The passage of a human life can be marked in many ways. One of the ubiquitous ways is beginnings and endings. From the first day at school to graduation from university, from launching a new career to retiring from work, the map of our lives can be seen as a series of beginnings and endings.

At some point in life, it may dawn on you that you are reaching the point where most of your beginnings are behind you, and what lies ahead of you is almost all endings. Please don’t think that I am feeling morbid today; on the contrary, endings can be very satisfying indeed. I still remember with a warm glow the day when Bernice and I made the last payment on our mortgage, although probably, if I had to choose one ending that soared above all others, it would be the day Bernice and I walked out of the kids’ high school one evening, turned to each other, and declared: “That is the last parents’ evening we will ever have to attend.”

It may surprise you to learn that Michael’s relationship with school, indeed his relationship with any institutional authority, was, shall we say, fraught, (arguably more for us than for him) and, for me even more than for his always understanding and always self-assured mother, parents’ evenings were one of the inner circles of hell.

Nothing has quite matched that feeling but there has been another major element in our shared life that has, on occasion, elicited the same kind of emotions as I felt sitting across the desk from Micha’el’s teachers. That is, unexpectedly, our house. Let me explain.

Bernice and I are very fond of our house. We have, over the years, nurtured it and lavished attention on it, and almost all of the time it repays us by being a haven of peace and comfort which accommodates our various idiosyncrasies and our accumulated junk uncomplainingly.

However! Every so often, the house misbehaves. Take last Friday, for example. (It is, incidentally, always a Friday, though not always just a week before we are going away for 11 days.) Bernice had put a wash on, and the machine was ticking and humming quietly to itself, the soothing sound of water lazily slapping the sides of the drum interrupted by an occasional chirp to mark the machine’s steady and serene procession through the various phases of the wash.

Suddenly, this calm was interrupted by the unmistakable buzz of electricity shorting. In a fusillade of short chirrups, the machine switched itself off and on repeatedly. The buzzing and chirping continued for a short while, until Bernice wisely decided to switch off and unplug the machine, which had, anyway, finished its cycle except for spinning, and to hang up the sodden washing.

Our washing machine lives in our utility room. This is a room of which I am immensely proud. It is about 1.80 x 1.70 metres, with a door that opens inwards. A circular vent from the adjacent under-the-stairs toilet is cut into one wall. There are no windows and two electric sockets, on opposite walls. Not long after we moved in, we bought in IKEA some free-standing wooden open utility shelving units, in the form of upright poles and shelves. We were able to buy a combination of units that gave us shelving along two adjacent walls, and a single unit on a third wall. This left a space for standing slightly less than 1.30 x 1.00 metres.

We managed to fit the washing machine between the uprights of the single unit, opposite the door, and, between that unit and the L-shaped unit, a small upright freezer, with a small upright fridge standing on top of it.

The shelving unit holds household supplies, tools, cleaning equipment, our emergency supplies in case of war (the utility room also doubles as our improvised ‘safe’ room, in the event of missile or rocket attack), about 60 beer bottles (sometimes full, sometimes empty) for home brewing, a shopping wheelie bag, laundry baskets, buckets, plastic bag dispensers, our Shabbat plata and urn, and a lot of other stuff…and I mean a lot. The room is a shrine to the efficient use of space. However, there is one drawback.

In order to access the electricity socket, in the event, for example, that it burns out, as it had last Friday, a certain amount of rearrangement of the furniture is required. The socket is 70cm above floor level, behind the stacked fridge and freezer.

So, on Friday, Bernice and I had to empty the fridge, then lift the fridge off the freezer, put it down on the floor, and slide it out of the utility room. This is an exercise made more challenging by the fact that the utility room is only just large enough for two people to stand in, and, when there are two people standing in it, there is no available floor space to put the fridge down. Imagine, if you will, a game of Twister played in a retirement home, with the participants required to carry heavy weights throughout the game, and you will have some idea of what we went through.

When we had eventually extricated the fridge and freezer, we could see the charred socket. It made no sense to put anything back until the socket was replaced, and that wasn’t going to happen before Shabbat, so we then repacked the fridge, plugged it in in the salon, slid the freezer out, left that in the hall, plugged in via an extension lead, and called our electrician and explained the problem to him. Quick as a flash, there I was back at the parents’ evening. He started pointing out how far short of the safety protocol our house’s electricity falls, and how haphazardly it was wired in the years before we moved in. He then castigated us for overloading the system.

Once he had humiliated us in this way, he then admitted that what we would need to do to replace the house’s wiring and upgrade to a three-phase circuit would be prohibitively expensive, and he quite understood why nobody is ever prepared to do it. As if this kindness were not enough, when he arrived on Sunday to carry out the work of removing the burnt-out socket and channelling cables from the junction box to a new four-socket outlet that he mounted in an accessible position on the wall, I was able to show him that I had reformed my ways since his last humiliation a few months ago, and I had labelled all twelve of the circuit-breakers in our electricity box, mapping each to its respective lights and sockets. He was suitably impressed.

Once the electrician had finished, cleaned up, and left, Bernice and I then had another long game of Twister (it is even more challenging in a confined space to lift a fridge onto a freezer than to take a fridge off a freezer), and eventually managed to get the utility room back into shape. Now, we are left waiting for the next unexpected domestic crisis (usually either electricity- or water-based), reminding us, yet again, that our house is capable of acting not only like a non-conformist child, but also like an aging parent, suddenly developing some new system malfunction that requires immediate attention.

It is with a shock that I now realise that, while I was looking in the other direction, I transformed from the son whose parents’ health is an increasing cause of concern into the father whose health is an increasing cause of concern for his children. I suppose that is just another way in which we mark the transition from a life full of beginnings to one increasingly marked by endings. And on that memento mori note, I wish you a good week, untroubled by any health or other issues.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I have had an earth-shattering week: little short of momentous. When I tell you about it, you almost certainly won’t agree; indeed, you’ll probably wonder what all the fuss is about. But trust me: weeks don’t come much bigger than this. (Indeed, it has been so action-packed that I am going to have leave one entire topic over until next week.)

First of all, I tackled some jobs. Life is too short to list even a small percentage of my character flaws, but, in the pantheon of David’s greatest failings, right up there jostling for pole position is procrastination. I have spent most of my life bent almost double under the weight of jobs I keep putting off that could, almost always, be handled, done, dusted and filed away with considerably less effort than I expend not handling them.

It was probably the mid-1970s when I read The Eiger Sanction by Trevanian. I am fairly sure that was the book that featured the Head of Western Intelligence, or some such, who worked from a desk that was just large enough to hold one opened folder, so that he always had to complete one task before going on to the next. I thought that was a brilliant, enviable, and, for me, totally unattainable, level of efficiency. Apart from anything else, where do you put your cup of tea, your tissues, your other pair of glasses?

Incidentally, in the first of two astounding author revelations this week, I have just discovered, while carrying out the online research that most weeks fools at least some of you into thinking that I am erudite, that I have been labouring under a delusion for the last 50+ years. I always believed – nay, I always knew – that ‘Trevanian’ was the pseudonym of a publicity-shunning duo who wrote novels together, and whose names were – obviously – Trevor Somebody and Ian Somebody-Else. I now discover that it was simply the nom de plume of Rodney William Whittaker, an American film scholar who just happened to write a string of best-selling thrillers in the 1970s.

As I was saying. Last week I tackled some long-standing jobs. In my defence, some of these jobs were dependent on Bernice and I making a decision that we would travel to Portugal this summer as usual. This decision hinged on our assessment of my health prospects, so booking flights, as I did last week, was either a very positive sign, or else a reflection on our foolhardiness. Time, no doubt, will tell which. (Joking aside, apart from my feeling about 350% better than I did when we returned from Portugal in March, medical experts have told me we have no reason not to plan a trip.)

Once we had dates for Portugal, and a final decision not to cancel plans to go to England in mid-May for a great-nephew’s barmitzvah, I was able to start slotting in all the medical appointments I had been due to arrange. Since many of these appointments can’t be made automatically online, they almost all involved a callback from the relevant office. There is something faintly depressing about getting a call from a secretary who says “I’m calling from Shaarei Tzedek, returning your call. How can I help you?”, and having to say: “Can you tell me which department you’re calling from? I’m waiting for three calls from Shaarei Zedek.”

However, one bonus of this burst of activity is that I have actually been able to arrange two different appointments at the hospital for the same day next week. I’m wondering how many appointments I need to make to qualify for a free surgery of my choice, or at least a reserved parking spot.

