The England that I grew up in was, if my memory serves me correctly, a fairly free and easy place. If I look back at my late teenage years, I have to admit that I did not suffer unduly from social constraints. My parents, although fairly strict, were strictly fair, and I indulged in a lot of cigarettes, a bit of whisky, but none of the wild, wild women that the song quote in today’s title goes on to speak about. I got away with some things my parents didn’t know about, although I subsequently learnt that it was not as much as I had thought at the time.

However, my real addiction, beside cigarettes, was bridge, and my only real embracing of the mood of the 60s lay in playing very, very bad folk guitar. I kept up both of these hobbies into my married life, although I would be the first to admit that my skill at the bridge table far outshone my ability on the guitar. Or, to be more accurate, I played guitar even worse than bridge. For all of my years in Hanoar Hatzioni, the youth movement I belonged to, six chords, a basic sense of rhythm, and a halfway decent singing voice, served to allow me to steer a careful path through the Israeli and American folk repertoire, occasionally fooling people who were either much younger than me or who did not play the guitar (or, preferably both) that I knew what I was doing.

And then, at age 36, I came on aliya. I put my guitar aside, and then, later, passed it on to Micha’el, and, apart from reading an occasional bridge column in the Hebrew press, I forswore the game, until…

I really don’t know how to account for what happened next. ‘Next’, I should explain, was seven months ago, when a friend from shul, who had recently learnt the game and was playing regularly in a relative beginners’ school hosted by the couple who had taught him, discovered that I used to play and started nagging me to come along. His persistence paid off, and I eventually succumbed. I was initially very wary. Let me rephrase that. The first week I turned up, I was petrified. Not only had I forgotten a significant amount of what was second nature 55 years ago, but I was also acutely aware that my razor-sharp intellect had arguably blunted somewhat over the intervening decades.

To make matters worse, and here I’m afraid things get a little technical, the advice I was given was that I should learn a new (for me) bidding system. Basically, this is a set of rules and conventions for describing your hand to your partner. To make this description as accurate and efficient as possible, systems are, perforce, fairly elaborate. Learning a new system was (Who am I kidding? Not ‘was’;’is’!) a bit like learning a new language.

Needless to say, my friends around the table (both those I knew well and those I had only just met) made me very welcome, and I realised in the first week that I was not going to make an absolute fool of myself. As I started playing every week, I found that gradually I regained more of the ability to remember the cards that had been played, to count cards, to visualise opponent’s hands, to remember what the contract was, to hold two separate bridge thoughts in my head simultaneously, not to drop my cards on the floor. It’s difficult for me to judge, but I feel that I have regained 60% or so of my playing ability when I was at my best.

As a result, when a good friend phoned me a couple of weeks ago to say that her regular partner for the weekly duplicate competition in Jerusalem was unavailable, and to ask whether I was available, I agreed. I went through the usual agonies of insecurity in the days before we were to play, and spent the evenings cramming as if for an exam.

Once again, the reality was completely unintimidating. I soon realised that the players were all pupils at the bridge classes at the community centre where the competition was held, and many had only been playing for a few months. Others had been playing considerably longer, but had not started playing until they retired, and their progress up the mountain range that is competitive bridge was slow. By the end of the morning, I was enjoying myself, and finding that I was able to maintain a level of intense concentration over the three hours of competition, which flew by.

The cherry on top of the cake was that my partner messaged me later that day with the results. We had come top.

There is always a moment, in films about alcoholism or gambling, when you realise that what was a social habit has become an addiction, and the protagonist is in the grip of something that he is unable to fight.

My name is David, and I am a bridgeaholic.

The following week (last week) found me at a newly opened seniors’ residence in the Jerusalem Hills, with a new partner (and old friend), playing in a more serious competition. Once again, my initial trepidation melted away as I realised that, although the players represented a range of abilities and experience that stretched far higher than the previous week, there were also a number of pairs of much less experience and ability. My partner and I came second. This is probably the worst outcome for someone sliding into addiction. The heady delight of doing well paired with the niggling conviction that next week you will do even better.

In the intervening week I have joined the Israel Bridge Federation and paid my annual membership. This morning we played again, and I am waiting to hear how we did this week. We are a curious pair: my partner couldn’t care less about winning or losing, and I couldn’t care more. However, so far we seem to be working as a partnership, and my insecurity is somewhat allayed by the knowledge that, however appalling or egregious an error I make, my partner will laugh it off.

As if this readoption of a teenage passion were not enough, a few weeks ago I confessed to Bernice that I thought I might like a guitar for a birthday present. She was very encouraging, and so I have devised a minimum-risk plan. I have signed up for a free online tuition program, and my musical daughter-in-law Maayan has kindly lent me her spare guitar to start playing. The idea is that if, after six weeks of starting to relearn, I am still interested, I will get a guitar for my birthday.

So far, I am thoroughly enjoying the process. It is not without its humiliations. I always knew that I was a rubbish player, but I never realised the multiplicity of layers of rubbishness of my playing, and just how many dreadful habits I baked into my left and right hand over a decade or more of ‘playing’ the guitar. However, I am enjoying the real pleasure of the stimulation of unlearning some bad habits, learning some new good ones, being introduced unthreateningly to a range of techniques, and having the opportunity to play a guitar whose rich, mellow tone is a world apart from the couple of instruments I played in my youth.

I can only play one tune so far: Happy Birthday to You. (At least, I could play it when I last tried, before Shabbat. I shall discover later whether I have retained it over the intervening 48 hours.) However, the joy of playing that enchanting tune, with all of the right fingering, is precious.

There are moments in the dead of night, when, with only a tentative grip on reality, I dream of becoming a top competitive bridge player. I harbour no such fantasies about the guitar. However, if I reach the point where I can pick out tunes, play the right chords to Turn, Turn, Turn (Who knew there was an F# in there?! Who even knew what an F# was?), and maybe even improvise a little on a pentatonic scale, then I will feel vindicated in making the purchase.

Meanwhile, while the scalp feels fully 75 years old, the fingers, fanning a bridge hand or strumming an Am chord, feel 21 again. No laughing at the back there!

Asked what the topic of this week’s post was likely to be, very few of you would probably have opted for ‘microwaves’…and you would, to be honest, have been right. However, microwaves do make a cameo appearance later, so be sure to watch out for them.

This past week has been dominated by one event: the build-up to, the moment of, and the ripple effect triggered by, the arrival of our newest grandson, who Raphael is calling ‘Zazu’ (which is the rough equivalent of ‘Jiggly’, and is the name the nuclear family gave him in utero, because of his activity there). The rest of us will have to wait until the brit to discover what his name will be, going forward.

When Maayan’s contractions started last Tuesday, Bernice and I picked up our pre-packed overnight bag and drove up to stay in the flat with Raphael. Without going into too much detail, let me just say that the labour was a protracted affair, and Maayan and the baby did not have a very easy time. The first time Esther took her to the hospital on Tuesday at midnight, Maayan was not quite sufficiently dilated to be admitted. They decided to return home, and, after a very long and hard Wednesday for Maayan (and Esther, and, no doubt, the baby), they eventually went back to hospital on Wednesday evening. After a long night and day of further complications, and only after the senior doctor managed to flip the baby to be face down, was he born, on Thursday evening, with Maayan heroically summoning the last of her strength to help him on his way.

I have to say that, for the long day between their return from the hospital for the first time and their return to the hospital, I felt more surplus to requirements than I can ever remember feeling. I consider myself well qualified to state that there is a difference between a biological man and a biological woman, and at no time is that difference more obvious, more undeniable, than at the end of a pregnancy. I am, I know, not the first man to observe that, if men carried babies and went through labour, there would be far more one-child families, and far more childless families, than there are. In childbirth, women are Amazons and men are wimps.

At least, this man is. I know that there has been a huge cultural revolution in the West since my child-not-bearing days, and I know that there are fathers-to-be and fathers who are unimaginably hands-on, but, when push comes to shove, there’s only one gender doing the pushing and the shoving. There I was, in a flat where the mother-to-be was on all fours, the two other women both had first-hand experience of the pain and exhaustion she was going through, and all I could do was stack the dishwasher. It was a chastening experience.

