We start with some unfinished business: I had a couple of interesting discussions last week, of matters arising out of my reflections about the ‘responsibility’ (if any) of a film-maker to stick to the facts. (And I do believe this is a responsibility particularly of film-makers: the medium itself always feels to me documentary, in contrast to, for example, the theatre – but that’s a topic for another post (which I think I may have written two years ago).) Let me just share a couple of points that emerged from one or two of those discussions.

Although Spielberg appears to argue that The Fabelmans is very faithful to the facts, should we perhaps be warned by that choice of family name – ‘fable-man’?

I suggested last week that Bernard Delfont’s descendants might want to sue for the misrepresentation of his character in Stan and Ollie. It has been pointed out to me that English law does not recognize defamation of character of the dead, because defamation, whether it is libel or slander, is a personal action which cannot be assigned or brought on someone’s behalf. The reason for this principle is quite simple: defamation is an act or statement that damages a person’s reputation and, once you are dead, you are taken not to have a reputation in legal terms that is capable of being damaged. So there! Contrary to popular opinion, you should apparently speak ill only of the dead.

Perhaps I’ll leave the last word on this to Prince Harry: not immediately relevant, but I believe it captures this particular moment in time: ‘My memory is my memory, it does what it does, gathers and curates as it sees fit, and there is just as much truth in what I remember, and how I remember it, as in so-called objective facts.’ Very post-modern! The trouble for me, dear reader, is that, as someone who tends to bang on a bit about artistic truth, I have an immense amount of sympathy for that sentiment, despite my best efforts not to. Of course, where Harry got it wrong was in the classification of the 400-page brick that he has just thrown through the window of Buckingham Palace.

We read last week that Spare broke all records for first week sales in British publishing, becoming the best-selling non-fiction work in British publishing history. And, of course, there’s the rub: it’s patently not a work of non-fiction. What Harry has written is an autobiographical novel, based on his memory, his subjective experience, of his life, and telling his truth. All very legitimate: all he needed to do was change the names, and he could have been up there with James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – and D H Lawrence – Sons and Lovers. Had he taken that path, winning the Booker Prize could have been his path back to Britain. What a missed opportunity!

More unfinished business: Israel’s internal political situation is not, you may have noticed, more settled than two weeks ago, when I gritted my teeth and went all serious. Part of me feels I really should revisit this topic today, but, to be honest, I prefer to channel my inner ostrich and bury my head in the sands of something of no significance whatsoever.

So, with your indulgence…

Bernice and I received a gift from friends this week, the Book Lover Magnetic Poetry Kit. This is a box of 200 small fridge magnets, each with a single word printed on it. (We actually received two gifts: the other was a set of silicon muffin cases. Our friends were at pains to stress that each of the gifts was to be shared, but we all know who’s going to bake the cakes and who’s going to rearrange the words, don’t we?) The bizarre idea of the magnetic poetry kit is that you should use the word tiles to build a text – on your fridge or any metal cabinet.

I say ‘bizarre’ because, if you were setting out to write a poem, you probably wouldn’t start by restricting your vocabulary to 200 words chosen by someone else. And yet, and yet…

The day after receiving the gift, I found myself spilling the tiles out onto the dining room table and starting to play. (By the way, if you are given a set of these yourself, allow plenty of time for what I have lightly dismissed as ‘spilling the tiles out’. The rubber-backed magnetic tiles stick to each other in convivial clumps and need to be separated, spread out and, in many cases, turned over. Bearing in mind that the tile that displays the word ‘a’ is only 8mm by 8mm, this is a fiddly job, particularly if, like me, you are blessed with short, stubby fingers.)

Anyway, ten minutes later, having had a chance to gain a superficial familiarity with at least some of the 200 words spread before me, I cast about for inspiration. Speaking as someone who has spent many an hour staring at a blank sheet of paper, I can say that the tiles did not take very long to work their strange alchemical magic.

I believe I have written before about the fact that, as a twelve-year-old schoolboy, the most dreaded sentence I ever heard from my English teacher was: ‘You can write an essay on any topic you want.’ This was for me always the signal for my mind to drain of any thought whatsoever. What I wanted to hear the teacher say was something like: ‘I want you to write a story that includes a 60-watt lightbulb, a ferret with a wooden leg, and a bowl of custard.’

After only a few moments of letting my eyes wander over the vocabulary spread before me, I noticed a ‘through’ and a ‘step’…and I was off. Twenty minutes later, I was able to transfer to our metal front door the following poem (untitled, for reasons that will become clear later):

Now, I know it’s not Milton, or Auden, but I think it works, despite the extraordinary limitations imposed. (Full disclosure: as the more eagle-eyed among you will have spotted, my kit does not contain the word ‘door’, which I felt was absolutely needed, so I improvised it from ’do’ and ‘or’. I do recognize that this is cheating, and, indeed, is only one step away from creating a poem using words built from only the 26 letters of the alphabet, but I hope you will allow me this one indulgence. I promise, henceforward, I will play by the rules.)

I feel that I learnt a couple of things from this first attempt. Most significant is that the combination of an active and racing brain, open to boundless opportunities, and 200 tiles, with words chosen by someone else, is extremely powerful: the very limitation helps to control the febrile imagination in a constructive way.

Of course, I’m not sure it would have worked with Robin Williams, the febrility of whose imagination was completely uncontrollable. Here he is not being subdued by Johnny Carson in 1987. (Parts of this interview are a little more explicit than Johnny, or his producers, would have wanted, so some of you may prefer not to click the link.)

The second feature of the kit is that it lends itself to the creation of shape poems. In case you’re not familiar with the concept, here is The Mouse’s Tale (d’ya gettit?) from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

The fact that the tiles can be moved so easily makes it easy to use variable spacing, and to experiment with different patterns of layout.

Finally, the process of ‘creating’ a ‘poem’ from the tiles requires you to focus on each individual word. Every word involves a search through the array on the dining-room table, and that makes the selection of each word a very conscious process.

At this point in my musings I started worrying about the criteria the manufacturers had used for selecting their final list of 200 words. So, I laid the tiles out again and started documenting them (I know, I know! I really do need to get out more. Still, I do all this stuff so that you don’t have to; it’s a form of public service.)

Here is the table of 194 unique words (six of them appear on two tiles each). You will see that they include 10 tiles with common suffixes (and one prefix) to help form verb tenses and plurals. The process of taxonomy is not entirely straightforward, because there are, in English, so many homonyms and so many words that can function as more than one part of speech.

One of the things that emerges from this list is that, to justify the label of Book Lover in the branding of the tiles, a hefty chunk of the nouns are book words, many of which do not particularly lend themselves to poetry: library, book, volume, spine, chapter, page, fiction. In addition, many of the subject areas that are most widely represented in poetry have been entirely neglected: there is no mention of nature in this list. Also absent is any reference to family relationships, which meant that there was no way I could call my poem To a Child, which is probably what I would have chosen.

If you find yourself at a loose end this week, you might like to consider what your list of 200 essential words for writing poetry would be…or you might not. It’s not in the exam.

Meanwhile, in Portugal, Ollie, at six months, faces challenges even more daunting than composing a poem using only 200 words selected by someone else. (Don’t adjust your volume; this is a silent movie.)

But first: When I promised, last week, to write about something light, and fluffy, “perhaps a piece on different ways of threading laces in shoes.”, I thought I was joking. Yet, a quick google reveals that lace-threading is indeed a thing. If you want to jazz up your footwear, see whether any of the 24 (count them!) lacing methods illustrated in this video speak to you. I certainly plan to be adding some of these to my repertoire!