I also got several other administrative monkeys off my back, in a flurry of activity that left me feeling uncharacteristically energised and positive

Once Pesach ended, I knew I had to start harvesting the shesek (loquat) from what we used to call our little tree, but now need to call our medium-sized tree. In terms of ripeness, they would probably have benefitted from another week on the tree, but I stopped netting the tree when, a few years ago, Robert Shaw growled in my ear: “We’re gonna need a bigger net,” and, I realised, a taller ladder and a much younger person to set the whole thing up. It was at that point that I cut a deal with the birds, offering them all they could eat from the top half of the tree, as long as they left me the bottom half.

This year, much to my surprise, they have been much more reasonable about this than in the past, and, in the two harvests last week and this, I was able to pick over 13 kilo of shesek.

This is probably the best point to stop for a moment and marvel at the miracle that every humble fruit tree is. When the family bought it for my birthday, probably 25 years ago, our tree was not as tall as me. Rooted in the very thin soil that constitutes our front garden, watered by a drip system, but otherwise benignly left to its own devices, it offers us shade in mid-summer, more dried leaves than anyone could possibly want in the late autumn, and, most years, between 10 and 20 kilo of the juiciest, tastiest loquats you have ever eaten.

In my cynical youth, I used to laugh at what I considered the cheap sentimentality of Joyce Kilmer’s poem Trees.

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

I can still take or leave its relentless metre and end-stopped lines, its hammering monosyllabic rhymes, its insufficiently realised metaphors. (If you are looking up at God, how can your mouth be prest against the earth’s breast?) However, I have more sympathy with its sentiment these days. When you pick fruit from your own tree, and take offerings and tithes required on fruit and vegetables grown in Eretz Yisrael, and taste the first shesek of the season, and lay down provisions to keep this moment alive through the whole year, you feel a connectedness and a sense of continuity, and you are made aware of God’s beneficence. I am told that there are people who do not believe in a Higher Force, but I don’t understand what goes through their minds when they see the first shesek flowers appearing each year and reflect on the miracle that every single tree is.

Incidentally, in the second of two astounding author revelations this week, I have just discovered, while carrying out the online research I mentioned above, that I have been labouring under a delusion for the last 60+ years. I have always assumed that Joyce Kilmer was a woman, and a pretty soft, soppy woman at that. I now discover that he was very much a man; indeed, a war hero posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerres for his bravery on the battlefields of the First World War. I hang my head in sexist shame.

Loquat, like the rest of us, has its strengths and weaknesses. Our particular tree, for example, produces fruit that, no matter how healthily and vibrantly yellow-orange-apricot it glows on the tree, a few hours after it is picked develops grey patches and starts to soften. It is true that the fruit continues to taste really good for a day or two after this, but, fond as we are of shesek, Bernice and I cannot eat 13 kilo in a week ourselves.

Our neighbours on one side, and our good friends down the road, both have their own trees, so our neighbour on the other side always gets a generous bagful. We also take up to Zichron, where Raphael can be relied on to eat them, as, indeed, any fruit, in whatever quantity his parents will allow.

If the loquat’s weakness is its shelf life, then its strengths, apart from its juiciness and flavour, are its versatility and its high pectin content. So, having picked the last almost 6 kilo first thing this morning, I made shesek jam and shesek chutney (reminiscent of Branston pickle), stoned and stemmed another 4 cupfuls, to join the five cupfuls already in the freezer, promising to keep us in shesek ice-cream throughout the year. This left enough to take to Esther tomorrow and enough for Bernice and I to enjoy in our breakfast fruit salad for the next week. Bernice is also planning to make cinnamon loquat cake. Our kitchen windowsill looks like The Little House on the Prairie at the moment.

When you have stemmed and stoned 9 kilo of loquats (I keep the skin on for the ice cream and the jam), you are left with a large quantity of stones. In a normal year, I would make my shisky (shesek liqueur) from these stones. It is very reminiscent of amaretto (which is, after all, made, similarly, from the stones of the almond fruit). However, this year we will be in England at exactly the time the stones would need to be bathing in alcohol and sitting in the heat of the sun for a month, being shaken every four or five days. Fortunately, we still have 2 unopened bottles of 2023 and two of 2024 vintage, so we can get by while skipping a year.

However, Esther, I am delighted to say, is planning on stepping in. So, tomorrow we will be taking up to Zichron a pot of shesek jam, a pot of shesek chutney, a litre and a half of shesek stones, a recipe for shesek liqueur, and a kilo or two of actual shesek.

If we compost the stems and (few) skins, we will have wasted nothing of this astonishing fruit.

I wonder if the Loquat Marketing Board has a vacancy. I feel I may have a calling.

Only time will tell whether I’ve chosen the right story to follow that title. It’s not easy to gauge just how much time, but, back-of-the-envelope reckoning, I calculate we will need however long it takes us to figure out how to travel at the speed of light, and then another 124 years.

As the geeks among you will have realized, what I’m alluding to – and, as it happens not writing about this week – is K2-18b, the planet on which a team of scientists based at Cambridge University, using Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, have detected signs of two molecules – dimethyl sulphide (DMS) and dimethyl disulphide (DMDS) – that, on earth, are produced only as a result of the activity of marine phytoplankton and bacteria.

The scientific world seems to have become very excited by the prospect of having intelligent near neighbours. And understandably so! Who wouldn’t relish the prospect of driving 700 trillion miles to discuss geopolitics with a piece of seaweed? However, without wishing to put a damper on all this excitement about new folks moving into the neighbourhood, I should point out that the level of probability that where there is DMS and DMDS there is also seaweed is, at time of writing, only three sigmas (99.7%). The standard scientific bar for this kind of discovery is set at five sigmas (99.999999%). So, I wouldn’t start putting ‘K2-18b’ into Waze just yet. Mind you, since it is only 18 months since the team achieved a one-sigma result (68% probability), it is easy to understand the excitement generated.

However, my attention this week has been somewhere else entirely, or, more precisely, three somewhere elses. Just when I was thinking that the time might have come to give up on the idea of finding intelligent life on earth, three items dropped into my mainstream media feeds. You have probably noticed one or two of them, but you might not have thought of joining up the dots as I have.

For the last 90 days, I have watched and read in bemusement and amusement as political commentators have attempted, in blogs and newspaper columns, on radio and television, to justify their salaries. With a considerable vested interest, this unfortunate group of experts have been turned to for daily in-depth analysis of President Trump’s policy. Finally, this week, I see that a number of them have dropped the pretence, and admitted that Trump does not have a policy. He has no strategy, no plan for achieving his goals, no team of guides and advisers. All he has is a constantly ducking and weaving gut-instinct, which he relishes in giving rein to as it leads him to draw directionless and structureless doodles across the map of the world.

I admire these commentators for giving up the pretence of commenting on the style, cut and quality of the emperor’s new clothes and admitting that he is, indeed, stark naked. At the same time, my heart goes out to them, because in admitting this, they are also admitting that their dual functions have no meaning in Trump’s second term. They cannot interpret his actions and analyse the underlying reasoning, because they have just admitted that there is no underlying reasoning. At the same time, there is little point in their offering projections regarding the effect of the President’s latest actions. Before the ink has even dried on their latest op-ed piece, Trump will have done three new and mutually contradictory things, and undone two others, so that their article is only good for wrapping fish.

Moving from the new world to the old, I was shocked to read that the British Supreme Court ruled this week that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex. This means that trans women can no longer use single-sex female toilets or changing rooms or compete in women’s sports, and that self-identifying trans women convicted of raping biological women will not be incarcerated in women’s prisons. As I typed that last sentence, the lunacy of the last more than a decade in Britain washed over me again. At a stroke, the Supreme Court seems to have made it possible for ordinary, sane people in Britain to, once again, proclaim the simple truth that ‘woman’ is a biological term.

That is what is so shocking about this entire last woke period in Britain. The grip that officially-sponsored lunacy held on the country, the totality of woke sway, made it possible to believe that the entire country was hallucinating. However, the speed with which almost everyone has celebrated the Supreme Court ruling shows that this was never anything other than a reign of terror, which only a few very principled and brave heroes had the courage and integrity to resist publicly.

Incidentally, Cambridge University, the very institution where astronomers are becoming cautiously optimistic about the prospect of alien algae, was at the forefront of the British woke insanity, scoring 2.38 (0.42 more than its nearest rival) on a scale that scored the following manifestations of woke thinking and action: anonymous reporting; anti-racism training; free speech controversies; official commitments to decolonisation; race equality charter membership; transgender-related restrictions on speech; trigger warnings.