Frustratingly, in attempting to describe how this whole experience could not have been less about me, I seem to have made it sound as though it was all about me. It was, of course, actually all about everyone else, and, especially, ultimately and supremely all about the baby who eventually emerged in all his glory, to make everything instantly worthwhile. I know that’s easy for me to say, but there is, within the family, unanimity on this.

There is something about the warmth, the stillness, the delicacy, the trust, the aroma, the softness, the continuing dependence, the immediate independence, the infinite potential of a newborn child that makes holding him in your arms one of the most special experiences life can offer. Every time it is just as special, if only because every child is a unique and complete new world.

So, we are now blessed with two opening batsmen and two opening bowlers. Make of that what you will.

Raphael was, as always, a champion throughout the week. He actually chose the day his parents were in the hospital to run a slight temperature and feel rotten. On Thursday, he went off happily to gan, and seemed fine when we collected him in the afternoon and took him to the park, but when he took only one bite from his ice-cream before handing it over to be saved for later, and then said he wanted to go home rather than play in the park, it was obvious that he was coming down with something.

Once home, he put himself to bed and slept for 13 hours, only waking a few times for a drink. Fortunately, when he did wake he seemed to have slept off whatever it had been, and his temperature was normal. He woke, of course, to the news that he was now, finally, a big brother, a role that I suspect he will relish and excel at.

Executive decisions were duly made, and all three of us set off for the hospital after breakfast on Friday. Raphael knew that he had to keep his distance from the baby, in whom he displayed less interest than I had expected. Of course, newborns don’t come with much in the way of bells and whistles, and, at the age of three, your ability to see the potential adult in the newborn child is not very developed, so his lack of interest was, I suppose, very understandable.

Bernice and I, on the other hand, got our generous quota of cuddles, until, all too soon, we had to head back for Maale Adumim, still needing to make some preparations for Shabbat. Meanwhile, Raphael and baby’s other grandparents were on their way to take Raphael home with them for a Shabbat that, I believe, included the safari, and, no doubt, other treats.

Once home, Bernice needed to defrost the salmon steaks she planned to cook for Shabbat. When I realised she planned to ‘defrost’ them by using the cooking function of the microwave, I pointed out that the microwave had multiple functions, including rapid defrost. Bernice protested that this was all much too complicated. I then pointed out that, printed along the top rim of the oven opening, and therefore visible whenever the door is opened, is a ridiculously simple set of instructions for the various functions. Five minutes later, the salmon was defrosted and ready to cook.

During the previous couple of days, I had discovered that, similarly, Esther only uses one function of her multi-function microwave. So, this week’s takeaway seems to be: If you want to use a microwave to melt butter, or defrost a chicken, or sensor cook a potato, or, indeed, heat up a takeaway, you’re better off being a man. If, on the other hand, you want to give birth to a perfect baby, you’re better off being a woman. I’ll leave it to you to decide which of these two is the more challenging. I’m just very pleased that I got to cuddle the delectable grandson and to eat the delicious salmon, both on the same day.

How blessed am I!

Blogger’s Apologies. This is the post I should have published last week, when it would have been immediately relevant to you, and when it would have reflected the news story of the day. I can only remind you that I’m still the 17-year-old who handed in his homework a day late every week for the last two years of his schooldays, and plead that I needed a week of thought, and the invaluable contribution of the National Library of Israel blog, to formulate this week’s reflections.

“Shocked, but not surprised.” Those four words, I would suggest, best sum up the reaction of the Jewish world to the pogrom on Bondi beach a week ago (as I write). How can we be anything but shocked at the unhurried and casual calm of the two terrorists, as they strolled along the bridge, picking off victims. At the same time, how can anyone be surprised that such a massacre occurred in Australia, whose iconic Sydney opera house was the scene of a mass pro-Palestinian demonstration on October 9, 2023, 18 days before Israel launched its ground offensive in Gaza, and whose prime minister has failed, since then, to unequivocally condemn and forcefully act against the inflammatory rhetoric and escalating violence of Palestinians and pro-Palestinians against Jewish Australians, choosing instead to ‘recognise’ the ‘state’ of ‘Palestine’.

Bondi feels like something of a watershed. Part of our shock may stem from the fact that we tend to think of Australians as more laid back, less polarised, than Europeans and Americans. Knowing that Sydney is over 14,000 km from Jerusalem, we may also have believed that Australia had no reason to be unduly interested in events in the Middle East. After Bondi, we know that the intifada has indeed been globalised. In addition, of course, fifteen innocent victims is thirteen complete worlds more than the two victims of the Heaton Park Synagogue  attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and those thirteen additional martyrs do represent a substantive difference, I feel.

If we want to digest, and to explore the deep significance of, the Bondi attack, we have had, over this past week, literally in our hands and minds, the perfect source text. (Jews, by definition, cannot explore the significance of anything without a source text.) In this case, the text is one written in the blood of Jews through the millennia. It is written in Hebrew, which means that many of the millions who sing it do not connect deeply with its meaning, because they do not understand Hebrew, but rather connect with it viscerally, as a part of their cultural-historical-familial heritage that has always been there. I invite you to explore it this week with me.

Most of us probably grew up with five verses of Maoz Tzur. The first is an appeal to God to rebuild the Temple. This restoration will occur when Israel’s enemies will be finally defeated. Then the dedication of the Temple will be completed.

This is a very appropriate sentiment for Hannukah, since the vanquishing of our enemies and the rededication of the Temple so that we can offer thanks to God reflects precisely the story of Hannukah.

The following four verses walk us through Jewish history, which, in the memorable summary, is a repeated story of “They tried to kill us; we beat them; let’s eat.” Or is it? Let’s take a closer look.

Initially, Pharaoh, fearing that “this people” would grow so numerous that they would side with Egypt’s enemies and overwhelm the Egyptians, enslaved the Children of Israel. It was only when Moses demanded the right to lead the people into the desert to worship God (something they had been less than dedicated to in Egypt), that matters escalated to the point where Pharaoh sought to slaughter the entire nation.

Here, at the period when the family of Abraham became the nation of Israel, the dual nature of that nation, its peoplehood and its religion, is immediately central to the story.

This verse describes the Babylonian exile, which was a result of Israel abandoning its religion. However, the people were exiled as a unit, and, when Babylon fell to the Persians, the people were granted permission, after only 70 years of exile, to return to their land, the Land of Israel.

Next is the Purim story, where the focus is not on Jewish religion. (The story begins with the Jews revelling in Ahasuerus’ feast, which was definitely not kosher-catered.) Haman is a classic antisemite who sees the Jews as a seditious people, who can never be a part of the Persian and Medean empire, because they will always insist on keeping themselves separate, however much they appear to assimiliate.

The Greeks, on the other hand, had no issue with the Jews as people, but only as practising religious Jews. The Greeks’ defilement of the Temple was designed to speed up the Hellenization of the Jews and their successful absorption into the Greek empire. This is, of course, the story of Hannukah, and, in one sense, it seems a logical ending point for the song.

Speaking for myself, growing up with the above five verses, I never consciously thought about the fact that they do not tell the complete story. However, you can argue that there should be a sixth verse, retelling the story of a fourth inimical empire – Rome – the destruction of the Second Temple and the exile.

And, of course, there is.

Admon – the red one – is associated with Edom (Yishmael) and, by extension, with Rome and, by extension, with the Holy Roman Empire and Christianity.

It is only since coming on aliya that I have become familiar with this verse. To examine why this is so, and why it appears in some siddurim and not others, we need to look at the history of Maoz Tzur. (It is here that I am indebted to the National Library’s blog, which is always a fascinating read.)

Maoz Tzur was written in the Middle Ages, and it is quite possible that the sixth verse was composed together with the first five and that the sixth verse was suppressed, either by the Christian authorities throughout Europe, or by the Jewish communities themselves in the interest of self-preservation.