In the end, I decided instead to write on the duck test, which I want to turn on its head. The classic duck test states: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. Fulfilling the three conditions is probably sufficient. I want to ask whether fulfilling the three conditions is also necessary.

In other words, can you be a duck if you don’t look like one, or if you don’t swim like one, or if you don’t quack like one? I’m not asking this literally, you understand. I can easily imagine a duck with one leg, or laryngitis, or even a decoy duck disguised by its fellows as a 12-bore shotgun. That would still indubitably be a duck…

Editor’s Note: I’m starting to feel the real subject of this week’s post drifting inexorably away. Time, I think, to call a spade a spade.

Bernice and I watched, last week, a gentle film called Stan and Ollie. If you haven’t seen the film, I’d be grateful if you’d spare two minutes and twenty-three seconds of your life to watch the official trailer, because it will give you a context for what I’m talking about.

In a nutshell, Stan and Ollie focusses principally on the relationship between Laurel and Hardy during a theatre tour of Britain that they undertook at the end of their professional careers in the early 1950s. We both came away from the film asking the inevitable question: ‘How accurate was that? Is that what really happened?’

Having thought about this question a little more over the last few days, I have come to the conclusion that this is actually three questions; there are basically three areas in which a film such as this can be accurate.

The first area is cultural background. Much of the film is set in England in 1953, and the filmmakers have taken great pains (as they usually do these days) to recreate the period. Of course, there will inevitably be some armchair expert on the period who watches the entire film in slow motion, checking every frame for accuracy, and who then delights in commenting online. You know the kind of thing:

‘At 16 minutes and 23 seconds, we see an Austin A40 Somerset drive past a newsagents shop. The Somerset clearly has two-tone bodywork, indicating that it is one of the limited edition of 500 saloons that Austin produced in 1953. The sandwich board outside the newsagents displays a headline: STALIN DIES! This places the date as Friday, 6 March, 1953, two days after Stalin’s death and a day after Russia released the news of his death to the rest of the world. However, the limited edition Somerset only went on sale on Monday 6 April, 1953. This egregious error completely ruined the film for me! Do film studios no longer employ anyone to check the accuracy of what they portray on screen?’

Watching an accurately recreated cultural background is usually great fun for anyone who lived through the period in question. ‘We had a radio exactly like that!’ ‘Remember buying butter from a large block?’ It is, of course, much less important for anyone who didn’t live through the period. It is also something that sometimes gets noticed only when a blatant error is committed.

A second level of authenticity is the accuracy of portrayal of real people. In this respect, Stan and Ollie is an incredible accomplishment. In a prosthetic body suit and with three hours in the make-up department every morning, John C Reilly takes on the form of Oliver Hardy. With more modest prosthetics and make-up, Steve Coogan does the same for Stan Laurel.

Vocally, and in their body movements and mannerisms, both actors bring the comedy duo to life with uncanny accuracy, while seeming entirely natural. They are even able to recreate on camera classic Laurel and Hardy routines and dances.

So, the film spares no effort of time and attention to detail in bringing these two comedy giants to life and placing them in a world where every detail rings true. And yet…and yet….Having gone to all that trouble, having ensured complete authenticity, the film then tells a story that distorts the truth (or at least the truth as presented in the published account of their career together, written by someone who was very close to both of them).

Let me give you a brief rundown of some of the liberties the film takes with the truth (spoiler alert). Three successful tours of Britain are condensed into one tour that begins very unsuccessfully. Hardy’s heart attack is moved to the end of the tour, whereas in reality it cut short the third tour after its opening night. Their wives accompanied them on their tours, whereas in the film they only join them at the end. Laurel’s wife at the time was a quiet personality; in the film, her character is swapped for that of one of his earlier wives, who was very strident.

Furthermore, the Robin Hood film that, in Stan and Ollie, they believe they are about to make in England, and that is basically the reason why they are embarking on a theatre tour of Britain at this point, was merely an idea at an earlier point that never reached the stage where they expected it to be made.

The film builds to a major argument between San and Ollie, who, in real life, never argued. Their personal relationship is altogether close and affectionate throughout the film, whereas in real life their relationship was much cooler and more professional. In the film, Laurel, after Hardy’s announcement that he is retiring after his heart attack, is persuaded to continue the tour with another comic. (In the end, he backs down as the curtain is about to rise on their first appearance together.) This is a fabrication. Laurel refused categorically to even consider appearing with anyone else.

And so on and so on. So, my question is: Is this in fact a film about Laurel and Hardy? It looks like the historical period, and they move and sound like Stan and Ollie, but if they don’t quack like the historical characters did, then is it a duck?

Actually, I think there’s another way to phrase this question. Would it have been better to make a film about a fictional double act. Why call them Laurel and Hardy? Why ‘burden’ a touching story of an onscreen and offscreen partnership with the added weight of mimicry of Laurel and Hardy?

I am reminded of the story of Peter Schaeffer writing Equus. While Schaeffer was being driven by a friend through the Suffolk countryside, the friend pointed out a riding stables and told Schaeffer that it had been in the news recently when a teenage stable-boy blinded twenty-six horses there, seemingly without cause. This story fascinated Schaeffer, but what is interesting is what he didn’t do with it. He made no attempt to research the story or attempt to find out what lay behind it.

Instead, with no knowledge of the incident beyond that one simple fact, he set himself the dramatic goal of creating ”a mental world in which the deed could be made comprehensible”, as he later explained. The result, Equus, is a beautiful, thrilling, profound play that probably shares none of its plot with the actual facts, apart from the criminal act itself, and that exists independent of anything that actually happened.

Would it not have made sense for the makers of Stan and Ollie to behave more like Schaeffer? If it is the relationship between the two men that interests them – and it clearly is – and if they are going to treat real events with contempt, then why burden themselves with anchoring the film in actual real people. It is not as though Laurel and Hardy have historical importance, as Shakespeare’s characters in his history plays (for example) have, so that his plots are an attempt to reshape history as an expression of loyalty to the Tudors.

Of course, the price that would be paid in this case is that we would be deprived of a very talented recreation of the comedy duo, a dazzling double performance. It is also true that much of what the writers and director can assume we know of Laurel and Hardy need only be very hastily sketched; the film can very quickly move to the twilight of their careers, where its interest is focussed.

At the same time, if the characters had been fictional, we would also have been spared a fairly ruthless and, from what I have read, unjustified character assassination of the theatrical impresario Bernard Delfont, who certainly comes off as the almost Victorian melodrama villain of Stan and Ollie. (Hal Roach doesn’t fare much better!) If I were a descendant of Delfont, I think I would want to sue.

So, bottom line, I am grateful to the makers of Stan and Ollie for giving us a little piece of movie magic. At the same time, I’m not sure that the kneejerk disclaimer that the film is based on real events, but that certain incidents and characters have been changed for dramatic purposes, really cuts it. When the portrayals are this accurate, they add, for us, an authenticity to the events that persuades us unconsciously, at least while we are watching, to forget the disclaimer and take the story at face value.

Now here’s someone not prepared to rest on his laurels… or his hardys. When I told Raphael how much my readers enjoyed his performance on the bell three weeks ago, he readily agreed to play an encore.

