I was putting my sweater/jumper/pullover on this morning, and my subject for today suddenly struck me. This was not as random a thought as it might first appear, because I experienced a life-changing event last week.

Throughout our married life, you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of occasions when Bernice has seen me getting dressed in the morning. Either I have been getting up for work, or shul, before she is awake, or, since my retirement, if I decided to sleep in, she was getting up for work before I was awake. Following her retirement, since I am more of an early morning person than she is, I have still tended to get up before she is fully awake.

However, for the last couple of weeks, we have been experiencing a rainy spell (although, as I am writing this, I can gaze out at a cloudless, gentle-blue sky and a landscape bathed in bright, if not hot, sunshine). (End of nature notes.) This has coincided with me catching a cold (or, rather, my permanent cold coming more to the fore).

I have therefore not been getting up for shul. To stand outside on a damp winter morning for an hour seems ill-considered. Even worse, I seem finally to have shaken off my internal alarm clock, and I now find that I can sleep past (sometimes embarrassingly past) 6:45AM.

One unexpected result of this is that my getting dressed has become an occasional spectator sport. (Nothing kinky, you’ll be relieved to hear.) As a consequence of this, Bernice has, on more than one occasion, called me over to her side of the bed to straighten the sleeves of my sweater. (See glossary above.) I had not previously been aware of it, but I now suspect that, for most of my adult life, I have been walking around with twisted sleeves. Fortunately, since we came on aliya, I don’t wear sweaters that often.

As soon as I discovered this sartorial lapse, I began taking care, if I dressed before Bernice was awake, to adjust my sleeves. And then, last week, for no obvious reason, I suddenly took it into my head to break the habit of a lifetime.

Even if you haven’t read Gulliver’s Travels, you are probably aware that the world is divided into big-enders and little-enders, one’s affiliation being determined by the end that you tap, or cut off, when preparing to eat a boiled egg.

Well, I now discover that the world is divided into neckers and armsers, depending on which part of your anatomy you put first into a sweater when donning it. At this point, I am starting to suspect that I am the only armser in the world. What is certainly true is that, for as long as I can remember, I have always first put my arms into the sleeves of a sweater, and only then put it over my head.

Anyway, as I say, last week, I suddenly decided (impetuous fool that I am) to go in headfirst, as it were. I immediately discovered that, although it was a little more difficult than usual to find the armholes, getting the sweater over my neck, and also ‘unrolling’ the sweater down my torso (I do hope this is not getting too steamy for you), were much easier than usual. However, what made the experiment little less than thrilling was that the arms of the sweater were not twisted!

So, my question is: why did I have to wait until I was a week shy of 71 before discovering this? (Notice the clever way I dropped in a reminder of the impending birthday, there.) Why didn’t they teach me in kindergarten how to put a sweater on?

Once this struck me, this morning, I suddenly found myself thinking of several other vital pieces of advice that I was never given at kindergarten. As I do with almost anything that springs to mind (or even claws its way into my consciousness) on a Sunday, I have labelled them all grist and am just about to put them through the mill.

First of all, pomegranates. Why wasn’t I told that, if you cut a pomegranate in half, hold one half in your hand upside down over a bowl, with the flesh touching your palm, and hit the skin of the pomegranate repeatedly, all over, with a wooden spoon, the seeds will all drop out? Do you know how many hours of my life I have wasted through not knowing that?

Second, why did nobody give me a commonplace book as a sixth birthday present, and train me to use it? I’m referring to a book in which you jot down interesting ideas you come across and memorable short quotes from books you are reading. Full disclosure: my anger here is principally aimed at myself. I have been aware of the concept of a commonplace book since my teens, and convinced of its value almost as long; it’s just that I have lacked the self-discipline to start.

The result is that, over the last half century, every sentence I have been seduced by and reread several times for the sheer pleasure of it, every thought that has perfectly captured a truth about our existence, every witty or beautiful expression that I have felt compelled to read out to Bernice because I just had to share it: all of them have run through my fingers like sand on the beach, and all because I didn’t have a bucket to put them in.

Now that I have gone public with this, I shall immediately take out one of the four bound notebooks I have accumulated over the years for just this purpose, and start today! If that’s not part of a crescendo (see last week’s blog), I don’t know what is.

Not rectifiable, at this stage, is the fact that nobody explained to me that the mortality of my grandparents, and then my parents, of blessed memory all, meant that, if I did not take advantage of the time that I had with them to ask them about their childhood years, all of that history, which is my history, would vanish forever. One of the most important projects undertaken in Israeli schools is a roots project, as part of which children are required to interview their grandparents and learn about their personal history. In this last year, when the last of my parents’ siblings and their spouses has died, almost the last doorway to that past has closed, for me, for ever.

I feel blessed that I have the letters that my father wrote, throughout his five years of army service, most of them in Burma and India, during the Second World War: both letters to his mother and sisters, and letters to my mother. These letters give me a glimpse both of a life he did not speak about a great deal, at least to me, and of a man much younger than the father I remember.

I also wish someone had said to me, in 1968: ‘You are living through a golden age of British theatre. Spend however much you can afford on going to the theatre as often as you can, because an era like this will not pass this way again.’ In the event, I didn’t do badly, between going to theatre with Bernice and leading school theatre visits to London; but there is so much that I missed.

Finally, and perhaps most painfully: I am the owner of a partial memory. There are certain scenes, moments, events of childhood and youth that I remember vividly (some important in a ‘historical’ sense, others important precisely because they have no importance outside themselves). However, there are many, many others, most of them involving discussions with, relationships with, key people in my life, of which my memory is frustratingly hazy.

What I needed was for someone to sit me down at age 7 and explain to me that I should strive to fill my life with faithful, beloved, honest companions; and one of the greatest of these should be a diary. I envy diarists almost more than anyone else, because their past has not slipped through their fingers; they are in possession of who they were, who they are, who they no longer are, who they have always been. What a priceless possession.

I am not saying that the above are the secret to a happy life. However, they are some of the elements of a perfect life that I feel the lack of. What I need to do immediately, of course, is to write another piece, listing the things that I did ‘learn in kindergarten’, to remind myself of how lucky I am. Just be warned: until I see what is on that list, I shan’t make my mind up as to whether to share it with you.

Meanwhile, someone in Penamacor has just learnt the importance of holding on to what you’ve got!