However, some scholars argue that the last verse is not part of the original piyyut but a later addition. This makes sense; otherwise, why sing this poem specifically on Hanukkah? The words of Maoz Tzur refer, in each verse, to a different exile (Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome), and it could have been sung on many other occasions in our calendar. Only if the poem ends with the story of the miracle of the cruse of oil is there reason to associate it specifically with Hannukah.

There are a few references to Maoz Tzur in medieval Jewish literature, but the first time we see a reference to that last verse is in 1696 in a book printed in Germany, outlining the main laws and ideas of daily mitzvot and the festivals of the year. In the chapter discussing the laws of Hanukkah, the author writes:

“I found it written, and since the poem of Maoz Tzur deals only with the three kingdoms of Babylon, Media, and Greece, and the fourth kingdom of the exile of Edom, Yishmael, is not mentioned at all, therefore, we established some rhymes that speak of this redemption from exile, to be recited after the song Maoz Tzur in the tune of Maoz Tzur.”

I find myself wondering whether, in Germany in 1696, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, things looked promising enough for Jews to feel that they could anticipate God’s vanquishing of Edom. It is certainly easy to understand why the Jews of 19^th Century Eastern Europe and mid-20^th Century Europe would have felt that they had no strength to sing the sixth verse.

On the other hand, it is easy to understand how, after the establishment of the State of Israel, and after the Six-Day War, and after the recalibration of Catholic-Jewish relations in the wake of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-60s, Jews, in Israel and in the liberal democracies, felt that they could foresee a future where Israel’s last imperial enemy was finally vanquished.

And then came October 7. And then came the globalisation of the intifada. And I find myself wondering now whether we will feel able to sing, to that rousing, uplifting tune, the words of the sixth stanza of Maoz Tzur, or whether we are now in one of those periods in history when we can still pray to God to vanquish our enemies, but we cannot imagine the accomplishment of that vanquishing.

One final thought. Maoz Tzur makes it clear to us that, at different points in Jewish history, the focus of antisemitism is sometimes on Judaism as a religion, and sometimes on the Jews as a people. The target of antisemitism is sometimes the religious rituals, artefacts, practices and beliefs, and sometimes the people themselves. Our enemies sometimes restrict our freedoms, sometimes exile us, sometimes enslave us, sometimes murder us.

The enemy we face today claims, of course, that he is anti-Zionist, not antisemitic. His fight is with Israelis, not Jews. What this means, if I am reading it correctly, is that his objection is to the concept of a Jewish people, not to the concept of a Jewish religion. The flaw in his argument is his belief, or claim, that the two are separable. The fundamental truth, of course, is that the Jewish people is inexorably bound up with the Jewish religion, and both fuse together in the Land of Israel.

Our enemies actually understand this. They acknowledged it when they attacked us on Yom Kippur 50 years ago, Simchat Torah two years ago, Yom Kippur less than four months ago, Hannukah a week ago. (Do you detect a theme, there.) They acknowledge it every time they kill a Jew “for being a Zionist” even though they have no idea whether the individual Jew they kill identifies as a Zionist.

One of the tragedies in our current situation is that there are Jews who reject this truth, even though our enemies embrace it in their actions against us. But that is a subject for another time.

Bit of a hodge-podge today, mostly arising from last week’s blog post. Let’s dive right in.

Two of my originally American readers encountered what was, for them, a new word last week: anti-macassar. One googled it, and thanked me for teaching him a new word. “I didn’t even know those had a name,” he admitted. This, I suspect, is because, while Victorian men were applying macassar to their hair, American men were taming the Wild West. To each his own.

The other friend confronted me in shul, to ask about anti-macassars, because she strives, commendably, to minimise her digital footprint, and chose to ask me rather than Google. I must confess to finding that rather flattering. I must, however, admit, that I have subsequently confirmed and fleshed out the answer I gave her by plunging down a number of google rabbit-holes, all so that you don’t have to.

So, our story begins in Sulawesi (as so many do), although at the time that our story begins, it was known as Celebes. One of Indonesia’s major islands, Sulawesi boasts, on its Western coast, a major port by the name of Macassar. I won’t give you its entire history, but the first mention of Macassar is in the Nagarakretagama, which you hardly need me to tell you was a 14^th-Century eulogy to the king of the Mahajapit empire, which was, as if you needed reminding, a Javanese Hindu-Buddhist thalassocratic empire. (A thalassocracy, for those of you who slept through Ancient Greek at school, is a state or nation that acquires maritime supremacy over a large area of sea, rather than land. The Vikings are probably the example most of us are more familiar with (not first-hand, you understand), but Mahajapit (also known, confusingly, as Wilatikta) extended over almost the entirety of the Nusantara archipelago.) But I digress.

Skipping lightly over the Portuguese (1513), the Sultan of Gowa (1545), the Dutch (always a good idea to skip over them) (1605), Islamisation (1607), the English (1613), the Dutch again (1667), the Chinese (1730s), the Dutch yet again (1906), the Japanese (1942) and the Australians (1945), Macassar eventually became the capital of the newly declared State of East Indonesia in 1946 and was renamed Ujungpandang in 1971.

Incidentally, just to confuse matters, there is another Macassar in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. When the Dutch East India Company expelled a local Muslim religious and civil leader, Sheik Yusuf, from Macassar to South Africa, he was such a prominent figure that the settlement he founded, which became a centre for spreading the message of Islam to the Capetown slave community, became known as Macassar in his honour. Rather as if a neighbourhood were renamed Nantymoel because that’s the town in Wales that Bernice and I came on aliya from. But I digress.

We take up our story again in late 18^th-Century London, where barbers would concoct hair preparations for which they claimed astonishing powers, and sell them to an eager public for considerably more than they cost to prepare. One such barber was Alexander Rowland, and, from the moment he began offering his customers Rowland’s Macassar oil, it was a resounding hit. Undoubtedly, this was partly because of the name. Probably, some customers believed the oil was an extrusion of the macassar ebony, a very handsome wood, deep brown or black with striking yellowish brown streaks, native to Indonesia. In fact, the oil was almost certainly originally an extrusion of the schleichera oleosa (rather a less catchy name for a tree), or gum lac tree (the name tells you all you need to know), also native to Indonesia and, indeed, the whole of Southeast Asia. Let us be generous to Alexander, and assume that the ships that carried the oil for import to Britain left from the port of Macassar.

Whether or not, a couple of decades of aggressive and very effective advertising that made extravagant claims about the product transforming a bald pate into a luscious head of hair established it as a firm national favourite; at some point, Rowland began preparing it from the cheaper and more readily available ingredients coconut oil and ylang ylang (a tropical tree still valued for the essential oils extracted from its flowers, which has a strong floral fragrance).

Impressively, having once been Prince Albert’s favoured hair preparation, Rowland’s macassar oil remained in continuous production until 1954 (in other words for 161 years), when the company went into liquidation. However, do not despair. An enterprising gent by the name of Shane O’Shaughnessy left the world of IT to return to his grandfather’s barbering business, and, in 2012, revived some of his grandfather’s preparations, including macassar oil. So, the anti-macassars on our new lounge suite (of which, incidentally, we took delivery this past Sunday) are not a mere whimsical touch on our part, but may well prove extremely useful if some hirsute English fop or dandy chooses to pay us a visit.

I can’t leave the world of tonsorial taming without mentioning that cricketing and football hero of my youth, Denis Compton. Compton played both football and cricket for England, but it was as a cricketing batsman that he is best remembered – one of the finest England produced (in an era where it produced a good few), he set several records that are still unbroken. In a very early example of sports sponsorship, Compton became the famous face – or, rather, hairline – of Brylcreem, the 1940s and 50s heir of macassar oil, a brilliantine cream that both controlled and gave a sheen to men’s hair.

Compton earned £1000 a year (the equivalent of just under £45000 today), which was a huge amount by the standards of the time. To put this in context, I haven’t been able to find stats for cricketer’s salaries in 1950, but a footballer earned £14 a week, or £728 a year, so Compton did pretty well from his sponsorship.

At this point, you may well be wondering why this obsession with matters tonsorial. I must admit I was wondering that myself, until the penny dropped a few minutes ago. The truth is, I’m feeling a little vulnerable, so I hope I can rely on you to lend a sympathetic ear (or, more accurately, eye, unless you’re using one of those AI text readers).

