Now that we have moved the clocks forward, Shabbat afternoon is a much longer thing than it was a month ago. The major impact this has on us is that it means our conversation with our good friends when they drop by on Shabbat afternoon – as they habitually do, I’m delighted to say – can progress beyond catching up with each other’s week, and move on to matters more philosophical.

Which is exactly what it did this week, when Bernice asked: “If you could go back to your 18-year-old self, and make career and life decisions that would mean you were likely now to be much better off materially, what decisions would you change?” (Incidentally, you may be interested to know that most of those present decided that they would not be prepared to make any compromises in terms of a satisfying working life in order to gain materially, and the rest of us admitted that we still had no idea what making a sound financial decision would look like.)

We all agreed, eventually, that we had many, many blessings to count (principally our wonderful respective families – even those members of them who have chosen to take themselves and our grandchildren far away, a choice that would be more incomprehensible if it were not the identical choice that we all made when younger). Nevertheless, I do find myself from time to time musing how wonderful it would be to win the lottery. I would, of course, probably increase my chances of winning if I ever bought a ticket. If I were to buy a ticket, this week would undoubtedly be the week for me to buy one.

Which is as Errol Garnerish an intro as there is (see my blog post from 17 December 2019 if you haven’t been paying close enough attention) to sharing with you what a lucky week I have had these past seven days. Five events have made this a very fortunate week.

First of all, exactly a week ago, I accurately predicted the winner of the competition to find the nation’s favourite song for the 75^th anniversary (see my blog post of 25 April 2023 if you haven’t been paying any attention at all). Not only did this produce a delicious feeling of smugness in itself, but it also meant that, since Thursday morning, every time I have read a story reporting the results and explaining why the winner was such an appropriate choice (four articles so far), I have had an even more delicious feeling of rapturous smugness at having scooped most major Israeli media outlets. I really don’t pay me enough!

Second, on Yom Ha’atzma’ut itself, I watched, as I usually do, the World Bible Quiz for Youth. This is usually a humiliating affair for me, since I manage to get right only a handful of questions, and am left feeling in awe of the book-learning of Jewish teens from around the world. This year, typically, as the original field of 16 (whittled down from hundreds of applicants in non-televised rounds over recent months) narrowed to 8, then 4, then 2, most of the contestants from outside Israel fell by the wayside. Atypically, 6 of the last 8 remaining contestants, and both of the finalists, were girls.

The winner only answered one question incorrectly over the entire quiz. Of the four questions I answered correctly this year, one was the question that she answered incorrectly. (“What was the first recorded occasion on which David cried?” I’ll print the answer below, to give you the opportunity to feel as smug as I.*)

The third incident actually took place two weeks ago, and is a little less dramatic, but it is proving for me to be an ongoing game-changer. One of the biggest advantages of stopping eating meat (for Bernice, at all; for me, at home) is that we now have enough kitchen cupboard space to accommodate our year-round and our Pesach dishes. Changing over requires only some condensing of the everyday, and bringing some of the Pesach stuff down from the less-accessible cupboards to a more convenient level.

We have a fairly deep double cupboard above the fridge, which is difficult to access because the fridge protrudes. We have always used this cupboard to store trays and other items that are too wide for an ordinary cupboard, as well as a number of items that we rarely, if ever, use: a teak meat carving board, knife and fork (a wedding present, and too good to get rid of), a pizza stone, and so on. Our other deeper cupboard, which is a single cupboard above the oven and microwave, houses the wide Pesach items (Seder dish and so on).

As we were packing away after Pesach this year, it suddenly occurred to me that the double cupboard is very under-utilised, since we have, over the years, passed on and otherwise retired several items we never used. On the other hand, all of the Pesach cupboards are jam-packed. I therefore switched the contents of the two deep cupboards, allowing me to relieve the jam in the other Pesach cupboards, and also making more readily accessible such items as the Havdalah mats, which are now no longer above the fridge. I am torn between congratulating myself on my astonishing vision and creativity, and wondering how it can possibly have taken me 10 years to think of this rearrangement.

Fourth, just when I thought I had exhausted ways of using up our shesek (loquats), which will have yielded about 10 kg by the time I harvest the last crop this week, Esther came up with another. In addition to the jam, the chutney, the ice-cream and the liqueur – and, of course, the fresh fruit itself, particularly juicy and sweet and flavourful this year – I am now attempting shesek vinegar.

I’m delighted to report that the bubbles and clouding, which should, according to the recipe, begin after one and two weeks respectively, were already visible after one and two days respectively, and are now very well advanced, which means, I hope, that I should be able to bottle before we take a mid-week break in Budapest in mid-May. As with my sourdough starter, I have been struck by how full of bacteria and microbes our home is. Let me stress that this is a good thing.

Lastly, when I turned to Bernice 90 minutes ago and confessed that, despite thinking of little else for the last two days, I still had absolutely no idea what I was going to write about this week, she said: “Well, whatever it is, after the last couple of weeks it had better be something light!” and hey presto, by a trick of literary alchemy, by the time I got upstairs I knew exactly what I was going to write about.

So, if this week’s effort has left you singularly unimpressed, please blame Bernice.

*When it became clear that Saul’s anger at David was not to be assuaged, Jonathan shot the arrows as a sign for David, and David fled. Before he left, the two embraced and wept. (Samuel 1, 20:41)

Meanwhile, in the tradition of King David, all of our grandsons seem to be music-makers.
(I could segue for Israel, couldn’t I!)

Postscript – written after, but placed as an introduction to, today’s post. Today (Tuesday) is Yom Hazikaron, that most painful day in the Israeli calendar when the nation unites to remember its fallen. This year, the nation is also holding its collective breath, to discover whether the social fabric will actually hold over today, and tomorrow, Yom Ha’atzma’ut. In the 20 hours since I wrote the rest of this post, that social fabric, the essential core of the country, as exemplified on two very different WhatsApp groups of which I am a member, has been sorely tested. I have felt compelled to leave one of the groups, and may possibly leave the other. If I were writing this post today, rather than yesterday, the tone I would use would no longer be as light as it is. However, I have decided not to change the post, because the content already belies the lightness of the tone.

I urge you, in the words of Psalm 122: שַׁ֭אֲלוּ שְׁל֣וֹם יְרוּשָׁלָ֑͏ִם – Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

For the benefit of those on whom the reference in the title of this post is lost, the long running BBC domestic radio programme Desert Island Discs each week invites a different celebrity to select which eight recordings they would want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island. At the end of each programme, the presenter traditionally asks them: ‘And if you could only take one recording, which would it be?’

This Wednesday, on Israel’s 75^th Independence Day, Israel’s state broadcaster’s popular music radio station will be announcing which song its listeners have voted to be Israel’s ‘Song of 75’. While I would not claim to be anything of an expert on Israeli popular song, the choice seems to me obvious. So obvious, in fact, that I am going to stick my neck out and go public with my prediction, so convinced am I that this is the only real contender.

In fact, I’ll be very surprised if at least some of you do not react, when I share my selection with you, by saying: ‘Well duh, of course that’s going to win.’  

But just before I do let you know my choice, let me reflect on another, more official, symbol of the last 75 years – Israel’s national flag. The months since the present Government announced its intention of rushing through a far-reaching program of judicial reform have been marked by consistently large mass demonstrations in Tel Aviv and all other major cities, and many minor locations, throughout Israel. There have been several notable features of these protests.

First, the numbers attending did not fall off after the first flush of protest, nor did they fall off in the bad weather of late winter. Instead, the demonstrations have continued to attract consistently large numbers. Second, both the demonstrators and the police have, by and large, maintained a civilised relationship over the past weeks and months. Third, the demonstrations have attracted not only the to-be-expected secular, middle-class, left-wing Tel Avivians, but also a much broader cross-section of Israelis, across the religious, social and political spectrum.