Editor’s Note: Those of you who read last week’s post will be relieved to hear that, after driving the car to shul last Friday afternoon, I then remembered, on Saturday evening after shul, not only that I had taken the car but also, more remarkably, where I had parked, so that I arrived home on time with no mishaps whatsoever. Positive thinking is all about acknowledging one’s small triumphs. Thank you for listening.

I write to you this week in a fairly depressed state. I have been witness, over the last couple of weeks, to a number of events that have saddened and worried me. But first, a little dry factual background.

I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of Israel’s rather convoluted system for calculating, after the votes have all been counted, the allocation of seats between parties. Suffice to say that the Israeli electoral system is a fixed-list direct proportional representation system, with an electoral threshold and using the Bader-Ofer (known to the wider world as the Hagenbach-Bischoff (de-Hondt)) method of allocating excess votes to parties and also to alliances of two parties that have agreed in advance to pool their excess votes. All clear so far?

All of the above is designed, principally, to reduce the number of parties represented in the Knesset, and to create a smaller number of larger parties. In this election, of the 40(!) parties that contested the election, 13 received enough votes to gain at least one seat, but, because of the electoral threshold, only 10 will actually sit in the Knesset. The system also tends to have the effect of favouring the larger parties, for reasons that I won’t go into.

After all the votes were counted, and the complex calculations carried out, the final result looked like this, for the four parties that went on to form the coalition.

There are a couple of points that I want to emphasise here. Obviously, this coalition can be characterized as a right-wing religious coalition; however, each of the constituent parties has a very different interpretation of what religious means, and also what right-wing means.

Those of us brought up in a two- or three-party system are used to a situation in which, even though a wide range of positions are represented in any given party, there is usually a broad recognition within the party of a consensus within which everyone is happy to work. I would argue that the previous government, whose range of parties was arguably wider than that of the present government, nevertheless created a unity of purpose by recognizing, and focusing on, the consensus.

In the current government, by contrast, it became very clear as negotiations progressed between Likud (whose leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, was charged with attempting to form a government) and each of the other parties, that none of those other parties had any intention of compromising on its narrow and small constituency’s partisan agenda.

For those of you who are balking at the word ‘small’, let me point out that the Religious Zionism–Otzma Yehudit list (a list formed from three parties whose leading figures are Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Avi Maoz) won just under 11% of the vote, and has under 12% of the seats in the Knesset.

Similarly, the two ultra-orthodox lists (Shas and United Torah Judaism) together won under 15% of the vote, and ended up with just 15% of the Knesset seats.

All of which makes me upset to hear supporters of Smotrich or Ben-Gvir speaking about them representing the will of the people. They, and the ultra-orthodox parties, are in the coalition only because they are the parties that are prepared to sit in a Government led by Netanyahu as Prime Minister, and because when their 32 seats are added to the Likud’s 32 (each 32 seats representing under 27% of the vote), the total is 64.

I have no doubt at all that Bibi would be much more comfortable forming a government with the ultra-religious parties and, for example, Benny Gantz’s National Unity party, a centrist party to the left of the Likud, which would offer him the possibility of being able to temper both ultra-religious extremism because of the need to keep Gantz in the government, and centrist-left policies, because of the need to keep the ultra-orthodox sweet.

To watch the Government coalition being formed was a painful and nationally humiliating exercise. None of the other parties in the coalition trusts Bibi an inch, which is a tribute to his serial treachery in forging coalitions in the past. (Smotrich was even caught on microphone calling Netanyahu ‘a liar and the son of a liar’.) These parties insisted in having all of their demands met up front and in writing (although it has to be said that, on past form, that may not be any guarantee of good faith). So we watched a parade of blatantly ad hominem laws rushed through even before the government was formed.

The most outrageous is probably the blatantly-called Deri law, which amends the Basic Law that previously prevented a person convicted of an offence involving moral turpitude from being appointed as a minister within ten years. Because Deri resigned from the Knesset, he avoided the need for the court to rule on the question of moral turpitude.

He then negotiated a plea bargain, admitting a string of tax offences and accepting a fine and a suspended prison sentence. The law has now been amended to prevent only a person who has actually served a prison sentence for such a crime from serving as a minister. (Of course, Deri served a prison sentence after earlier conviction for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, but that was over ten years ago!)

So, Deri will now serve for two years as Vice Prime Minister (unfortunate terminology, it has to be said), Minister of Health and Minister of the Interior and Periphery, and then become Minister of Finance. I genuinely don’t know how to follow that statement!

Leaving aside the unashamed brazenness of Deri himself, I am, to be honest, more disgusted to see the depths to which Netanyahu is prepared to drag the name of the Israeli state in order to form a coalition. I wish I could escape the conviction that his over-riding aim is simply to secure the quashing, out of court, of the criminal case against him, but, so far, I haven’t succeeded.

This is, perhaps, the moment to remind you of Ambrose Bierce’s definition of ‘politics’ in his The Devil’s Dictionary: ‘Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage’. (And he was talking about parties contesting an election, not parties coming together to form a coalition!)

I honestly believe that Bierce’s definition does not apply to Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. They are, I fear, something altogether more frightening: ideologues. Smotrich is now Finance Minister and a minister within the Defence Ministry, with increased control over settlement and other policies in Yehuda and Shomron. He has a long history of statements that it is very difficult not to categorize as racist; he is also a self-declared, and was an activist, homophobe.

He has attempted to excuse some of his more outrageous statements by arguing that he ‘responded inattentively’. Whatever qualities one looks for in a minister within the Defence Ministry, ‘inattentive responses’ are not, to my mind, among them. I would also be looking for ideology to be balanced by pragmatism.

I turn now, with heavy heart, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, who will serve as the country’s national security minister in an expanded version of the public security portfolio, with unprecedented control over Israel’s police. Ben-Gvir makes no secret of his admiration for Meir Kahane, the cofounder of the Jewish Defense League who was convicted of terrorism in America and who served one term in the Knesset before his party was banned for its racist position.

Ben-Gvir is also known to have had a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. (He apparently removed the portrait after he entered politics.)

Of all the things that have saddened me over the last weeks, the most personally upsetting has been the number of people in our modern orthodox Jewish religious circle that have not expressed outrage or even undue concern over all that has happened in the process of forming a government. They would, I believe, argue that the end – achieving a religious Zionist government (if you can classify the incoming government as either Zionist, given the disproportionate influence of the ultra-orthodox parties within it, or religious, given that the majority Likud is a traditional, but not religious, party) – justifies the means by which it is achieved.

My conviction is that the moral and ethical price that will be paid by the government, and ultimately the nation, in achieving that end is far too high. There comes a point where sacrificing your principles for the sake of advancing your principles is a pointless exercise.

Nothing in Netanyahu’s actions over his last five terms as Prime Minister gives the slightest hint that he shares the views of Smotrich or Ben-Gvir about the direction the state should move in the areas of Jewish-Arab relations, religious-secular relations or the LGBT+ community. I am sure that he believes that he will be able to control and rein in their excesses. I have seen enough of his political nous over the last decades to sustain a hope that he will be able to. (Bernice does not share my very cautious optimism.)

I suspect that Netanyahu’s game plan is to keep the coalition together long enough to legislate for the changes necessary to make his trial go away. In the meantime, it can almost be guaranteed that the security situation will deteriorate. He will then plan to tie Smotrich’s and Ben-Gvir’s hands until they threaten to leave the Government. He will not relent, and, when they leave, he will turn to Benny Gantz and invite him, with his 12 seats to join the Government, for the sake of national unity.