Ever since I first noticed, some decades ago, that I have what I always preferred to refer to as an aggressive forehead, I have been coming to terms with the fact that the thick mop of hair I enjoyed in my twenties and thirties seemed destined to have a shorter shelf life than most of the rest of me. (On reading that last sentence, Bernice suggested that I never had a thick mop of hair. Recollections, as Her Majesty observed, may differ.) I gave up going to the barber about fifteen years ago, when he insisted on charging me full price, even though I was in the chair barely long enough to warm the seat. Since then, Bernice has been trimming my locks, and a very fine job she has done of it, too.

However, in recent years, it has been an increasing challenge for my shaver’s trimmer attachment to grab hold of my hair to cut it, there being less and less of my hair to grab hold of. Last week, it took Bernice repeated passes over the back and sides to trim them (there having been nothing on top for some considerable time). When she had finished, I came to the conclusion that the game was no longer worth the candle. It had been taking Bernice longer and longer to cut my thinner and thinner hair, and, I felt, we were now so close to the point where it would take her an infinite amount of time to cut an infinitesimally small amount of hair that, in short, we had reached the end of the barbering road.

So, from the trimming chair, I went straight to the bathroom, and shaved off all of the remaining hair at the side of my head. (‘All’ is rather a grand term for the quantity involved, but the principle holds.) This included shaving off my sideburns, which were considerably fuller. I left the sparse undergrowth at the back, where I could not see it. The result was that, when I looked in the mirror, I appeared completely bald.

In the week since then, I have learnt a number of important lessons. One: if you plan to shave your head, try to avoid choosing the very week where a previously interminable summer dips suddenly and dramatically into winter. Two: a short, stubbly, head-covering of hair, in combination with a fairly coarse-crocheted kippa, creates a Velcro-like effect that secures the kippa to your head surprisingly better than you might have expected. (I had, in anticipation of serious challenges in this department, ordered a healthy length of wig tape, which, as I write, has cleared Israeli customs, and should be arriving in the next few days. I have no idea whether it will be effective, but I look forward to finding out.)

Three (and this is the painful part of this whole story): I wondered how people would react to this new tonsorial look, and it has been a very bitter pill to swallow to discover that scarcely anyone has noticed. This forces me to the painful conclusion that, over the last couple of years, I have been labouring under the misapprehension that I have been living under a head of hair at all. Clearly, I was, to all intents and purposes, bald long before I shaved my head.

Don’t get me wrong. Having taken the plunge, I am very happy with the result, not least because I have made four other very positive discoveries. One: I will never need to buy another packet of kippa clips. Two: all those much too small kippot that I had been saving for no reason are now a perfect size. Three: the bottle of shampoo that I suspected might see me out I can now sell, because shampoo is something that lives for me only in the past. Four: I have shaved not only my head but also a couple of minutes off my showering time. One sponge with one squirt of shower gel now does me top to toe, I am already planning what to do with my extra half-an-hour a week.

Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, next week, I promise, will be a hair-free post.

And so, while you’re looking the other way, another 19 years slip by, and before you know it
that new lounge suite is starting to look embarrassingly shabby. That’s more or less the point
we reached a few months ago, and so we started exploring possible replacements.
A few days stumbling around online led us to the conclusion that anything that we were
likely to find as comfortable as what we were replacing was going to cost us more than we
really wanted to spend. Enter Plan B.
While it’s true that our old suite (a three-seater plus two-seater) is getting a little misshapen
around the arms and the headrests, since it is a bulgy style of furniture anyway, this is not
something we couldn’t contemplate living with. The real problem is that the fabric has
become stained, both from the occasional spillage of coffee (or, in Bernice’s case, tea) and
from the long-term effects of perspiration (or, in Bernice’s case, glow).
So, we started to explore recovering the suite. Another round of research soon led us to the
conclusion that a proper recovering job would set us back not sufficiently significantly short
of buying a new suite. Although the recliner mechanism is fine on all four reclining seats, the
extent to which the stuffing has been knocked out of the sofas means that we didn’t feel
paying a hefty sum to recover it made sense. Time for Plan C.
A further internet research revealed loose, one-size fits all, fabric covers, that (online, at least)
tie effortlessly underneath the sofa, are held tightly in place (online, at least) by long, thin,
foam sausages that tuck down between the seat and the back and seat and sides, and come
with glowing recommendations from hundreds of satisfied customers. For an outlay of only a
couple of hundred shekels, we could effectively renovate our suite.
Except, of course, the material is rather less durable than we had hoped, securing the covers
to recliner seats proved more of a logistics challenge than foreseen, and the foam sausages,
no matter how firmly tucked down, soon spring up again, startling unsuspecting guests and
driving us mad. After a couple of months of living with the idiosyncrasy of this papering over
the cracks, we faced the fact that we really had to bite the bullet and buy a new suite.
An initial, and fairly thorough, internet trawl revealed that, in the sweet spot of reclining
sofas that do not require remortgaging the house, Dr Gav has little, if any, competition.
Blogger’s Note: If you have had a bad experience with Dr Gav furniture, please don’t feel
obliged to share your story with me. We have already gone ahead and ordered, so I’d rather
not know what’s liable to be waiting for us a depressingly short distance down the road.
As luck would have it, we reached this point exactly on Black Friday. For the benefit of my
readers outside Israel, I need to explain that this is less of a statistical improbability than you
might think, because, in Israel, Black Friday lasts for the entire month of November.
Sometimes, it is called Black November, but sometimes it is still called Black Friday (and
sometimes even Bleck Friday, but that’s another story), even though it lasts 30 days.
Having found Dr Gav’s website, Bernice and I saw that there was even a choice of suites, at
more or less the same price as we paid 19 years ago, when we certainly couldn’t afford it. So,
last week, we set off for Talpiot in South Jerusalem, to see what we would make of the suites
in the flesh. Having done our homework, we were able to announce to the saleswoman that
we wanted a 3+2 with a manual reclining mechanism, and, in addition, a reclining TV chair.
(In our back room, which we call the snug, where our 32-inch screen lives, we have an
electric reclining sofa, and it feels decadently luxurious, but for the salon we need a seating
arrangement that we can recline in on Shabbat, so it has to be manual.)

The only unresolved question was: leather or fabric. After viewing, and sitting on, all that Dr
Gav had to offer, we quickly made up our minds. We really felt we couldn’t justify spending
another 35% for leather. As it happens, the TV chair was not in exactly the same style, and
not available in the same shade of grey, as the sofas. Bernice thinks this variation is very
sophisticated, and, by this stage of our shared life, I know the areas in which she outpunches
me, so I immediately bowed to her refined taste.
The best news of all was that, as luck would have it, the day we walked into the shop was the
last day of Black Friday, and the 3+2 were, for that one day only, available at a 33%
discount, and the chair at a 6% discount. This was a little confusing, since the day was
actually December 1, which seems an odd day to end Black November. However, we didn’t
argue. (I have, subsequently, revisited the website, where I see that the furniture is now being
offered at full price, so it appears we were indeed lucky to get in just in time.)
Feeling very pleased with ourselves, we sat down at the showroom desk to finalise the
purchase. (The nice thing about buying furniture, incidentally, is that you get to sit in a really
comfortable chair when you finalise the purchase.) We confirmed the choice of fabric from
the swatch book (Note to self: research the etymology of ‘swatch’ – such a wonderful-
sounding word), and had the price confirmed…and then the fun started.
First, the saleswoman added the delivery charge. I’m pleased to say that there was no extra
charge for delivering over what a few people who didn’t get the memo still call the green
line. (A surcharge for delivery to ‘the territories’ used to be standard, but seems to have more
or less died out.) Then, when she confirmed that the delivery team would undoubtedly be
ready to take our old suite to the municipal bins at the end of the street, for a modest
remuneration, I made a mental note to add another 100 shekels to the bill.
As Bernice and I rode the (free for seniors) bus home, we agreed that we could tie the three
pieces together, thereby counter-balancing the different shade of grey and slightly different
design of the TV chair, by buying another cushion at IKEA to match the two we already have
on our current sofas. This, of course, is predicated on the assumption that IKEA still stock
that cushion design. I am sure we will find they don’t, and will have to buy two new cushion
covers, in addition to the one new cushion.
While we are at IKEA, we will also probably be looking for six placemats in a distinctive
contrasting colour, to use as anti-macassars. We would buy anti-macassars, if we could only
find them in the shops, but they seem, strangely, to have gone out of fashion in the last 120
years.
As you can see, our list of hidden extra costs is mounting up. However, at least everything I
have mentioned so far is in the realm of the expected. Once we returned home, Bernice came
up with one that I wasn’t expecting. She pointed out that probably the shabbiest part of our
current sofas is the footrests, which are discoloured and rubbed and dirty. “We’re going to
have to start taking our shoes off when we come in, and changing into slippers,” she informed
me. I couldn’t argue with the logic, even though I am not a fan of changing into slippers.
Once I have invested in the, at my age not inconsiderable, effort of getting a pair of shoes on
in the morning, I like to extract the maximum from that effort, and to keep them on until I go
to bed.
However, as I said, I couldn’t fault Bernice’s reasoning. The only problem is that my one
decent pair of slippers live in Portugal, where I need them for the winter, especially when my
shoes are soaking wet, and the only pair I have in Israel are a ridiculously wide pair of
backless slippers, bought on impulse several years ago. In order to keep them on, I have to

