Before we get down to business today, one quick piece of housekeeping, which is more Flaubert than Diderot.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the walking stick that I was then using (I now have a silent stick), which ‘makes a rather audible tap on the pavement as I saunter to shul. I’m seriously contemplating acquiring a matching red and green parrot to wear on my right shoulder, and teaching it to say: ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’

The other evening, I happened to be in Rehovot, walking along a suburban street, when I was tapped on the upper back. Turning round, I discovered nobody there. Feeling a little puzzled, I turned back again and carried on walking. A couple of seconds later, I felt another tap. Turning my head (but, not, this time, my body), I discovered a red-beaked, green-bodied parakeet perched calmly on my upper back. I pride myself on not being, by nature, of a nervous disposition, but on this occasion I was prepared to make an exception. The moral of today’s lesson is, obviously, ‘Be careful what you wish for!’

And so to Diderot, the great 18^th Century French encyclopaedist and philosopher. The French, they say, have a word for it…although exactly what ‘they’ mean when they say it I am not entirely sure. They surely cannot mean that French vocabulary is richer than English: the word-count in the two languages’ vocabularies is estimated to be about 130,000 and 500,000 respectively.

In addition, French vocabulary is confined almost exclusively to words from the Romance languages, whereas English has the twin major tributaries of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. I sometimes suspect that the saying saucily refers to an era when French literature was more sexually explicit in its vocabulary than English – ‘where English has a row of asterisks, the French have a word for it’.

Either way, there is no doubt that there is at least one situation for which the French have a word – or, rather, a phrase – and the English can only translate it and recycle it; no original equivalent exists in English. That phrase is l’esprit de l’escalier, sometimes translated as staircase wit. The phrase was coined (or, at least, the scenario to which it alludes was first described) by Diderot, speaking, one senses, from the heart.

In his Paradoxe sur le Comédien, Diderot describes attending a private dinner party, at which a remark was made to him that left him speechless at the time, because, he explains, “a sensitive man, such as myself, overwhelmed by the argument levelled against him, becomes confused and [can only think clearly again when he] finds himself at the bottom of the stairs”.

In this case, “the bottom of the stairs” refers to the architecture of the kind of mansion to which Diderot had been invited. In such houses, the reception rooms were always one floor above the ground floor. To have reached the bottom of the stairs means to have definitively left the gathering.

I can easily sympathise with Diderot. Many is the time that I have thought of the perfect riposte in the car driving home….or the next morning…or, indeed, six months later.

Which, I guess, puts me in the same box as not only Diderot but also George Constanza in The Comeback, an episode of Seinfeld. You can view the relevant 5 minutes here.

Or, indeed, Humph. In one episode of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, which radio show I know I’ve referenced before, the late, lamented Humphrey Lyttleton mentioned that an interviewer said he was an “orthinologist”. Humph was on the way home before it occurred to him that the correct reply was “Not so much an orthinologist as a word-botcher”.

And here’s another tangent we can go off at (or off at which we can go, if you prefer). A not entirely dissimilar phenomenon is what is commonly referred to as fridge logic, first identified by Alfred Hitchcock. When asked about the scene in Vertigo when Madeleine mysteriously and impossibly disappears from the hotel Scottie saw her in, Hitchcock responded by calling it an icebox scene: a scene whose impossibility “hits you after you’ve gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox.”

For those last three references, I am indebted to an astonishingly well-constructed site I stumbled across, called tv|tropes, which names, explains and catalogues examples of tropes from popular media. To quote the site: ‘A trope is a storytelling device or convention, a shortcut for describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the audience will recognize. Tropes are the means by which a story is told by anyone who has a story to tell. We collect them, for the fun involved.’

And now, I’m afraid, you’ll have to hold that thought. We’ve reached a dead end. Just keep l’esprit de l’escalier in mind. We will get back to it at some point, and carry on from there.

I find myself these days musing about the reason why I keep writing this blog. More precisely, “Why on earth do I put myself (and sometimes Bernice) through this hell every week”. The answer I have come up with is, appropriately for this Franco-filled post, in three parts, just like ancient Gaul.

First, never say to someone who is competitive by nature: ‘I bet you can’t keep your hand in that flame for 10 seconds’. If possible, even avoid such sentiments as: ‘I don’t know how you manage to run 10 miles every day.’ So, my thanks to those who say similar things to me about my blog…I think.

Second, I read somewhere that one of the best ways to stave off Alzheimer’s is to challenge yourself mentally. I am particularly interested in retaining what mental faculties I have. I assume we all are, but I bet I’m more passionate about it than you are, because Bernice has made it very clear that, the day I succumb, she will ‘lockdown puppy’ me. In other words, she will drive me to the Jerusalem Forest, ask me to get out the car to have a look at the rear passenger-side tyre, which seems to have something wrong with it, and then drive off.

Unfortunately, crosswords and other logical puzzles, however convoluted and obscure, are apparently not enough to keep the brain active, because they do not unsettle you. I suppose I could have Bernice strap me into a chair from which she will release me only when I have completed The Times Cryptic crossword, and then set a timer for a crossbow-bolt to fire directly at my heart in 30 minutes’ time.

However, that seems like a lot of trouble to go to. I reckon that being reduced to a nervous wreck at 5pm on Monday when I still have no idea what to write about, and only finishing proofreading and uploading my blog at 8:58am on Tuesday, when I am publishing at 9:00, represents a sufficiently high stress level to keep dementia at bay.

However, these are reasons why I continue writing the blog; they do not explain why I continue to enjoy writing the blog.

To explain that, I have to go back to Diderot, after a short detour to take in Oscar Wilde. I watch The Importance of Being Earnest, and I am dazzled by the brilliance of the wit. The entire play is a string of sparkling jewels. At the same time, it is very obvious that a tremendous amount of work went into it. Wilde painstakingly revised the play, refined the speeches, tightened the action. The end result has the intricate multi-faceted richness of a Fabergé egg.

A blog, on the other hand, is more like a Picasso sketch: apparently improvised, intuitive, clean-lined. I have come to the conclusion that the blog is the perfect medium for me. In it, I can appear to be spontaneous: it all, so it seems, just pours out. However, what is wonderful is that I can revise, refine, find the perfect expression, while still, I hope, maintaining the illusion of spontaneity. Basically, I feel like Diderot playing the part of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, reliving the same day over and over until I get it right.

Of course, now that I have shown you how the trick works, the magic is gone. I’m going to have to ask you to forget everything you have read this week, and we’ll start next week with the illusion intact. Do we have a deal?

Meanwhile, here’s someone who always seems to have the perfect comeback.