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.

First this week some quick updates, which are mostly good news.

My cut finger has healed nicely, to the point where I‘m being cavalier with the kitchen knives again – do watch this space for further updates.

Unsurprisingly, in the end I chickened out of braving the China shop lady in the hope of making some exchanges. Bernice has womanfully found a use for the wrong-sized disposable aluminium baking dishes, and I decided to keep my other purchase, which proved to be worth every cent of the ridiculously low price I paid, and not a single cent more. So, a bad decision to buy it in the first place, but at least I didn’t dig myself into a deeper hole by exchanging it for the next model up.

More significantly, last weekend the kids took delivery of a rejuvenated truck, The replacement gearbox definitely seems to be an upgrade, and having the truck back means both that they are able to get to the land easily again and that Tao can go back to his rural gan, after a long period when he wasn’t able to.

Tao resumed his regular two days a week at gan last Thursday, and took very little time to adapt to the new-old routine. He has certainly matured socially over the last year. His month in Israel last November exposed him to a much larger circle of unfamiliar children and adults than he had been used to, and was quite a growing experience for him.

Although his nursery teacher is native Portuguese, none of the other children are (other than her own). They are mostly English speakers, with a couple of Dutch children. After a couple of months of gradual introduction to Portuguese, she has now switched to conducting the gan exclusively in Portuguese, which Micha’el and Tslil are very pleased about. We are also delighted that, with luck, this time next year we will have our own interpreter for the supermarket and other negotiation situations.

Last week included another event: we took Tao to the local library for a Portuguese story-time and related craft activity. This was arranged by his nursery teacher, and included most of the children at the gan, so it was a useful lead-up to his return to gan. Tslil had fortunately been sent a synopsis in advance, to familiarise Tao with the story before the actual event. This had the added advantage of familiarising us with the story, which is just as well, since I for one understood barely a single word of the narration, about a snail whose shell was damaged, and whose friends refused to take her in, but then provided her with her own new shell. Had the story not included friends making excuses that she snored, or sneezed too loudly, with both sounds reproduced by the narrating librarian, I would have been totally lost.

However, that spoken Portuguese humiliation was followed, at home, by a written Portuguese triumph. Bernice had picked out a couple of story books for Tao to borrow, and I was nominated to read one with him when we got home. Fortunately, written Portuguese looks like the Romance language it is. I was able to confidently decipher the title – A Montanha de livrose mais alta que o mundo – The Mountain of Books Taller than the World. (Of course the cover illustration helped to confirm this translation.)

Once inside the book, I was able to keep up a narrative that more or less matched the pictures, was consistent with what words I could make a stab at translating, followed a very satisfying narrative arc, and, most important, engaged Tao. When he immediately demanded a rereading (as he usually does with new books), I was able to embellish the early thrust of the narrative with the benefit of hindsight, and to notice, and incorporate, many details from the wonderful illustrations that I had missed on the first, more challenging, ‘reading’. The only downside of this triumph was that it left me even less motivated to do anything about the fact that I cannot communicate with anyone in Portugal much beyond saying ‘Good morning’, ‘Good late in the day’, ‘Good night’, ‘Thank you’, ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Pardon me’.

Having spent the last couple of weeks in Israel before we flew attempting to give away, and work our way through, the generous crop of lemons from our barely mature tree, we arrived in Portugal to find that the lemon tree that flourishes in the backyard of the house here put our own tree to shame. This tree holds fruit that can be picked from the lower and the upper levels of the yard, and also from the first-floor balcony of the kids’ bedroom. The trouble with lemons, as I may have mentioned before, is that, while there is no shortage of recipes to be found that use them, most call for ‘two tablespoons of juice’ or ‘the zest of half a lemon’. So, as my contribution to the cause here, I have been starting the day with a cup of hot lemon water, and adding the juice of a lemon to my orange juice at breakfast. I feel a bit like Sisyphus, since I am sure the tree generates new fruit every night, but at least it seems like a healthier alternative to eating my weight in lemon cake and lemon curd.

Being an observant reader (all my readers are surely observant), you will, by now, be starting to wonder about the title of this week’s post. Well, if this were a selfie, you would see me perched in a coach seat, laptop on my knees, as we travel in relative comfort, en famille (six people, infinite luggage, no dog), to Lisbon, for a three-day, two-night city break. There is a story behind this mini-holiday; but then, isn’t there always a story?