Gantz was, of course, enticed into a previous Netanyahu government on the same premise, with the promise of alternate prime ministership. Whether he will allow himself to risk being humiliated in this way a second time I do not know. However, if Netanyahu pulls that off, he will have proved himself Israel’s greatest prime minister – at least in the Machiavellian sense – and he will find himself exactly where he wants to be, at the centre of a coalition whose extremes he can moderate in the name of maintaining the Government.

Next week, I promise something light and fluffy. Perhaps a piece on different ways of threading laces in shoes. Meanwhile, I can only hope that the public world our grandchildren build will be an altogether better place. Now there’s a big ask!

I wanted to share with you a bizarre experience that I had this week, but first – since this is the season of party games – a quiz question. (Actually, of course, that isn’t quite as true of Chanukah among our circles as I half-remember, half-fantasize, it used to be in the Dickensian semi-mythical Christmases of our early married life in Wales. However, as a hook to hang the following paragraphs on, it will do.)

So, on our drive up to Zichron on Sunday this week, we passed a lorry. Technically, we passed many lorries, but this was the only one that was interesting to read. Well of course I read lorries? Doesn’t everyone? I’m the person who, as a child, could recite the complete text to be found on the back of breakfast cereal packets by heart, and who, for several decades, remembered the patent number of the World Dryer Manufacturing Company hand-dryers ubiquitously installed in 1960s and ’70s motorway service stations in Britain. Yes, I know it’s a disability, but it’s my disability, so mind your own beeswax.

Anyway, as I was saying, this particular lorry was carrying baby strollers/buggies/agolot. (These have, by the way, in case you’ve been looking in the other direction for the last 40 years, evolved beyond all recognition. I’m not sure that the early Mercury space capsules of the 1950s employed technology half as sophisticated as a modern integrated baby transporter system. But I’d better stop there; I suspect there might be enough meat on that topic for an entire post!)

The lorry carried a strange advertising slogan: ‘O.K. strollers. Oh, mama!’ In itself, ‘O.K.’ seems a slightly bizarre choice of name for a product. What self-respecting parent or grandparent of an adored newborn would be tempted to buy a stroller that described itself as ‘O.K.’? I would expect to be drawn to strollers that call themselves ‘Magnifico’, ‘Splendiferous’, and so on, rather than ‘Alright, I suppose’ or ‘Not so bad’.

Actually, I have just googled stroller brand names, and I see that they are considerably more wide-ranging in their appeal than that. On one website’s selection of the 22 best brands, I found ones that appear to:

• Advertise their country of manufacture (or, these days, probably their country of initiating outsourcing to manufacturers in China): Britax, Teutonia, Inglesina – that last being a company, by the way, that hints at coupling baby-centric Italian culture with British reliability, but is actually American).
• Go all cooey and cutesy: Bugaboo, Dream On Me, BumbleRide, Baby Jogger, Mamas And Papas.
• Target the first-time parent who must now sell the two-seater sports car and buy a sensible family car: Maclaren, Aston Martin, Grand Touring Baby,
• State clearly their priority: Safety 1^st
• Go utterly prosaic: Dorel Industries Inc, Phil & Teds
• Aim, apparently, to appeal to the parents of an unwanted child: Uppu Baby

Anyway, this lorry! The slogan was, I remind you: O.K. strollers. Oh, mama! What attracted my attention was that the designers of the slogan had decided that what it was lacking was an apostrophe, and had inserted one somewhere. Your quiz question is: Where exactly do you think they had inserted the apostrophe?

Bernice, who was driving, had not read the lorry, and so I asked her. She very shrewdly suggested: O.K. stroller’s. Oh, mama, favouring what is known in Britain as the greengrocer’s apostrophe, so named because, in the good old days when greengrocers marked up their prices every day on chalkboards, they tending to add an apostrophe before the final ‘s’ of any word in the plural.

These days, of course, most street market stalls with chalkboard pricing are staffed by PhDs who grow artisan vegetables on their smallholding, and whose mastery of the vagaries of grammar and punctuation is matched only by the excellence of their calligraphy.

Well, have you made your guess? The answer is: ‘O.K. strollers. Oh, m’ama!’ I can only imagine that someone thought that it would sound very French and sophisticated if they pretended that ‘ama’ was a form of a transitive verb, preceded by a direct object pronoun.

If I have, by this stage, completely lost you, fear not. We are now going to undergo so complete a change of subject that I cannot think of anything remotely resembling a segue, and so I shall resort to my least favourite purveyors of fine comedy: Monty Python.

And now for something completely different.

Let me tell you what happened to me last motzei shabbat.

Because of the desirability of lighting the Chanukah lights as close to the earliest permitted time as possible, I arranged with Bernice that she should collect me by car from shul after the Saturday evening service so that I would get home earlier. We had some discussion about whether she should come if the weather was good, or only if it was raining. Anyway, after the service finished, I left shul, to discover that the evening was cloudy but dry.

Bernice wasn’t waiting for me outside. I had a good look at the parked cars, but none had their lights on or engine running, and none looked like ours. This wasn’t surprising, because it was still only a couple of minutes after Shabbat had finished, and I knew that she would be setting up the lights in the chanukiyot and setting out the tray for Havdalah before she came to pick me up, if, that is, she decided to pick me up even though it wasn’t raining. I decided to save a couple of minutes by starting to walk home. I made sure to walk at the edge of the kerb, so that she would spot me as she was driving up. A couple of minutes from shul, I saw a car approach that might have been ours. However, because of the dark, and the car’s headlights, I could not be absolutely sure. The car didn’t stop, so I took a closer look as it passed. It was certainly our make and model and the same colour and, sure enough, the last three digits of the number-plate were 702, matching ours. As a clincher, the car turned right into the street where the shul is, so I turned around and started walking back towards shul.

As I turned the corner of the street, I could see the same car driving back down the street toward me, Bernice having presumably discovered that I had already left shul, As it stopped at the corner, I opened the door and jumped in. “I’m so sorry!”, I said, a little breathlessly. “I thought you would spot me as you were driving up. I…”

At this point, I looked at the dashboard, and noted, with interest, that Bernice seemed to have replaced our media screen with a less modern radio-player. Turning my gaze to the driver, I saw a bespectacled man, about my age, who said, very guardedly, in heavily accented English, struggling to keep his voice calm: “What do you want?!”

Realising that a coherent explanation would take far more time than I had, and would also involve confessing my stupidity to a complete stranger, I simply apologised profusely, opened the door and left the car as quickly as possible. The idea of asking him whether he was going my way and would mind giving me a lift didn’t actually occur to me.

Since then, I am finding it difficult to get the image of his face out of my mind. His expression was somewhere between the first trace of doubt that might pass across a person’s face as he is suddenly struck by a suspicion that the man who has befriended him in the pub might actually be a cold-blooded murderer, and the moment, much later in the story, when his last doubts are removed and he acknowledges, with absolute certainty and in a state of terror, that this ‘friend’ is planning to kill him. In the eyes of that poor driver, I could read his very real fear that he was trapped in a car with a deranged axe murderer.

I was, of course, absolutely mortified, and I wish that I could find this man again and apologise to him for disturbing him so deeply. At the same time, there was a certain thrill in seeing the trace of terror in his eyes.… I think I’d better stop here, don’t you?

When I eventually arrived home, Bernice confirmed that we had in fact agreed that if it wasn’t raining there was no need for her to pick me up. I decided not to tell her what had happened, preferring to wait and see the expression on her face when she read this week’s post pre-publication. I can confirm that it was worth the wait.