Finally, this week, I move closer to home. I fear that some of what I am about to write may be deeply upsetting to some of my readers, but I have to call it as I see it.

As I write this, on Monday, we are at Day 563 of the war, and there are still 59 hostages that have not been returned to Israel: 35 whose families are waiting to give them a burial, and 24 whose loved ones are praying that they will be returned alive. Since October 7, with relentless determination, Israel’s national broadcaster, Kan, has striven to keep an awareness of the hostages at the very centre of the nation’s attention.

In a country where news typically breaks hourly, rather than daily, almost all hourly radio bulletins have contained an item featuring an extract from an interview with, or a speech by, a member of a hostage’s family. Not infrequently, such an item has been the lead or second item in the bulletin. Only rarely have these sound-bites been truly definable as news.

On Day 563, this unequivocally reflects an extreme prioritization that, I would suggest, can no longer be seen as reflecting the objective reality of newsworthiness, but, rather, speaks to the broadcaster’s subjective understanding of its own role and influence. One of the most striking examples of this bias is a weekday daily two-hour current affairs programme, with a human face, from 10:00 till noon.

The presenter, Keren Neubach, features every day a lengthy interview with a hostage family member, in which her empathy and compassion are eloquent. Almost always, these conversations are very upsetting to listen to. With many of these interviewees, whom she has spoken with more than a few times, over the last almost 19 months, Neubach has clearly forged a personal relationship that means a great deal both to them and to her. In her opening monologue this morning, she spoke of how today seems like a routine day:

“Pesach is over; perhaps you’ve taken the kids to kindergarten and gone off to work; Holocaust Day is just around the corner, and then Independence Day. Have you started planning your barbecue? Apparently a perfectly normal day. But nothing is normal, nothing is routine. Because in Gaza, at this very moment, 59 of our brothers and sisters are still being held. Some of them alive, tortured, suffering, threatened, at this very moment; some no longer alive. Their families are waiting as well. And nothing will be normal, or routine, until all 59 come back home. They all have to come back, up to the very last one.” The tone, directness and bluntness of this piece are typical of Kan’s approach until now.

However, yesterday and today, on the programme that immediately precedes Neubach’s, both one of the two co-presenters, and one of the expert commentators, calmly stated that it is by no means certain that the hostages will ever be returned. For the last year and a half, I have dreaded that there is no situation in which Hamas will consider it to be in its interest to return the last of the hostages, but this is not a position that Kan has given voice to over this period, and, in Israel as a whole, it is not an opinion often spoken aloud in public.

Kan published today the result of a recent opinion poll, which showed that 56% of those questioned favoured ending the war immediately in return for the release of all the hostages, while 22% were opposed and 22% did not express an opinion, I was surprised that Kan gave publicity to the survey, which showed far fewer supporting the return of the hostages if the price is ending the war than Kan’s presentation has been suggesting over the last months.

On the same programme, they played a message from a mother speaking directly to her hostage son. (Kan has been featuring such messages since it was first revealed that hostages sometimes are able to hear Israel radio broadcasts,) Interestingly, in the message, the mother states that 80% of the Israeli public support ending the war immediately in return for the release of all the hostages. The survey results suggest otherwise, but the media prominence given to hostage family members and protest rallies has, until now, created a different impression.

I have no idea whether what I see this week as a shift in Kan’s perception and projection of the reality we live in is a temporary blip, or represents a policy change, or is something less formal and more spontaneous. I welcome it as what seems to me a reading of the situation that is more grounded in reality and is, on the whole, healthier, than the “Bring Them Home” mantra that has, until now, suggested that the fate of the hostages lies with the Israeli government rather than their Hamas captors.

All I know for now is that I have identified three (count them: three!) examples of widespread delusion melting after receiving a dose of sanity. I don’t know when I last felt so positive about the future of the human race’s ability to understand the reality it finds itself in. (Not optimistic about the future of the human race, mind you! Let’s keep a grip here.)

I suppose I should also take heart from the fact that, if life on earth ever proves to be untenable, we can always go and live with those nice bacteria round the corner on K2-18b.

It is one of life’s imponderables that, every year, Pesach appears on the Jewish calendar at exactly the same time, and yet, every year, no matter how long in advance we start our preparations, and how carefully we plan our Gantt charts, we always end up only just managing to get in under the wire. This appears to be true whatever measures we take to minimise the load.

My sibling sympathies were stretched mighty close to their limit last week when, at the end of our pre-pre-Pesach phone conversation, my brother, who is spending Pesach this year with children and grandchildren at a European resort hotel, was unsure whether he would be able to spare the time on Wednesday for our pre-Pesach conversation, because of his packing.

As I outlined last week, my major preparations were completed on Wednesday, which I dedicated to baking. Bernice, on the other hand, faced, on Thursday and Friday, a mountain of cooking for the two days of Shabbat and Chag, and barely had time to draw breath. From where I’m standing, however hard she worked over those two days, it was certainly worth it, because we assuredly ate royally over the weekend.

As it turned out, I had a couple of errands to run myself, even if one of them was entirely self-imposed. Let’s start with the other, since that was responsible for me aging considerably last Wednesday.

For the last several years, we have had a water machine, which provides us with chilled, almost-boiling, and tepid filtered water at the press of a button. Having access to what are to all intents and purposes unlimited and immediately available supplies of water for both cold and hot drinks is, throughout the week, a real pleasure, and, on Shabbat and Chag, a great convenience. While many people would be hard-pressed to find a use for tepid water, I find it perfect for adding to flour to make bread dough. I recognise, as I type this, how I am simply oozing first-world privilege, but not having to play around mixing hot and cold water to get the right temperature for the sourdough starter to thrive is a real bonus.

The only drawback with our last machine was that, after quite a long period of working perfectly, once it had lulled us into a sense of security, it became rather unreliable, and started breaking down every couple of months. These failures often took the form of a slow leak. Eventually, we decided that we would stop paying insurance for free servicing, since the technician was only in Maale Adumim once every two weeks, and we would simply wait until the next technical failure, and then give up on the machine.

Fortunately, it responded to this threat by behaving for a good few months. However, a couple of months ago, it started leaking again, and, after a few days of laying towels alongside the slow leak and changing them every few hours, we accepted the inevitable. This happened shortly before we were due to go to Portugal, so we decided to try living without a machine for a few weeks before deciding whether we wanted to try again.

The trouble is that there are only one or two companies that offer a machine that provides hot water on Shabbat using a technology that is acceptable halachically (in accordance with Jewish law). These companies are not the market leaders, and so their technical, and other, support is not as responsive or efficient as that of the market leader.

By the time we returned from Portugal, we had more or less decided that we would give it one more go. I waited a couple of weeks until I judged that companies would be offering a special pre-Pesach deal, and then placed our order. As it happened, they only offered delivery to, and installation in, Maale Adumim on Wednesdays. The Wednesday 11 days before Pesach was, unusually, a day we were going to Zichron, and so I arranged delivery for last Wednesday, four days before Pesach. “No problem”, the sales rep assured me. “The technician will contact you first thing on the day to arrange a window of three hours when we will deliver and install.”

On Wednesday, I started baking biscuits for Pesach, growing increasingly aware that no technician had called. At 10 o’clock, I decided that ‘first thing’ had certainly passed, and so I called the service centre of the company. An automatic answering service that sounded deceptively efficient informed me that I was 31^st in line, but recommended that, since my time was precious to them, I leave my number, and, when my turn came, they would call me back.

Yes, of course I experienced a sinking feeling, and of course I had my doubts, but when, five minutes later, the same service informed me that I was now 31^st in line, I decided to take a leap of faith and leave my number.

Over the following two hours, I continuing baking. In sympathy with the cinnamon balls in the oven, a little round knot in the pit of my stomach heated up and hardened, until, at 12:17, I phoned again, at this stage more in hope than expectation. I was perhaps less heartened than I should have been to hear that this time I was only 26^th in line. I decided to hold on this time, and, as I waited, I began to get myself used to the idea that we would spend Shabbat and Pesach with bottles of water chilling in the fridge, and water staying hot in an electric urn. After all, I reminded myself, this was undoubtedly far better conditions that the Children of Israel faced when they left Egypt.

Astonishingly, the numbers started coming down, and, very shortly after I had been informed that I was 18^th in line, I got through to a real, living, breathing person. I succinctly explained the situation, and the real, living, breathing person immediately responded: “You’ve come through to the wrong department.” (I, of course, hadn’t ‘come through’ to anywhere; the system had delivered me.) “I’ll put you through to Sales.” “Now we’re cooking,” I thought. “Perhaps we will go to the ball – or at least drink water – this Pesach, after all.”