Fourth, the demonstrators seem to have reasserted their identification with the Israeli flag. In recent years (in recent decades), there has been a tendency for the political right to ‘appropriate’ the flag to a certain extent. In the last couple of months, the flag (together with the Declaration of Independence) has been a constant and ubiquitous presence at the demonstrations. It has also been a constant and ubiquitous presence at the counter-demonstrations that have been gathering momentum. It seems to me a sign of national strength that both sides of a dispute that has threatened to rip the country apart should continue to identify so strongly with the national flag.

Indeed, there have even been stories of what has happened when those opposed to the judicial reform programme leaving the demonstration cross the path of those supporting the programme arriving for a counter-demonstration. The latter reportedly asked to use the flags of the former and, according to the reports, the opposers handed their flags to the supporters. (I have no first-hand evidence of the accuracy of these reports, but, even if they are only apocryphal, the fact that the stories are repeated so widely and have gained such traction in itself reflects a very positive aspect of the national mood.)

This embracing of a cultural symbol by opposing sides leads me neatly to my choice of song. There are few, if any, Israeli songwriters more beloved, or better able to capture the national mood, than Ehud Manor. I have mentioned him before as a remarkably skilled translator of English-language musicals into Hebrew (he translated over 600 such works), but he was also, indeed primarily, a chronicler of Israel through over 1200 original song lyrics.

In 1968, Manor’s younger brother was killed while serving in the Israel Defence Forces during the War of Attrition. Manor wrote a song – אחי הצעיר יהודה, My Young Brother, Yehuda – which became very popular, In the mid-1980s, he wrote another song, reportedly also in reaction to the loss of his brother – אין לי ארץ אחרת – I have No Other Country – which was perceived as a protest song by those opposing the First Lebanon War, and has continued to be embraced by those who are unhappy with the direction the country is taking, but who nevertheless fiercely identify with the country.

Sadly, Israel’s first 75 years have been characterised as much by such patriotism and dissent as by any other national emotions: from the disdainful and patronising treatment of the immigrants from North Africa and Iraq by the ruling European Jewish ‘aristocracy’, through the ‘occupation’ of Judea and Samaria in the wake of the Six-Day War, through the first and second Lebanon Wars, the first and second Intifadas, the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Remarkably, every successive wave of dissenters and protesters has heard, in Manor’s song, the resonance of their own feelings.

For the benefit of the two or three of my readers who don’t know the song (and for the rest who do), here it is as originally sung by Gali Atari. I’d like you to listen to it first, and then I’d like to reflect on what seem to me the secrets of the song’s enduring success.

Here are the lyrics, with my tweaking of the translation given on the video:

אין לי ארץ אחרת
גם אם אדמתי בוערת
רק מילה בעברית חודרת
אל עורקיי, אל נשמתי
בגוף כואב, בלב רעב
כאן הוא ביתי

לא אשתוק, כי ארצי
שינתה את פניה
לא אוותר לה,
אזכיר לה,
ואשיר כאן באוזניה
עד שתפקח את עיניה

אין לי ארץ אחרת
עד שתחדש ימיה
עד שתפקח את עיניה

אין לי ארץ אחרת
גם אם אדמתי בוערת
רק מילה בעברית חודרת
אל עורקיי, אל נשמתי
בגוף כואב, בלב רעב
כאן הוא ביתי בגוף כואב, בלב רעב
כאן הוא ביתי

I have no other country
Even if my land is on fire.
Only a word in Hebrew can pierce through
To my veins, to my soul
With an aching body, with a hungry heart
Here is my home

I will not be silent, because my country’s
Face has changed.
I will not give up on her,
I will remind her,
And I will sing here in her ear
Until she opens her eyes
I have no other country

Until she renews her days
Until she opens her eyes

I have no other country
Even if my land is on fire
Only a word in Hebrew can pierce through
To my veins, to my soul
With an aching body, with a hungry heart
Here is my home

With an aching body, with a hungry heart
Here is my home

The first thing to say is that the range of both the words and the music is very limited; there is very little variation in the song. It is obsessively focused on the main message: ‘I have no other country’. I have omitted, in the lyrics above, one complete repetition of the opening 12 lines. This means that, in a three-minute song of 35 short lines, the opening line ‘I have no other country’ is sung four times, each time to the same seven notes, in a musical motif that is closely echoed throughout the song, I believe, 28 times. The Hebrew vocabulary is not complex, and the syntax is very straightforward.

When the song is sung these days, it tends to be sung more slowly, with more raw emotion in the voice of the singer. However, there is something in the slightly flat, almost matter-of-fact treatment of the song by Gali Atari that emphasizes that the fact that the songwriter feels he has no option is a given, something to be taken for granted.

Note also what seems to me a deliberate ambiguity in the following lines: ‘I will not be silent, because my country’s / Face has changed.’ Does this mean: ‘The fact that my country’s face has changed is not a reason to be silent’? (If I may be allowed to ‘translate’ this into the situation Israel is in, that can be paraphrased as: ‘The fact that the country has changed is not a reason to move abroad.’) Or does it mean: ‘The reason I will not be silent is that my country’s face has changed’? (‘The fact that the country has changed is the reason why I feel compelled to take action.’)

One further reason for the power of the song is the following. The emotional and physical state of the songwriter is very specifically described in lines 3–5: ‘Only a word in Hebrew can pierce through / To my veins, to my soul / With an aching body, with a hungry heart.’ However, the specifics of the way in which ‘my country’s face has changed’ are not mentioned at all; it is, of course, precisely this which has allowed so many disparate groups over such a long time to hear in the song their own anguish, and their own determination not to give up.

Let me quote from the tribute to Ehud Manor when he was awarded the Israel Prize for Hebrew Song: ‘Ehud Manor never wanted to be a shaliach tzibbur – (in other words, to speak on behalf of others). In his poetry there is usually no place for the phrase “we”. According to his view, no lyricist can speak except for himself. Indeed, he brought to Hebrew song his private voice, an intimate, revealing and sensitive voice, but miraculously his song of the individual became the song of many.’

It feels, in these days, as though the lyric of this wonderfully simple, simply wonderful song has never rung truer. However, I know that it has felt like that in each successive social challenge that the country has faced. Like all great art, the song speaks to each generation in its own voice. That is why it is my choice as the song of the 75^th anniversary. I’ll let you know next week whether the great Israeli public has got it right!

Meanwhile, Tao and Ollie are enjoying the comforts of the tipee (including sofa with integral oven), while Raphael also went camping last weekend.

It all started with recorded sound, as produced by Edison’s tin foil phonograph, invented some time in 1877.

Incidentally, if you happen to be looking for proof of Edison’s visionary powers, just peruse this list he offered in North American Review in June 1878 of the following possible future uses of his invention:

1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
2. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.
3. The teaching of elocution.
4. Reproduction of music.
5. The “Family Record” – a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.
6. Music-boxes and toys.
7. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.
8. The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing.
9. Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment, and spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to memory.
10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication.