Meanwhile, in Penamacor, Ollie is perfecting his Superman.

If you need an explanation of the title of this week’s post, click the link (but only if you have a strong stomach).

As I sit in front of my laptop, gazing at a blank Word document, it is 13 hours until publication zero hour, and I still seem not to have decided what to write about this week. It’s not as if there’s any shortage of possible topics. Tonight was the second night of Chanukah, and there has to be a story there. In fact, I have just stored away 300 words that are, indeed, the start of a post on Chanukah. For some reason, what I wrote doesn’t feel quite right, and I don’t think there is enough time to wrestle it into shape and then expand it tonight. I suspect the topic needs to spend more time sloshing around in my subconscious’s digestive juices.

Then, of course, there is this week’s big sporting story – Rehan Ahmed’s debut five-for and seven-wicket haul for the match at 18 years of age. (Bet you didn’t see that coming.) I imagine I will write about the transformation of England cricket’s test squad at some point, but the way their success is being sustained is making me almost prepared to risk waiting to write it until the Ashes series, so that I can extract maximum pleasure from the post, and the concomitant humiliation of my Australian readership.

Oh, and there’s another sports story I almost forgot. Having vowed to ignore the World Cup completely, I have found the drama of the tournament irresistible. However, I haven’t actually watched any of the football, so I don’t really feel qualified to write about it, although a Friday evening dinner conversation has planted the seed of an idea in my mind that, again, needs further germination. After a conversation with my brother this evening, I may even try to catch up with the final online (I can’t really believe I just wrote that). He did warn me that if I do watch it and enjoy it my expectations of what a football match should be will be so high that I will probably never find another match that doesn’t disappoint.

If I were inclined to write about politics there is more than enough going on in both my country of birth and the land that I chose to live in. However, the one is too depressing and the other is both too depressing and a can of worms that I don’t really relish opening.

I was even entertaining the idea of writing one of those much ados about nothing – this one involving toilet rolls. However, I can’t quite see how to squeeze 1500 words out of that.

Anyway, I’ve just checked back over past posts, in the hope of finding inspiration, and I’ve reread a post that ended: “Let’s take a rest, and save our last couple of days in Madrid for another time.” It occurs to me that now, an astonishing ten weeks later, may just be that ‘another time’. However, once again, I don’t really have a lot more to say about Madrid.

But wait a minute. This extended vamp has already taken me a third of the way to a post. If I devote another third to toilet rolls, which surely must be good for 400 words, that will then leave only another 4–500 for Madrid. Mission accomplished. So, with no further ado….

I may have reflected in an earlier post on the fact that when a couple are considering devoting the whole of their future lives to each other, they sometimes ask each other questions about what seem to be the important issues: Do you want to have children? What country would you like to live in? However, there are other, perhaps equally important, questions that I suspect none of us ever think to ask. In fact, it was only relatively recently that I realised the one I am going to offer you now was even an issue. Which way do you hang the toilet roll? I have never actually asked Bernice about this, but I realised a few weeks ago that she and I probably have different answers to that question. She is a wall person and I am an outward person.

Let me explain. Toilet roll holders usually consist of a horizontal cylinder onto which you thread the toilet roll. You can choose to thread the roll onto the holder so that the sheet of paper that hangs down is facing the person sitting on the toilet, or is on the other side of the roll-holder from the person. These two options are illustrated below.

It seems patently obvious to me that the correct arrangement is as in the right-hand image above. To have a single plane sheet presented to view, rather than the workings of the roll, and to have the ‘top’ sheet closer to the user, rather than further away, behind the roll, seems to me to make both aesthetic and ergonomic sense.However, unless I am much mistaken, Bernice hangs toilet rolls as per the left-hand image. This means that sometimes, if I am not paying attention, I spin the roll in the wrong direction, and roll up the paper rather than unrolling it. It also means that I have to concentrate harder in order to take hold of the paper, at a time when my concentration is focussed elsewhere.

Since I made this discovery about our domestic arrangements, I have not stayed in a hotel or Airbnb, and so I haven’t been able to check first-hand whether my feeling that the right-hand arrangement is the conventional one is accurate. I’m banking on you, dear reader, to confirm my suspicions, or, alternatively, to put me right.

Editor’s Note: When Bernice reached this point in the post (she is, of course, my first reader and vetter every week) she declared, in no uncertain terms, that she always follows the right-hand method. I can think of only three possible explanations for this state of affairs: either she is gaslighting me; or one or the other of us has a multiple personality disorder, and our alter ego follows the left-hand method; or (and this is the most worrying scenario) we have a toilet-roll poltergeist in the house.

Which brings us back, somehow, to Madrid, and our last day before Shabbat. We had booked tickets for a tour of the Royal Palace, in the afternoon. After breakfast, I wanted to explore more of the city on foot, but Bernice elected to have a recharging morning in the air-conditioned room. I set off in the hope of reaching the river, but in fact didn’t quite make it.

My walk took me through the Thai quarter. I’m not sure whether I looked particularly tense, but as I passed every doorway along one particular street, one nice young Thai lady after another offered me a massage. From there, I found my way to an avenue lined with stalls selling second-hand books, where I spent a pleasant hour deciphering titles in Spanish and leafing through glossy coffee-table artbooks.

Back in the hotel, we had a bite to eat, then made our way to the palace, where, once again, our tour was greatly enhanced by an excellent audio-visual guide accessed through a phone app. This visit was something of an exercise in humility, because the audio guide went to great pains to stress that the castle had a longer and more extravagant frontage than, had more rooms than, had more square metres of floor space than, and was altogether grander than, Buckingham Palace. Not for the first time in Madrid, I was struck by the similar heritage of British and Spanish imperial history and royalty.

The palace was certainly spectacularly lavish, and everything was displayed to great effect. However, after about 90 minutes it all started to feel a little as though we had been working our way through a large box of very rich creamy chocolates, and we were not sorry to emerge into the afternoon sunshine again, despite the temperature still being in the 40s.

After an early meal at our favourite vegan restaurant, we retired to the hotel to shower and change and bring in shabbat with a very modest Friday night meal. We spent the next twenty-five hours resting, reading, eating, sleeping, and gathering our strength for the drive on Sunday to Penamacor and our reuniting with the family.

Fast forward five months, and Raphael is certainly enjoying one of his Chanukah presents.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the last seven years before our aliya, Bernice and I lived in Nantymoel, a mining (now an ex-mining) village almost at the head of the Ogwr valley, which is the next valley to the west of the more famous Rhondda valley. Our house (Bethel Cottage, opposite Bethel chapel: we lived in Bet El before coming on aliya – much the safer option) perched on one side of the valley, with a magnificent view of the forested other side of the valley.

Of course, this being a South Wales valley, ‘view’ was an accurate description only a small percentage of the time. As we used to say: ‘If you can’t see the other side of the valley, it’s raining; if you can, it’s about to rain.’ The first mountain that the Atlantic rainclouds rolling in from Newfoundland encountered was the Bwlch, just north of Nantymoel, so we could expect about 300 days of rain a year. When the sun shone, of course, the scenery was beautiful.

Both Bernice and I worked down the valley, she in the market town of Bridgend, and I in a village a little further west. When we first moved up the valley from Bridgend, where we had lived for the first seven years of our married life, it took us a long time to realise that ‘up the valley’ and ‘down the valley’ were two different climate zones. Spring reached Bridgend several weeks before it crept up the valley to Nantymoel, and for much of the year Bridgend was significantly warmer and drier. We would set off in the morning wrapped up against the cold, and spend the journey shedding layers of clothing.