Within 30 seconds, Sales, in the form of another real, living, breathing person, picked up my call. I succinctly explained the situation, and the real, living, breathing person immediately responded: “You’ve come through to the wrong department. I’ll put you through to the Service Department.” “No!” I screamed, only milliseconds after the real, living, breathing, but clearly not thinking person had transferred me back to the queue I had left a minute earlier, where I was now 24^th in line.

Around this point, Bernice started ensuring that she kept at least one room between myself and her, as I grew more and more enraged. Clearly, the company had taken far more orders than they could ever fulfil in one day, and they were simply delivering the machines to the people who had had the foresight to make it clear that, if the machine did not arrive in time for Pesach, they would cancel the order. Why, oh why, had I not hired some neighbourhood teenager to house-sit for us on the previous Wednesday and take delivery? Had I learnt nothing in 38 years of living in Israel?

I spent the next hour gathering every last reserve of self-control that I could, and, when I felt as psychologically ready as I would ever be, I phoned again. I was 16^th in line, so things were clearly looking up. A real, living, breathing person picked up within three minutes, so clearly the numbers 31, 18, 24, 16 were generated at random purely to amuse the service staff.

“Good afternoon. How can I help you?”

This time, I didn’t succinctly explain the situation. Instead, I very calmly said: “Before I explain the situation, let me make something clear to you. When I have explained the situation, you are going to realise that you cannot help me. At that point, do not transfer me to another department. We have already tried that over the last five hours, and it doesn’t work. Instead, I want you to put me on hold, use another line to contact the person who can help me, confirm that they can help me, tell them to phone me immediately, take me off hold and tell me that someone will be phoning me immediately. Will you do that?”

“Please explain to me what the problem is.”

“First, you have to agree that, when you can’t help me, you will put me on hold, use another line to contact the person who can help me, confirm that they can help me, tell them to phone me immediately, take me off hold and tell me that someone will be phoning me immediately. Will you do that?”

“Please just tell me how I can help you.”

“Not until you agree to do as I have said.”

“I understand. What’s the problem.”

“I don’t need you just to understand. I need you to agree to do it.”

“Yes. I’ll do it.”

Then, and only then, . I succinctly explained the situation, adding an explanation of how previous calls had failed, and the real, living, breathing, thinking  person immediately responded: “Please hold the line.”

She put me on hold, which was, to my huge relief, accompanied by a completely different piece of muzak from the ‘waiting for someone to pick up the call’ muzak. I held the line until just before the point where I would start to believe that I was wasting my time, and then, wonder of wonders, my thinking service rep took me off hold and informed me that I would be contacted “within the next three minutes”.

I thanked her profusely, wished her a Happy Pesach, hung up, and fought to suppress the conviction that I would never receive a call. However, not within three minutes, it is true, but no more than five minutes later, an installation technician called me, to confirm my address and say that he would be on our doorstep within half an hour.

Which he was, with a brand-new matte black machine that almost disappears under the kitchen cupboards, and a story about the technician who should have installed our machine having had an accident. Who knows whether that is actually the case? However, at that stage, I was prepared to cut the technician some slack, not least because he was quick, efficient, tidy, pleasant, gave us his number and assured us he would arrive after any call for service within no more than 48 hours. He even admired my coconut pyramids.

The happy ending is that the water was piping hot and refreshingly cold all through Shabbat and Chag. (I’ll let you know about the tepid when I’m making bread again in another week or so.)

I promised you earlier on accounts of two errands. However, the water machine has taken almost 1900 words, in much the same way that it took 5 hours on Wednesday. So, the other errand will have to wait until next time, unless something more urgent turns up.  

This week’s offering is, of necessity, rather short, and you may judge it to be remarkably thin on content. Those of us more inclined to view the world through a glass half full are celebrating the fact that it has arrived in your inbox at all. Let me explain.

You almost certainly won’t need me to tell you that Pesach begins this coming Saturday evening.

Do I really need to say more? Alright, then. At the risk of stating the obvious…

What this means in practical terms is that we need to be ready for Pesach this coming Friday evening, and being ready, of course, means having Shabbat and Chag meals ready for two days.

This means (you can see the Gantt chart forming before your eyes) that Bernice needs Thursday and Friday to cook and prepare. Fortunately, I have a long-standing medical appointment on Thursday, so I will be out of the way and she will be able to get on.

Since Thursday and Friday are needed by Bernice, this means that I must do my Pesach biscuit and cake baking on Wednesday. Fortunately(!), Bernice has a medical appointment on Wednesday, so she will be out of the way and I will be able to get on.

Tuesday is, of course, Zichron day, and we will be (are) collecting Raphael from gan early, as usual, for a day of grandparenting.

All of which means that we had to schedule the big changeover for Monday. We have this down to a pretty fine art, these days. Over the years, a number of factors have aligned to make our Pesach changeover more and more manageable.

First, we renovated our kitchen, increasing our cupboard space to enable us to keep a lot of Pesach ware in the kitchen all year. Then we stopped eating meat at home, freeing up more cupboard space so that all of our, now reduced, Pesach ware could stay in the kitchen all year round. Then we got rid of a lot of Pesach ware that we never used, especially now that our entertaining is a lot more modest.

As a result, our preparations for the changeover are in two phases these days. Spaced out over an increasing amount of time as we slow down with the years, we tackle the cleaning of the kitchen cupboards, and the overflow fridge and freezer, over a couple of weeks. (This year, Esther and Raphael helicoptering in for a day had been a huge help. They may not realise it yet, but they may well have set a precedent.)

Then, the day before changeover, Bernice and I work as a team, tackling the kitchen appliances: fridge, freezer, oven, hob, coffee machine, toaster and so forth. This we completed on Sunday, as scheduled, and even found the energy to pack away and condense all the dishes and pots and pans, and even to do our big supermarket shop, before collapsing into bed.

Finally, on Monday, after breakfast, we cleared up and put away the final few items, then cleaned the kitchen surfaces and floor, sinks and so on. I covered the work surfaces, and we had all the Pesach ware removed from its less accessible cupboards and packed away at a convenient height, all the food unpacked and put away, in time for a light lunch.

So far, so good. In fact, we were pretty smug about the fact that we had managed to keep to our tight schedule, and, yet again, had proved that “No, we’re still not too old for this!” The plan had been for me to write my blog once all that was done. However, I had needed to schedule an unexpected medical test, and, when I phoned to make an appointment on Sunday morning, I was offered a slot in an hour and a half. Unfortunately, that was not enough time to arrange the necessary paperwork and drive to the other side of Jerusalem. I was then offered a slot on Monday afternoon, which was too good to turn down. So, soon after lunch, off I went.

By the time I returned from the test, which, needless to say, took far longer than anticipated, involving as it did the usual ‘hurrying up to wait’ time, I was feeling pretty exhausted. After supper, I fell asleep over the crossword, and, by the time I woke up, it was time for bed. Bernice suggested that I give the blog a pass for this week, which I reluctantly planned to do, offering as an excuse that our non-existent dog had eaten my homework. However, on what is proving to be a very warm night, I find myself unable to sleep. Instead, I have been lying awake composing this post in my mind. Eventually, around 00:20, I gave in, and got up to creep into the office where I am now just coming to the end of the post, at what I am pleased to see is no later than 01:18.

So, some kind of minor victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, if you will.

Next week, I’d like to promise 3,000 words of geopolitical analysis, but, you know me: it’s just as likely to be pointing out that, incredible as it may seem, Britney Spears (who I confess I would’t be able to pick out in a police line-up) is an anagram of Presbyterians. (Hands up all those who didn’t believe me and had to check it for themselves.)

By the time we meet again, we will be well and truly into Pesach, so let me wish you Chag Sameach. However you are marking the season, may it be meaningful. And, as we approach the festival of freedom, and pass the awful landmark of one-and-a-half years since October 7, may we see all the hostages, alive and no longer alive, returned to their families.

This week, a game of two halves: one of no consequence whatsoever and the other that may tear this country apart. (What is particularly disturbing is that this is only one of the two or three items in the news threatening to tear the country apart.)

I’m going to get the serious stuff out of the way first.

Last week, I buried my head in the sand. This week, I can’t bring myself to ignore all of the stories that are vying for attention in the media. So here’s just one.

In Jerusalem last week, I was approached in the street by a haredi beggar. I dismissed him with a wave of the hand, feeling a mixture of two emotions.