Since Ollie’s birth, the kids have been trying to fulfil their legal responsibility as Israeli citizens to register his birth with the Israeli embassy in Lisbon. This is proving immensely difficult, for a variety of reasons that range from the almost reasonable to the utterly ludicrous, but which all have in common a very high degree of aggravation. Let me offer you just a small selection of what is a labyrinthine list, some of whose finer points, I readily admit, escape me, and are too painful for Micha’el and Tslil to try to explain to me again.

• The Israeli embassy in Lisbon is closed for all of the Jewish and Israeli and Portuguese holidays (which leaves precious little time).
• Israeli embassy staff have, in common with Foreign Office officials around the world, been taking industrial action for months.
• The kids are not regarded, under Portuguese (or, indeed, Israeli) law, as married. (They would like to arrange a civil marriage in Portugal, which would make their bureaucratic lives in general easier.* However, the Portuguese authorities require, for this, proof from the Israeli authorities that they are not married. Pause here for a moment to contemplate what a document that states that two people are not married would look like, and how the fact of their not being married would be verified, so that such a document could be issued…..Yeah. Me neither.)
• The Israeli authorities require from the Portuguese authorities a piece of paper that the Portuguese authorities do not issue.
• Even though the entire process of registration depends on documentation, the embassy does not offer the possibility of online submission of documents and registration; it has to be in person.

Enough of this. Anyway, before we came out, Micha’el and Tslil were planning to go to Lisbon to get a notarised translation of the last piece of paper they have been told they need, and then to go to the embassy to register the birth. It seemed to everyone a good idea that they time this for when we would be in Portugal. We could then all have a few days’ holiday, during which Bernice and I could take the children one day while the kids ran around doing all they needed to do.

In the end, this is not going to work out, because of the incredible inflexibility of the embassy, who are now offering an appointment in over a month’s time. At this point, the kids have decided that, if the registration of Ollie’s birth in the embassy matters to Israel, they will let the embassy figure out a way for it to happen that does not involve the kids taking a round-trip of 700 kilometres and losing two full days of their lives. If they can’t figure out a way, then it will have to wait until a time that is convenient for the kids.

All of which means that we are still getting a mini-break, only with less stress. The kids plan to go to a climbing wall. We have received (on Tao’s behalf) excellent recommendations for the aquarium and an on-hands science museum that currently features a special dinosaur exhibit. Tuesday – our last day in Lisbon – is, we now discover, Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) and we may even get to watch the big carnival parade through the city. The weather is forecast to be warm and dry. Our hotel is in a central area of the city, not too far from the river estuary and with plenty of vegan and vegetarian restaurants. What, I ask myself, can go wrong? (Tune in next week and you will doubtless find out.)

Meanwhile, don’t take my word for it that Tao enjoyed gan this week. And Ollie appears to have enjoyed staying home.

• Bernice has jus reminded me that getting married now will not advance the registration of Ollie’s birth with the embassy, since they weren’t certified as married before Ollie was born.

I write to you as we complete our first, action-packed, week in Portugal. I thought today I would bring you up to date on our news, such as it is. This being Penamacor, rather than, say, New York, life is lived at a fairly gentle pace, so I hope you’re not expecting any particularly exciting news. Having said that, the week has not been without its dramatic moments, as you will soon discover.

We arrived on Sunday afternoon, to discover that Micha’el and Tslil were still, after several months, without a vehicle. On their return trip from Israel in early December, their tender basically died on them. Fortunately, their next-door-but-one neighbour is a motor mechanic with a heart of gold. He diagnosed a faulty part in the gearbox – a common fault with this particular model – and started looking for a second-hand replacement part. ‘Why not simply buy a new part?’ you ask. Excellent question! This particular model of gearbox is obsolete and the part is no longer manufactured.

Having failed to find a replacement part, and knowing that the kids are of limited means, he reluctantly started looking for a second-hand replacement gearbox. Unfortunately, one of the reasons why the gearbox is obsolete is that it was a design prone to failure, which meant that he was unable to find a second-hand one that worked. Not to be beaten, he searched for, and eventually found, a second-hand gearbox to fit the newer model of the kids’ truck. This design is, apparently, much more reliable.

At this point, he came back to the kids, who agreed to pay the (not insignificant) cost of the gearbox. He then proceeded to start fitting it, at which point he discovered that the new gearbox is a different size from the old one and he would therefore have to make some modification to the housing in the tender in order to fit it.

