This week’s offering is rather a gallimaufry, a mish-mash or confused jumble of various things. I am passing it off to you as a considered and polished thing, but you will probably already have deduced that, like many a hash or ragout, it basically consists of whatever scraps I was able to find lurking in the corners of the fridge of my mind. And none the worse for that, say I.

Incidentally, while no one seems too sure what the etymology of gallimaufry is, a best bet is that it is derived from two Old French verbs – galer and mafrer – meaning to have fun by eating well. As lifestyle choices go, that seems pretty sound to me.

So, we start today with a little housekeeping. Let me bring you up to date on the Velcro front. (I know some of you have been losing sleep over this.) Last week, quite by chance, Bernice was in our local mall and happened to bump into one of our friends – one of you who never bothers to read my blog but just jumps straight to the photos.

This friend was on her way to the cobbler. I thought the cobbler had closed his business, but it transpires that he has, in fact, simply relocated from a totally unsalubrious cubby-hole near the toilets to a rather grander broom-cupboard strategically close to the entrance from the car-park. The point of this story was that our friend was picking up a pair of sandals on which the cobbler had replaced the original Velcro.

You can imagine how my heart leapt when Bernice relayed this news to me. The very next day, I dropped off my sandals, and, within an hour, they had been given a new lease of life, for a price that makes an annual refreshing, should that prove necessary, a viable proposition. Of course, while this was yet another piece of evidence that we live in what may well be the best of all possible worlds, I was reminded that very evening that the world is still not perfect.

Bernice usually retires to bed before me, and is often asleep by the time I go upstairs. The tenacity of my new Velcro is such that I now have to go out of the bedroom to rip open my sandals, for fear of waking Bernice. Still, this is a small price to pay for regained podal security.

Our cobbler is, I believe, a Russian, and as I stood just outside his tiny workspace waiting to be served, his country of origin and the semi-ordered clutter of his workshop put me in mind of another Russian artisan in Maale Adumim.

For years, the city was served by a watch repairer – Gregory – whose tiny workshop was a heaving mass of watch straps, glasses, hands, winders, screws and clips. He was the living embodiment of the old joke about the widow who, going through her late husband’s suits, finds a receipt from the cobbler for a pair of shoes that her husband took in to be repaired two years previously. When she takes the receipt to the cobbler, he looks at it, then hands it back to her, saying: ‘They’ll be ready tomorrow.’

If Gregory told you your watch would be ready on Tuesday, then, when you came to his shop on Tuesday (or, indeed, Wednesday or Thursday), he would tell you that it would be ready in an hour, and it would be! However, he was blessed with such an impish sense of humour, and such irrepressible good spirits, that you could not get annoyed.

When he collapsed and died suddenly a few years ago, it seemed that everyone in Maale Adumim was in shock. Even those of us who knew him only from a handful of brief interactions over the counter of his shop felt that we had suffered a personal loss. His death was a reminder of how far-reaching an impact any individual can have in making the world a slightly better and more friendly place for everyone.

Speaking of etymologies (as we were, briefly, five paragraphs ago), my nephew Saul sent me a link this week to a New Statesman article about the ongoing work on the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. What made him think I might be interested in this I can’t imagine, but nevertheless….

Among the many revelations in the article that I found fascinating, one in particular took my fancy. You may be aware that the method by which the OED was first compiled was by the general public being invited to submit to the editors, for any word that they came across in their reading, a postcard-sized piece of paper giving the word, with a reference to the work in which it was found, and its perceived meaning. The public responded with enthusiasm, in their thousands, and, as a result of the millions* of submissions, the OED documents, for any word, the first recorded use, and the development in meaning of that word over time.

One such word is astirbroad, which appeared in the 1885 edition. It is an adverb meaning ‘stirring abroad’ or ‘moving from place to place’ and the citation given was from a book printed in 1643: ‘The grasshopper…singeth astirbroad; the cricket at home’. However, when an editor came to revise the entry in 2019, it was discovered that the word was actually a typo: the typesetter 370 years earlier had dropped the word ‘stir’ into the middle of the word ‘abroad’ in error. However, it is OED policy that once a word has appeared in the dictionary, it is never removed, even if the original entry was an error. And so, ‘astirbroad’ is a word, albeit an obsolete one, in English.

This OED policy seems to me eminently sensible, because English is littered with words that were originally errors. ‘An apron’, for example, is etymologically linked to a ‘napkin’. ‘Nap’ means ‘cloth’; a ‘napkin’ is a small cloth, and ‘an apron’ was originally ‘a napron’. Over time, the ‘n’ of ‘napron’ moved across to the word ‘a’. Once a mistake has been adopted by a critical mass of people – or immortalized in the OED – it cannot be ‘corrected’.

The policy also seems to me to be a powerful metaphor. It is never possible to take back a word said or an action carried out in ill-considered haste. We can strive to make amends for our mistakes, to apologise for our slights towards others, to declare our linguistic miscoinings obsolete, but we cannot remove them from the OED of life.

If that’s all a bit heavy for you, let me say that Bernice and I have now finished reading Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling. We had been warned that Bryson is rather curmudgeonly** in this book, but we in fact found him just as delighted by the eccentricities of life in the British Isles as he was in Notes from a Small Island. What resentment he expresses over changes for the worse in the decades since he first arrived in England we found that we whole-heartedly share.

It was, however, possibly a bad choice for reading aloud. As I am reading I, naturally, look ahead to the next line, to prepare for speaking it. With this particular book, glancing at the next line, on far too many occasions, left me helpless with laughter and unable to spit the words out without repeatedly corpsing. This meant that Bernice’s enjoyment of the book’s humour was, I fear, considerably less than mine, although she was almost completely understanding about my complete helplessness.

It was, we found, both a very funny and a very generous-spirited book, in its celebration of all that is best, and its mocking of all that is worst, in life in 21^st Century Britain. For our next read, we have selected The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which has the virtue of being, at least in its first 50 pages, totally devoid of laugh-out-loud humour.

Meanwhile, in Portugal Tao is raising Micha’el’s head to new heights of tonsorial elegance, and in Zichron Raphael is working on raising his own head.

* This is not hyperbole. The submissions continued for decades, and peaked at over a thousand a day.

** I wanted to give you the etymology of ‘curmudgeonly’. I’d like to tell you that it is derived from Holland’s 1600 translation from Livy, in which he renders the Latin ‘frumentarius’ (corn-merchant) as ‘cornmudgin’; the word then acquired its present meaning since corn-merchants are notoriously discontented with how the vagaries of the weather (or, indeed, geopolitics) play havoc with the price and supply of corn. Unfortunately, the OED gives the first recorded use of the word as considerably earlier than 1600.

Let me try again. I’d like to say that ‘curmudgeonly’ is an anglicization of the French ‘coeur méchant’ meaning ‘’wicked heart’, but, sadly, this is now dismissed as a false folk etymology.

It transpires that the etymology of ‘curmudgeonly’ is unknown, which seems to me strangely unsatisfying. Still, as I already mentioned, this can be the best of all possible worlds while still not being perfect.