I mention all this because it was a phenomenon that I had not encountered again anywhere else, until last week, when we took the kids and grandkids away for 3 days in an Airbnb in the Golan: more specifically, the Northern Golan, which I had not realised made a difference. Bernice and I drove up alone last Monday , leaving Maale Adumim around noon, and enjoyed a very warm and sunny drive up the Jordan Valley road, which has, thankfully, signficantly improved since last time we took it.

Looping round the east coast of the Kinneret, we continued north and noticed that the weather was getting chillier and less sunny as we climbed. When we arrived in cold and windy Alonei Habashan, 15 kilometres west of Katzrin, we were very glad that we had brought our winter woolies, coats and hats. Our hostess advised us that, if the weather was bad, and we wanted to tour around, we should head south, into what would undoubtedly be better weather.

In the event, we did not venture terribly far. With two babies and a three-year-old, it seemed more sensible to be a little less ambitious in our plans. We had hoped that we would be able to eat out or order in, but it had become clear over the week before our trip, when we (or, more accurately, Esther) did more intensive research and spoke in detail to our hostess, that there were few kosher options, and none that delivered to Alonei Habashan. We therefore brought supplies with us for all our meals, and everyone pitched in over the course of the couple of days of pizza and pasta.

Those of us who drink agreed that, if you bring sufficient supplies of decent wine and home-made beer, home catering is always delicious; those who are more abstemious enjoyed the fresh fruit and orange juice; Tao’s Nana found supplies of chocolate biscuits, and the two babies enjoyed business as usual. Esther and Maayan brought a delicious soup and their excellent blend of coffee. When Bernice and Esther discussed quantities, a few days before we went, Esther erred on the side of caution (by which I mean over-catering). When Bernice and I went shopping, we both added to that error.

The result was, of course, that at the end of our stay, we had enough food left over to be able to set Esther and Maayan up for hosting Micha’el, Tslil and the boys (I do like the sound of that: ‘the boys’) for a couple of days, while Bernice and I were able to travel home considerably less weighed down that we had been on the journey up.

The property we rented was a fairly large house, with more than enough bedrooms, three bathrooms, a large, covered porch area that the kids used a lot and gardens that we didn’t use. The best feature of the house was the downstairs living area, which was open-plan and large, enabling us all to be together with Tao playing at one end with the tiny pieces of Playmobil that were among the many toys and games available, while the two babies could be safely on the floor well away from the chokables. At the same time, all six adults could sit confortably on the slightly shabby but confortable sofas, beanbag and easy chair.

On our last day, we woke to a very thick mist. Two-thirds of us ventured out in this in two cars, to visit Aniam, a moshav with a small ‘artists’ village’ featuring a parade of art and craft workshp-showrooms. This was only 17 kilometres from where we were staying, but, as we drove down the mountain, the mist thinned until we eventually dropped below it. Having left on a cold, dark, dank winter’s day, we arrived at Aniam to be greeted by warm sunshine. A couple of the showrooms had some very attractive ceramics, and Bernice and I were even able to find a souvenir of our time away.

As is always the case, we needed to ignore the fact that the shop boasted dozens of similar items, and imagine the piece we were thinking about in isolation. On our honeymoon in Majorca, we bought wooden figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. In this case, the shop boasted serried ranks of identical figures, stretching to the horizon like the terracota army: literally hundreds of cloned Men of La Mancha. Fortunately, we managed to persuade ourselves that, taken in isolation, one pair of figures would look attractive, rather than cheap and touristy. 50 years later, we are still very fond of them.

In all, our Golan mini-break was very enjoyable. It was lovely being away with the kids, and especially seeing the three boys interacting with each other. Raphael and Ollie, in particular, seem to get along really well, and are both more interested in each other than is often the case at their ages. Sadly, we have few opportunities to be all together, so it was a wonderful couple of days.

From Zichron, Micha’el and family went to Tslil’s parents for Shabbat, so Bernice and I had three days at home by ourselves, before they returned on motzei shabbat, and we moved into their last three full days before they set off for the airport. The COVID-laden start to their stay here has meant that this trip has been in a sense shorter than hoped.

However, we know how lucky we are that we can all be together for a whole month and still, at the end, be on speaking terms with each other. Some members of the family find this a lot easier than others, but I promise that I do try my best. Meanwhile, a few holiday snaps, including the long awaited formal family portrait of all nine of us – three households, three generations.

Your starter for 10 – much too easy – is to complete the sentence quoted in this week’s title.

If you responded, immediately, “Get a hat!”, then you may want to try the bonus question: Where does the phrase come from?

I wasn’t aware (until I googled my way into this week’s post-writing) that it comes, in fact, from an advertising campaign, launched by the British-based Hatters’ Development Council in 1948. The previous year, British men had bought 5,000,000 hats. This represents about one man in four buying a new hat. While you might regard this as pretty impressive market penetration, it represented a serious decline, particularly among the under-25’s. The Council attributed this decline to the “wave of informality” since 1918. In a concerted effort to reverse this disturbing trend, the Council budgeted £50,000 over the next two years (the equivalent of over £1,000,000 a year today) to an advertising campaign built around the catchy slogan “If you want to get ahead, get a hat1”

In an attempt to target those under 25’s, the campaign suggested, pretty blatantly, that a hat makes a man irresistible to what was still known in 1948 as the opposite sex. It has to be said that, in this particular ad, if the companion of the young lady whose eyes are drawn to the behatted man also wore a hat, he would still be outclassed by his much younger rival, with his sharp suit, lack of spectacles and chiselled chin.

In the short run, the campaign met with some success. However, in the last 50 years, as men’s hairstyling (and, indeed, starting in the late 50s, men’s hair) has become a major growth industry, hats have steadily gone out of fashion.

Of course, it was not unfailingly so. My late father boasted a fine selection of headgear. On workdays, especially in the winter, he wore a Dunn & Co cloth cap for driving to and from the East End to collect fresh food supplies for his shop. (I see that Dunn & Co flatcaps are available as vintage clothing items on eBay for under £20 these days.) If he was going out in the evening, he might wear one of his trilbies. On shabbat, like almost all of his contemporaries in Beehive Lane Synagogue, he wore a bowler hat. (The only exceptions were the shammes, who I almost feel I need to call a beadle, and the Honorary Officers, who all wore top hats.) As an aid to those who are unfamiliar with any of these terms, I offer this classic comedy sketch from The Frost Report.

Having viewed that, I realise this makes my father classless (or, rather, classful). Incidentally, I remember very clearly when, together with my classmates, I was completing my UCCA university application forms: the father of one of my classmates owned a shop in the same street as my father. Under ‘Father’s Occupation’ on the form, where I wrote ‘Shopkeeper’, he wrote ‘Managing Director’. Although he suggested I do the same, and, he believed, thereby enhance my chances of being offered a university place, I felt very strongly that this would be a betrayal of my father, and a belittling of what I saw as his very worthwhile occupation. Dad’s shop was a real institution in the Jewish community, and he was loved (genuinely, that is not too strong a word) by his customers.

What has brought on these musings is the turn of the seasons here. In summer, I am careful about always wearing a hat as protection against the sun. I currently have two relatively inexpensive ‘straw’ hats – one very battered and only used when gardening, the other swiftly reaching the point where I will no longer be able to wear it even for going to the local shops, at which point I will have two gardening hats, which seems a little excessive, even to me.