avoid lifting my feet off the floor, with the result that they make me look and sound a good
fifteen years older than I am.
So, a couple of days later, off I went to our local mall, to buy slippers. All the cheap ones
were backless and therefore no use at all, but I eventually found a pair of Kippy slippers that I
will be perfectly happy with. (Again for the benefit of non-Israeli readers, Kippy was a
hedgehog character in Israel children TV’s version of Sesame Street, who wore slippers that
zipped up the centre, which have, subsequently, always been known, and loved, or mocked,
in Israel as Kippy slippers. To see what I mean, or to relive your children’s childhood, take a
look here.) Slippers! Yet another hidden extra!
But that’s not all. If, as we are told, time is money, then there is one more hidden extra I need
to tell you about. As we left for our last trip to Portugal, we had time to kill at the airport, and
somehow talked ourselves into buying a bottom-of-the-range robot cleaner (which,
incidentally, we are happy with, so far). I hadn’t realised, when we bought it, the investment
of time in setting up that this would involve, but I soon learnt that I needed to let the robot
map each floor of the house. I then needed to divide each map into its separate rooms, in
order to be able to give specific cleaning instructions. Naturally, the robot maps such
impassable barriers as sofas, thereby learning that it must pass around them. A couple of days
ago, I realised that, after our new furniture is delivered, and we have decided on final
placement, I will have to redraw the downstairs map, to accommodate the new suite.
Next time someone says: “We really ought to think about replacing the…”, I’m going to
insist we carry out a brainstorming exercise to properly understand just what ‘replacing
the…’ is going to involve, hidden extras and all. I think we’ll start to find that it’s remarkable
what we can actually carry on living with.

T S Eliot assured us that the world ends not with a bang but with a whimper, but in the last few months I have started to feel that my cultural world (or, at least, the cultural world that I inhabited and loved before making aliya in 1986, which is the cultural world that I will always regard as home) is ending not with a bang, nor with a single whimper, but, rather, with an inexorable series of whimpers, as, one by one, the cultural icons of my youth and my first decade or so of adulthood turn up on the obituary pages.

This week, it was the turn of Tom Stoppard, whose unique gifts I want to celebrate today. Before I dive deeper into his work, a couple of observations, if I may.

Many of the comments below Stoppard’s obituary on Sunday spoke about what a tremendous loss his death was. While I am sure that it is felt as a profound loss by his family and friends, this seems to me a strange description for the world as a whole. Stoppard was 88 years old at his death. He completed what he declared would be his last play – Leopoldstadt – in 2019. Over a period of 56 years, he wrote 26 plays for the theatre, and adapted or translated 10 others. He also wrote the libretto for an opera, 10 plays for radio, 5 original plays and 2 loose adaptations for television, in addition to 17 film and television screenplays adapted from books and his own and others’ plays. As well as covering a range of genres, these 70 works span a wide range of subject matter. I must confess that I feel no profound sense of loss. I am, indeed, so overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of work that Stoppard has left us that I do not feel anything is lacking.

My second observation concerns the distinction that Stoppard shares with Shaw, Pinter, Chekhov, Brecht, Shakespeare (obviously) and a few other playwrights. He has been adjectivized. This coining of a term to describe the style of plays written by X strikes me as paradoxical. Such an adjective is useful only when describing another playwright’s work – ‘I feel X’s recent work is increasingly Pinteresque’. However, such an adjective is only coined for a playwright whose style is so idiosyncratic that any work by another playwright that puts one in mind of it feels like pastiche, and not really warranting serious discussion. So, the adjectives are, in practical terms, of very limited use.

Which is a neat way into addressing the question of what makes a play ‘Stoppardian’. One obituary suggested that Stoppardian is ‘shorthand for wit, linguistic cleverness and dazzling eloquence’.

This seems to me a very incomplete definition, that fails to recognise the extreme seriousness of Stoppard’s concerns in almost all of his work. He himself once wrote: “I want to demonstrate that I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours.” This, I feel, is an interesting comment for two reasons. The first is that, in dismissing his ‘wit, linguistic cleverness and dazzling eloquence’ as ‘flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours’, either Stoppard was being rather archly self-deprecating, or he was so naturally and effortlessly brilliant a master of words and realiser of absurd situations that he failed to see just how dazzling his wit was.

The second thing I want to note about Stoppard’s self-assessment is that he did not write: “I can make serious points while flinging a custard pie around the stage”, but, rather, “I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage”. The clever, eloquent wit is not an incidental entertainment that makes the serious content palatable to a theatre audience; it is, at its best (and a frighteningly high percentage of it is at its very best), the medium through which the message is conveyed. 

And that message is sometimes very serious indeed. If all you know of Stoppard is that he wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love, then you may be surprised that university professors of social and political theory write essays with titles like Freedom and Morality in the Plays of Tom Stoppard and doctoral candidates submit theses on such subjects as Epistemology and Ethics in Tom Stoppard’s ‘Professional Foul’

This may surprise you, even if you are familiar with the work with which Stoppard strode into the public eye in 1966, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The conceit of this play is so brilliant and so rich that I have to spell it out, even though most if not all of you will already be aware of it. What, Stoppard wonders, do minor characters in a play do, between the time they exit the stage in one scene and enter it again some time later. From this one question, Stoppard weaves a play parallel to Hamlet, following the offstage exploits of Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and exploring the logic of a world that exists suspended in limbo between their brief appearances onstage in Hamlet. When a probably befuddled theatregoer asked Stoppard “What is it all about?” he replied, with characteristic lack of pomposity, “It is about to make me a lot of money.”

Before I write about a particular television play I am very fond of, I want to give a taste of Stoppard’s intellectual range. He left the school he hated at 16, and, like many other auto-didacts, his interests were wide-ranging. The themes of his play Arcadia, for example, include the philosophical implications of the second law of thermodynamics, Romantic literature, and the English picturesque style of garden design. I cannot pretend to be educated enough to know whether he was right when he said: “The thing you have to understand is that, as a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas.” Even if that is true, he certainly succeeded in making the arguments around a huge range of political, ethical and aesthetic questions appear accessible to a general audience.

Which brings me to Professional Foul, an 80-minute television play from 1977 (when mainstream British TV still commissioned and broadcast every week serious plays by leading playwrights). The play is set in Prague and follows a Cambridge ethics don, Professor Anderson, as he attends a weekend philosophical colloquium in Prague, as a guest of the Communist Czech government. What should be a fairly uneventful trip, allowing him to attend the Czechoslovakia v England football game that is the real reason for him accepting the invitation, is complicated by a visit from an ex-student who asks the professor to smuggle out his banned doctoral thesis for publication in the West. The intervention of the Communist government leads to an ethical dilemma for Anderson, a situation explored by Stoppard through the opinions of several characters.