Many years ago, I heard a far better person than me quoted as saying that, if someone is reduced to approaching strangers in the street to ask for money, you should contemplate for a moment what can have brought them to these straits, and what this humbling of themselves may be costing them emotionally, and then you won’t feel able to deny them at least a token donation. They are, after all, providing you with the opportunity to do a mitzvah.

So, one emotion I felt when I waved this beggar away was a tinge of guilt. As it happens, I had no change on me. These days, I don’t normally take my change purse with me when I go out. Of course, I realise that, at some level, failing to take it is a convenient way of avoiding having to deal with the question of whether I want to give some change.

The other emotion was the fleeting thought, which is habitual with me, that if you are prepared, and able-bodied enough, to be out on the street in all weathers begging for small change, then you could, with less effort, find and hold down a job that would pay at least as well. This is not a thought that I am particularly proud of, but there it is.

Earlier today, I realised that, the next time a haredi man approaches me in the street to ask for money, I may not be able to resist giving him not a couple of coins but a piece of my mind. The dialogue I have prepared in my head goes something like this.

‘Have you completed military or national (public) service?’
‘No.’

‘Why not?’
‘Because I devote my life to studying Torah.’

‘How does that contribute to the nation as a whole during this war?’
‘My learning contributes to Israel’s victory and helps protect the soldiers.’

‘Then why are you frittering away your time now begging for money when you could be studying Torah? Surely if, by dint of your study, HaShem will protect our soldiers, then by dint of your study, HaShem will provide for your material needs.’

Actually, in light of today’s headlines, I plan to give him two pieces of my mind. Here is the second.

‘There is a serious shortage of manpower in the army that could be met by haredim if they chose to serve. Because of that shortfall, many reservists have served, over the last year and a half, 200 or more days of reserve duty. As a consequence of that, 41% of them have been fired from their jobs or lost their businesses.’ (I may have to explain to him that 41% means more than 4 in every 10.)’Many of these reservists have wives, or husbands, and children. How dare you turn to the Israeli public and ask for money when these people are sacrificing their economic stability in order to defend the nation, which includes you? How dare you?’

You may want to pause here, to avoid the incredibly abrupt change of gear.

Last Shabbat afternoon found me diving down some diverting rabbit holes in the Collins English Dictionary. (I’m the guy who reads the dictionary so that you don’t have to.) On the journey, I encountered a couple of things that I thought I might share with you today.

Let’s do this in the form of a quiz. Do you know what these trousers are called?

One point if you answered knickerbockers. However, if you recognised them as a particular breed of knickerbocker, and correctly identified them as plus fours, then give yourself two points.

When I stumbled on the etymology of plus fours on Shabbat, I was staggered. How, I asked myself, can I have lived for 75 years, and, for at least 60 of them, known what plus fours are, and never asked myself ‘Why? Why are plus fours called plus fours?’

The utterly charming answer is that your standard knickerbocker is cut so that it ends at the knee. However, the distinctive look of the plus four is achieved by adding another four inches of material to the leg. Plus four inches: obvious, isn’t it?

While we’re giving out points, here’s another opportunity to pit your wits. What do the following words have in common?

Bangle, bungalow, chintz, chutney, cot, gymkhana, juggernaut, shampoo, thug, toddy.

Give yourself one point if you answered that they all came into English from Hindi, during the period when the British ruled India. Before we get to the bonus points, let us pause to note that the ‘gym’ in ‘gymkhana’ is a corruption. The origin of the word is the Hindi gend-khana, which means a ‘ball house’ or ‘racquet court’ and is a place where sports activities take place. As the term was adopted by the British in India, ‘gend’ was altered to ‘gym’, purely under the influence of words like ‘gymnastics’.

Now here is your chance to earn five bonus points. When I look at the above list of words from Hindi, one of them stands out for me. I can understand how most of them were adopted in English: they described activities or objects that were characteristic of India and not of England. However, when I read the list, one word puzzled me. Surely, I thought, this is something that was adopted in England rather than in India. Which word do you think that was?

Shampoo: my limited experience of India suggests that 19^th Century Indians washed their hair with river water rather than shampoo. How can shampoo have come into English from Hindi.

A ten-point bonus for anyone who worked out that, in Hindi, champna is a verb meaning to press, knead or massage, and the original adoption in English was for the process of massaging the scalp, then for the process of applying shampoo by massaging the scalp, and only then for the soapy liquid itself.

None of which is of any consequence whatsoever, but at least it won’t get me into trouble with any Haredi beggars I encounter in the coming days.

I suppose I ought to be feeling spoilt for choice this week. There are no end of earth-shattering stories that I could explore. I could offer my take on whether Trump is well on the way to saving or destroying the world order. I could explore the multiple ways in which it appears that Israel is being dragged, either screaming or not screaming enough, to the very edge of self-destruction. I could even contemplate my own mortality.

However, I don’t feel up to any of that heavy lifting today, so instead I will, with your indulgence, offer two totally unrelated and probably trivial musings.

Muse the First: Marking the Passing of George Foreman.

Fairly high up on the list of sports that I don’t understand is boxing. I don’t understand how the deliberate inflicting of, often permanent, physical damage by one person on another qualifies as a sport. I don’t understand why anyone would choose to watch such inflicting. I don’t understand why the fact that so many youngsters view boxing as their only way out of a lifetime of poverty, crime and abuse should be seen as something to celebrate.

I did not watch the Rumble in the Jungle (Ali’s comeback fight in which he knocked out Foreman in Zaire) live or at any time since. Nor have I watched When We Were Kings, the acclaimed documentary about the fight. I haven’t even read Norman Mailer’s celebrated account of it. I did not follow Foreman’s career at all. I never even bought a George Foreman grill.

All of which means that I came to his obituary in The Times with an unprejudiced eye. (I apologise if the link is blocked for you by a paywall.) It was, unusually for The Times, a lacklustre obit, a pedestrian read about an unprepossessing and fairly directionless life. Like all Times obituaries, it carried no byline. I then read, in today’s Jerusalem Post, a tribute written by Alex Winston, the JP’s.English-born news editor specialising in real estate. This piece presented a coherent view of a life that followed a clear arc, a life informed by purpose, the life of a man who had elements of the hero in him. It was a thoroughly enjoyable and uplifting read.

I have no way of knowing which of these retrospectives is accurate, if indeed either is. Perhaps my only takeaway can be that you shouldn’t believe anything you read in the paper. Yet I find myself very strongly wanting to believe Alex Winston’s account. Partly this is because I take comfort, and perhaps even inspiration, from reading about a life of purpose. (It seems that, willingly or not, I may be, at some level, contemplating my own mortality.)

However, another part of the attraction is that this is a coherent story. Most days, at least one and often several of The Times obituaries are really good reads, not always, indeed not even nearly always, because they celebrate a life of virtue, but, rather, because they celebrate a life lived to the full, however outrageous or villainous that fulness is.

The readers’ comments that regularly accompany obituaries in The Times confirm that I am far from alone in finding that page of the paper a consistently enjoyable and meaningful read.

Muse the Second: What?! Why?!!

If you have any interest in film, you will already know that a new gangster film – The Alto Knights – has recently been released, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robert de Niro. It’s fair to say that, in itself, this is not earth-shattering news. Indeed, I might well have written, in the previous sentence, “yet another new gangster film….Levinson…de Niro”. However, what distinguishes this film is that it sctus;;y strs Roberts de Niro: both of the mafiosi whose true-life rivalry the film depicts are played by Robert de Niro. At the risk of repeating myself: What?! Why?!!

It is fair to say that one actor playing two parts has a long and sometimes distinguished history in cinema (and indeed on stage). It is a device that can serve any of a number of purposes.

Let’s start by considering Peter Pan. The tradition is that the roles of Mr Darling and Captaion Hook are doubled. Although this is not specified in the script, it is a tradition that began with the very first production 121 years ago, when Gerald du Maurier played both roles. This doubling invites speculation that Mr Darling is only ‘tamed’ by his wife; when she is absent, his ‘piratical’ side shows through, in the same way as the lost boys, lacking the restraining and civilising influence of a mother, revert to misbehaving.

Interestingly, in the fabulous 2016 National Theatre production of Peter Pan, which originated at the Bristol Old Vic in 2012, director Sally Cookson had an actress play Mrs Darling and Captain Hook. Sophie Thompson was gloriously, moustache-twirlingly villainous as Hook, but I personally felt some dramatic resonance was lost in this casting decision.