Of that impressive list, the item we will be looking at today is, you will not be surprised to hear, Item 4 – reproduction of music. In the early years of the phonograph, it is fair to say that piano rolls played on a reproducing piano offered a listening experience that was at least as faithful to the original live performance as, and certainly far more pleasurable than, the distorting, crackling, tinny phonograph discs of the time. From the last years of the 19^th Century until 1930, a very impressive list of composers and pianists had their interpretations captured on roll: among them Mahler, Saint-Saens, Grieg, Debussy, de Falla, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Scriabin,

By 1927, phonograph technology had become increasingly sophisticated, and from then on the gramophone record dominated. While most classical musicians were enthusiastic, one, perhaps the greatest pianist of the age, Artur Schnabel, steadfastly refused to record, until eventually, in 1932, he reluctantly allowed himself to be persuaded to record all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. His opposition was basically on two grounds. First, technical limitations of the new medium meant that the longest possible recording was four minutes and, in addition, post-recording editing was impossible. Any recording had to be of a series of short, single takes. As he wrote to his wife, in the middle of this mammoth recording project, which was, for him, a living nightmare:

“You can only play for 4 minutes. In those 4 minutes, you sometimes have to strike around 2000 keys or more. If 2 of them are unsatisfactory, you have to repeat all 2000. And when you do that, the original mistakes are corrected but you make another 2, so then it’s another 2000 to do over. This goes on 10 times, always with a sword of Damocles hanging over your head. Finally, you give up and now leave in 20 mistakes.”

For Schnabel, even worse than the physical and mental strain of this striving for an unattainable perfection was the underlying philosophical point that a recording is unavoidably viewed as a definitive performance:

“…from now on I shall rightly and constantly be condemned because I took it upon myself to declare something finished that wasn’t, because I released something to be used that was not fit for purpose, which means I lied. Because I released as definitive something that is essentially always unfinished as long as it breathes, which means I lied.

“I asked a music and record enthusiast (a peculiar talent) whether it bothered him if a musician makes small or even big mistakes in a concert. He replied with a smile, ‘No, not in the least, that doesn’t bother me at all.’ What about if it happens on a recording, I asked. ‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘I’m quite strict about that and won’t accept any blunders, I’m critical in a different way.’”

I have quoted Schnabel at such length both because he was a deep-thinking and articulate commentator and because he reflects one extreme of the debate about the virtues of music recording. He also displays the scepticism with which technical innovation is almost always regarded by at least some.

At the other end of the scale, and at the other end of the development of editing of recorded music, sits Glenn Gould. (I would distinguish, here, between editing and more intrusive manipulation, of which more later.) Gould’s creative process, most notable, probably, in his second recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in the early 1970s, was very much a two-part process. The first stage was the capturing on tape of multiple live (studio) renditions. The second stage was cutting and splicing together from those multiple renditions a ‘version’ whose every bar consisted of a segment of one of those renditions that best represented Gould’s understanding of the piece.

The end result was, essentially, a piece of absolute artifice, representing an ideal. (This was, incidentally, an ideal that Schnabel always rejected. He wrote: “I don’t want to play that well; I want to have something in front of me, not just behind me. Man’s constantly changing nature cannot be reconciled with the eternally unfeeling machine.”)

With Gould, we reach a point where the technology is sufficiently sophisticated to make a ‘performance’ that was artificially constructed in the editing room sound indistinguishable from a continuous live performance. If you feel this is cheating, then you should ask yourself why you accept it every time you see a feature film, and do not complain that this is cheating, and a live theatre performance is the only authentic acting experience. Is it because we are all aware of the role of editing in film? If so, then Gould’s complete openness about his editing technique should earn him the same tolerance on the part of his audience, which it largely has done.

These days, of course, digital editing allows for the correction of a singer’s or instrumentalist’s errors of pitch, adjusting the balance between individual instruments, or sections, in an orchestra, adjustments of tempo and so on. The recording studio can now give us a level of perfection that could never be sustained in the concert hall for the duration of an entire piece.

At this point, I leave the world of classical music, and move, with extreme caution, into the, for me, uncharted waters of popular music. In the pop music world, intense editing, and other manipulation of the recorded sound, is omnipresent and universally accepted, so much so that there have been groups that cannot perform live, because the recorded sound that is their trademark cannot even be approximated in a live concert.

Let me offer you some further food for thought, in the form of a number of real-life scenarios and the questions they raise. Frank Sinatra’s last project was a series of duets with artists whom he never, actually, shared a recording studio with. His contribution, and their contributions, were recorded separately and brought together only in the editing room. Is a song recorded in this way, in which there can be no chemistry between the artists, genuinely a duet?

Celine Dion, coincidentally, has ‘performed with’ Frank Sinatra. Interestingly, that was in 2007, nine years after he died. Is that a duet? A perhaps more interesting question is whether it seems as though Celine Dion is seeking to enhance her status by association with Frank Sinatra, an association that he is not in a position to bless or refuse. Is this homage or exploitation?

Our final, and arguably most bizarre, scenario this week is a new recording of a song featuring a duet by two iconic Israeli popular singers. The song was written this year. The singers, Zohar Argov and Ofra Haza, have been dead for a combined total of 59 years. The song was produced in honour of Israel’s 75^th Independence Day next week at the initiative of the Israel Broadcasting Corporation.

Before we get on to the question of how this record was produced, a little background. While Ofra Haza enjoyed the status of an establishment performer, Argov was never, in his lifetime, embraced by the establishment. He was a convicted rapist and drug addict who committed suicide in his prison cell the day after being arrested on another charge of attempted rape. Some might argue that this makes him an odd choice to bring honour to the state on its 75^th birthday.

The record was produced by an Israeli company, using artificial intelligence technology to analyse the recordings of the two legendary artists from the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation’s archive and other recordings, and produce a simulation of their voices. If this is beginning to sound like a cheap commercial gimmick on the part of the Israel Broadcasting Corporation, let me fail to set your mind at rest by pointing out that the title of the song is Here Forever, or, in Hebrew, Kan l’Olam, and the fact that the name of the IBC television network is Kan is, you might choose to believe, purely coincidental.

I have heard differing comments on the accuracy of the impersonation. I have a suspicion that those who claim that it is a poor approximation are influenced by the fact that they know it is a simulation. If they didn’t know, I suspect they wouldn’t detect it. I watched a video recently where a professional pop drummer and a performing classical pianist competed to see which of them could better distinguish between recordings of actual instrumentalists and AI simulations. Neither of the experts scored highly.

So, is Here Forever tribute or exploitation? If the object of the exercise is not to reinterpret the work of the artists, but to produce something indistinguishable from the work of the artist, should the artist, even after death, be protected by copyright laws? Or should we rejoice in the fact that artists’ creativity may soon be able to live forever.

I also find myself wondering about other, non-artistic scenarios. I have long felt that it is a great pity that Ian Botham flourished before the era of T20. It would be wonderful to watch him in a simulated match. Or, again, imagine seeing Rod Laver go head-to-head against whichever of the Big Three you think is the GOAT. It seems very likely that all of this, and much, much more that I (not being a Thomas Edison) cannot even imagine, may be just around the corner.

Editor’s Note: In keeping with the theme that I wanted to explore this week, I thought it would be interesting to ask ChatGPT to write 1500 words, in the style of my blog. The post you have just read is the result that ChatGPT came up with.

Editor’s Second Note: Just kidding! But did I have you wondering for a split-second there?…In a year or two, this may not be a joke…and then I’ll be able to enjoy my Sundays!

No picture of Tao this week, I’m afraid. I’m not sure he stands still long enough. But the two younger grandsons are both clearly enjoying their Sundays, and Mondays, and Tuesdays…

First this week, a bit of housekeeping (actual, genuine, housekeeping, as it happens):

Following my description of Pesach baking last week, I had feedback (boom! boom!) from a couple of people, asking for recipes . Ever ready to oblige, I offer you not only a PDF of the recipes, which you can access here, but also, at no additional charge, a bonus. Since, by the time you access the Pesach recipes, I can’t imagine anyone will want to do any Pesach baking, you will have to keep the recipes until next year. (I have been told that the recipes work during the rest of the year as well, but I’m not sure I really believe it, and I have absolutely no intention of finding out.)