The play was written to coincide with Amnesty International’s Prisoners of Conscience Year and is dedicated to Czech playwright Václav Havel, then periodically imprisoned by the Czech Communist authorities, and later president of a free Czechoslovakia. In the year of publication and broadcast, the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia presented the government with a formal protest against its violations of the Helsinki Accords.

Happily, this play is available on YouTube here. I really hope that you will watch it, especially if you didn’t catch it in 1977. I recommend it for many reasons, but I will mention here only two. First, it is an opportunity to watch Peter Barkworth’s flawless performance as the urbane, cultured, decent, professor, whose lifetime of hypothetical academic musings about ethical problems proves, in the end, to have equipped him to deal magnificently, and for the first time in his life, with a genuine moral dilemma. Nobody portrayed the ultimately decent, upper-middle-class Englishman more perfectly or with more natural poise than Barkworth, and here, as always, he shines.

The second joy of the play is the language. One of the play’s major themes is the uses and abuses, the possibilities and limitations, of language, and, everywhere the play turns, it finds new ways to shed light on this theme. It is incomprehension that enables us to share Anderson’s mounting unease as he finds himself apparently trapped in the home of his dissident ex-student while it is being searched by the secret police. It is some time before we and he realise exactly the situation, and one complete scene, with its multiple bit players intervening from neighbouring apartments, and arguments breaking out, is played out entirely in a language, Czech, that neither the professor, nor the audience, understand. The effect moves from confusion to menace very effectively.

In another scene, Anderson, having failed to make it to the stadium for the football match, and having listened, and understood very little of, a partial Czech live commentary on the game, finds, later that day, that the two rooms adjacent to his in the hotel are occupied by two English newspaper sports correspondents, each of whom is phoning in his copy for the next morning’s edition of his paper. Anderson wanders into each room in turn, desperate to hear the key details of the game, but is repeatedly frustrated by the correspondents’ hyperbole, which favours ornate figures of speech over the dry facts of the game. One of the correspondents, for example, describing a defender who was repeatedly swerved around by the same attacking opponent using the same move, says that he displayed “all the qualities of an elephant except memory.” This is, of course, a wonderfully witty line (although nothing drains the wit from a line that sparkles when dropped unexpectedly into the middle of a scene from a play more completely than extracting it with a pair of tweezers and pinning it, scientifically, to the display case of a written argument). However, more significantly, it offers another example of the limitations and obfuscations of language.

Which I really should take as a less than subtle hint to stop here, since I’ve probably been walking alone through this tangled undergrowth for at least a couple of paragraphs.

But, before I do, let me urge those of you still with me to join me not in mourning the loss of Tom Stoppard, but in celebrating the extraordinary wealth of entertaining food for thought, and thought-provoking entertainment, that, over six decades, he laid out for the delight of the world. If you stumble across any of his perhaps less well-known radio plays – The Dog It Was that Died, Albert’s Bridge – treat yourself to 40 minutes of sense disguised as nonsense…and I haven’t even mentioned The Real Inspector Hound…or the screenplay for Brazil…or Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, another play about dissidents, in this case commissioned by Andre Previn and featuring the London Symphony Orchestra, onstage.

I’ll shut up now, and leave that very crowded stage to a master: the late, great, Tom Stoppard. Please enjoy! The performance is only just over an hour long, and is a unique, hilarious, chilling jewel.

If we had not been off to Portugal, this is a post that I would probably have published a month ago, shortly after the mass Haredi demonstration against universal conscription in the Jewish sector, a demonstration that brought much of Jerusalem and sections of the country’s main traffic artery to a halt for several hours. Sadly, the intervening weeks have not made what I plan to say less relevant; if anything, the reverse.

Before I address the issue that concerns me today, I have to acknowledge the extraordinary developments of the weeks we were out of the country. That all of the remaining living hostages, and the bodies of all but three of those murdered and held by Hamas, have been returned to Israel and to their families is wonderful news. I confess that, as I stated repeatedly over the last 25 months, I was not able to envisage any scenario in which Hamas would agree to return the hostages. (So, if you follow me for my geopolitical expertise, you can stop now.) Of course, for the three families who have not received their loved ones for burial, the nightmare is as intense as ever, and the nation continues to work and pray for their release from their personal hell.

To work and pray: two fundamental human activities. Taken together, they reflect the attitude that, if you wish to see a particular outcome, you have to do what you can to ensure the desired outcome is achieved, and you also have to accept that it may not be within your power to achieve this. For some of us, our prayers are to the all-powerful deity in whom, and in whose beneficence, we believe; for others, ‘prayer’ represents the hope and the belief that the desired end can be achieved. (Faith comes in many forms.)

Both elements are essential. Without hope and belief, nothing will be achieved. As the (possibly atheist, and certainly secular) Herzl famously wrote: ‘If you will it, it is not a dream’. As the national anthem declares: ‘As long as Jews look towards Zion, our two-thousand-year-old hope of being a free people in our homeland is not lost.’

At the same time, hopes and beliefs and will achieve nothing by themselves. They need to be backed up by action.

He (Rabbi Tarfon) used to say: It is not up to you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it (Pirkei Avot – Ethics of our Fathers – Chapter 2:16).

All of which is a long and rambling way of reaching the conclusion that the majority of the rabbinic leaders of Haredi community are not teaching their students true Jewish values. These Rabbonim teach the Yeshiva bocher that his Torah study is the most valuable, indeed the only truly valuable, contribution he can make to the future of the Jewish people, and that it is his Torah study, and that of the tens of thousands like him, that is winning the war, and he accepts this. They declare that nothing is more important than his Torah study, and that, as long as he devotes himself entirely to Torah study, he can then rely on Hashem to act in the best interests of the Jewish people, and he accepts this.

The brutal fact, of course, is that the security of the state, and of all its inhabitants, requires that all of its inhabitants also contribute to that security by personal service, in one capacity or another. Israel has been involved in a just war, a holy war, an existential war, and to serve in that war is not only a national but also a religious obligation.

Implicitly believing and following all that his Rabbi tells him, the Haredi in the street genuinely believes that his Torah study, and the religious faith that it represents, will protect him from physical danger. We saw in the mass demonstration against Haredi conscription, tens of Haredim climbing onto the canopy over the pumps in the petrol station at the entrance to Jerusalem, or climbing onto, and sitting on, the arms of cranes tens of metres above street level. These are the actions of men (and they were not just teenage boys – who, by definition, tend to regard themselves as immortal – but included many adult men) who believe that Hashem is personally protecting them from all evil. That they can continue to believe this after the disastrous collapse of the stand at Meron is a measure of the intensity of the belief-system they live in.

And what of the leaders of the Haredi community? They are the ones who devote energy, time and resources to wielding political influence, wheeling and dealing in the corridors of power, organising campaigns that include demonstrations, posters, media appearances, appointing rabbis to serve as members of Knesset and government ministers.. They are well aware that Torah study alone does not guarantee any outcome. They recognise that the process of changing the world for the better is a partnership between man and God. While we may believe that God is the ultimate power in the world, we also must recognise that God created man to be a partner in the ongoing process of creation.

Which brings me to the other side of the counterfeit coin that is so much of Israel’s public life in 2025. With a blind devotion that rivals that of the Haredi community to its Rabbis, much of the Likud party, in the Knesset and in the country as a whole, has abrogated all personal responsibility to Bibi. Whatever Netanyahu says and does is, in their eyes, a priori right. They do not behave as adults responsible for their actions and beliefs, but as unquestioning followers of King Bibi. They willingly give up their right, and their duty, to test the value of Bibi’s words, beliefs and actions against the benchmark of their own intelligence and experience.

As for Bibi, his weakness, it seems to me, is that he has failed to recognise that our work on earth is to be partners of a greater power. For the practising Jew, our partner is God, and the purpose of our Torah study is to help us better understand how we can most effectively play our part in this partnership and continue the work of creation on a daily basis. For a secular person, the partner is a set of moral, ethical values, and the responsibility is to define and understand those values and then to devote one’s life to following, nurturing and promoting those values.