In a similar vein to Peter Pan, Chaplin’s doubling of roles in The Great Dictator was obviously a clear exploitation of the opportunity to mock Adolf Hitler. If he bore such a close physical resemblance to ‘the little tramp’, there was patently no substance behind his bluster.

Another reason for doubling is that the plot directly calls for it. In most cases, this is because the film centres on identical twins, typically one as pure as the driven snow, the other decidedly slushy. Indeed, Bette David played such identical twins not once but twice: in 1946 in A Stolen Life – ‘Kate is self-effacing and gentle, while Pat is bold and ostentatious, getting any man she pleases. Jealous of Kate’s new beau, Bill (Glenn Ford), Pat steals him away, marrying him. But when tragedy strikes, Kate takes an opportunity to get the love she’s always longed for’ – and then in 1964 in Dead Ringer – Davis plays the wealthy Margaret, estranged from her twin, Edith (also Davis), for nearly 20 years. Edith can’t pay her bills, and with an eviction notice hanging over her head, she enacts revenge upon her sister, killing her, and assuming her identity. 

In other cases, the playing of multiple roles is a vehicle for a versatile character actor to demonstrate his talent. Since in such cases the purpose of the exercise is to keep the audience aware that the characters are being portrayed by actors, this lends itself to comedies rather than dramas. Two such films come immediately to my mind. In the first, Alec Guiness struts his stuff as no fewer than eight members of the D’Ascoyne family, being serially murdered by a fiendish Dennis Price so that he can inherit the family’s title and wealth. While Guiness displays virtuosity, his characters clearly share a physical family likeness.

In the second film, arguably in a class of its own, Peter Sellers played three very disparate parts in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove: German-US ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove, US President Merkin Muffley and RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. As you can see, Sellers created three visually distinct characters. The illogic of him playing all three parts seemed perfectly natural in a film that was gloriously surrealistic – while simultaneously being chillingly realistic.

Which brings us, finally, and puzzlingly, back to The Alto Knights. The burning question here is: What is the motivation for casting de Niro in the two leading roles? I ought to say here that I have not seen the film, although I have read several reviews and back-stories. From de Niro’s own comments, it seems that the producer suddenly came up with the idea and de Niro thought it sounded cute, and might hold his interest sufficiently to render making yet another gangster film a more interesting experience for him.

No great attempt seems to have been made to disguise the fact that both roles are played by de Niro. I find myself wondering why nobody in the film remarks on the uncanny resemblance between the rivals.

In addition, reviews that I have read suggest that there is little chemistry between the two de Niros, which is not exactly surprising. Considering the electricity that de Niro and Al Pacino created on screen in such films as Heat, this feels like very much a missed opportunity.

I end, as I started: What?! Why?!! Is this a case of de Niro being too huge a name in cinema for any objective measure of judgement to be applied.

I apologise for pontificating without seeing the film, but I’m not sure I want to witness what I am sure, from all I have read, is little more than a piece of self-indulgence.

Blogger’s Note 1: The first half of today’s offering is arcane. If it isn’t your kind of arcane, you might want to know, before you give up on me, that the second half of today’s offering updates you on the kids in Portugal. Look for a paragraph beginning “If your memory…” If neither arcane nor Portugal interests you, perhaps you need to find another blog.

Blogger’s Note 2: There is a where that we’re heading for today, but it’s some distance away, and it’s a lovely day out here in the foothills of my mind, so I intend to take my time and follow a couple of interesting side paths. If you’ve nothing better to do, you’re more than welcome to come along for the walk. Stout shoes not required: this is a gentle ramble.

From 1923 until 1973, if you had happened to drop by the British Library (then known as the British Museum Library) and walked up to Desk K1, the odds are that most days you would have found Eric Honeywood Partridge there, surrounded by and absorbed in etymological and other reference works. Born in New Zealand, schooled in Australia and then wounded in action in the First World War, Partridge returned home to complete his BA in classics, French and English. He then became Queensland Travelling Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, where he worked on an MA on romantic poetry and a B Litt in comparative literature. He then taught briefly in a grammar (high) school before lecturing in Manchester and London universities. He married, founded a small press and wrote fiction.

In the four years before his press closed, he managed to publish some 60 books, one of which was his own Song and Slang of the British Soldier 1914-1918. This book marked his first venture into an arcane field of language study that, it is no exaggeration to say, he made his own. To illustrate his range within and, sometimes, beyond, this field, here is his bibliography:

RIGINS: An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English
A DICTIONARY OF THE UNDERWORLD
A DICTIONARY OF SLANG AND UNCONVENTIONAL ENGLISH
A DICTIONARY OF HISTORICAL SLANG
A SMALLER SLANG DICTIONARY
SLANG TODAY AND YESTERDAY
SHAKESPEARE’S BAWDY An Essay and a Glossary
A DICTIONARY OF CLICHÉS
A DICTIONARY OF CATCH PHRASES: British and American, from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day
COMIC ALPHABETS: A Light-hearted History
SWIFT’S POLITE CONVERSATION: A Commentary Edition
CHAMBER OF HORRORS: Officialese, British and American
USAGE AND ABUSAGE: A Guide to Good English
NAME THIS CHILD: A Dictionary of Christian or Given Names
Francis Grose’s A CLASSICAL DICTIONARY OF THE VULGAR TONGUE, a commentary edn
NAME INTO WORD dictionary of proper names become common property
ENGLISH: A COURSE FOR HUMAN BEINGS
THE LONG TRAIL, being songs and slang of the British soldier in WW1
(with Will Granville and Frank Roberts) A DICTIONARY OF FORCES SLANG, of all three services in WW2
A TESTAMENT WORD-BOOK
LEXICOGRAPHY: A PERSONAL MEMOIR
Seven volumes of essays on language (general) and words (particular)

Also some books literary rather than linguistic, e.g.:
GLIMPSES (short stories)
JOURNEY TO THE EDGE OF MORNING (autobiographical essays)
THE FRENCH ROMANTICS KNOWLEDGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETRY

I was going to say that he carved out a niche for himself, but, to be honest, from my forays into his world, I can vouch that it is more a network of rabbit warrens than a niche.

Partridge’s Dictionary of Historical Slang is, without a doubt, the filthiest book I know. I would estimate that some 60% of the entries, from a-cockbill on page 1 to zig-zig on page 1053, are not to be repeated in polite company.

The other of his works that I could not imagine living without is A Dictionary of Catch Phrases, to which I turn to quote in full the following entry that explains in part, for the benefit of those of you who are not simultaneously my contemporaries and my landesmen, the title of this week’s poat:

I’m worried about Jim. In the Daily Telegraph, 23 Feb. 1977, Gillian Reynolds (‘Radio Review’) writes, ‘It says a lot for the potency of radio that comedians can still raise the occasional laugh with a harp glissando and the words, “I’m worried about Jim…”, the catchphrase which came to represent “Mrs Dale’s Diary” in much the same way as “Play it again, Sam” [q.v.] did the film “Casablanca”.” VIBS amplifies: ‘Ellis Powell as the eponymous heroine of radio’s Mrs Dale’s Diary (referring to her doctor husband). Although she may not have uttered the phrase very often, it was essential in parodies of the programme’. This very British, middle-class soap opera was first broadcast in Jan. 1948-and ran for 21 years.

I invite you to admire that paragraph. Packed with information delivered with efficient, but never terse, brevity, it includes an apposite citation, a cultural reference that will capture this catchphrase’s place in British popular culture very accurately for a much wider audience, a telling detail to trigger a delightful sound-memory for any reader already familiar with the phrase. Is it any wonder that, when I ask myself these days what professional path I would like to take if I could have my life over, being Eric Partridge comes pretty close to the top? Of course, I would need to have been born with a much sharper memory and a keener intellect than I have, and – perhaps most significantly – a work ethic that could see me occupying Desk K1 in the British Library almost every day for 30 years.

So, moving swiftly on. Many thanks and appreciation to those of you who inquired after my health after last week’s post. Let me say that I have no intention of turning this blog into Mrs Dale’s Diary. I’m currently in the middle of tests which will doubtless, in the fullness of time, allow my doctor to come to a conclusion. Meanwhile, my infection is responding nicely to the antibiotic.

But what, I hear those of you have not got some anonymous AI bot who sounds nothing like me reading this post out loud to you, of the ‘Gym’ in the title of this week’s post. Not ‘Jim’, but ‘Gym’. I thought you’d never ask.

If your memory bears a closer resemblance to Partridge’s than to mine, you may remember that Micha’el and Tslil are currently preparing to embark on a new and exciting business venture – launching a bodyweight gym in Penamacor. Launch date is now only a month away and things are starting to come to a head. I thought I would bring you up to speed on what, exactly, I mean by ‘things’.

