At my grammar school (high school for my trans-pond readers), one of the Classics masters was a mildly eccentric character who could easily be deflected from the topic of the lesson by an ostensibly innocent question from a pupil. There was a running competition in the school to see which class could manage, using this method, to get this teacher to speak on the largest number of subjects in one 40-minute lesson. I believe the record was 47. (Incidentally, this was one of the more gentle examples of ways in which we tormented our teachers. The more I look back on my own childhood, the more convinced I am that William Golding, in his dystopian novel Lord of the Flies, painted far too rosy a picture of pre-pubescent boyhood in post-War middle-class England.) Anyway, I invite you to count the number of topics in this week’s rambling and entirely trivial post.

I have only walked out of the cinema in the middle of a film twice. Once I gave up on Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils, from Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun via John Whiting’s stage play. In a family blog like this, I can’t go into the intricacies of the plot but two of the film’s publicity taglines were ‘There have never been exorcisms like this’ and ‘Hell will hold no surprises for them’; so you can imagine! The film starred Oliver Reed in one of his more understated performances (which was almost the only understated thing in the film), and I can, having now put 49 years between it and me, remember little else, thankfully.

The second film I walked out of was Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). You may know this film first hand, or you may know it from regular references to it (largely by Graeme Garden), in BBC Radio 4’s self-styled ‘antidote to panel games’ I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue (ISIHAC). While the programme has fallen off a little since the demise of Humphrey Lyttelton, the jazz trumpeter and bandleader who chaired the show from 1972 until his death in 2007 at the age of 85, it still has me listening, not least to marvel at the continued speed of wit of Barry Cryer, who wrote material for many of Britain’s comedy greats in the 1950s-80s, and who,at 84, has lost little of his comic creativity. Please don’t write and tell me that the panel get a week’s warning of the topics in the upcoming edition of ISIHAC. I prefer to live with my illusions (particularly as 84 seems to me less distant than ever). You can hear a typical archive edition of the programme here, but be warned: the humour is very British and very schoolboy.

Or (to return to the second sentence of the last paragraph), you may never have heard of Bring Me the Head… If so, let me explain that the title is a quote from an American Mafia boss on discovering that his daughter is pregnant by said Alfredo. The remainder of the film, which I have always thought of as Peckinpah’s blood-soaked parody of 1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (but which he apparently regarded as the only one of his films on which he did not have to compromise with studio executives, and which appeared on the screen exactly as he envisioned it), documents various people’s efforts to retrieve and hold onto the eponymous head, in order to bring it to the mafia boss and collect the one-million-dollar reward.

The only other thing you really need to know, for the purpose of this post, is that the central character, who initially retrieves the severed head from the grave, keeps it in a drawstring canvas bag on the passenger seat of his convertible as he drives across the Nevada desert, so that, as the film progresses, the bag attracts more and more flies.

And so to the topic of this week’s post, which is my adventures last Friday at the hotel where we are staying. Because we sleep over at the house on Friday nights, we have to check out of the hotel every Friday morning, and check in again every Saturday night. Seeing how under-occupied the hotel is, we requested to keep our belongings in the room over shabbat, to avoid having to physically pack, vacate the room, and then unpack the following night. The hotel readily agreed.

Last Friday morning, Micha’el whatsapped me at about 6:30 to ask if I was/we were awake, and, if so, whether I/we could come over early, to relieve them after a not-so-good night with the baby. I was awake, but Bernice wasn’t, so I got up, dressed, grabbed a quick breakfast, then went back to our room to collect our drawstring laundry bag, since we were planning to do a wash and tumble dry before shabbat.

As I was walking across the (fairly large) lobby area on my way to the car, it suddenly struck me that: a) the hotel staff at the desk had only ever seen Bernice and myself leave the hotel together; b) we usually left around 9 to 9:30, whereas it was now 7:15; c) I was carrying a drawstring canvas bag of about the right size and shape to contain a severed head. To my relief, the desk was unstaffed, and I managed to reach the hotel doors unspotted by any of the staff.