By the time you get around to reading this week’s blog post, Pesach may even be over already, in which case what you will be looking for is a good bread recipe. Unfortunately, sourdough starter is almost certainly what the Torah calls se’or, which is the one thing above all others that we are not allowed to possess during Pesach. This means that this year, as every year, just before Pesach, I poured away the last of my starter. The first thing I plan to do after we have changed back after Pesach is mix flour and water in a jar, place it on our kitchen windowsill (or, if the weather is cool, on top of our water machine) and place a large sign next to it that will read:

DEAR BACTERIA.

PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR MOVING YOU TO THE DUSTBIN LAST WEEK. I HOPE YOU WERE ABLE TO FIND ANOTHER FOOD SOURCE THERE.

I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW THAT WE ARE BACK TO BUSINESS AS USUAL AND I HAVE SET UP THE ADJACENT HOTEL JUST FOR YOU.

PLEASE CONTACT OUR STAFF IF THERE IS ANYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO MAKE YOUR STAY COMFORTABLE.

If past experience is anything to go by, the local bacteria will be very quick on the uptake, but, even with the best will in the world, the starter won’t be robust enough to perform its magic in bread dough for four or five days. Meanwhile, of course, Bernice and I will be longing for some real bread.

Fortunately, I have a couple of recipes that produce a fairly hearty loaf even though they use only baker’s yeast, and not sourdough starter. This means that the second thing I plan to do after we have changed back is to make a batch of rye bread with caraway seeds (heimishe brown bread). If you can bear to wait just over two-and-a-half hours, you can enjoy a tasty loaf with very little effort.

You can access the fairly quick and simple rye bread recipe here.

Ed Note: It’s just struck me: if someone had told me, twenty years ago, that I would, at some point in the future, be writing a weekly blog in which, among other things, I shared recipes with my readers, I would have laughed in their face. But life sometimes contrives to manoeuvre you into an unexpected corner.

So, here we are, a third of the way into this week’s post, and the question, as ever, is: Where do we go from here?

Let me reference first a thought-provoking haggada produced this year to a commendably high standard in a very short time. It is a conventional haggada, illustrated with very striking photographs taken at the protests against the Government’s planned programme of judicial reform. To the text have been added a range of commentaries on Pesach and the Seder’s relevance to this struggle, contributed by a range of Israeli people of letters. Click the title to view the הגדת החירות – סיפור של מאבק ותקווה, also available with the commentaries translated into English as The Freedom Haggada – A Story of Protest and Hope.

I took a good look through this haggada before our Seder, which we celebrated with Esther, Maayan, and even Raphael, who managed to stay engaged until after he had performed his Ma Nishtana dance. While I do not agree with every sentiment of every reflection in the collection, I was delighted to be able to find enough material that I could bring to the Seder, confident that it reflected the common ground that we and the girls stand on. I know that not all of you will agree with the content, but I hope we can all celebrate the fact that it is, at the very least, an illustration of the continuing relevance to the Jewish people of our reliving the story of the Exodus.

End of lecture. Rapid change of subject.

Walking repeatedly through our front garden in the last couple of weeks, on my way from the house to the rubbish bins as we cleared out our cupboards, from the house to the front hedge as I put the disassembled and scrubbed kitchen drawers out to dry, and then on my way from the house to shul and back again, I could not fail to notice that Pesach is not called Hag He’Aviv – the spring festival – for nothing. Bernice and I were very late in saying the once-a-year blessing on seeing fruit blossom on trees for the first time, and by the time we got around to it our nectarine tree had barely any blossom left. Indeed, I was surprised to see, it already had fruit – and, in comparison with previous years – lots of it.

So, yesterday, I decided the time had come to protect the nectarines from the birds. This was a job that I undertook fairly early in the morning, before Bernice was up and about. Let me explain why that is necessary.

Among the television programmes Bernice ‘enjoys’ watching are programmes that follow the stories of patients who arrive at the A&E/emergency/casualty departments of hospitals. It appears that almost all of these patients are men in their 70s who fail to realise that they can no longer zip up and down on ladders: arthritic knees, sudden spells of dizziness, wasting leg muscles, impaired inner-ear balance mechanisms, all conspire to make going up on a ladder a very stupid thing for a man in his 70s to do. All of this means, of course, that I have to do it when Bernice isn’t looking.

I am, naturally, tremendously careful, and all the time I am balanced up there I take tree-hugging to new heights, but nevertheless I do realise that it is a very stupid thing to do and, if it makes you feel any better, I promise I won’t do it next year and will, instead, wait for either my daughter (or, more probably, my acrobatic daughter-in-law) to arrive from Zichron, or for one of our neighbours’ strapping sons in their twenties, stamping their alpha male-dom all over my deflated ego, to breeze in from next door, and attach the netting in 10 minutes, doubtless while balancing on a slender branch on one leg.

The fact is that I spent 70 minutes yesterday wrestling with a nectarine tree that has undergone an adolescent growth spurt in the last year and could now play basketball for The Summer Fruits in the Israel tree league. After all that time, I was sweating heavily, I had managed to dislodge about 30 immature nectarines (which is arguably more than the birds would have eaten), and the tree still looked barely protected, even to the untrained eye.

I plan to tackle the shesek (loquat) tree tomorrow (now today – Tuesday), which is much more straightforward. I have a deal with the birds that I cover this tree only up to a height where I can safely reach. Anything above that is theirs. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure all of the birds understand the small print of this agreement.

As for the much smaller and more manageable peach tree, with its very modest harvest, I won’t have any netting left over, so I may have to play a game of chicken with the birds, and see if I can manage to pick each individual fruit just before the birds get to it.

When our gardener suggested several years ago that he plant three small nurslings – peach, nectarine and lemon – it seemed a charming idea. Nobody explained to me the expenditure of physical effort and mental strain that this would entail. Where the prophet Micah writes that “each man shall sit under his grapevine or fig tree with no one to disturb him”, I always thought that the vision of the Messianic age was one free of war and strife between man and his fellow-man. I never realised it also encompassed freedom from the war between man and birds, and, indeed, between man and gravity. I think I must be acquiring the wisdom of age, or something.

Meanwhile, if our three grandsons continue to explore the world around them with the same curiosity and enthusiasm they are all showing now, they will probably, on their way up, meet me, on my way down, somewhere on the slopes of the mountain-range of human wisdom, some time frighteningly soon.

In a normal week, Sunday morning sees this week’s blog post as my number one priority. In a normal week. This is not a normal week.

In a normal week, by Sunday evening, the post is done and dusted. It’s been written, reviewed by me, read and approved by Bernice, revised by me, set up in WordPress and scheduled to go live on Tuesday morning. In a normal week. This is not a normal week.

I am writing this at 8:30 on Monday evening. Despite the lateness of the hour (Go Live minus 12:30 hours), I have no idea what I am going to write about and, to be honest, I feel more asleep than awake. But my public (such as it is) awaits me; the show must go on. So here we go.

This is not a normal week since, as you will hardly need me to remind you, Pesach begins on Wednesday night. All religious holidays obviously require a certain amount of spiritual preparation; for me this usually involves study, in the form of reading a book or some articles or shiurim or listening to recorded or live talks and shiurim. However, on no other holiday am I, are we, so thoroughly tested on our degree of preparation. On Pesach, we are expected to provide stimulating questions, discussion points and observations. No pressure, then.

Pesach is also unusual in that it involves physical preparation. Not uniquely, of course: before sukkot there is a lot of physical preparation: flimsy temporary structures that are liable to collapse don’t, after all, build themselves. However, building a sukkah pales into insignificance beside the logistic challenge of cleaning a house for Pesach while, at the same time, living and cooking and eating in it.

Of course, I realise how lucky we are. We no longer have six-year-olds who post wafers into their money-boxes and don’t think to mention it to anyone. (In fairness we never did have a six-year-old like that.) We no longer have twelve-year-olds who leave a sandwich in their schoolbag at the beginning of the year and forget about it, only for it to be discovered in late March. (In fairness, we did have a twelve-year-old exactly like that. I leave you to guess whether it was Esther or Micha’el.)