Among the occupations with which our auto-didact son has been filling his evenings this last couple of years is teaching himself Python, a programming language. (Here I find myself attempting to tread the painfully thin path between those of you who imbibed Python with your mother’s milk, and those whom I lost at ‘teaching himself…’. I know that I shall, from here on, be simultaneously patronising and befuddling. I apologise. I am, myself, very unsure of my footing here, but we’ll see whether I can avoid falling flat on my face too embarrassingly.)

As well as developing his programming skills, Micha’el has been immersing himself in online courses in marketing, and small business management generally. Bernice and I arrived in Portugal at quite an exciting moment. Having downloaded the freeware part of a CRM (customer relationship management) software product, Micha’el had been coding all the bits he and Tslil lacked the resources and the inclination to pay for. Our presence gave Micha’el the time to troubleshoot this coding and integration, and, by the time we left, he had a fully integrated CRM program that, two days later, actually worked in real time.

Simultaneously, Tslil and he have been working on promotional materials for a marketing campaign. By the time we left Penamacor, they had temporarily set up their temporary gym premises and held a successful photo and video shoot and their website was up and running with bilingual English and Portuguese text. I reviewed the English text, but Micha’el’s briefing of the AI that wrote it was so fine-tuned that I hardly had any suggested amendments to make. As I remarked to Micha’el: if I were still working, I reckon I would be out of a job.

In addition, their flyers and tee shirts were printed. They managed, while we stayed home with the boys, to pound the streets for a couple of evenings and weekend afternoons, gathering feedback to their market research questionnaire and getting the word out on the street.

A couple of days after our return, Micha’el was able to report that they already had a client very interested in private lessons, and a prospect who, in response to their online campaign, had proposed an appointment. The CRM program had fired back to her all of the appropriate SMS and email messages, captured her data and uploaded it to the database, and pinged Micha’el about the appointment.

As if that were not enough, the online interest had, within a couple of days, stimulated several hundred hits on the website. You can imagine how welcome this news is for Tslil and Micha’el, whose very significant commitment to their plan seems to be starting to pay off. Of course, a visit is not a firm prospect, and a prospect is not a customer, but the word-of-mouth feedback they have received on the street has been very encouraging. Undoubtedly, they are partly helped by the fact that this kind of 21^st-century marketing is not something often seen running through the optic fibre of Penamacor.

This is where you come in. If you could pass on this link to the website to all of your friends and family who live in the Penamacor….Ah, yes, I see what you mean. Well, then, if you follow the link yourself, you’ll at least have a better idea what I’ve been talking about.

For those of my readers of a certain provenance and age, the name Les Dawson will need no introduction. For the rest of you, I need to explain that he rose from a working-class Manchester background to become a very popular comedian and entertainer on British TV in the 1970s and 80s. He had several strings to his bow, but the one relevant to this week’s post is that a regular feature of his weekly show was a sketch consisting of a conversation between two Northern working-class women in their sixties, played in drag by Dawson and his male sidekick. Their conversation often turned to what Dawson referred to as ‘woman’s trouble…down below’.

Spoiler Alert: The next paragraph contains a trigger warning. If you don’t want to discover where we’re heading today until the perfect dramatic moment, don’t read the next paragraph. [It occurs to me that most trigger warnings should probably carry a spoiler alert.]

Trigger Warning: Our theme this week is ‘man’s trouble…down below’. While I promise to spare you explicit detail and, indeed, illustrative diagrams (other than in a link you are free not to follow), if this is not a topic you wish to read about, however obliquely worded, I’ll see you, God willing, next week, in what will probably be the last update that I can squeeze from our Portugal trip, from which we returned in the small hours of this (Monday) morning.

Right. Now we’ve whittled you down to the strong of stomach and the (frankly) slightly perverted, and before I get cold feet, let’s press on.

Just over two weeks ago, I awoke to a dull ache down below. Since this was not accompanied by any other symptoms, and since pursuing this further was bound to be a complicated and time-consuming process that would take us away from the boys for precious hours, Bernice and I made a joint decision to monitor the situation, in the hope of limping through until, two weeks later, I could nestle in the comfortable surroundings of our own family doctor’s surgery.

This was, as it turned out, a less than wise policy. However, hindsight is one of those things that you never seem to be able to benefit from until it’s too late.

From Sunday to Wednesday night, there were ne developments, other than the fact that I rather lost my appetite. However, when I woke on Thursday morning, I discovered considerable swelling and hardness, and we both agreed that we could postpone no longer. Tslil and Micha’el are not particularly impressed by their family doctor, and so Micha’el agreed to accompany us to a walk-in and out-patient clinic in a small city – Covilha – a 45-minute drive away. We were very grateful to have him with us.

After Micha’el explained the situation to the receptionist, and requested a doctor who spoke English, we had a not unreasonably long wait before a charming young doctor saw us. In a fashion typical of educated Portuguese of his age, he claimed that he spoke only a very little English, but, in fact, the entire consultation was conducted in English, and his only hesitation came when he couldn’t recall which of the words ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ was which.

After a brief examination, he diagnosed a bacterial infection – epididymitis. (Just now, my own doctor corrected this diagnosis to something that sounds even more like one of the lesser dinosaurs – epididymo-orchitis – follow the link or don’t!) The Portuguese doctor referred me to a urologist, who would be holding surgery the next day, and who would be able to give me an ultrasound to confirm the diagnosis. Meanwhile, the GP was confident enough in his diagnosis to start me on a two-week course of antibiotics, rather than waiting another day.

Before setting off for the clinic, I had called our medical insurers’ emergency number to explain the situation, and the agent I spoke to had unlocked the credit card they had issued to us in Israel. I was therefore able to pay for the consultation using this card, which was certainly convenient.

The following day, Micha’el and I went back to see the specialist. Curiously, despite having made an appointment, we had to wait far longer than we had the previous day. The urologist was less the gentle provincial Portuguese and more the cosmopolitan Coimbrian, hailing from Portugal’s distinguished university city, famed throughout medieval Europe. Finer featured, silver-haired and refined, when asked whether he spoke English he declared scornfully: “Of course!”…and indeed his English was excellent. He swiftly and efficiently confirmed the diagnosis.

I then asked him for a written summary of the consultation, a request he absolutely refused to comply with. I explained that my insurer required it. He arrogantly dismissed the very idea, claiming that he had treated many French and German tourists who required no documentation other than a receipt. He patiently explained that the information he had entered into the computer was not in the form of a file, and it was not possible to extract it in any file format.

He further explained that Portuguese patient confidentiality laws prohibit extracting or printing any patient information. When I protested that I needed to be able to present this information not only to the insurer but also to my own family doctor, he questioned what they would do with a document in Portuguese, for all the world as if AI were a figment of some sci-fi author’s imagination,

I then asked him whether he could give me a handwritten summary. This he was prepared to do (Where had the law disappeared to? I wondered, though not out loud), but that this would be considered an additional consultation, and so there would be a second fee of 90 euros. This was clearly his final offer.

Despite all of Micha’el’s persuasive powers, the administrative staff were no more help, and so I left the clinic armed only with two receipts for the two consultations. To further complicate matters, I discovered that the initial activation of the insurer’s credit card had been for 24 hours only (a fact that the agent had not thought to mention to me at the time) and so I had to pay with my own card. Obviously, I will be claiming this back from the insurer.

For the last eight days of our stay, I was certainly not firing on all cylinders. The antibiotics did not kick in quickly, as I had hoped, and my energy level was well below par. On reflection, I probably tried to do more than I should have. In addition, I also started developing (possibly as a side-effect of the antibiotics) some acid reflux, which kept me awake for half the night last Saturday night.

Then, on Sunday morning, on 3 hours’ sleep, I had to face a 15-hour door-to-door journey, starting with a three-hour drive, through intermittent rain, followed by the route march that is navigating a major airport, followed by a five-and-a-half hour overnight flight in an economy seat in which I could find no comfortable position for my down-belows, and consequently I did not sleep at all. This was followed by a second major airport route march. As I remarked to Bernice when we boarded, I should have requested wheelchair assistance. There’s that damned tardy hindsight again.

I did catch half-an-hour’s sleep in the back of the taxi from the airport, and another five hours from 5:00 to 10:00 this morning. However, now that we are back home, I rather think it has all caught up with me, and I have spent most of today sitting on the sofa with my feet up feeling sorry for myself, and fretting over not having written this post.