All of this took time and, of course, more money, although what he charges them for labour is more than reasonable, and he is ready to accept that payment in instalments. The bottom line is that they had been without a vehicle for two months before our arrival. There are two other facts you need to bear in mind. First, the road up from the local supermarket to the house is about two kilometres of a 1 in 2 incline. Even the local shops are almost a kilometre away and far below us. Second, supermarkets and shops in the village do not deliver! For these reasons, supplies in the house were understandably low when we arrived.

Fortunately, we had brought some tide-me-overs with us. I’m not sure I could survive any longer without my home-made granola in the morning. Since it is also very popular with Tslil and, especially, Tao, I have learnt to make a supply to bring with us, to buy myself some time before I need to make another batch. We also bring such staples as tea, and this time we brought a couple of loaves – again, to buy time.

However, we arrived to find that even fruit and veg, which are usually in plentiful supply in the house, were very short. We therefore drove to the local super that very afternoon, for a range of essentials. We then took things a little easier on Monday, and, on Tuesday, drove to a larger super some 25 kilometres away, where we broke our own supermarket bill record. To their credit, both Bernice and Tao lasted the course without either of them having a meltdown.

This was quite an achievement since the supermarket was not one whose layout we know well, we don’t have sufficient Portuguese to ask where most items we need are, or to understand the directions we are then given, and we can’t always identify the items correctly even when we are in the correct aisle. To give you an idea of the size of our order, when Bernice eventually arrived at the checkout with the first of our two trollies, the cashier took one look and then called on the manager to open another checkout point.

Fortunately, the season is winter, and so we haven’t needed to try and fit as much into the fridge as we would in June. The weather, incidentally, has been pretty kind to us. We landed in Madrid to be greeted by an almost balmy day. Even when we reached Penamacor, the day was still sunny and mild. With the exception of one day of intermittent rain, last week was bright and sunny, though fairly to very cold. Apparently, November is the rainiest month here, and this time of year is often bright, dry and cold.

I managed two days during the week when I didn’t get to the local super, and I only visited the China shop once. The Chinese manageress was, as far as I can tell, very happy to see me again, although I find her Portuguese even more unintelligible than that of the locals, and her face is stereotypically inscrutable.

Unfortunately, two of my purchases turned out to be the wrong size, and I will at some point have to attempt to exchange them. I am, to be honest, dreading attempting to explain what I want to a manageress who has a poor opinion of human nature and with whom I share no linguistic or cultural points of reference. I may simply decide to put the unwanted purchases back on the shelf, buy the replacement items, and lie to Bernice.

And so to our two dramatic moments, each of which, in its own way, reflects how Bernice and I, each in our own way, are pretty bad at learning from experience. A couple of weeks ago, Bernice returned from a lunch date with a friend to discover that she had lost her phone. Eventually, she returned to the restaurant and discovered the phone on the floor where she had been sitting, directly under her back trouser pocket, in which she had kept her phone, as she always does. Her takeaway from this sobering experience was that she really shouldn’t keep her phone in her back pocket.

On Monday last week, Bernice came back from the bathroom to announce that her phone had fallen in the toilet and stopped working. I confess to being heartless enough to say: ‘You had it in your back pocket, didn’t you?’ leaving Bernice no option but to admit that I had guessed correctly. We immediately buried the phone in a bowl of rice, as one does. We then dug it out of the bowl of rice, removed the SIM, and buried the phone again, in the fond hope that the rice grains would draw out all of the moisture. Twenty-four hours later Bernice found that she was left with a phone that still didn’t work, and a bowl of rice that nobody really felt like eating.

Author’s Note: When Bernice read this passage, she commented: ‘And you didn’t even mention that the only reason I got this phone was because my last one was ruined when it fell out of my back pocket into the toilet!’ So now I have!

Tao was kind enough to allow Nana to share his phone (Tslil’s old phone, on which he watches his daily timed dose of English and Portuguese videos). Her SIM was, thankfully, undamaged. Unfortunately, however, Bernice has never backed up her data, and so she has lost all of her contacts, photos, and sundry notes. In addition, Tao’s phone does not support Yahoo mail, and it is a Yahoo mail account that Bernice uses. This explains why many of you did not receive your usual Shabbat Shalom message from Bernice. She asked me to explain and apologise on her behalf.

Then on Wednesday, while I was washing up, I cut my left index finger on the edge of the cleaver that Micha’el likes to use for chopping. As luck would have it, we bought Tslil for her birthday a whetstone, and, just before we came, she had been using it to excellent effect, sharpening all of the kitchen knives. I stood in the kitchen, watching the blood well up, then grabbing a piece of kitchen towel, wrapping it very tightly round the finger and applying as much pressure as I could with my right index finger and thumb while holding both hands above my head.

