Our topic today, dear reader, is humiliation. Before we go any further, I would ask you to take a moment to consider the following: Does humiliation require an audience? In other words, is humiliation something I feel because of my judgement of myself or is it rather something I experience because of others’ judgement of me…or at least something I feel because of my estimation of what others’ judgement of me would be? Think about that for a moment, and then read on.

If I were, for example, to find myself dining with President Herzog, and I belched, I would certainly feel humiliated. If I were dining alone, and I belched, I would think of trees falling in a forest when nobody is within earshot, and conclude that they do not make a noise.

Ed. Note: I realise that, in today’s climate, the preceding paragraph should have come with a trigger warning. In my defence, I would ask you to consider all of the other bodily functions I could have used in the example, other than belching. ‘Nuff said?

So, since for some reason I feel the need to wallow in self-humiliation today, let me share with you how I spent the early part of my morning.

I need, first, to take you back to last November, when the air-conditioning unit in our salon started making the kind of noises that these days accompany me while I am trying to unscrew the lid of a vacuum-sealed kilo jar of honey. (And, yes, I know all of the tricks, from tapping the jar on the edge of the countertop until, preferably, just before the countertop chips, to pouring very hot water over the area where the cap meets the neck of the jar, and hoping to avoid both third-degree burns and multiple lacerations from exploding glass. I am even enough of my late mother’s son to have one of those dimpled silicon cloths to help achieve a better grip.)

Where were we? Ah, yes, the air-con unit. We carried out the basic repairs that the average householder has in his armoury. Bernice switched it off and switched it on again. I switched it off and switched it on again. We opened it up, looked inside, and closed it again. We cleaned it. We waited 30 minutes and switched it on again.

At this point, we played our trump card: I called the air-conditioning technician who had installed the unit some 20 years previously. Once I had told him the model number of the unit, he explained that it was impossible to get a replacement part for that model (of course), and it wasn’t even worth his while coming to see it.

After several other calls, we found a technician who was prepared to come. He spent a good time disassembling the unit, and concluded that the motor had gone. He then spent a couple of days trying to locate a replacement, unsuccessfully. He then suggested ordering a replacement unit that was not a perfect match; he would than jiggle it (I can’t remember the term he used in Hebrew, but ‘jiggle’ is the gist of it) and we would see how it went. Naturally, he could not guarantee that the replacement would work for any length of time. He estimated that this would cost about 3000 shekels. Buying and installing a new unit, equivalent to the one we had, would cost about 20,000 shekels. We didn’t think very long or very hard, not least because we were already seriously considering moving from Maale Adumim to Zichron, to be much nearer to Esther, Maayan and Raphael.

The technician found a replacement, installed it, and it worked. As it happens, we use our air conditioning very little, in winter or summer, not least because the natural ventilation of the house is excellent in summer and winters in Maale Adumim are usually fairly mild. We hardly used it on heat during the winter and have just now started using it on cool. Two Shabbatot ago, it became rather noisier than it had been. Last Shabbat, it switched on, but then operated at incredibly low power, breathing out air that was more or less at room temperature.

So, yesterday, I called the technician again, and explained the situation. He said there was no point in trying to salvage the existing unit, showing a mature grasp of the sunk cost fallacy. Since we have now decided that we definitely want to move to Zichron, I explained to him that we wanted a cheap, less powerful, simple unit that would allow us to be in reasonable comfort in our salon for the, we now hope, last year before we move.

He asked me to go up on the roof and film the external unit there, so that he would be able to give us an accurate estimate. Not wanting to sound pathetic, I agreed to go up.

At this point, I need to explain to you what ‘going up on the roof’ entails. There is no access to the roof from inside the house, and we do not have a long enough ladder to reach the roof from outside. So ‘going up on the roof’ (just five, short, simple, words, right? Think again) means the following.

One side wall of our backyard is the external wall of the communal shelter that the five cottages in our terrace share. Set into that wall is the emergency exit of the shelter, which is serviced by a ladder, which is attached to the wall and starts five feet above the ground. If I place our stepladder beneath this ladder, I can climb our ladder, transfer easily to the shelter ladder, climb up that, then reach for the ledge of the shelter roof and pull myself up. From there, I can similarly reach for the ledge of the main roof and pull myself up to the main roof.

At least, all of that was true about eight years ago, when I last tried to get on to the roof. Since then, I discovered today, someone has moved both the shelter roof and the main roof considerably higher, so that I am no longer able to pull myself up by my arms.

I managed, this morning, to reach the shelter roof from the top of the shelter ladder, using the solid iron handle of the closed shelter door, the window bars of our bedroom, on the wall perpendicular to the shelter, and the main struts of our wooden pergola. By the time I crawled over the ledge onto the safety of the horizontal shelter roof, I was wishing I had brought tea and sandwiches with me.

I then turned to face the wall up to the main roof. After a couple of minutes of huffing, musing, contemplating my mortality, and considering asking Bernice to call the fire brigade, I saw a cleft in the wall at a convenient height for me to insert one foot. Thus was I able to belly my way over onto the main roof.

I shot the video, sent it to the technician, and called him, asking him to look at it straight away, so that I could do any retakes before attempting to climb down. Having received his approval, I briefly contemplated taking some time to recover on the roof before descending. After all, the summer is coming, and the nights will be milder on the roof.

Eventually, I steeled myself for the descent. The cleft, so conveniently placed for ascent, was considerably more awkward for descent. I seem to remember vaulting from the main roof to the shelter roof last time I did this, a feat that seemed unimaginable today, even if I had been pursued by a tyrannosaurus rex.

The descent of the shelter wall was actually not too bad, but I arrived on terra firma knowing that this is a trip I shall not be taking again in this lifetime. Bernice, of course, thought that I was crazy to have done it, as, no doubt, do most of you. But, before you judge me too harshly, consider this. From the relative safety of my first-floor office, I take considerable comfort from the fact that, perversely wanting to feed my humiliation, I have produced from this experience 1400 words of prose in a week when I spent the whole of Sunday having no idea what to write about this week. Suddenly, my climb doesn’t seem quite so unnecessary or foolhardy! It was clearly meant to be.