In addition, I have a peaked cap with a neck flap, which offers very good protection, and which I wear for my summer morning constitutional, and a fairly wide-brimmed sun hat for other informal outdoor occasions. On shabbat in summer, I wear my panama hat, which I spent a long time looking for when I was travelling for work, and eventually found in Puerto Rico. It is a genuine panama, which means, as all you trivia quizsters know, that it was made in Ecuador.

The panama is the traditional Ecuadorean ‘toca’ straw hat made from toquilla – a small, palm-like plant that is native to South America. When the Panama canal opened, there was suddenly a demand from Europeans and North Americans passing through for a lightweight sunhat. The toca fit the bill, and since then has been known as a panama. What I particularly like about it is that I can roll it up and slip it into an empty round whisky cardboard canister. Thus protected, it could travel to Singapore or Puerto Rico, in both of which it was essential wear. Unrolled and left overnight in the hotel bathroom, where it was revived by the shower steam, the hat was restored to good as new.

After decades of resistance, I eventually succumbed and bought a baseball cap. This piece of headgear’s only redeeming feature, in my eyes, is that it can be slipped into a back pocket (where, I would argue, it looks considerably more elegant than on someone’s head). I usually wear this only when going to the supermarket, since, with any other hat, I have to remember to pick it up from the trolley when we get back to the car.

This last week, winter arrived in Maale Adumim. (It then left again, but I believe it will be back at some point.) This means a whole other set of headgear. For my morning walk in winter cold (when I can steel myself for it) I sport a woollen bobble cap. For everyday wear I have a classic flat cap, which will, for me, forever be associated with Dad. I also have a suede-like water-repellent, lightweight beige cap, which is slightly more up-market.

In an Atlanta discount clothing store, when I realised that my Shabbat hosts lived a 15-minute walk from the shul, and that the weather forecast for the coming weekend was for rain, I bought a trilby, which feels very 50s when I wear it with my now-45-year-old M&S trenchcoat. For the once-a-year deepest winter sleet Friday night walk back from shul, I have a leather, wide-brimmed Indiana Jones hat, bought on a whim at Heathrow Airport many years ago. While the wide brim ensures that no rain falls on me, and precious little on my coat, the hat has a tendency to retain the water, so that, on particularly wet evenings, by the time I arrive home from shul I can barely hold my head up.

In Kathmandu, I bought a highly decorated peacock blue Tibetan brimless cap, which I have occasionally worn on Purim and at no other time. I was also given, many years ago, a fur-lined pilot’s helmet in which I feel that I could fly a twin-engined plane to Shangri-La. Agsain, this doesn’t get much use, but it’s comforting to know that it is in my wardrobe ready to be called upon if needed.

Which, I am astonished to discover, means that I possess twelve items of headgear, not counting kippot. While I can make a case for needing hats – in the almost total absence of hair – I don’t really feel like someone who has twelve hats. Acquiring them has not been a conscious act, but rather something that happened of its own volition.

Over the years, of course, I have mislaid, or laid to rest, several other items. The only one whose loss I genuinely feel is what I would describe as a brown, corduroy, Tom Paxton cap. On relection, perhaps the period in my life when I could comfortably wear that is now behind me, and it may be just as well that I mislaid it at some point.

Meanwhile, up in Zichron, the move to winter hats has also happened. Now here’s a young man who really looks as though he’s going to get ahead.

Quick Medical Update: Relative clean bills of health have been issued all round. Bernice is still testing positive; however, since it is now seven days since she first was aware of contracting COVID, government guidelines indicate that she is free to mingle with the general population. Micha’el and Tao seem to have joined Tslil in the land of Postcovidia; poor Ollie still has rather a runny nose and occasional, though much less frequent and much less severe, cough. Esther and Ma’ayan have resurfaced; Raphael’s doctor has today announced that he appears to be clear of any infections, although he is also still suffering from a cold and cough. Horror of horrors, it appears that foot-and-mouth disease is doing the rounds in Zichron, and so Raphael has been advised to keep away from other children (seldom bad advice, in my experience – present company excepted). In short, the entire family is in a much better place this week than last, and Micha’el and family, and, indeed, all of us, are looking forward to enjoying the second two weeks of their trip even more than the first!

Editorial Aside: I thought of posting today at 11 seconds past 11:22 this morning, for obvious reasons, but decided that it would be lost on some (but certainly not all) of my readers, so we’ll stick to the boring old 9AM (my blog – my timezone).

What with one thing and Corona, our outings with Tao in the first two weeks of this visit have been very local and rather unambitious. He has become very familiar with our two closest children’s playgrounds, and we made it a couple of times to the local mall, where there is a wide range of the static children’s rides – usually cars – that can be activated by a five-shekel piece or, I was more astonished to discover than I probably should have been – by swiping a credit card. As luck would have it, we only seemed to have one 5-shekel piece on us each time we went, and both forgot to being our credit cards (at least, that’s our story and we’re sticking to it) but fortunately Tao’s imagination is sufficiently strong, and his expectations sufficiently modest, for him to be satisfied with one electric ride and four or five in which Grandpa and Nana rock the car (and, as the storyline requires, double as rescue helicopters or water-dropping firefighter planes).

However, on Monday of this week, we got to take Tao out properly, to Jerusalem, to the Train Theatre, a children’s puppet theatre that has been a part of the Jerusalem cultural landscape since 1981. The last time we went, when we took our own young children, the theatre was still in its original home, a disused railway carriage, which in itself made every visit a special adventure. Since then, how things have changed! The old railway carriage has been renovated, and converted into a children’s library, while a new complex was opened in 2016, comprising a small theatre space, an outdoor amphitheatre, a snack bar and offices, all in separate buildings that are connected underground by a larger, 140-seat theatre.

One of the delights of taking a bright three-year-old out is that aspects of the outing that I might not even consider can assume tremendous importance. So, before we even parked the car, our afternoon included highlights such as driving alongside, overtaking and being overtaken by, a light-rail train, which Tao initially called a bullet train. He was deceived by the fact that the profile of the structure of the trains is not dissimilar, although we were quick to point out that Jerusalem’s light rail never reaches a speed of 320 kph, or, indeed, much more than 20 kph, although it still managed to beat us through Jerusalem’s city centre traffic.

We had also not deliberately planned our route to include travelling through two tunnels, but this feature certainly met Tao’s approval. Indeed, we almost had to double back on the way home in order to go through one of the tunnels again. Once we arrived at the theatre, comfortably early, the municipality was kind enough to lay on for our benefit a helicopter repeatedly circling overhead. I wish there were an easy way to regain, in cataracted old age, the clarity of vision and delight at the simple wonders of everyday life that a three-year-old can show you.

By this stage I was wondering whether the show itself could match these technological wonders, but I really needn’t have worried. The audience consisted of perhaps 12 two-to-six-year-olds and various parents and grandparents, which was a large enough number to create an atmosphere but a small enough number not to be intimidating. Anat Geiger-Shabtai, the storyteller and puppeteer who performed the show, was completely attuned to her audience and managed to break down any inhibitions within the first couple of minutes of what was a 35-minute story of preparing for, and holding, a birthday party.

Her puppets were ostensibly constructed from everyday discarded objects – a teapot, a bicycle seat, wheels from a toy car. The truth is, of course, that they were in fact constructed from equal parts of these objects and hers, and the children’s, imaginations.