As I stood there, I assessed the situation. Because of my irregular heartbeat, I take blood thinner medication daily, which means that my blood takes longer to coagulate. Tslil wasn’t available: she was out walking the dog. Bernice was bathing Tao, and so couldn’t easily and safely leave him unattended for long. Ollie had just woken up, not very happy, and Micha’el was busy soothing him. I was already beginning to feel that I couldn’t keep my arms raised for much longer.

Why, I asked myself, did I seem incapable of learning to take more care when handling knives? I confess that I cut myself these days, while chopping or washing up, with embarrassing frequency, a fact that aggravates Bernice as much as her insisting on keeping her phone in her back pocket aggravates me.

Eventually, I called Bernice, who was able to come in and dress my wound, which is healing nicely, thank you. Not a very dramatic accident, I know, but, as I said above, Penamacor is a very sleepy village. Now, if we were in Midsomer, I might have a more dramatic tale to tell.

And finally, from what we hear, Israel had a worse weather week than Portugal, last week, but Raphael still managed to get out and about between the storms.

Housekeeping 1: Having said, last week, that we did not want to run the risk of catching anything in Zichron, we eventually went up there last Thursday, and spent a lovely time with the girls and Raphael. SInce, by this time, Bernice had a nasty cough, we thought our risk was lessened.

Housekeeping 2: Those of you whose week was ruined by the thought that I missed out on a killer birthday cake from Esther will be thrilled to know that, on Thursday, she produced a magnificent chocolate, toffee, nut tart that even I couldn’t manage two pieces of. Since Thursday was, in fact, my Hebrew birthday, all worked out wonderfully well.

Househeeping 3: A huge thank you to all of you who sent me birthday greetings after last week’s post. This, combined with our Thursday in Zichron, made for a memorable birthweek of celebration.

And now to this week’s post, which comes to you, not for the first time, from somewhere over the Mediterranean. You join me at 8AM on Sunday morning, although my watch says 7AM, since I always adjust it to destination time as soon as we are airborne. It’s very annoying, in my experience, thinking that you are landing in another 20 minutes and discovering it’s actually 80 minutes.

Bernice and I are on our way to Penamacor again, and once again via Madrid, although this time we will go directly from the arrivals lounge to car rental without giving Madrid another thought. Been there! Done that!

We are on what we have been euphemistically calling an early morning flight. Technically, this is an accurate description: we took off, a few minutes behind schedule, at 6:40AM. However, what this means in real terms is that we left the house at 2:30AM, which does not qualify as early morning in any universe I have ever inhabited.

In the end, everything went very smoothly, if rather slowly, at the airport. We arrived there at 3:30, to find a queue snaking through the entire depth of the check-in hall. What, we asked ourselves, are all these people doing here in the middle of the night? Much the same, it transpired, as us, We were initially perplexed to see several people scattered through the queue not only wheeling luggage but also dragging what looked like zippered holdalls for alligators. I spent a few minutes wondering whether these could qualify as support pets. We eventually worked out that the bags held nothing more lethal than skis and other winter sports equipment. (Mind you, on my feet, skis would quite probably qualify as lethal.) There was, indeed, a flight to Switzerland leaving around the same time as ours, which explained a lot.

Careful readers will have noted that the above paragraph began “In the end…” If you are a regular reader, you may have inferred that, as often seems to be the case with us, arrangements did not go entirely to plan. Your inference would indeed not have been entirely wrong. The fact is that, when, in mid-September, I booked the flights, I gave my email address for both of us. As a result, the e-tickets were, I suppose, both sent to my mailbox, in separate mails. I carefully moved the mails, you’d have thought, from my Inbox to a newly-created ‘Portugal Feb-Mar-23’ folder, where they stayed, presumably, until I wanted to print them out last Friday afternoon,

At which point I discovered that one of them – mine, since you ask – had stayed in the folder; the other – Bernice’s (wouldn’t you know) – appears to have deleted itself some time between September and last Friday. I hunted high and low for the email, but, with Shabbat fast approaching, I had to abandon the search, and wait until Saturday evening, when I planned to check us in online.

Shabbat was slightly tarnished by the nagging thought that something had gone wrong with Bernice’s reservation. Perhaps I hadn’t successfully completed booking her ticket, and there had never been a second email! You won’t be surprised to hear that, as soon as I arrived back home from shul after shabbat, I went online on my laptop to check in, only to discover some good news and some bad news.

