Housekeeping: Rosh Hashana falls on Monday and Tuesday next week. With regard to the blog, Tuesday will fall on Wednesday, as it were. I know this will confuse some of my readers, and indeed me. I also know that telling you (and me) now is no guarantee that you (or I) will remember when we receive (or indeed send out) the post next Wednesday. However, lacking a qualification in psychology or neurosurgery, there’s a very limited amount I can do to help. I’ll try to remember to remind you next blog-day that Shabbat is one day less far away than you probably think. Now that we’ve clarified that…

I’ve spent most of the last week feeling like Prince Philip. (I thought of making this an interactive post, and asking you to submit guesses as to exactly in what way I felt an affinity with a Greek naval officer who married a foreigner and may occasionally have played away from home. However, time constraints make that impractical, so let me explain.)

Last Tuesday, as Bernice and I were about to go upstairs and shower and change into our glad rags to set off for a wedding that we were actually both very much looking forward to, we decided that, since I felt a bit fluey, it would only be prudent to take an antigen test for COVID. Bernice tested negative, but I passed with flying colours. (I was always better at exams than Bernice.) As a consequence, we missed the wedding, and I have spent the last seven days in isolation.

What this meant in practical terms is that Bernice moved out of our bedroom and started sleeping in the bedroom down the hall. Since then, she has been using the kid’s bathroom and I have been using our en suite. This is a fact whose greater significance we shall return to later. But, for now, you’re still waiting for the Duke of Edinburgh connection.

Well, if you watched the first couple of series of The Crown (and, yes, I do know it’s a work of fiction, thank you, and that, likewise, Richard III never offered his kingdom for a horse, and, if it comes to that, no post mortem revealed ‘Calais’ engraved on Queen Mary I’s heart)…if, as I say, you watched the first season of The Crown, you may remember all of those end-of-a-long-day scenes in which the Queen and Prince Philip were preparing for bed in their separate bedrooms at opposite ends of a corridor and engaging in private conversations over a distance of about 15 meters (or yards, as they still were in those halcyon imperial days).

Well, that, mutatis mutandis, was Bernice and myself. (Incidentally, in our case, the mutandes were the absence of a maiden of the bedchamber in one case and a valet in the other to help with disrobing, and the number of robes that we each needed to dis.)

For the next few days, we more or less avoided each other. I spent a day mostly in bed, then a day mostly on a chair in the bedroom, then a couple of days in our backyard, enjoying the thankfully more temperate weather in the morning and again from the late afternoon. By this time, I was feeling more or less back to normal, except for a stuffy nose. I was very lucky that, even at their worst, my symptoms were very mild, and responded to paracetamol.

During this time, Bernice only came near me at various times throughout the night, when she needed to check that I was still breathing. (This led her, incidentally, to reflect on how small the periods of respite have been when she has been able to enjoy an uninterrupted and full night’s sleep. First, she spent years lying awake at night checking that the kids were breathing when they were young. She then graduated to lying awake at night listening for the sound of one or other of them arriving back home after an evening out as teenagers or young adults. Unreasonably soon after they left home, she had to start lying awake at night again, worrying about whether I was breathing, during one or other of my medical adventures.)

Those of you who know me (or indeed knew my father, z”l, or my brother, or his sons, or my son) will not need to be told that I, on the other hand, am the man whose wife was unable to wake him up when she went into labour with our firstborn. While my nights are no longer completely unbroken, when I am asleep, then I am a-s-l-e-e-p.

This brought us to shabbat, by which time I was feeling considerably better. We agreed that we could risk eating our shabbat meals together. On Friday night, we ate in the backyard, but instead of eating opposite each other across the table, as usual, we sat one at each end of our long garden table, and, it is fair to say, felt the absence of liveried footmen to convey the serving dishes from one end of the table to the other.

By the time shabbat lunch came around, Bernice had been to shul services and discovered that most of our friends were amazed that I was even bothering to isolate. We therefore decided that we could repeat the previous evening’s seating arrangement, but this time in the relative cool of inside, at either end of our long dining table. Still no liveried footmen; but then, good help is so hard to find these days.

Returning to the bathroom arrangements. I have always harboured a low-level rankle about toilet seats. I know that I risk exposing how little like Prince Philip I really am in my lack of chivalry, but it has always seemed to me a little unfair that men are always expected to lower the seat after use, out of consideration for the ladies. What seems to me, in a liberated and feminist world, far more equitable, would be for men to lower the seat after use out of consideration for women, and for women to raise the seat after use out of consideration for men.

I’ve not made an issue of this, and, barring the odd occasion when it slips my mind, I always lower the seat after use. This can niggle a bit through the night, when I end up lowering the seat after use and then, thanks to my prostate, raising it again a short while later, in a pattern that can repeat itself several times through the night, while Bernice sleeps peacefully on (providing I am between periods of medical alert), blissfully unaware of my, ultimately pointless, chivalry.

I really don’t mind this arrangement (you could tell, couldn’t you?), but it has felt wonderfully liberating to be able to leave the seat up for the entirety of the last week with a completely clear conscience.

By the time you read these words, I should be out of isolation and Bernice and I should be reunited, just in time to watch the funeral (sorry, The Funeral) together. Speaking of which, and its ramifications, I found this article by Melanie Phillips about the nature of British constitutional monarchy very interesting. (Author’s Note: If you read the article, please note that while the text of Zadok the Priest has indeed been used at every English coronation since 973 CE, Handel’s setting of the words has only been used since George II’s coronation in 1727.)

And now for someone who’s been around for considerably less time, but who certainly seems to have come a long way in six months. Raphael recently discovered real food – although he has been eyeing his mothers’ plates with fascination and longing for some time – and it’s a resounding hit. This is, I believe, batata, spinach and tehina.