At about 2 the same afternoon, while waiting for the hallot to rise prior to giving them a wash of egg and putting them in the oven, I suddenly realized that I had left my chumash (the book containing the Torah reading that I needed for shabbat) in the hotel. So I set my phone countdown timer for 25 minutes (after which time the challa would need my attention), asked Bernice to turn the oven on in 20 minutes, and set off for the hotel (a 5-minute drive away).

Which is where Hudson Hawk comes in. This 1991 comedy crime caper is, for me (or, rather, was, in 1991 – whether my tastes have changed I couldn’t say) a delightful piece of fluff, with Bruce Willis proving as entertaining as he was playing opposite Cybill Shepherd in the TV series Moonlighting. In Hudson Hawk, he plays an art thief who works with a partner. On the job, they calculate how long they have to carry out the job, and Hudson, from his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Great American Songbook, and of the standard versions of those songs, selects a song that is exactly the right length. The two thieves then sing said song concurrently but separately, to time and synchronize their exploits. (Among their choices, for example, is Bing Crosby’s rendition of Swinging on a Star.)

So there I was, entering the hotel, with 20 minutes still on the clock. I knew deep down that, if I was seen by the desk clerk, I could easily explain that I had forgotten something in the room, but I nevertheless hoped to get in and out without being seen. Again, the desk was unmanned at the time. I reached our room, to discover that it hadn’t yet been made up. I assumed that they were leaving that until the next day, and it occurred to me that I had just enough time to take the shower I had skipped in the morning, in the walk-in shower, in a warm, spacious bathroom, rather than facing a colder, over-the-bath-hand-held-showerhead shower in the house, made all the more exciting by the chance that someone would, at the same time, use the kitchen sink (which is upstream from the bathroom), thereby giving me the dubious pleasure of being frozen or scalded almost to death. I brought my phone into the bathroom, and calculated I had just enough time. Indeed, I managed to complete my shower, dry myself off and get dressed except for my socks and shoes, before I heard a tap at the door. I toyed for a moment with the idea of tiptoeing across the room, silently opening the balcony French window, slipping outside, swinging over the railing and hanging by my fingertips until whoever was at the door had let themselves in, finished and left the room. (I blame this fantasy on the fact that one of the hotel TV channels had just run a season of the Bourne films.) However, I soon saw sense, and opened the room door, to see two chambermaids. It only took a moment or two of pointing to my watch then holding up two fingers (in the nicest possible way), while muttering ‘Dos minutos’ (with no idea whether this was the Portuguese equivalent of Dog Latin), for them to understand, express what I assumed from their body language was agreement, and start to walk away. A glance at my watch told me I still had 7 minutes, so I hastily completed my dressing, picked up my chumash (remember that?) and left the room. I caught up with the chambermaids and proudly used almost half of my Portuguese: ‘Desculpe. Obrigado. Boa tarde!’ (‘So sorry! Thank you! Good afternoon!’) I found myself wishing that their cleaning trolley had included a bag of spelt flour, so that I could deploy over 50% of my entire stock of vocabulary: ‘Desculpe. Obrigado. O! Farinha de espelta! Boa tarde!’.

I walked swiftly to the hotel door, where I stopped to check how much time I had left on my phone. My phone! Where was it? Aaargh! I had left it in the bathroom. Hastily, I retraced my steps, retrieved my phone from the smiling chambermaids and raced back to the door. Unfortunately, there was a clerk at the desk as I crossed the lobby. Without breaking step, I smiled in my most winning way, waved my chumash and called out: ‘Would you believe it? I forgot this book this morning’, and went out the door.

Four minutes later, exactly as my phone’s timer started beeping, I pulled up outside the house.

And that was my Hollywood Friday!

I’ll do my best to provide more serious content next week.

Meanwhile, here’s Tao helping me to make challa. Note that he appreciates this is a serious business.

Remember: If you want less of the meanderings of my stream of consciousness, and more of the kids’ progress, you can follow, subscribe to, and like their youtube channel.