Bloggers Note: I wanted to give you all a heads-up. I’ve decided that, for at least the next few weeks, and possibly permanently, I’m going to switch to publishing a post every two weeks, rather than every week. I don’t kid myself that this will mean I have the post ready to publish days before publication date, but at least my Mondays will be stressful only every other week. I realise this probably will make no difference to your life, but I wanted to avoid Bernice having to field a lot of questions next Tuesday about rumours of my demise.

For the benefit of the two or three people who may not know about it, I offer this week the ultimate in binge watching.

When the TV series I am about to recommend to you first came out, viewers were not able to binge watch; they had to wait patiently for the next episode. Normal practice, in these situations, was for the episodes to be screened a week apart. Whether it was Quatermass and the Pit in 1958, The Forsyte Saga in 1967 or Dallas in 1978, that week-long wait was an undeniable part of the enjoyment of the series.

However, in the series I am suggesting to you, you originally had to wait 365 times as long as seven days – a full seven years.

I am referring (as some of you may have guessed) to the Up series. This was originally conceived as a one-off programme – Seven Up! – looking at the individual lives of a number of seven-year-old English children in 1964 and interviewing each of them about their interests, ambitions, hopes and fears. The original director intended a programme about the beauty of childhood, but a researcher and interviewer on the programme, Michael Apted, had a much more aggressive social agenda: he ‘hijacked’ the project to demonstrate how entrenched the class system still was in English society. To quote from the original programme: “Why did we bring these children together? Because we wanted a glimpse of England in the year 2000. The union leader and the business executive of the year 2000 are now seven years old.”

At some point, someone had the brilliant idea of revisiting these children seven years later. Michael Apted was appointed the director… and the rest is history – a history that now spans 56 years and may not yet be finished (although Apted’s death in 2021 may actually mark the demise of the series). We will have to wait until 2026 to see.

If, by some chance, you do not know the series, then you have the ultimate 9-hour binge watch waiting for you. Three warnings. First, the original programme is a product of its time, and features ten boys and only four girls. Once they had started with that mix, the makers had it baked in, and this is a great pity. Having said that, the four girls/women punch way above their weight, in each episode.

Second: each episode, quite reasonably, reprises a lot of archive material from earlier episodes. I say ‘quite reasonably’, because without ‘the story so far’ you would have had to retain a detailed memory of the last episode for a period of seven years. So, if you are binge watching, you may find yourself fast-forwarding quite a bit.

The third warning is that I don’t advise you to follow this link to the Wikipaedia entry on the series. You will find there lots of spoilers which will significantly impact your enjoyment of a story which, in many cases, has all the unpredictability of real life (literally).

All of the above is actually just an aside. I was musing this week on our different experience of our grandsons in Portugal and our grandson in Israel. A month at a time three times a year – the binge watch – as opposed to one episode a week. One effect of the weekly visit to Zichron, in the last couple of months, has been the chance to see, on each visit, Raphael’s progress in language acquisition: both his comprehension and his speaking. Esther speaks to him exclusively in English, and Maayan exclusively in Hebrew, but it is noticeable that his choice of language (in what are still, at the moment, one-word utterances) is marked. In almost all cases, although he understands the word in both languages, he only uses one language for any given concept.

So, for example, ‘bath’ is always in English. Of course, I am tempted to say, ‘bath’ is much easier to pronounce than ‘ambatya’, However, he favours ‘kadur’ over the English equivalent ‘ball’. It doesn’t seem reasonable to claim that ‘kadur’ is easier to pronounce than ‘ball’, so I don’t think that explains his choice. It is possible that Maayan plays more ball with him than Esther. However, it is usually Maayan who baths Raphael, so I suspect it is best to avoid simplistic explanations.

Then, of course, there are the occasions when Raphael gives us a glimpse of his, and almost every other child’s, formidable intelligence, in fashioning his own use of language. So, for example, ‘doovdoov’, which is his word for cherry (properly ‘doovdoovan’), is also his generic word for fruit, despite his knowing very well the words for about a dozen fruits. (This is a child who, left to his own devices, could easily exist exclusively on a diet of fruit, despite thoroughly enjoying all of the wonderful meals his mother and nana cook for him, and also enjoying grandpa’s chopped herring and rye bread.)

An even more striking ‘coining’ is in the world of food preparation, which Raphael is really into. He loves helping Esther make bread, or muffins, and is particularly good at mixing dough or batter. (Tao, by now, is virtually a competent independent cook, since he has been eagerly helping his parents in the kitchen for all of the last three years.) As well as wanting to help in the grown-up kitchen, Raphael also enjoys toy kitchen play. He has his own whisk and is always asking for a ‘bowl’, and also pressing any vaguely concave object into service as a ‘bowl’. A box, a cup from his stacking tower, a plastic mug with a handle, a saucer: all can be a ‘bowl’. If, as they say, all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you have is a whisk…

Also remarkable, to me, is the way children near the beginning of their language journey discover how to use language not just to comment on, or categorise, the world, but also to make requests. Raphael now understands that he does not have to push away a spoon, or scatter food from his tray onto the floor. ‘Down’ is a more effective way of explaining that he has had enough to eat and would like to carry on playing. It is wonderful to see the civilising effects of language in action.

I find it impossible to remember when Tao was at this stage, despite it being such a relatively short time ago. The differences we hear in his language every time we fly to Portugal are, of course, still very striking. At this stage, this expresses itself in an ever-expanding vocabulary and an increasing complexity of sentence structure. Even though we speak every week, our calls tend to be more of a storytime and puppet show; chatting on a WhatsApp video call does not come all that easily to Tao, or, indeed, to me.

Tao and Olly are exposed to much more English than Hebrew, and Tslil knows that she has her work cut out to ensure that their Hebrew keeps up with their English. Raphael is in the opposite situation (and will be even more so when he starts going to gan every day next year – a situation I suspect he will adapt to more painlessly than his mother). Esther knows that she will have to work equally hard to maintain his English, and I suppose we will just have to resign ourselves to continuing selflessly dragging ourselves up to Zichron every week, just to point out the difference between a cup, a mug, a saucer and a bowl. It’s a miserable job, but someone has to do it.

Meanwhile, everybody is still enjoying the summer!