The good news was that both Bernice and I showed up as passengers. The bad news was that, when I opened my check-in page, I found that several personal details fields had been pre-populated: specifically my passport number and my date of birth. Unfortunately, the passport number was completely wrong and three digits short. No problem there: I quickly overwrote the wrong number. My date of birth was given as 29 January 1953, which, if you read last week’s post, you will know is exactly three years later than my actual date of birth. No problem again, I hear you say: just overwrite it. Ah! But there’s the rub! This entry refused to be overwritten, deleted, or amended, and the handy adjacent calendar icon, when I clicked it, failed to respond in any way.

Undaunted, (well, considerably daunted, in fact, but refusing to succumb to my daunt) I turned to the next field, which was my passport expiry date. This field had been left blank. When I attempted to populate it, I discovered why; it, too, was uneditable.

With mounting daunt, I decided to give my page some time to reconsider, and turned to Bernice’s page. This had, thankfully, been left blank, but proved as unpopulatable as mine had been. Time, obviously, for the traditional solution when confronted by intransigent software – go away and come back again.

After a second identically frustrating experience, I decided to see whether El Al’s Check-In interface worked any better on a smartphone. To my immense, and Bernice’s even immenser relief, the process went very smoothly, and in a couple of minutes I was able to print out boarding passes.

This left us both free to turn to our newly prepared digital checklist for Portugal. Why it has taken us this long to produce one I do not know: we have, until now, been relying on a handwritten list that, after being reused for several trips, is now so full of ticks and crosses in various colours as to be almost illegible.

Now we have a printed sheet of A4 paper, with two columns of Actions and two of Packing. The Actions are subdivided into 3 Months Before, 2 Weeks Before, A Day Before, and On the Day, and cover everything from ordering tickets to cleaning the toilets. The Packing is divided into Sundries, Hand Luggage and Food. Why has it taken us until now, and a chance comment from friends who make a similar trip to America, to realise that, if we have difficulty finding vegetarian cheese in Portugal, then we should take cheese with us?

By mid-evening, we were packed and suppered, the cases were in the car, our sandwiches for the journey were made and the fridge was cleared, leaving the bare minimum for those crucial 50 minutes between 1:40AM and 2:30AM. With only a 5-minute delay while I struggled to remember exactly which safe place I had put my front-door key in a mere six hours earlier, we were soon on our way.

When Hollywood buys the rights to my blog, and comes to film the current post, at this very point the image on-screen may go all wiggly, or, alternatively, an analog clockface may be displayed, running at 2000 times the usual speed. This will, of course, be a device to indicate the passage of sixteen hours…..

…..bringing us to the moment when the door to the house in Penamacor opened, and we were greeted by an excited Tao (but not excited enough to relent at all on his usual rule of “No hugs, no kisses” which may represent the biggest challenge of these four weeks) and a grinning Ollie, who was happy to come to us for hugs and kisses, and who has a sunny disposition that rivals that of his cousin, Raphael.

It is now early Monday evening. We both had an early night, after what felt like a very, very long day, and woke to an unadventurous but wonderful first full day of stories, games, playing in the park, and all the stuff that makes these trips so worthwhile. We have even managed to have a couple of brief grown-up conversations with Micha’el and Tslil. Even the weather is being kind to us: very, very cold – especially when I was walking the dog in the forest earlyish this morning – but bone dry and sunny: in short, a lovely winter’s day.

I leave you this week with a rose between two more roses, the younger of whom appears to have momentarily mislaid his sunny disposition.

Today (at least the today on which I am writing this – 29 January) is, I discover, National Puzzle Day (in the UK). I did not know such a thing existed until yesterday. Indeed, I suspect it is nothing more than a recent marketing invention. Even so, it gets my vote, and legitimizes my sharing with you a story I read a week or so ago.

You may well have heard of ChatGPT, although I suspect some of you may well be less familiar with its significance than others. It is basically a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with a chatbot. The language model can answer questions, and assist you with tasks such as composing emails, essays, and code. The expectation is that it will be impossible to distinguish between school projects completed by students and those written by ChatGPT. Usage is currently open to the public free of charge because ChatGPT is in its research and feedback-collection phase.

Elon Musk recently said: “ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.” Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, on the other hand, described it as “not particularly innovative,” and “nothing revolutionary”. When Nick Cave read the lyrics ChatGPT wrote ‘in the style of Nick Cave’, he summed them up succinctly: “This song sucks”. He went on to explain what he sees as the fundamental flaw in any attempt by AI to ‘create’ art.

“Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self.

“This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.”

While I might wince at its pretentious presentation (or I might not – I have a stronger stomach for pretension than most), I have a great deal of sympathy with this argument. I certainly feel that it can be applied to the creative struggles of such artists as Beethoven, van Gogh, even the likes of D H Lawrence. However, there is, I suspect, a continuum of ‘creative struggle’; if Beethoven is close to one end of it, then John Grisham, to give one example, may be close to the other end. I leave it to those familiar with his work to decide where exactly Nick Cave sits on that continuum, but if ChatGPT can write even a John Grisham novel, then that’s pretty impressive.

One mischievous fellow, taking advantage of the fact that ChatGPT is accessible by the public, decided to test its skills at solving cryptic crossword clues. He selected a Times Quick Cryptic (whose clues are considerably easier than those in The Times Cryptic – I set myself a target of solving the Quick – with, on average, about 23 clues – in under 10 minutes, and usually succeed; my target for the Cryptic (with an average of about 28 clues) is 30 minutes, and I very seldom succeed). He further selected a day when the clues had been a little easier than usual, and he chose relatively easy clues.

ChatGPT’s performance was magnificent, though not in the way its programmers would have hoped. Here is part of the conversation:

JW: From here on out, I will post cryptic crossword clues, and I want you to answer with the solution and an explanation. First clue:
1. Chap recalled skill; something frequently repeated (6)

Before I reveal ChatGPT’s answer, let me explain, for the benefit of anyone who isn’t a cruciverbalist (one who enjoys or is skilled at solving crosswords – you see what I meant above about pretension) that a cryptic crossword clue is typically made up of two parts: a definition of the answer, and wordplay that leads to the answer.

In this case, the clue begins with the wordplay:
chap = ‘man’
skill = art
recalled = an instruction to reverse ‘art’ = ‘tra’
‘man’ + ‘tra’ = ‘mantra’
and the definition:
something frequently repeated = ‘mantra’

Here is ChatGPT’s answer:

The answer to the clue is “habits” because “chap” is a synonym for “guy”, and when you recall someone’s skill, you remember it. When something is frequently repeated, it becomes a habit. “Habits” is a six-letter word that fits the clue.

This is so spectacularly wrong as to be magnificent. But ChatGPT isn’t finished.

At this point, JW gave the bot another chance with the same clue. Here is the second answer:

The word “chap” is a shortened form of “chapman”, which is an archaic term for a trader or merchant. “recalled” is a hint at the reversal of the word “trader” to get “redarat”, which is a homophone for “mantra”. “something frequently repeated” is a description of the definition of a mantra.

This is, if anything, even more magnificent. ChatGPT has arrived at the correct answer – ‘mantra’ – but the ‘route’ by which it has arrived does not, in this universe, lead to anywhere near ‘mantra’ and, furthermore, if ‘’route’ means, in this context, a logical sequence of steps, then it has not even followed a route. Apart from the arcane and correct information that ‘chap’ is short for ‘chapman’, the rest of the ‘reasoning’ is nonsense.

However, it’s worth noting that it is a particularly magnificent form of nonsense because ChatGPT has clearly learnt the nature and structure of a cryptic crossword clue. Furthermore, it has also mastered the nuts and bolts of constructing a logical argument, and those of writing a grammatically correct and syntactically sound sentence. Its sentences read as if they should make sense, and my initial reaction is that I must have the wrong brain on, and I need to change it for my thinking brain.

Of course the fault, dear reader, lies not in our brains, but in the bot. If you reverse, ‘trader’, you get ‘redart’, not ‘redarat’. ‘Redarat’ is not a homophone (nor even a near-homophone) for ‘mantra’.

I cannot tell you how encouraged I am by the fact that, at the age of 73, I can solve crossword clues that leave ChatGPT floundering. Which is as clumsy a way as any of pointing out that today (Sunday) is not only National Puzzle Day, (and, incidentally, Adam Smith’s birthday), but also my birthday.

It’s turning out to be a funny kind of birthday. On the one hand, the wild celebration that we were planning hasn’t worked out. We were due to go to Zichron to celebrate with Esther and Raphael and, after work, Maayan; I would have been presented there with one of Esther’s stunning cakes, full of all my favourite things – probably some combination of chocolate, caramel, nuts and coffee, since you ask.