I also realise how lucky I am. I have never played my part in preparing meals, so the waves of chag, shabbat, chag, shabbat have never struck terror into my heart as they do into Bernice’s.

But Pesach is something else. First of all, to make up for all those years when I was out clubbing sabre-tooth tigers while Bernice was scrubbing cupboards, I strive to play my part in Pesach cleaning. We start what one ex-colleague of mine regarded as ludicrously late: he and his wife started cleaning for Pesach every year immediately after Hannukah. Others might regard it as early. I tackle each of the kitchen drawer units in turn, giving them a really thorough clean so that the final clean can be much quicker. These days, I feel I can only tackle one unit per day, so I spread that over two weeks.

Meanwhile, we confine eating to the kitchen and dining room, so that Bernice’s pre-Shabbat house cleaning can, over two weeks, be even more thorough than usual.

This year, we moved on to Phase 2 towards the end of last week: getting rid of, or putting aside for pre-Pesach eating, our odd bits of hametz in the freezer and the cupboards; cleaning the overflow fridge and freezer in the utility room, ready to move over all the non-Pesach perishables; doing our big Pesach Rami Levi shop; condensing the non-Pesach food into half of the kitchen drawers.

Yesterday (Sunday) morning, we were up early for our big push. We teamed up to tackle the kitchen fridge-freezer; Bernice took on the oven and hob, while I got the microwave, wine-fridge. (I know this sounds as though I’m not pulling my weight, but ever since the year when I cleaned the oven really thoroughly and couldn’t quite put it back together again, Bernice has declared it off-limits for me.) Finally, I condensed the non-Pesach dishes and cutlery into half of the kitchen drawers.

These days, I seem to pack ever more efficiently, so that finding drawer space for all the bits and pieces that normally live on the worktop – the mixer, peanut jars (yes, two jars, since you ask: one for raw peanuts in their husks and one for home-roasted – this is a serious peanut-eating household), coffee machine, condiment set, butter dish – seemed ridiculously easy.

By the time we collapsed into bed last night, we were all set for a post-breakfast switch-over today, which went more smoothly than ever. Having cleared away after breakfast, we took a moment to admire the stark elegance of an uncluttered kitchen, and agreed that, despite the fact that this was the way our interior designer urged us to live, it seemed completely lifeless. (Personally, I would be happiest with something halfway between unlived in and cluttered, but there you are.) Then Bernice swept and washed the floors, while I attacked the work surfaces. In no time at all, I was ready to retrieve, from the cupboard under the stairs, the polygal (corrugated plastic) sheets with which we cover the work surface, and the plastic sink inserts.

In previous years, I have struggled to work out exactly how the various pieces of polygal (which I cut, several years ago, with cunning skill, from only five sheets we bought) fit together round the kitchen. This year, it all fell into place. Even manoeuvring the water machine to fit the polygal under it produced no disasters, and in no time at all I was up on the stepladder, handing down to Bernice all the Pesach dishes and glassware and kitchen equipment. 

By 11:30, we were able to enjoy a cup of tea, which in my case was Chai Masala, which I thought I liked, but now discover I do not. If anyone would like a box of Adanim Chai Masala, with only one bag missing, you’re invited to come and collect it.

Perceptive readers will be wondering what I was doing between 11:30 and now, that prevented me writing my post during the afternoon. Funny you should ask.

My father, alav hashalom, once he retired, always loved to bake for Pesach. He would make almond macaroons, cinnamon balls, and a French chocolate cake that, even though it was in Evelyn Rose’s kosher cookery book, and even though it used potato flour, was not, unaccountably, listed in the Pesach section of the book. It was, however, obviously, ideal for Pesach.

After we moved to Israel, my parents visited us from England over Pesach, and Dad continued to bake, wonderfully, every year. After he died, I felt I had to take up the mantle, and so I continued the tradition. Bernice generously agreed to give me first dibs at the kitchen every year after we change over, so I traditionally take the rest of changeover day.

I soon added to my repertoire coconut pyramids, originally simply because they use yolks only, and I was easily able to bake quantities that meant using equal numbers of egg whites (four each for macaroons and cinnamon balls) and yolks (eight for coconut pyramids). The French chocolate cake, very efficiently, uses equal numbers of yolks and whites.

Unfortunately (purely from the aspect of egg efficiency), a colleague at work shared a recipe for florentines that is so ludicrously simple, and so delicious, that I readily adopted it for Pesach. (Bung egg whites, sugar, chocolate chips, chopped dried fruit and chopped almonds in a bowl, stir, and dollop onto a baking tray.) So now I have to make a heavily yolky omelette on the day I bake.

Over the years, I have, in theory, perfected this baking day. I tackle the recipes in order, so that the baking time of item x is a little longer than the preparation time for item x+1. Fortunately, all of the recipes call for an oven at 170^o-180^oC, so oven use is efficient. The instruction manual that I have written for this entire enterprise gives total kitchen time as 3.5 hours. This, of course, assumes that everything goes according to plan, and every baton change, as it were, is effortless.

Today, it didn’t, and it wasn’t. First of all, I finished mixing the ingredients for pyramids, carefully shaped 20 of them, using my favourite eggcup, and only then realised that the reason the mixture seemed a little wet was that, although the number of eggs I had used was correct for the double batch I always make, I had followed the original recipe for single quantities of coconut, sugar and lemon, so that I now had to dump my 20 perfectly formed pyramids back into the mixing bowl, weigh and mix more coconut, sugar and lemon, and start shaping again.

A little put off my stride by this setback, I plunged into more confusion with quantities of ground almonds for the cinnamon balls. I normally grind my own almonds. However, this year Bernice found that the ground almonds were cheaper than the whole almonds, and so she bought enough for my recipes. It was only as I was setting up that I remembered that I had discovered years previously why commercial cinnamon balls are so dark inside, whereas home-baked ones are usually much lighter. The secret is not the cinnamon, nor kiddush wine, as I used to think, but rather the almonds. Commercial cinnamon balls are made with almonds that have not been blanched.

So, I decided to use home-ground, unblanched almonds for a third of the mixture, to give the colour I wanted. However, when I came to weigh and mix together the two kinds of ground almond, I unaccountably ended up with 250 grams more of mixture than I needed. Fortunately, I had, at that stage, not mixed the two kinds of almond together thoroughly, and so I spent a few exhilarating minutes carefully scooping blanched ground almond out of the mixture.

All of this helps to explain why the three-and-a-half hours expanded to just over five! Bernice was kind enough to remind me that I had a set of similar, but, of course, not identical, hiccoughs last year before Pesach. I am beginning to suspect that several days of intensive cleaning and a feeling of terminal exhaustion are not the best preparation for a smooth afternoon of baking, but what can you do?

So, now you understand why I have no idea what to write about this week. Sorry! You’ll just have to make do with some pictures.

Ed Note: To help you read that heading correctly, imagine that it is followed, after a pause by: ‘When do we want it?’, to which the answer is, of course, ‘Now!’

As I sit attempting to write this week’s post, I am, uncharacteristically, listening to the rolling news programme on the radio, and following this (Monday) morning’s events.

I imagine most of you are keeping up, more or less, with developments in Israel, and, of course, by the time you read this post, any ‘update’ I offer will be at least 22 hours stale, and, therefore, at the rate at which things are developing here, will be worthless. However, allow me to clarify for you exactly where things stand at this exact moment, since it helps explain this week’s post.