Which I have now done! And, cleverly, I have the bulk of the insurance story to delight you with at some point in the future when it is all resolved, one way or another. Until then, and if you have made it this far, I admire your tenacity.

I must stop here, since I have to leave for an appointment with my own doctor, who has, I know, the stomach for a considerably more detailed account.

Quick update. My doctor feels the antibiotics are doing a good job, but, since he is extremely cautious, and since there is no emergency urologist, he referred me to A&E, so that they can run a bank of tests and another ultrasound and just confirm that everything is on track. No need to rush in tonight, but he wants me to go tomorrow. So, instead of going to see Raphael, I shall be sitting in a hospital waiting area…waiting, for most of the day, no doubt.

At least now, if you bump into me in the next couple of days, I hope you will understand why I don’t exactly look like I am just back from a luxury winter holiday in Portugal.

One can’t help feeling sorry for civil rights campaigner, human and animal rights activist and feminist writer Rita Mae Brown. In her 1983 book Sudden Death, she attributed to a fictional ‘Jane Fulton’ a very memorable saying that has become something of a cliché and has been immortalised on countless mugs and posters. “Insanity,” she wrote, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

How galling it must be for her to see this memorable pensée misattributed, almost universally, to Albert Einstein, who, let’s face it, doesn’t really need the publicity. His reputation, after all, rests on rather more substantial foundations.

Speaking personally, I feel rather more comfortable going head-to-head with Rita Mae Brown than I would with Einstein. For my intention today is to demonstrate that, contrary to what Einstein didn’t say, doing the same thing twice and expecting different results may be eminently sensible.

Some months ago, Micha’el, Tslil, Tao and Ollie embarked on an expedition to Lisbon with two objectives. The first was to obtain an apostille of the translation from Portuguese to Hebrew of all of their relevant documentation. I should explain, for the benefit of those of my readers whose nationality issues are rather more straightforward, that an apostille is a document used in international law that is issued by a government in accordance with the Hague Convention and that certifies that another document has been signed by a notary public.

Armed with the apostille, which sported a suitably impressive embossed stamp on the last page, they then made the short journey to the Israeli embassy, in the hope of registering Ollie’s birth and establishing his Israeli citizenship.

Their experience at the embassy was horrendous. Security was understandably strict; however, it seemed excessive for the strictness to stretch to refusing to allow them to take in any personal items whatsoever, including any equipment for their then infant son, and any book or game for their older son. Having been assured that the waiting-room was equipped with items to occupy a child, they found it boasted a couple of sheets of plain paper and some dried-up felt-tip pens.

When they finally saw an official, they were told that the apostille should have been stamped and signed on every page, and could not be accepted, and, at the end of a long, fraught, unpleasant and wasted couple of hours, they left. Bear in mind that this entire waste of energy required a stay of two nights in Lisbon.

Having taken a considerable time to recover from this experience, they finally felt ready to try once again, and so we included a city break in Lisbon for the whole family in our visit this time. We arrived in Lisbon on Monday. On Tuesday morning, Bernice and I took the boys back to the experiential science museum that we had visited on our previous break, while Micha’el and Tslil attempted to obtain an apostille stamped and signed on every page. The museum was even more fun than last time, both because Ollie was now old enough to enjoy a lot of the hands-on exhibits, and because of a temporary exhibit demonstrating and explaining the various animation techniques employed by Pixar studios in making Toy Story, Wall-E and other films. The entire museum is hands-on, and both boys had a wonderful time.

Towards the end of our long morning there, Tslil and Micha’el joined us, with good news and bad news. The bad news was that the apostille required by the embassy could not be obtained. The office had refused to sign and stamp every page of the documentation, stating that several months ago the procedure had changed in Portugal, and now only one signature was required. The good news was that, when, from the office, Micha’el phoned the embassy, the clerk there assured him that, indeed, only one signature was necessary.

When, the following day, all four of them walked from our hotel to the embassy, in bright sunshine, Tslil was optimistic, while Micha’el was resigned to failure. On this occasion, they were attempting to register Ollie’s birth with the Israeli authorities, obtain recognition of their Portuguese civil marriage, renew their own Israeli passports and obtain Israeli passports for the two boys.

Anticipating that their stay at the embassy might be a drawn-out affair, we had agreed that Bernice and I would have a grown-up day of sightseeing in Lisbon, and we would make our separate ways back from Lisbon to Penamacor.

Imagine our shock when, after a ridiculously short time, Micha’el contacted us to say that: the reception at the embassy had been civilised rather than, as previously, surly; that they had been allowed to go back to reception a couple of times to retrieve a couple of items they needed to keep the boys entertained; that, as promised, the single signature was all the embassy required; and, finally, that they were now in possession of a marriage certificate, an identity number for Ollie, and four brand-new passports.

Our best guess is that, at the time of their previous visit, the Portuguese authorities had just changed the law, and the Israeli authorities had not yet caught up with the change. As Einstein might not have said, on the continuum of life’s roller-coaster, they had been in the right space at just the wrong time.

Faced with the delights of Lisbon and an entire day to enjoy them, Bernice and I planned to take a 25-minute tram ride to Belém, site of a tower that offers good views of the city and location of the Monument to the Discoveries, celebrating Portugal’s glory days as a maritime explorational super-power. Having stood waiting for a tram for 15 minutes or so, we discovered a notice posted on the tram shelter explaining that, owing to road subsidence, the service was to be diverted on that day.

At that point, together with a motley crew of French and Japanese tourists, we walked a couple of hundred metres to a bus-stop. A few minutes later, our bus arrived, but we were too far back in the queue to get a seat. For the next 20 minutes, we stood, while the bus edged about 200 metres along the road. At this point, we decided to cut our losses and rejig our day’s plans. Hopping off the bus, we headed away from the river estuary. Moovit showed our walk as about a kilometre, but failed to mention that about 750 metres of that was uphill.

You may well not have paid sufficient heed to the fact that ‘uphill’ is a fairly vague term, covering everything from: “You know, when you’re driving along this road, you don’t actually notice that it’s uphill; it’s only when you walk it that you realise” to “There must be a station where they provide oxygen masks some time soon”. ‘Uphill’ in Lisbon is considerably closer to the second than the first experience. However, having enjoyed a decent hotel and excellent vegan meals for a day and a half, Bernice and I were easily up to the ascent, and, while the view from the top was nothing special, the archaeological museum nearby was fascinating.

Housed in a desanctified 14^th-Century church that was severely damaged in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that devastated the city, the museum displays many findings from paleolithic times, excavated from a site near Lisbon, and also an impressive collection of pieces from all periods of Portuguese history.

The roofless nave has a series of tombs, fountains, windows and other architectural relics from different places and styles. The one shown here, the gravestone of Yehudah ben Rimok, from the 19^th Century, particularly interested us. As did a second stone, marking the founding of the Porto Jewish community in the 14^th Century.

The museum also offered an interesting video, explaining how, in 1995, a plan to flood the valley in which the recently uncovered paleolithic settlement lies was thwarted by a group of schoolchildren who led sit-down protests and eventually persuaded António Guterres, then prime minister, to reverse the government’s plan and build a museum on the site.

Finally, we watched a well-produced audio-visual display, projected onto, and incorporating the features of, an original vaulted wall. This traced the history of the church, including an account of the earthquake and the story of the establishment of the museum.

From there, it was a short walk to a much better vantage point, affording a panoramic view of the city, and then to a vegan restaurant offering an all-you-can-eat buffet that was not only a bargain but also very tasty. We walked off lunch by making our way to a bizarre street-art comic-strip mural of the history of Lisbon, painted on an underpass and boasting, at its centre, a public lavatory that was, by Portuguese standards, less than salubrious. (Public facilities in Portugal are, in our experience, spotlessly clean and well-appointed.)

This was followed by a long walk that was, finally, downhill, and that took us past a pizza parlour with an eye-catching placard.

We ended up where we had started, at the large square on the front, from where we caught a bus back to the Edward VII Park opposite our hotel.

This park was renamed to commemorate the visit to Lisbon by the King of England in 1903 to reinforce the ancient Portuguese-English alliance. Unfortunately, the bus dropped us at the far end of the park, which was, naturally, downhill from our hotel. A further long walk led us to a huge greenhouse, where we spent a magical hour or so forgetting that we were in the centre of a bustling city.

By the time we boarded the coach back to Castelo Branco, we were very glad to sit down, and by the time we parked outside the house, at 10:30, we were more than ready for bed. However, the whole family agreed that it had been an enjoyable and productive break. Next stop, we all agree, should be Porto, possibly at a sunnier time of year.