Bernice and I went up to Zichron yesterday, as we have been doing every Sunday, to spend the day with Esther and Raphael. Esther’s very good about this, playing along with our charade of being keen to help her out during Maayan’s long day at work, even though anyone with an ounce of sense can see that Esther and Maayan already have this parenting malarkey down pat, and need no help at all, and all we’re really interested in doing is having cuddles with the baby. He, for his part, is unbelievably obliging, convivial and snuggly. Even when the outside temperature is in the 30s, as it was yesterday, and Raphael is like a very soft and gurgly hot-water bottle, still nothing can beat a good cuddle. The Welsh have a lovely word for it – ‘cwtsh’ (pronounced more or less to rhyme with ‘butch’). Happy days!

As I know I’ve mentioned before, on the journey up, while Bernice drives, I usually read aloud. As it happens, yesterday we finished reading Margaret Attwood’s The Testaments. It is such a good read that we had been trying to eke out the last pages, and only read one short section a day; however, with a journey of almost two hours in front of us, and the novel’s denouement tantalizingly close, we could not resist pushing on to the finish. Quite apart from the fact that we both thought it was a wonderful book, I’m not sure I have enjoyed reading aloud so much since I used to read Jane Austen to Bernice when we were first married. Indeed, the deliciousness of the reading was a very similar experience: one of the three narrators of the story has an ironic tone worthy of Austen herself. I was particularly struck by how effortlessly Attwood balanced delicious ironic humour with a nail-biting adventure story, all within a chilling yet cerebral novel of ideas.

Our return journey was, as usual, in the dark, which precluded reading – not that we would have wanted to start a new book so soon after finishing The Testaments. I suspect we may now have to reread The Handmaid’s Tale, to refresh our memory (as we should probably have done before starting The Testaments). However, I think we need a break before we plunge back into Gilead, and I rather fancy Bill Bryson’s further look at Britain, The Road to Little Dribbling. I’m a little concerned, after reading some reviews, that it will prove more curmudgeonly and less affectionate than the original Notes from a Small Island (‘rather like travelling round Britain with your grumpy father-in-law’, wrote one reviewer), but it’s still very likely to be laugh-out-loud and read-out-loud funny. Probably about as far from Gilead as it is possible to get, and probably not as many distinct voices for me to attempt to remember. (How did Stephen Fry ever manage the entire cast of the Harry Potter audiobook heptalogy?)

On our journey home, we initially resorted to talking, which we still occasionally do, although, to be honest, after almost fifty years, we feel we’ve said most of what we wanted to say to each other. So, after a while, I found a Joni Mitchell concert album on Spotify, including a couple of very unusual songs, one a capella, the other with piano accompaniment, both setting words to melodic lines by Charlie Mingus. For the piano accompaniment, Mitchell has one of the most one-upmanship intro lines I’ve ever heard: ‘I’d like to bring Herbie Hancock on’. I was struck, as I increasingly am, by how much fascinating music I have not become familiar with over the last 60 years. It is inevitable, I suppose, but no less tantalizing, that every path you take, in the arts as elsewhere, involves not taking at least one other path. At the risk of discovering that I’m the only person here who doesn’t know the album, here is a link to the second of these songs recorded Live at the Bread and Roses Festival 1978.

While we were chatting with Esther about the journey, she reminded us that when she and Micha’el were children we had a set of songs that we only sang in the car on long journeys. These were almost all, not surprisingly, songs with multiple verses, including Ilkla Moor baht ‘at (no complaints about misspelling, please: that particular rendering of Ilkley has been chosen after considerable research online). This Yorkshire folksong (although originally a Kentish hymn tune) is, of course, perfect wholesome family fun, being a tale of love and death with a quasi-cannibalistic twist at the end that never fails to appeal to the streak of savagery that runs through every healthy child.

We usually followed that up with Where Will We Be in a Hundred Years from Now, a song so ghoulish that you can probably be arrested these days for teaching it to your children.

Then there was Be Kind to Your Web-footed Friends, an early introduction to surreal lyrics, meta-referencing and, as each verse was pitched higher, falsetto singing.

When we tired of singing (which we seldom did) there was always I-Spy to fall back on. On one memorable occasion, when Micha’el was still too young to know his letters or, indeed, to fully grasp the nuances of the game, he announced, when it was his turn, that ‘I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with green!’ After several minutes of increasingly desperate guessing, when we had exhausted all of the obvious ideas – grass, trees, apple, frog – (whether we could actually see them or not) and were clutching at such straws as ‘a wide, toothy green’, we eventually all gave up, and asked Micha’el what he was thinking of. It was at this point that it became clear that he hadn’t actually grasped that the game required him to be thinking of something.

As the years passed, we reached what was, for me, a sweet spot: a window of opportunity when we could play the Hebrew game הוא והיא. For the benefit of those of you who don’t live in Israel, let me explain. All nouns in Hebrew are either masculine or feminine and, typically, feminine nouns end in an ‘ah’ sound. So, for example, ‘ish is ‘a man’ and ‘isha’ is ‘a woman’. The game consists of finding a pair that sound like a masculine and a feminine noun formed from the same root, but that are, in fact completely unconnected, and then offering a verbal description of each. The remaining players have to guess, from these descriptive clues, what the two words are. So, for example, ‘etz’ is ‘a tree’ and ‘etza’ is ‘advice’. You might then say: “He grows out of the ground very tall and she is something that a sensible friend might give you.” There was a period of a few years in their childhoods when my greater intellectual powers were perfectly balanced by the kids’ greater Hebrew vocabulary, and we were able to play the game on a fairly level playing field. Those days, sadly, are long past.

My own childhood car journeys were less musical and more exclusively cerebral. I can remember playing I-Spy, and, at a slightly later period, trying to complete my I-Spy books, as written by Big Chief I-Spy and his friends at the News Chronicle. This was, for me, a precursor to trainspotting, offering the challenge of ticking off items illustrated in the books as you spotted them in real life.

I also remember car number-plate games. At the time, British car registration-plates had a sequence of three letters followed by three numbers, and my favourite game was taking it in turns to pick a car and then think of a word that used the three letters of the number plate in the order in which they appeared, though not necessarily consecutively. For example: TWL 524 would yield ‘towel’.

Three numbers were not really enough to do anything useful with, but, when we travelled by bus, we were issued a ticket with a 4-digit number. We would first add the four digits. If the sum was 21, this was extremely good fortune. If it wasn’t (and it rarely was), we would then work at manipulating the digits, using the 4 arithmetic operations, to try somehow to arrive at 21. As our knowledge of maths grew, we would add exponentials, digit sums and factorials. (I clearly needed to get out more!)

Up to this point, when we have taken Tao on longer car journeys in Portugal he has usually fallen asleep, but I think he must now be getting to the age where we will be able to once again enjoy the pleasures of travelling with conscious and cognizant children.

Meanwhile, in case you were wondering whether we’re nearly there yet….we’ve arrived.