They’ve gone and left us. In fact, they’ve all gone and left us. As a surprise for Esther’s birthday, Maayan booked a week’s break in Naples, home, so they say, to the world’s best pizza and espresso (they being the Neapolitans, but nevertheless…).

Apart from the espresso, my strongest memory of my own week-long conference in Naples, over 30 years ago when I worked for the British Council, is the fact that at least 50% of the people I saw walking in the street were carrying a car radio cassette player. I initially assumed (O, the innocence of…if not youth, then middle age) that there was a city-wide sale on. It was only later that I realised that any parked car with a player in it would be broken into and the player stolen.

I also remember that, in a week of looking, I saw only two cars that did not bear the scars of a minor collision. Rather sad that these are my strongest impressions of Naples, but there you go. I’m sure that the girls will come back with much more evocative memories.

So, after seeing Micha’el, Tslil, Tao and Ollie off at the airport on Wednesday, we wished Esther, Maayan and Raphael bon voyage on Thursday at the end of our weekly visit, and we now face a week at home with only each other for company. I must say it feels rather strange, after the last month. We spent the next few days getting the house back to normal, with a curious blend of reluctance and a feeling of restoring order. (I’ll leave you to decide the exact mix of that blend in Bernice and myself.)

All of the toys and books that we keep here, together with a few new gifts that were too bulky for them to take, have been packed away in the cupboards. (Actually, not all: I am keeping out the magnetiles, because I am determined to finally build a stable regular icosahedron out of the equilateral triangles.) Mattress and feeding chair have been returned to the generous friends who lent them. Bedding and towels have been washed and dried, folded and put away. The cot, floor mat and collapsible bath have been folded up and stored. (In our defence, when we renovated the kids’ bathroom and got rid of our old bath we did not have any grandchildren, nor foreseeable prospects of any.) The car seat borrowed from the girls is now back in Zichron.

That last item wasn’t quite as easy as I make it sound. When we needed to instal it, at the beginning of the kids’ visit, I watched the first seven minutes of the forty-minute explanatory YouTube video, then delegated the job to Micha’el. When it came to detaching it, Maayan and I spent ten minutes wrestling with it until I admitted defeat, accessed the video and discovered that all that was needed was a click on two discreet buttons.

Our home once again feels both ridiculously large for our needs, and eerily quiet, particularly between ten o’clock every evening and six the following morning. The last month has been a reminder (more for Bernice than myself, I have to confess) that people are designed to raise children in their early adulthood, and not at our age.

One day last week, Bernice and I took Tao to the Jerusalem zoo. The last time the kids were here, Bernice had taken him by herself, because I was not well, but this time I was able to join them. We all had a great time, not least because Tao knows his own mind and is very happy to tell you which animals he wants to see and when he wants to go on to the next enclosure.

Before we went, he had explained that he wanted to see the tortoises. As luck would have it, there are tortoises in an enclosure close to the entrance to the zoo, and they had just been brought lettuce leaves, so they were (to the extent that tortoises are able to be) extremely active. An added bonus were the stone sculptures of giant tortoises that Tao could ride on.

We managed to walk all the way to the top of the zoo, spendiong a very long time admiring the very active penguins, and less time watching the very much less active big apes, bears, lions and elephants. The only really lively larger animal was the Syrian leopard, and since his activity consisted of compulsively pacing his enclosure, we found that rather unsettling.

When Tao told us that there were no other animals he wanted to see, we rode back down on the zoo ‘train’, which he claimed to remember from his last visit. I’m sure it did not match the train ride from Castelo Branco to Lisbon, along the Tagus valley, with which the kids started their trip to Israel, but Tao seemed enchanted.

However, the highlight of the day – even better than the previous day’s pizza that he enjoyed cold (we know how to show a three-year-old a good time) while watching the penguins – was the climbing park. Here we were delighted to see that, since our last trip to Portugal, Tao has become much more comfortable in large public spaces, interacting with children he doesn’t know.

The zoo was hosting a number of school trips that day, and this climbing park, comprising mosaic sculptures of a variety of real and imaginary animals, with integral tunnels, climbing nets and slides, was full of very loud, very boisterous, Israeli children, from eight to eleven years old. To our surprise, Tao happily went off, and, while he clearly favoured those animals with fewer children on them, he was happy to join them, and played for the best part of an hour, until he said that he was ready to go and, in the time-honoured fashion, fell asleep in the car on the way home.

We planned, but failed, to transfer him asleep into the house. We were anxious about how he would react when he realised his parents were not there. (They had needed to go to the airport to part with an exorbitant amount of money in return for a passport for Tslil – the passport that the Israeli embassy in Portugal had not issued because of industrial action, and that she had been unable to receive from the Interior Ministry in Maale Adumim, because of incompetence, we suspect.) In fact, he was not at all worried by their absence, which obviously made us feel very relieved.

Then, all too soon, after twenty-four hours of washing, drying, sorting, packing, making sandwiches, and after a last dinner together (well, almost together: Tao was exhausted and asked to go to bed almost as soon as we sat down), it was time for us to travel in convoy to the airport. Tao travelled in our car, which we were thrilled about. (We were also thrilled that, when I asked him if he was looking forward to going home, he said he wanted to stay with us – although we know that he was also missing his regular routine.)

By the time we all met up outside the airport, Ollie was, naturally, fast asleep, which made parting from him easier, to be honest. As always, it is a great comfort to know that our next trip is already booked (from early February, for a month as usual). We have seen tremendous development in Ollie in his month here: in terms of, for example, both movement and verbalisation; we think that his cousins on both sides have been an inspiration to him. We’re quite sure that he will, in two months’ time, be a different child again, and we’re already allowing ourselves to get quite excited about seeing his progress. As for Tao, it will be very interesting to see him in his new gan (nursery) environment.

Meanwhile, we have to get through the next week without a visit to Zichron. We are comforting ourselves with the knowledge that we should at least be able to resume our own regular reading routine, with something even more gripping than Thomas, The Tank Engine.

At least we have lots of great memories, and photos.