For Bibi, it increasingly seems, the supreme value is not a moral and ethical worldview that is outside of, and greater than, himself, but, rather, his own survival. In his certainty that he, and he alone, knows what is for the best, he places his own continued political survival above all else, and, in so doing, puts the entire Zionist endeavour in jeopardy.

The true Jewish way is not the self-effacing retreat from the world and its problems, nor the placing of self above values, and an over-weening arrogance in one’s indispensability. The true Jewish way is:

It is not up to you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.

Our future as a Jewish, democratic country may well depend on all of us recognising the timeless truth in Rabbi Tarfon’s formulation.

As we pack the few items we are taking home, and prepare ourselves, and the boys, for our departure from Penamacor tomorrow (Monday) morning, it seems like a good idea to try to get this week’s post written tonight, before tomorrow’s long day. We plan to leave the house at 12 noon, and are scheduled to land in Israel at 2:30AM on Tuesday, which means we will probably turn up at Esther’s flat in Zichron around 5:30–6:00, which will seem to us like 3:30–4:00. Just what part of this seemed like a good idea when we planned it escapes me for the moment, but I’m sure it makes sense in some universe or other.

I thought I would start this week by responding to the one or two of you who have asked me how the kids’ business, their bodyweight gym, is going. I’m pleased to say that after a slow start it has, over the weeks we have been here, just started to gather a little momentum. They have acquired about fifteen regular customers. Tslil has attracted more students to her yoga classes, and has added a new pilates class, while Micha’el, in addition to having new members training in the gym, is planning to introduce two new classes: in martial arts and an introduction to bodyweight training.

Having started by concentrating their publicity on social media, they soon realised that this was not sufficiently focused. While their campaign generated a fair bit of interest, some of those who responded were based in Lisbon or other similarly far-flung locations. Since the kids started a poster and flyer campaign that is much more locally focussed, their results have been starting to translate into actual feet walking through the door.

They are, of course, in the middle of a learning process, and, with each new customer, indeed with each new prospect, they realise more about what their target customers need to be, and how best to reach them and attract them. This understanding can then help to inform their promotional materials. Each new advertising initiative is producing more useful results.

There are advantages to being based in a small community. First, there is no local competition. Gymacor is the only game in town. In addition, in a small place like Penamacor, where everybody knows everybody else, one satisfied customer is likely to generate more interest from among his or her circle. For example, the high-school student who contacted them this week might easily represent a way into a new market segment.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. The kids are still very much at the beginning of their journey, and they have a long way to go before they can say that their idea is viable. However, they have, in the last few weeks, seen enough positive signs to make even an old Eeyorean sceptic like me believe that they may well be able to build their idea into a business. We do hope so, because they have certainly invested considerable effort in getting to this point, and they both firmly believe in the quality and importance of the service that they can offer.

Beyond that, there really isn’t much to report. The major feature of the last week has been the weather. After a mild and dry first two and a half weeks of this trip, the last week or so has been very wet and fairly cold. We have not, yet, experienced the threatened thunder storms. They did reach Portugal, but seem to have hit Lisbon and the Algarve worst, and not to have travelled as far inland as Penamacor. However, the rain has been more or less constant: presenting a rich, and unrelenting variety of precipitation. We have had days of soft rain and days of driving rain. Low, swirling cloud, and cutting wind; dank mist and a quiet stillness.

Lua, who, as a local breed, should be well used to this weather, was very unnerved by the change in atmospheric pressure that preceded the change in the weather. However, the actual rain, however fierce, does not bother her at all. So, I have been very grateful for the good hooded raincoat that I have out here…and I have made a note to myself to dig out the wellington boots that I never wear in Israel and bring them out next time. Fortunately, the kids have a tumble dryer, which means that I can get through a day that is punctuated by two rain-soaked walks on two pairs of jeans and two pairs of shoes.

One plus, for us, of the colder weather, has been the magic of a wood-burning stove. I have, finally, mastered the art of starting a fire, and the evenings are much cheerier basking in the radiated heat of eucalyptus logs. The new load of wood that the kids took delivery of a week or so ago is from a supplier they have not used before. He, thankfully, cuts his logs shorter than their previous supplier, so there is no longer a struggle to wedge logs into the stove. There are also more thinner logs, which are useful when starting the fire. Now, if only there were underground access to the woodshed, so that bringing in an evening’s supply of logs did not necessitate braving the elements, life would be close to ideal.

Today has seen the start of our preparations to leave. I have left loaves and chocolate ice-cream in the freezer, and there is a good supply of my granola in the kitchen. Nan made scones for Shabbat and for teatime today, with cream and jam. We did our last supermarket shop today, leaving the house well-stocked. The empty gas bottle has been exchanged for a spare full one. Both Grandpa and Nana read the bedtime stories this evening. One of our carry-on trolleys is packed inside one of the cases, and the few things we are taking back are packed in the other. The last big laundry has been washed, dried, folded, and put away for next time.

And so, another trip has come and, before we know it, gone. The boys are still young enough for us to see some change even within one visit, and certainly from one visit to the next. Early childhood is such a fleeting time. We are lucky to be able to catch as much of it as we do.

It has long puzzled me exactly what the nature is of the unfailing attraction that puppet shows (as they are called by Nana) hold for the boys in Portugal. Every day, both Tao and Ollie ask Nana for a puppet show at least ten times, and, being Nana, she agrees to provide one at least five or six times.

These puppet shows have evolved over the years, and, indeed, the number of puppets (or, more accurately, models) is now approaching the number of cast members in the English National Theatre’s epic 1982 production of Nicholas Nickleby.

Although the shows always follow a very familiar format, the cast list has grown over time, as the kids acquire new Playmobil, Lego and other people and animals, and the boys have, recently, started handling one or two of the characters themselves, although Nana carries most of the burden of the narrative on her broad shoulders.

Blogger’s Note: At this point, I wanted to insert a cast photo. However, I am experiencing technical difficulty uploading the image to display on a laptop (it seems to display on a smartphone)), but I still want to include the legend for the image, to give you an idea of the rich tapestry of characters.

What puzzles me is that the storyline of these shows is very mundane. The characters all live in a small, quiet, town, and a typical show might involve Jackie and Cat going for a run in the park, while Woof and Lion have an argument and Mister Policeman needs to talk to them about getting along together. Increasingly, Tao attempts to hijack the narrative. He might take charge of the character of Vampire, who is a newcomer to the cast, and who has an evil streak that his neighbours have not yet managed to educate him out of.

So far, Nana has managed to steer the narrative flow away from the threat of death rays and zombies and back to such questions as what Mummy is going to make Little Boy for his tea. Remarkably, Tao succumbs to subtle grandmotherly direction, and the storyline almost always stays firmly rooted in the everyday.

It was only this week that it suddenly struck me that these puppet shows are the kitchen table equivalent of the television soap opera and clearly hold the same attraction for the boys as East Enders does for millions of Britons. The familiarity of the characters and the storyline are their very attraction. It also strikes me (not much of a revelation, this) that the comfort of familiarity also find expression in the boys, and, I suspect, all read-to children, enjoying having the same story  time and again.

Incidentally, having never read Dr Seuss to our own children, I confess that I am appreciating The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham more each time I read them….which, on this trip, has been a lot of times.

We had a video call with Raphael this week, I asked him how he had enjoyed the concert he went to. This was a special, apparently subsidised, children’s concert by a brass ensemble at a fairly local community centre. When I asked him, I had no idea what a torrent of enthusiasm I was unlocking. We were treated to mimes and impersonations of the trombonist and the one-man-band percussionist, and Esther assured us that Raphael had joined in heartily with all the songs he knew, and had applauded wildly throughout. She and Maayan had been concerned that he might be too young for a live show like this, but it seems that he lapped it up. He is a child who has always been exposed to, and has responded enthusiastically to, music, so it is not really surprising.