However, best laid plans being what they often are, both Maayan and Raphael have been laid fairly low with viruses, temperatures, coughs, loss of appetite, and all sorts. They are both, thankfully, doing better now, but we really didn’t want to impose ourselves on them (especially since Esther, who was also not well for much of last week, has had no time to prepare the cake, so half the point of going to Zichron was removed). We also didn’t want to risk catching anything so soon before we fly to Portugal next Sunday. (Ironically, Bernice has been laid low by a nasty cough and sore throat, but by the time you read this will probably be fully recovered.)

Instead, we are having a quiet day at home today. While I haven’t actually spent the day excitedly unwrapping my many presents, I have had a couple of very nice surprises for my birthday. Not only a nice chat with Esther, with Raphael chattering happily in the background, but also a full and spirited video rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ from Micha’el and Tao, and a slightly puzzled stare from Ollie. Add to that warm greetings on the phone from my brother Martin, who timed his call perfectly for just two minutes after Djokovic won the Australian Open. Plus a selection of warm and much appreciated WhatsApp greetings from other family members.

Then, just when I thought my day couldn’t get any more special, an SMS arrived from my health fund with a link to a little personalized video greeting that they had gone to the trouble of putting together just for me. No sooner had I watched that than an email arrived from our Portuguese bank assuring me that “Esta é uma data muito especial e queremos celebrá-la consigo.” “This is a very special date and we want to celebrate it with you”.

So I have been going around today with a warm glow. Everybody, it appears, loves me. Tomorrow, no doubt, things will go back to normal. Neither the bank nor the health fund will give me a second thought. No one will sing me songs on WhatsApp. And ChatGPT will probably complete The Times Cryptic Crossword in 43 seconds. But I’ll always have today, to treasure for the whole year.

Meanwhile, Esther managed to take a photo of Raphael before she broke the sad news that Nana and Grandpa wouldn’t be coming today, after all.

By the time you read this, it will be less than two weeks until Bernice and I fly off to Portugal again. Once again we are flying to Madrid, which, at the time of booking, was still significantly cheaper than flying to Lisbon. This time we land mid-morning and drive straight to Penamacor, where a comfortable bed is waiting. Unfortunately, we probably won’t get a chance to see that bed until many hours later, but, just as long as we can continue hitting the ground running, we’re up for it.

We booked the flight some time ago; at the same time, I booked a rental car. The price was outrageous, but, since it was less than 60% of what we had paid on our last trip, I felt we had got a bargain. (You may remember that car rental prices went through the roof because a worldwide shortage of thingamyjigs – caused either by Covid or by Ever Given getting wedged in the Suez Canal, or by the grain harvest in Ukraine, or by something else – meant that no new cars were being produced.)

Last week, Bernice and I suddenly realized that we were flying in three weeks! So, Bernice set off to hunt for all of the items that the kids can’t get in their neck of the woods in Portugal (or can’t get with the authentic flavour) – Turkish coffee with cardomam, dates, date syrup, and suchlike. Meanwhile, I reviewed our paperwork to see what still needed doing. There were three main things I had to do. One was to renew my international driving licence – which I can do at an optician in our local mall, in five minutes, for a nominal charge. Friends tell us that the licence is now valid for three years, rather than just one, as it has always been, and I plan to do that tomorrow. The second was to make sure I had a five-week supply of meds to take abroad, which, with our computerised health system, was fairly straightforward.

Finally, I had to take out travel insurance. This is usually something of an ordeal. We have an excellent insurance agent, who always finds us the best deal. However, issuing the policy involves a conference call between our agent, the insurer, and myself, in which I am asked seven or eight questions about Bernice’s medical condition, and three or four hundred questions about my own medical condition.

With each trip, answering these questions gets more complicated, both because I have usually acquired at least one new condition, and because I have usually experienced a deterioration in mental ability. Add to this the fact that anyone who spends much of her working day asking people whether they suffer from atrial fibrillation or other cardial arrhythmia tends to enunciate these medical terms (or their Hebrew equivalent) with less precision and at more of a rush than I can comfortably cope with. Suffice to say that I come out of these twenty-minute interrogations exhausted.

Out of the kindness of their hearts, the insurers this time waived the general health statement signed by our family doctor that they normally require. All they really demanded was my credit card details. As always, Bernice’s medical insurance is costing a modest sum, and mine? Well, let’s just say that whatever I save on the international driving licence won’t cover it!