The show was similarly constructed from equal parts of story-telling, simple (which does not, of course, mean easy) puppetry and audience participation that was inviting, inclusive, age-appropriate, and great fun.

We had been unsure how Tao would react to all of this, in his first experience of live theatre. There were a few moments of initial uncertainty – a room full of strangers; a Hebrew-speaking environment with Nana and Grandpa, who are usually exclusively English-speaking. However, after that initial tentativeness, Anat put him, and the entire room, at their ease, and he was soon completely captivated, and showing his delight in imaginative story-telling and his highly developed appreciation of humour.

I’ll stop kvelling now. What I will say is this. I know that it is a wicked thing to project our own tastes and ambitions onto an innocent child. My greatest wish for Tao, as for all of our children and grandchildren, is that they should all live, in fulfilment and contentment, the lives that they choose to live. At the same time, I hope that I am allowed to be very, very happy that, in his first encounter with the magic of theatre, Tao was spellbound. I am therefore delighted to present him with my personal award as most promising newcomer to theatre of 2022.

Meanwhile, Ollie is just starting to wander in the foothills of Mary having a little lamb, and hasn’t yet really made up his mind.

This has been, for the family, seven days of ups and downs.
Michael, Tslil, Tao and Ollie have been with us since very early last Tuesday
morning, after a traumatic time at the Israeli embassy in Lisbon. Just to
remind you: the Israeli passports of both Tslil and Micha’el had expired, and
currently the Israeli Government is not issuing new passports at all. The waiting
list for a new passport is obviously very long, and the kids were unable to
renew theirs.

Although Israel usually requires that its citizens enter
and exit Israel on their Israeli passport, in these extenuating circumstances
citizens who also hold a foreign passport are being told to travel on it. This
includes Micha’el, but not, unfortunately, Tslil. So she required a laissez
passer (a temporary travel document allowing foreign travel), which the embassy
was prepared to issue not more than three days before travel, on presentation
of all the relevant documentation.

When the family arrived for their appointment at the
embassy last Monday morning, they were required to deposit their bags,
including, understandably, their phones. They were allowed to keep one bag with
everything they needed for the baby. However, the bag they had packed with
snacks and games for Tao, anticipating a long wait, they were required to
deposit. The security staff assured them that they would find, inside, a
playroom with games and toys. What they actually found was a table with a few
sheets of paper that had already been drawn on and a few crayons.

The kids had also been hoping to register Ollie’s birth
with the Israeli authorities, as legally required. However, the list of
documents that the embassy demanded to see included at least one that does not
exist in Portugal, so this is a battle they will have to continue fighting when
they have regained their strength.

After a succession of further examples of lack of
consideration, the family eventually emerged with the travel document Tslil
needed. From that point, their journey to Israel was considerably smoother.

The owner of the Airbnb they stayed at in Lisbon, with whom
they had left their luggage, coordinated with them, and met them at the airport
with their luggage. In the airport, as the parents of a four-month-old baby and
a three-year-old, they were given priority treatment at every stage, and
whisked through the various checks and processes with the minimum fuss. Tao, in
his buggy, slept through virtually the whole process and woke up just a little
time before they were due to board.

The plane left late but landed on time. Tao slept well on
the flight, and Ollie, apart from one momentary cry, didn’t make a sound
throughout the flight, even on take-off and landing. In Israel, the recommended
taxi driver we had booked met them, not exactly as planned, but after a rather
anxious delay..

Although everyone was fairly wiped out, as much as anything
by the anxiety over the uncertainty of being able to fly, and by the long trip
from Penamacor to Maale Adumim, they were more or less recovered by the middle
of the week. Except, that is, for Tao, who had been nursing a cough and been
feeling run down for a couple of weeks, and who was also scratching some spots.
The kids had suspected chicken pox, but the doctor they took him to in
Penamacor did not offer a diagnosis. We were able to take Tao to the doctor
here, who was fairly confident that he had, indeed, been fighting chicken pox,
and seemed to be over the worst.

Then, early on Thursday evening, Esther, Maayan and Raphael
arrived, after a horrendous almost three-hour journey. They soon revived when
they reunited with Micha’el, Tslil and Tao and met, for the first time, their
newest nephew. While I was adjusting to the new reality of our ridiculously
large home for two bursting at the seams after these waves of invasions, Tslil,
feeling very tired, put herself to bed early – which seemed to me eminently
sensible.

On Friday, we all left still poorly Tslil in peace while
we, and Bernice’s sister and two nieces and their husbands, gathered at my
mother-in-law’s grave to mark her yahrzeit (which was, in fact, a couple of
weeks ago. However, the first date that worked for everyone was last Friday).
From the cemetery, everyone came back to us, neatly picking their way between
the activity floormats, teething rings, toys and games. It was a lovely
opportunity for Ollie’s great-aunt and uncle and first cousins once removed to
meet him. They were all suitably captivated, and he was his usual smiling and
placid self, as, indeed, was Raphael. Tao is at a considerably more discerning
age, but also enjoyed himself.

After the extended family left, Tslil took a rapid flow
COVID test and tested positive, to nobody’s particular surprise. So, while she
stayed in her bedroom upstairs, and Micha’el and all ferried Ollie and food and
drink to her and Ollie and empty cups and plates from her, we (two aunts and
two grandparents) kept Tao occupied and entertained and fed and watered, with
Micha’el and a very poorly-feeling Tslil stepping in at those critical points
where even an adored Nana is no substitute for Ima, or even Abba.

The joy of having everyone with us for Shabbat was,
naturally, less than complete, with Tslil suffering alone upstairs. However, it
was wonderful to see Raphael watching Tao’s every move in adoration, and Ollie
watching Raphael’s every move similarly. By the time Esther and Maayan were
packing up, Raphael and Ollie had bonded beautifully.

To look at them now, they seem so disparate in size, abilities
and age (eight months and four months); we have to keep reminding ourselves
that, in a matter of a year or so, that gap will shrink into insignificance and
they will, we hope, grow up feeling close to each other. Even if they live
geographically apart, we will have to make every effort to bring them together
as often as possible.

It was also wonderful, as always, to be together with our
children and their spouses: to watch Esther and Micha’el ganging up on Bernice,
so that I could take a break; to see them enjoying their own, and each other’s,
children together. Shabbat was over too quickly, but it was a lovely day.

Now, as I write this, it is Sunday. Tslil is feeling a bit
more human, but it looks very much as though Ollie may have COVID, and he is
not at all happy. To round off an eventful week, after Esther and family had a
long drive home yesterday, we learnt today that Maayan has also tested positive
for COVID. While she does not seem to have terrible symptoms, she is suffering
badly from seasonal allergies, so she really didn’t need this in addition.

An update on Monday: Tslil seems to be more or less over
her COVID, but Ollie had a terrible night last night with an awful cold and
coughing, and Tslil and Micha’el got very little sleep. Tao, today, has been
wiped out; after an early start and a brief outing to the park with Grandpa, he
has spent most of the rest of the day sleeping.

If I say that this has been a wonderful week, I will not be
lying. If I say that we had all hoped for an even more wonderful, and less
stressful, week, I will, again, not be lying. What we are all praying is that
this string of illness will soon be behind them all, and we, and they, will be
able to enjoy the rest of their stay with no qualifications.

If I tell you that I haven’t managed to take a single
photograph since they arrived, you may not believe me, but it’s the truth. So
here’s a photo taken when Raphael was eagerly looking forward to meeting his
cousins for the first time.