To have been treated, in the space of a couple of weeks, to watching two children spellbound at a dolphin show at the zoo and a third enthusing over the concert he had seen made this a very special week. May their lives be filled with being excited, enchanted and delighted by all the wonders that the world has to offer,

This week I have had another mystery unravelled. In Portuguese, the more formal greeting and farewell changes with the time of day. However, rather than ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good afternoon’, with their clear transition time of twelve noon, the first two terms are ‘Bom dias’ and ‘Boa tarde’ – ‘Good day’ and ‘Good late’. The question thus begged is, obviously: At what time does one switch from ‘Bom dias’ to ‘Boa tarde’. Every time we come to Portugal, I observe how locals use the two terms. (I get plenty of opportunities, because the supermarket cashiers, and the neighbours I pass in the street when I am walking Lua, all use these two greetings. Indeed, I would estimate that 70% of my verbal interaction with locals (and 95% of the verbal interaction I understand) consists of these two phrases.) Once I started wondering about when to switch, I soon realised that whatever the answer is, it cannot be a single time on the clock. Sometimes people wished me ‘Boa tarde’ at 2:00PM; at other times, I was wished ‘Bom dias’ at 2:30.

When a shop assistant wished me ‘Boa tarde’ as early as 1:10 this week, I realised I had no idea what was going on, and decided I had to understand the logic once and for all. When I googled, I learnt that dias ends and tarde begins at 12 noon. This was clearly nonsense, so, over Shabbat lunch, I mentioned to the kids my befuddlement. Tslil was delighted to offer the explanation, which had been given to her by a kindly neighbour when she wished him ‘Boa tarde’ and he responded ‘Bom dias’, adding, with a smile: ‘I haven’t had my lunch yet.’ So there you have it: a movable feast, as it were. I initially worried about what Portuguese Jews do on a fast day, but then, of course, I realised that on Yom Kippur we say ‘Gmar Hatima Tova’, on minor fasts they can employ ‘Tsom Kal’, and on Tisha b’Av we don’t greet each other at all.

And so we enter our last week in Portugal. With the first week spent in Lisbon, we seem to have reached this point frighteningly quickly. With our 10^th of the month 10% seniors’ discount shop completed at the super today, a winter’s supply of firewood delivered yesterday, and a big bake for the freezer completed yesterday, the kids are well on the way to preparing for us to leave. We have grandparenting duties, including a two-night sleepover for Raphael, waiting for us in Israel in the week we return, so we are planning to recharge our batteries on the plane back home. I tried to write ‘Still, it keeps us young’ at this point, but my fingers couldn’t quite manage it.

Flying to Portugal seems like an awfully long way to travel just to be insulted, and yet that seems to be the emerging theme of this particular trip.

For a long time now, my grandsons have all accused me of being silly, and, to be honest, it is a badge that I wear with pride. Riddled with insecurities, ‘silly’ is one thing I have dreaded being exposed as for most of my adult life, so it is tremendously liberating to be so labelled by grandsons who clearly regard it as an endearing trait rather than a flaw.

A less welcome development on this trip has been the constant admonishment that: “You’re old, Grandpa.” In fairness, it is a card that I play myself fairly regularly, so I can’t really complain.

However, today marked a further development. Bernice and I walked Tao to his Portuguese lesson at school. (Four days a week, all the non-native-speakers in the school learn Portuguese together in one class, and Tao, as a home-schooled pupil, is able to join them.) The school is, very conveniently, only a four-minute walk from the house. However, like 97% of Penamacor, it is downhill from the house, which means, of course, that the walk back is uphill, beginning with three flights of steps, about 25 in all. Ollie had come with us and, as we tackled the steps on the way back to the house, he was heard to declare: “Come on, Grandpa! You can do it!” My only solace is that he followed this with: “Come on, Nana! You can do it!”

Even more painful were the preparations for a game that didn’t actually materialise. Nana and Ollie were, he informed us, to be Mr Happy and Grandpa was to be Mr Miserable. Inexplicably, Bernice found this hilarious. Other opinions differed.

Life has, as you will doubtless have already realised, been very quiet since we left Lisbon nine days ago, on Sunday. Tao returned with a bug, which he then passed on to Micha’el, and Tslil has also not been firing on all cylinders. So last week was uneventful. Happily, everyone is more or less recovered now. Tao was well enough to enjoy a Hallowe’en party over the weekend, Hallowe’en being heartily celebrated in Portugal. For the last few days he has been leaping out at us in his vampire top hat and cape and gruesome face-distorting fangs, which tends to give his Nana what old people like me should probably call conniptions.

The weather has been very kind to us, with the exception of last Friday and Shabbat, when the rain bucketed down unabated for about forty hours. Today (Monday), in contrast, has been sunny and almost warm, so that the boys and Tslil and I were able to enjoy a morning stroll with Lua, which included boarding new fewer than three pirate ships, and Tao and I stayed on with the dog long enough to devise a system of simplified semaphore to enable us to communicate with each other from one mountaintop to another. And all before breakfast.

Supermarket shopping has been as mysterious as always. Two different supers offer a wide variety of bread flour, but both have run out of spelt flour. Is there a world shortage that nobody told me about? The fish counters are devoid of trout, which they always used to feature. Maybe there is some reason behind this, but it certainly eludes me.

Days here are more structured than they have been previously. Now that Tao is officially a home-schooled first-grader, he has a timetable that includes not only his Portuguese lessons at school, but also English, Hebrew, maths and a subject that I think I will translate as general studies, although the Portuguese word means ‘environment’. It includes elements of geography, history, science and civics, and is a core school subject throughout primary school. After 6^th grade, pupils study each of these subjects separately.

The first-grade syllabus does not seem to be too demanding. In fact, Tao was already well ahead of the maths syllabus before he started studying formally. However, almost certainly the most important thing at this stage is that he is enjoying all of his studies, at home and in school.

One last school story. I took Tao to school yesterday for the first time. He had Portuguese for the first two lessons of the day. We walked through the playground and into the building, at which point a short, middle-aged lady in a yellow jacket – obviously an ancillary staff member – aggressively barred our entrance and started remonstrating with me in a stream of unintelligible Portuguese. I attempted to explain why we were there, but it was not easy, given that I still have no Portuguese at all. From her continued ranting, it seems I even failed to convey the fact that I do not speak Portuguese. I’m not sure which of us was more traumatised, Tao or myself.

After a couple of minutes, a member of the academic staff arrived, and calmed the situation. Another staff member – an older man who is, I believe, the co-ordinator of the home- schooling programme – also arrived, and everything was sorted out. I now realise that my crime was to come into the school before the bell had rung. We should have waited in the playground. When the bell rang, the children lined up in their year-groups, and Tao should then have joined the first-graders and gone into school only when they did.

Today, when Bernice and I took Tao again, the same yellow-jacketed woman – who is, incidentally, short of stature (just saying, Napoleon complex and all that) – came over to us as soon as we walked through the gate into the playground, and greeted me warmly with a broad smile and a stream of obviously welcoming Portuguese. Armed today with an explanation – ‘Aula de Português lingua no matera’, which as near as damn it is comprehensible as ‘a lesson in non-mother-tongue Portuguese’ – I was ready to have it out with her, but she was very warm and welcoming (‘simpering’ is a word that springs to mind) and left Bernice and myself with the distinct impression that she had, after yesterday’s encounter, been given a very stiff talking-to by the powers that be.

The other highlight of my week was on the sporting front. Last night, it fell to me to sit with the boys while they had their bath. Bath-time is a major attraction for the boys, and they take their time over their ablutions, which have more to do with bubbles, hydraulics and pouring than with carbolic soap, flannels and scouring. Yesterday, the boys had, in the bath, a sponge ball, and we worked up a very enjoyable game that owed its format, in more or less equal proportions, to the slip cradle of the playing fields of my youth, the squash court of my teaching years and the school brick wall of Bernice’s childhood. The game was a big hit with all concerned, and threatens to become a fixture of the bathtimes that fall to me.

And that’s, more or less, my week. Quite how such slight material can be sewn together into so meaningful a week is one of life’s mysteries, but there it is.