At this point, I reviewed our car rental contract, and was struck by just how much we were paying. I decided that it was worth checking to see whether I couldn’t get a better deal. After all, with car rental these days, everyone knows it is always possible to cancel up to 48 hours before your rental begins and get a full refund. So, I checked online, and found an equivalent rental (which we shall call B2) for about 2500 shekels less than our existing booking (B1). I naturally booked B2, then went back to B1 to cancel it. Which is when I discovered that, contrary to what everyone knows, if I chose to cancel B1 I would be charged a modest cancellation fee, and issued a refund in the form of a voucher, redeemable against one or more car rentals, over a period of 24 months. I was rather miffed about that, not least because it tied me to this booking agency probably for another three bookings, until the voucher was fully redeemed.

At the same time, I realized that I had no real choice. Having failed to read the small print when I originally booked B1, I had to bite the bullet now, by searching on the original booking agency for the best deal (B3), cancelling B1, booking B3 through the original booking agency, using part of the voucher, then cancelling B2.

Which is what I did. Cancelling B1 was easy. I was then able to find exactly the same deal with the same rental company as I had used for B2, and so booking B3 was also straightforward, until I came to the Payment screen. I applied the voucher number, and then spent five minutes watching the little mouse circle rotate gracefully. At that point I decided that I would utilize this dead waiting time in cancelling B2, which I proceeded to do. After I had completed the cancellation, I was taken to a screen that asked me why I was cancelling. I decided that I did not want the company to think there was anything wrong with their side of the deal, so I wrote a sentence explaining that I had discovered I had a voucher which I wanted to redeem.

I then returned to B3, where the circle was still rotating gracefully.

Please excuse what reads like an interruption but will, as you will discover, fold seamlessly into our story. My phone seems to have entered its teenage years, and now wilfully* and at random ignores my wishes. Its latest trick was to define, in Settings, to cancel the call ringtone. This has meant that I have missed a number of calls. (If any was from you, I apologise.) I have now changed the setting, but, at the time I am writing about, I had not yet discovered the problem. I simply thought I had missed calls. My policy, when I discovered a missed call, was to return it only if it was from a number I recognized.

Back to the main story. After another few minutes of watching the circle rotate, I decided to use the time to sort out, on the phone, an administrative detail that I needed for a medical appointment that I have made for just after we return from Portugal. (When people ask what I do now I am retired, I don’t like to say that my principal hobby is medical appointments: researching, making, gathering paperwork for, attending, following up on and reporting back to my family doctor on them.) I called, navigated my way through the automatic system, and was informed that I was fourth in the queue. Ten minutes later, I was down to second in the queue, and the circle was still going round.

At this point, my phone informed me that I had an incoming call. I didn’t recognize the number, but decided that I had plenty of time to take it. (Don’t tell me that men can’t multitask! I can sit around waiting simultaneously for at least two things to happen, no sweat!) A pleasant young man with what sounded like a Spanish accent asked me if I was David Brownstein. I guardedly confirmed the fact. He then said: ‘I see that you have just cancelled a booking with us and you are trying to book again. Let me help you. I’ll make the booking for you, deduct the correct amount from your refund voucher, and arrange for the balance to be credited to your credit card!’ I tried to conceal my astonishment and delight, and assured him that this would be wonderful. I confirmed that I could simply cancel the attempted booking of B3, where the circle was still rotating, and he would do the rest, sending me a confirmation email.

And that, dear reader, is what happened. I less than gracefully exited B3, and, within a minute, received a confirmation email for B4, followed by the actual booking voucher. The confirmation email stated that the processing of the refund of the balance on the voucher would take two or three days, to which Bernice said: ‘Yeah! Sure! Let’s wait and see.’

Then, on Friday, I received another email, stating that the refund had been processed, and I should expect to see it on my statement a few days later. And, lo and behold, this (Sunday) morning there it is!

This, of course, is where the interruption six paragraphs ago becomes relevant. If I had not been already on another call when the agent phoned, I would not have realized he was phoning, because my phone would not have rung. If I had not been on a call where I was queuing, I would not have taken his call, because I did not recognize the number. If I had not taken his call, it is very possible that the circle would, at some point, have finished going round, my B3 would have been completed, and we would now be left with a voucher with a considerable sum of money tied up on it.

Which explains this week’s title. Some days, the saying has it, you’re the windscreen, and some days you’re the fly. Today we are undeniably a windscreen. Hope your week goes as well!

Meanwhile, here’s the latest from Penamacor, where Tao is hard at work, digging to Australia. (The next time Tao is featured, I won’t have to ask Micha’el to send a picture – I’ll be able to take one myself, God willing. How much better can things get!)

*Note to American readers: we spell it ‘wilfully’ in Britain, however wrong it looks to you.