Overnight, well over 100,000 took to the streets across the country in unplanned demonstrations to protest Netanyahu’s firing of Defence Minister Gallant. So far this morning, the Histadrut (Trade Unions Congress), in a press conference where they shared the podium with representatives of employers in the private sector, among others, called an immediate general strike, without explicitly stating what their demands were. Obviously, their primary demand is the halting of the judicial reforms. Whether that is all they are demanding is not 100% certain, although it would probably be enough to stop the general strike.

It has to be said that this unanimity of the workers and the bosses is unprecedented in Israeli history.

Following this announcement, which brings out the public sector, including the Health Service, which is now working on a severely reduced footing, the (Likud) head of the workers’ union at Ben Gurion announced the immediate halting of all departures from Ben Gurion. Halting of all landings is expected to take effect from tomorrow.

The closure of many of the country’s shopping malls has just been announced. Universities are also closing. (Schools break up for Pesach after today, and will therefore miss the immediate wave of action.)

Netanyahu is currently meeting with all coalition party leaders (a meeting that is lasting far longer than originally anticipated), and is expected to address the nation immediately afterwards.

Which leaves me two options.

I could, theoretically, ignore what is happening in Israel, and write about what I planned to write about before the sky fell in. That seems at best cloth-eared, at worst callous, at all events irrelevant.

I could, theoretically, offer an opinion. I’m not sure how far I want to stick my neck out, not least because I feel so far out of my depth. Let me just say this. First, Netanyahu has to stop the legislative process for the judicial reform, and to prepare for a considered process of national public debate leading to a reform that the majority in the country undoubtedly feel is needed.

Second, the opposition have to accept that the stopping of the legislative process and the establishment of a framework for public debate represent the achievement of the declared aims of the demonstrations, which should, accordingly, cease with immediate effect. The demonstrations must not continue as a call for the removal of the democratically elected Prime Minister.

Now that I have alienated all my former friends on the right and the left, here’s what I’m going to do.

I am, for this week, going to stop here, and hope to meet you, next week, on the far side of this, the greatest civil and arguably the greatest existential, crisis that Israel has faced since its foundation.

Two final reflections.

If you feel that to call the current upheaval an existential crisis is an exaggeration, I recommend, for an assessment of the external existential crisis, an article by a former deputy national security adviser in Israel.

As for the internal existential crisis, over the next few weeks, we are due to mark, together, the festival of our national foundation, the anniversary of our greatest national tragedy, and the terrible cost and remarkable reward of achieving national statehood. If it becomes clear that we are, for whatever reason, unable to stand alongside each other to mark these events, then I fear this will point to the truth that we are unable to stand alongside each other at all, and the Zionist experiment has failed.

Popular singers in Israel enjoy a place in everyone’s heart that is uniquely Israeli. One such iconic figure, Shlomo Artzi, announced yesterday that he feels unable to accept the Israel Prize: in this context of the existential crisis, I feel that is the saddest news I have heard this week.

I do not, I cannot, believe that the Zionist experiment has failed. Instead, we have to seize the landmarks of these coming weeks and embrace them as the unifying national experiences they undoubtedly are. Until then, I wish us all a peaceful week and a week in which all Israel begins the long, hard essential journey back to brotherhood and the recognition of our shared destiny.

I leave you with the innocence of youth, and two pictures that prove that all you need to be contented is your Nana, and that brothers can live together contentedly under the same roof…but maybe only in Wendy houses.

I like hard physical work! Not in the sense that Jerome K Jerome liked work. He famously said: ‘I like work; it fascinates me. I could watch it for hours.’ No, I actually enjoy working up a sweat and getting my hands dirty. The trouble is, that, over the years, various parts of me have started, with increasing frequency, begging to differ. This means that just as I am getting into the swing of sawing a thick branch, or emptying a cupboard to clean it for Pesach, or some such physical exertion, one of my knees, as it were, decides that, on the whole, it would rather be suspended between a rectum on a sofa and an ankle on a pouffe.

This can of course pose problems. When Bernice comes home two hours later and asks, not unreasonably, why both dinner services are stacked on the kitchen counter and the drawer they belong in is in four pieces on the floor, she doesn’t really want to hear that I just didn’t have the strength to put everything back, but I’ll get round to it in just a minute.

Which is one of the reasons I love going to Portugal. At some point during our month with the kids, Micha’el is bound to mention that he is just about to start some project or other, and I can eagerly volunteer to help. It feels very good to wave off his assurances that “You really don’t have to!” and “Are you sure that it won’t be too much?” It feels even better to know that when, as usually happens, my body tells me, with the end of the job still nowhere in sight, that it has put up with as much as it is prepared to for one day, Micha’el will be wildly appreciative of what I have done, and will be happy to finish off.

This last trip to Penamacor afforded two opportunities for this kind of workout. One involved the sandbox for Tao that Micha’el was setting up on their land, close to the tepee. One day towards the end of our visit, Micha’el drove with Tao to collect the sand: half a cubic metre, which more or less filled the back of the truck. Back at the house, Tslil and Tao took a couple of bucketfuls to replenish Tao’s sandtray in the backyard, then Michael, Lua and I drove down to the land to wheelbarrow the remaining sand from the path to the sandbox.

This was, to be honest, little more than a mild workout for me (and almost a stroll in the park for Micha’el), since the distance we needed to wheel the sand was only 50 metres, all of which was downhill, and I had the fully functioning wheelbarrow, while Micha’el wrestled with the one that has seen much better days. Old age carries some privileges, you know! We had estimated that the sand would fill more than ten and fewer than twenty barrows, and were delighted when it stretched to just over fourteen. I find it very heartening when I can kid myself that I have an instinct for these things, and am the kind of man who can judge the correct consistency of cement just by smelling it.

As you can see, it was a beautiful, even warm, winter day, and we returned to the house very satisfied with ourselves.

Let’s take a little rest before going on to the second bout of physical exertion, and talk about the title of this week’s post. It is, as many of you will not need telling, part of the lyric from Ol’ Man River, the song that offers a Greek-chorus-like commentary on the action in the Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein musical Show Boat. It is also, unusually for a Broadway musical, a bass solo, and is most closely associated with Paul Robeson, who was unable because of other commitments to appear in the original Broadway production, but did open the show in London, and appeared in the revival and second film of the musical.

The lyric is interesting for at least a couple of reasons. First, there is a section of the song (often omitted) whose lyrics have undergone numerous changes over the years. Kern originally wrote:
Niggers all work on de Mississippi,
Niggers all work while de white folks play…

This version survives in the 1929 film version, but, in the 1936 (Paul Robeson) film, ‘Niggers’ was changed to ‘Darkies’. Starting with the 1946 stage revival, and in most revivals since, ‘Darkies all work’ has become ‘Coloured folks work’. The Temptations, in their 1960s version, claimed that ‘We all work while the rich folks play’.

Taking liberties with the lyric in a completely other direction, Paul Robeson chose to reflect, in his adoption and adaptation of the song away from the musical it was born in, what he saw as the racial reality and aspirations of American blacks in his time. Here, side by side, is an extract from Kern’s original lyric, and Robeson’s eventual evolved lyric.

Which is all very well for ol’ man river, but some of us have to keep totin’ that barge. Shortly after we arrived in Portugal, Micha’el and Tslil took delivery of a load of firewood. Incidentally, when it looked as though their usual supplier was not going to return Tslil’s call, and she contacted another supplier, he asked her what quantity she wanted, in cubic metres. Since their usual supplier has never asked, but just delivers what he knows to be a reasonable quantity for one domestic stove in a small terraced house in the village, Tslil had no idea what to say, and asked my advice. This was where I was forced to admit that I can’t really judge the consistency of cement from its smell, and that ‘a quarter of a shedful’ is not an official EU measurement of volume.

