In the early hours of Monday morning, we arrived back home from Portugal, safe and sound, exhausted and rather sad, but looking forward to catching up with everyone (and especially, of course, everyone in Zichron (and extra especially, of course, a certain little someone)). However, blog time runs differently from earth time, and my posts for the next few weeks are going to be lingering in Portugal.

Last week, I gave you an account of our trip to Lisbon with the family. It sounded, I hope, like a lot of fun. Today, I thought I would, in the spirit of Rashomon, give you a rather different version.

This one begins online, with me booking the coach tickets. I happened to notice – it wasn’t, to be honest, easy to miss – a firm statement from the coach company that all children were required to sit, throughout the journey, on a child car seat or booster seat. This statement was accompanied by a dire warning that any child not equipped with such a seat would not be allowed to board the coach. When I mentioned this to Micha’el, he assured us he had never seen a child travelling on a child seat on any coach in Portugal, and suggested that we should just ignore the instruction.

Bernice and I pointed out that, since we were driving to Castelo Branco with Ollie’s sal kal (car seat with carrying handle), it would make sense to take that and Tao’s booster seat to the coach station. If Micha’el proved correct, we would be able to leave the seats in the car in Castelo. If the driver insisted on car seats, we would not be caught out.

Which is why we arrived at the coach station laden with two child seats, only to be told by the bus driver that we had to put them in the baggage compartment; we were not allowed, under any circumstances, to bring them on to the bus. Micha’el mustered his considerable reserves of patience when dealing with officious pomposity, and explained that the company’s website explicitly stated that…Our protestations were futile, and after a couple of minutes, I explained to the driver that I was taking the seats back to my car, three minutes away, and asked him to wait for my return before departing. To nobody’s surprise, the driver insisted that he had no intention of deviating from the coach’s scheduled departure time.

However, confident that Micha’el would lie down in front of the coach rather than allow it to leave without me, I took the seats to our car and returned a few minutes later, in plenty of time to board the coach before departure time, or, indeed, to sit for 13 minutes waiting for the coach to leave 11 minutes behind schedule, which it duly did.

The majority opinion was that having to shlep the seats to the hotel in Lisbon, and back to the coach station to catch the return coach to Castelo, would be a real pain, particularly since the return driver was also certain to refuse to allow us to bring the seats onto the coach. However, I must record that Bernice expressed a dissenting opinion, suggesting that, if the return coach driver insisted on the children using child seats, and we had left them in Castelo, we would be in a real mess.

Fast forward two days, to a real mess: our arrival at the coach station for our return journey. If the first driver had proved inflexible, this second one proved particularly unpleasant. I’m not sure what he would have liked to be doing on that evening, but, clearly, driving a coach to Castelo was nowhere near his first choice! He took one look at the boys and asked: ‘Where are their seats? You can’t bring those children on without child seats!’ Fortunately, Micha’el had had time over the previous two days of R and R in Lisbon to replenish his reserves of patience. He calmly explained the story so far, adding that I had written to the coach company suggesting that they coordinate their policy with their drivers. The driver heard him out, but insisted (and, I must say, not unreasonably, albeit rather unpleasantly) that company policy was company policy.

After several rounds of toing and froing, not all of which I was able to follow, the driver, tiring of the debate, said that the children could board without child seats, but that he took no responsibility for that. If the police stopped the coach and inspected it, we would have to pay the fine; the coach company would not be liable. We of course thanked him profusely, boarded quickly, and, to nobody’s great surprise, there was no police raid on the coach and we arrived at Castelo safe and sound after a smooth journey.

There is a very embarrassing postscript to this story. Tao’s booster seat is one that we bought for him in Israel. The kids took it back to Portugal after their trip a few months ago, and used it in the taxi they took home from the airport on that occasion. An hour after we left Penamacor this Sunday to drive to Madrid airport, Bernice suddenly spotted that the booster seat was still on the floor of our car. So now, it has made the return trip from Portugal, and will be in Israel when the kids come again. Fortunately, Tao is still really a bit young for it, and has, in Portugal, his proper, and very heavy and bulky, seat.

Time for another confession.

Blogger’s aside: I find it remarkable that I feel able to tell embarrassing stories about myself in my blog that I would be hesitant to mention in person. Something about the distance both in time and in place between my writing and your reading allows me to be less inhibited than I would otherwise be. There are people who assure me that this exercise in self-humiliation is healthy., but this jury is still out on that.

I mentioned last week that, on our first night in Lisbon, Bernice and I ate at a vegan Indian restaurant a mile or so’s walk from the hotel. I was wearing what serve in Portugal as my shabbat shoes: a pair of ‘formal’ black shoes that have seen better days, but that are fine for our month in Penamacor.

If I’m being perfectly honest, I must say that, over the last couple of visits, the soles of the shoes have started to feel rather thin. However, this did not seem particularly significant, since I only wear them on shabbat and we very rarely leave the house on shabbat, there being no eruv in Penamacor.

After our very enjoyable meal, we strolled back to the hotel. With four hundred yards to go, I suddenly felt my left shoe flop off my foot. Looking down, I saw that there was a hole in the sole, or, rather, that there was a little sole around a huge hole, and, as if that were not bad enough, the upper was so offended at this that it had refused to have anything more to do with the sole, and the two had parted company.

I somehow managed to flop back to the hotel, feeling like Coco the clown. Fortunately, the hotel lobby was empty, and we made it back to the safety of our room with my dignity suffering no further assault. In the morning, I explained what had happened to Micha’el. Since I had brought no other shoes to Lisbon, he kindly lent me his to walk to a nearby Decathlon sports and leisure clothing store after breakfast, where I was thankfully able to buy a pair of remaindered trainers for myself (and a second pair for Bernice, incidentally) for under half their original price.

So even this story had a happy ending, which is only appropriate for Purim. Wishing you all Chag Purim Sameach!

Here we are on our last morning in Penamacor, moments after Ollie gave us a going away present of pulling himself up from a sitting position, using the slats of Bernice’s chair.