Portugal is self-raising – even bread flour – and that we needed to look for packets labelled SEM (without) FERMENTAÇÃO (…I leave the translation to you). Another example: when I got home, I discovered that the 6-pack of beer that I had bought was non-alcoholic!!! What a strange country.

Let me just say that this was a very stressful and frustrating shopping expedition, not helped by the fact that we were by this time only 52 hours from the start of our first shabbat. We eventually reached the point where we decided that the items we had so far failed to find meant less to us than the time it was taking us to fail to find them, and so we made our way to the checkout, where, thankfully, I paid by debit card.

Why do I say “thankfully”? Well, before my retirement, I travelled quite a lot in my job, and, over the course of 18 years, visited about 15 different countries for one or two weeks at a time. Because I keep kosher, I would regularly visit food shops and supermarkets, to hunt for Philadelphia cream cheese (kosher throughout the world and divine when spread into the trough of a stick of celery),as well as to buy fresh fruit and salad vegetables to eat with the tuna and crackers I always brought with me. After one big initial shop, I would, over the course of my stay, pop back for individual items. When I first started travelling, I used to pay for these small items in cash. It’s difficult to put into words how humiliating an experience this is. First of all, you reach the checkout and return the cashier’s cheery greeting with the two words that constitute about 40% of your total vocabulary in the local language. However, the cashier takes your confident “Bom dias” or “Dobré ráno” as evidence of your fluency, and then tells you the total cost of your purchases; you, of course, fail to understand. You attempt desperately to locate where on the cashier’s screen you can read the total, and it comes to, let us say, 25 lek and 47 qindarka. Until now, you have taken the coward’s way out, offering the cashier a 20 and a 10 – after all, it’s easy to familiarize yourself with the notes. However, over the last few days, this strategy has meant that you have accumulated several pocketfuls of small change, and you feel you want to get rid of some of it. And this is where your problems begin. You have not studied the coinage; the value embossed on each coin is usually placed in an unexpected position, and is often almost too small to read; you cannot trust your intuition, because, aggravatingly, the 5-qindarka coin is bigger than the 10. So, in desperation, you hold out a fistful of change, and the cashier gently picks out the coins they need. What is most unnerving about this whole experience is that they smile sympathetically while doing so, clearly questioning your mental competence.

This is bad enough in Bangkok or Brno, but when they issued new coins a few years ago in Britain without telling us, it happened to me at a cash desk where I had been happily chatting like a native to the cashier (I was a native, dammit!); this was true humiliation. For the rest of our stay, I affected a Peter Ustinovian, vaguely Slavic accent with cashiers.

The technique I eventually developed at work was always to pay by credit card, even for the most trivial purchase.

So, yes, I am really sorry, Mum, that I persistently nagged you to do a little food shopping, and failed to understand how daunting and challenging that can be in a new country, with a language, currency and culture that you know hardly anything about.