In the end, the original supplier phoned back to announce that he would deliver that evening, and he indeed did. Unfortunately, his end-point service consists of dumping the wood (cut into more or less manageable firelog lengths) unceremoniously along one wall of the shed. If you have ever played Jenga, you will appreciate the problem that left us faced with. The wood had been stacked along the side wall of the shed, with the logs more or less parallel to that side wall, leaving a narrow path through the shed, This meant that every time a log was removed, there was a real danger of an avalanche into that narrow path. As Micha’el explained, what was needed was to completely restack the load, perpendicular to the side wall. Since Micha’el was busy with other, more demanding jobs, I volunteered myself for this, about three hours before Shabbat came in.

The first step was to remove a section of the logs, to create an empty space in which I could start stacking. The kid’s shed is accessed from the backyard by a door at one end and leads out to the street behind the kids’ house through a second door at the other end. So, I stacked a fair amount of firewood on the pavement immediately outside that door and started to stack wood into the space I had created. Eventually, I had stacked sufficient wood to have cleared another space against the wall, and so I was able to continue.

After about two hours, when I was little more than half finished, I had to stop because Shabbat was fast approaching. I stepped back to admire my work and then realised that I had been stacking parallel to, and not perpendicular to, the wall. This, of course, meant that on Sunday morning I had to virtually start again. However, I was at least restarting from a rather more ordered and stable pile.

This time, I managed to complete the whole job in about two hours, and the end result was, I must admit, very satisfying. You will have to take my word for it that the pile looked much bigger in the flesh – or, rather, the timber – than it does in the picture.

All of which may explain why, on my return to Israel, I found that I had lost two kilo in Portugal. Bernice, of course, achieved a similar result by a disciplined weights routine. What she will do when Ollie is too heavy to carry, I don’t know.

In other news, last Friday we celebrated Raphael’s first birthday in Zichron, with rather too much whipped cream, and a motorcycle ride with his big cousin on Maayan’s side, while Tao and his friends celebrated his fourth birthday in Penamacor, in true gan fashion, with them all being candles.

One year, so rumour has it, the two boys are going to celebrate their shared birthday together, in the same country. Easier said than done, I suspect.

…but the memories linger on. I still have notes for several anecdotes about our latest trip to Portugal, so, in the blog at least, we probably won’t be leaving until a week or so before Pesach.

Let’s start with what may become Bernice’s signature dish, Munchy salmon. Unusually, the selection of fresh kosher fish in the three supermarkets we visited on this trip was rather poor, and consequently we ate considerably less fish this time. This was much to the dog’s disgust, since Lua loves nothing more than fish bones and skin, and she only gets offered these when we visit. I kid myself that this is not the reason that she always remembers us from one trip to the next, and is always delighted to see us, but I suspect it is, indeed, less puppy love and more cupboard love.

Anyway, what was readily available in the super was salmon, which Bernice baked in the microwave, garnished with garlic, and served with wedges of as many lemons as you wanted from the tree. An illustration should explain why I call it Munchy salmon, and why I give it here what is not so much a shout-out as a scream-out:

Speaking of the dog, she and I bonded more closely than ever on one of our walks this time. We were out early in the morning, deep in the forest, when I realized I needed to relieve myself. When I had finished, Lua trotted over, appeared to nod approvingly, squatted down, and matched my contribution. I feel that we are now, if not blood brothers, then at least urine siblings.

A couple of days after we returned from our Lisbon break, Tao resumed gan, after a break of several months, when the kids were visiting Israel and were subsequently without their truck. His return was unfortunately timed, because he was just getting a dreadful cold, and wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to go to gan. In the end, Bernice went with Micha’el to take him to gan, and I went with Tslil to pick him up at the end of the morning. I didn’t realise what I was signing up for until Tslil asked me whether I had boots! Fortunately, I was able to borrow Micha’el’s wellingtons, and we set off in the truck.

After a fifteen-minute drive along very minor roads, we turned off onto an unpaved track across country. A couple of hundred metres along, we hit a traffic jam where a flock of sheep were crossing the track, then, five minutes later, Tslil pulled up in what looked to me suspiciously like the middle of nowhere. If Tslil were 40 kilo heavier, and 15 centimetres taller, I would have been a little worried that she had brought me out here to sleep with the rabbits.

As it was, we set off down a gentle slope and soon arrived at a stream, which we had to cross using stepping-stones that, at that time of year, even during a very dry winter, were 8 centimetres under water. Leaving a small herd of cows behind, we were greeted on the other side by a very friendly, large, aging, docile, black dog and then by Marta, the ganenet, and her assistant, and the children. Set above the stream was one refurbished building, and one derelict and roofless shell. This was the forest gan.

Tao showed me round the refurbished building, The one large room at ground level was furnished with an efficient wood stove, a cooker, a kitchen cabinet and work-surface and a mobile signal. Up a flight of ‘these would never get Health and Safety approval’ open stairs was a second large room with a large toy cupboard. I was under strict instructions from Bernice to ascertain whether the cupboard was securely attached to the wall, which it was.

Outside was a flat, grassed mini-meadow, where Marta told us the children had practised their yoga that morning, facing, and being watched by, the faintly bemused cows. On a warm and sunny winter’s day, with the sound of the flowing stream and the placid chewing of the cows as background, the scene was near-idyllic. I suspect it loses some of its charm in a howling gale and driving sleet, but then, which of us doesn’t?

Last week, I am pleased to report, Tao went back to gan very willingly, and thoroughly enjoyed himself. The move back seems to have gone as smoothly as everyone hoped, which, considering the length of the break beforehand, is very positive. Not only is it an opportunity for Tao to have extended exposure to Portuguese, but it is also a chance for him to play and mix regularly with his circle of friends. When your nearest friends are a 15-minute drive away, and others are 30 minutes away, play dates are not quite so straightforward, so the gan, on a regular basis, is a tremendous thing. This first year, Marta is running the gan for two days a week, but she may add another day at some point.

Another regular feature in Tao’s routine is his videos – English in the morning and Portuguese in the afternoon. Some of the English videos are puppet shows – some stop-motion animation, others where adult hands are clearly seen moving the figures. In addition, there are thinly veiled promotional videos, principally for Lego. Tao has not yet, I am delighted to say, realized that his role in this set-up is supposed to be to demand to be bought ever-more-elaborate Lego boxed sets. Rather, and much more healthily, he takes ideas from what he sees to build his own models from Lego or magnetiles and to fuel his own imaginative play.

Shabbat sees a curious phenomenon in the house. Micha’el and Tslil are respectful of our beliefs and feelings, but we have always insisted that, while the house may technically be in our name, it is their home, and we are their guests when we stay. So, on Shabbat, out of respect for us, the kids light no fire (we keep the heaters on all shabbat) and turn on and off no lights, in the ‘public’ rooms, but, in the privacy of their bedroom and their office, the kids are free to continue their normal lives. What this means is that, on Shabbat, Tao knows that he must watch his videos not in the salon but in the bedroom. It suddenly struck me one Shabbat that he is, in a sense, marking Shabbat as a special day in a ‘clandestine’ action that is a curious mirror-image of the behaviour of Portugal’s crypto-Jews.

Finally, for this week, here is Tao, enjoying his new sandbox on the land (rather grand, but not yet quite completed – more of that next week), Raphael, enjoying his reunion with Nana on Purim, and Ollie, relieved to have cut his first tooth not long after we returned home.

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.

…now that they’ve seen Lisboa? As I mentioned last week, we had three days/two nights away last week in the big city, and everybody seems to have enjoyed themselves. When planning the trip, Bernice and I decided that we would stay in a decent hotel, rather than an air bnb, and give everyone a proper rest. Having set ourselves a budget for the hotel, we found that our choices were rather limited, and we settled for a better hotel in a less central area.

As it happened, this was a lucky choice, because both the bus station we arrived at in Lisbon, and the attractions we visited while we were there, were not far from the hotel, which was also on the east side of the city, which meant that we never had to travel through the city centre to get anywhere.

Because we were travelling to Lisbon on Sunday, the public transport options were limited. We took a coach from Castello Branco, having driven there from Penamacor after breakfast. After a two-hour-and-twenty-minute ride, we arrived in Lisbon. By the time we took taxis to the hotel and settled in, and were ready for lupper (the equivalent of brunch, but between lunch and supper), we found we were in the Portugal restaurant twilight zone.

Most restaurants here close after lunch, around 3, and reopen only at 7. So, although the hotel was, as I had researched, within easy distance of 4 vegan restaurants, when I phoned around I discovered that none of them was open.

Barely pausing to break stride, we walked to the neighbourhood mini-super and bought a selection of salad vegetables, fruit, crackers, Philadelphia cheese, tinned sardines, disposable plates and cutlery. We then retired to a nearby park and shared a picnic with a gang of streetwise pigeons, on a couple of benches. This certainly suited the kids; Tao thought it was a treat; Ollie was as easygoing as usual; and Bernice and I were in holiday mode and open to new experiences.

As we made our way back to the hotel, the kids said that they planned to stay in the room for the evening, and suggested Bernice and I go out for a romantic dinner alone. I pretended that, after 50 years, dinner isn’t as romantic as it used to be, but the fact is that we both thought it was an excellent idea. So, back at the hotel, we had a rest.

I flicked through the TV’s 27 channels, which comprised, as usual in Portugal, 12 channels of news in Portuguese, 5 channels of game shows and talent shows, all in Portuguese, 4 channels of cartoons in Portuguese, 4 channels of classic cinema, all dubbed into Portuguese, and two channels of Eurosport, one of which was, of course, showing snooker (the Welsh Open final, in fact), with an enthusiastic Portuguese commentary. I then showered. (In hotels, I always shower multiple times a day, which is odd, since I probably get less dirty when staying in hotels than at any other time.)

The shower, incidentally, ticked all the boxes, offering a powerful stream of fairly instant, very hot, water, as well as proper toweliing robes. In fact, we were all very pleased with the hotel. The kids, in particular, had a very spacious corner room, enabling them to set up a carpeted play area for the kids. The breakfast on offer had plenty of options for us, and apart from the coffee (which was as surprisingly mediocre as most coffee I have tasted in Portugal), everything was fresh and of good quality.

The first evening, Bernice and I ate in a vegan Indian restaurant, which was both excellent and pretty good value. On the way back to the hotel, realizing that I had forgotten to bring whisky with me (another indulgence I allow myself daily on holiday in hotels), we stopped at another mini-super and I picked up a very reasonably priced Cardhu 12-year-old, a whisky I’m fond of.

The next day, after a leisurely breakfast, and a late start that I will explain later*, Tslil and Micha’el (with Ollie) attempted – unsuccessfully – to get their documents signed by a notary. By the time they arrived at the office, the queue outside the door was longer than the staff were going to be able, or prepared, to process before they closed, and so they were turned away, planning to return the following day.

Meanwhile, Bernice and I took Tao to the Lisbon oceanarium, a very impressive campus of two buildings joined by an aerial walkway out into the sea. The emphasis throughout is on ocean preservation and our individual and collective responsibility for that. The principal building has a very large central aquarium and four corner aquariums, each of which recreates a different ocean environment – from equatorial to Antarctic. Each of the aquariums is two storeys high, and the animal and plant life can be viewed from the two levels, representing sea-level and immediately below, and the ocean-floor and immediately above.

The layout, lighting, species represented and ‘staging’ are all excellent and we all thoroughly enjoyed it. Tao, in fairness, probably enjoyed the cartoon model ‘diver’ most of all, but he was engaged throughout our two hours there.

The oceanarium is highly recommended, and not only by me. On the basis of customer reviews, the booking site Tiqets holds an annual awards ceremony featuring museums and tourist attractions in nine countries: France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, UAE, UK and USA. In 2022, the Oceanário de Lisboa was voted Most Remarkable Venue, beating the other national winners, which included Germany’s Alte Nationalgalerie, Italy’s Duomo di Milano, the Netherlands’ Rijksmuseum and Britain’s Windsor Castle.

We then all met up for lunch in a very nice vegan restaurant 200 metres from the Oceanarium and only 15-minutes’ walk for the kids. The weather was mild enough to sit outside and, apart from one mix-up with the order, which the restaurant immediately rectified, the service was very good and the food excellent. Between the five of us, we sampled much of the menu, and everyone was very happy with their choices.

It was then back to the hotel for the rest of the day. The kids raided the supermarket again, while Bernice and I had enough left over from what we had bought the previous day to have a light supper in our room. Everyone then enjoyed their second consecutive good night.

To be honest, I always enjoy a good night, but Ollie is not the best sleeper, and the kids are chronically sleep-deprived. While we are in Portugal, Bernice offers to split the early shift (late evening and first part of night) with Micha’el. She has a golden shoulder, on which almost all children will fall asleep within minutes. (Raphael, as of yet, appears not to have got the memo about Nana’s shoulder.)

I don’t have such a shoulder, and, to be honest, at that time of the evening (or indeed at most times of day or night), if I sit in a comfortable chair with the light low or off, I am almost certain to fall asleep before any child.

The following day, Micha’el made a relatively early start for the notary – only to discover that, since it was Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras), the office was closed. On his return, we packed and checked out and stored our luggage with the hotel. This meant that we all made our way together to the magnificently-named Pavilhão do Conhecimento – Centro Ciência Viva (Pavilion of Knowledge – Living Science Centre) which is a very hands-on science museum located 100 metres from the oceanarium. The museum came to us highly recommended by friends of the kids whose then 4-year-old had enjoyed a wonderful day there.

We began, at Tao’s request, on the ground floor, at the special exhibition Dinosaurs: The Return of the Giants. This was an excellent one-hall exhibit with a central display of life-size models of a range of dinosaurs, with animated mouths that produced their various roars. The T-Rex was only 20 years old, and therefore had another 8 years to grow, but a ruler stretching to the ceiling indicated the height he would reach every year until he was fully grown.

Around the room were various activity areas, including: a sandpit with half-buried bones that the visitors could excavate with trowels and soft brushes; a microscope with relevant slides and explanations; a wall-mounted dinosaur skeleton puzzle, which the children could assemble from the bones lying around, and several other equally interesting and engaging activities. Everything was labelled clearly and in detail, in Portuguese and excellent English.

From there we ascended to the first floor, which consisted of two very large rooms, each with 15 or 20 activities. We only explored one room, which included very imaginative and fun activities based around such themes as light, sound and mechanics. Children aged from 3 to 10 were having the time of their lives, as were some parents (and, I confess, grandparents). For Tao, the highlight was a complete child-scale construction site, including a two-storey building under construction, foam building blocks, wheelbarrow, a 6-metre tall working crane and so forth. 3–7-year-olds were invited in, issued with hard hats, and put to work.

After almost three hours there, we returned to the same restaurant as we had eaten in the previous day for lunch, then the kids walked straight to the bus station, so that Tao could have the ice-cream that the restaurant was not able to provide, while Bernice and I returned to the hotel to pick up the luggage (our two carry-ons and a laptop backpack, and the kids’ rucksack, three grips, carrier bag and potty bag) and take a taxi to meet the kids.

After another smooth bus ride, and a 50-minute drive from Castelo, we arrived home safe and sound, after a thoroughly enjoyable mini-break.

Meanwhile, Esther assures us we won’t recognize Raphael when we get home: he’s growing so fast.

* Unfortunately, I seem to have run out of space this week, so the explanation as to why our second day started late will have to wait until next week, when I will offer you another, very different, account of our three days in Lisbon.