It began, for me, on Wednesday, during my weekly Zoom chat with my brother, Martin. He started by remarking on how another week had whizzed past, which I thought slightly strange, since we normally speak on Thursday or Friday, and this was only Wednesday.

During the call, I told him how I had spent the best part of two days during the week in bed with a stomach virus. As I was speaking, I was trying to work out whether that had started on Monday – but I didn’t think it had started that early in the week – or Tuesday – but that made no sense because it would mean that today was the second day, and I was no longer ill. In the end I gave up, and pushed the confusion to the back of my mind, since it didn’t seem to make much difference in the larger scheme of things.

The following morning (Thursday), I woke around 6:30, as usual, and, before going downstairs, opened my bedside table drawer to fish out that day’s tablets to take downstairs. I was surprised to discover that I appeared to have only two days of tablets filled in my daily dispensers. This was odd, since I always refill with a week’s supply on Sunday morning. “Oh well,” I thought, “I must have done it on Shabbat morning last week by mistake.”

Checking my email before going downstairs, I discovered, to my surprise, a notification email with a link to my friend Ron’s weekly blog. My surprise was because Ron always posts on Friday. Following the link, I started to read, curious to discover why he was posting early this week.

Yes, folks, even then the penny didn’t drop. My ingenious brain was perfectly happy reorganizing everyone and everything around me to accommodate the false conclusion it had come to. It was only when I had read the entire blog, and discovered that Ron was not having any truck with my internal calendar, making no reference whatsoever to early publication, that I reviewed all of the evidence of the previous 24 hours objectively, and realized my mistake. Martin and I had Zoomed on Thursday; I had filled my tablet dispenser on Sunday; I had been ill on Tuesday and Wednesday, Ron had posted on Friday as always, and I had better get going because there was challah to bake.

With mounting horror I realised that I had lost a day, which made me not quite as hopeless a case as Ray Milland, who, in 1945, lost an entire weekend. Actually,  he lost five days, which, even by post-Covid four-day working week Western standards, is quite some weekend!) For those unfamiliar with The Lost Weekend, it was the winner of four Oscars (and what a quartet: Best Picture, Best Leading Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay) and perhaps the least likely winner in Oscar history, being almost unrelentingly bleak in its portrayal of a man struggling against alcoholism. It was also one of only two films to win Best Picture at both the Oscars and Cannes.

If you haven’t seen the film, it comes recommended by almost everyone – other than, predictably, the American liquor-producing industry. It afforded Ray Milland what was, at the time, a rare opportunity to show that he was more than a rom-com lead actor. You can get a taste of the film from the official trailer, although, as ever, any nuance and subtlety seem to have been edited out for the trailer, in favour of bludgeoning over the head with a blunt voiceover. Not that the film itself is the most subtle treatment of the theme. Personally, my vote for greatest Hollywood treatment of alcoholism goes to another film that allowed an actor often considered primarily comic the opportunity to give a towering dramatic performance. Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick are both magnificent in Days of Wine and Roses.

So, there are two bleak, depressing recommendations, which might help to put you into something like my mood when I realised that I had lost a day, which, of course, meant that we were one day closer to leaving Penamacor and returning home.

Friday (as I had now discovered it was called) was followed by Saturday (in Portugal, they organise their days the same way we do in Israel), which was, as it happens, our 50^th wedding anniversary. When, several months ago, we looked on the calendar, and saw that August 6 fell on Tisha b‘Av (the saddest day in the Hebrew calendar), we realised that celebrating on the day was not an option. Of course, when Tisha b’Av falls on Shabbat, the fast, and all of the accompanying mourning practices, are deferred to the following day, which meant that we were unable to celebrate on Saturday night.

Around the same time, we realised that Tslil was due to give birth a month before our anniversary, and so we decided to schedule this current trip. On Shabbat, we raised a glass to ourselves, but little more. Since the Hebrew date of our anniversary falls a few days after we return from Portugal, we have postponed any celebration until later. Bernice and I agreed not to bring out gifts to give each other here (not least because we simply couldn’t spare the weight in our luggage).

I did, however, manage to give Bernice one small gift on Shabbat – my stomach virus, with the result that she spent all of Sunday in bed – most of it, thankfully, peacefully asleep. This morning (Monday) she woke up feeling completely better, which is a great relief. Very early next Monday morning we will be driving back to Madrid airport (assuming that the three changes in flight times that we have so far been updated with are the only changes), so today we have started our last seven days in Penamacor.

The weather has turned a little cooler over the last week, which is a great relief, and is due to stay unchanged this week. We have one errand in Castollo Branco to run for the kids this week, which we will probably combine with one last big supermarket shop and, possibly, lunch out. In addition, there is one site in Penamacor I would like to visit, which I might well tell you about next week, if I manage to get there.

Other than that, both Bernice and I would like to do some cooking and baking for the freezer, to give the kids a little cushion after our departure. Knowing the way time seems to slip through the fingers, even when I’m not mislaying entire days, that’s probably all we will have time for, until our next trip. By then, Ollie will undoubtedly have completely changed. He is already unrecognisable as the newborn we encountered when we arrived. Esther assures us we won’t recognise Raphael when we return to Israel either. Only Tao is changing less dramatically, although even he seems to be maturing before our eyes and ears.

One thing all three have in common is that they love stories, whether (R to L) on video, in books, or following the oral tradition.

As I am writing this, we are halfway through our four weeks in Penamacor, and, before you ask, no, we haven’t been anywhere or done anything yet other than dote on two-thirds of our grandsons and perform light household duties. (Can’t wait until Bernice reads that ‘light’.) As we never cease to explain, while Penamacor has its charms, it would not be our first choice of holiday destination, all other things being equal. However, since very few other things are equal, Penamacor is where we are, and, while the waterskiing leaves much to be desired, that’s not really what we’re here for.

Actually, it transpires that Penamacor and environs do offer a variety of attractions, particularly in the festival season, at the peak of which we appear to have arrived. Before we drove over the border from Madrid, a friend (who, clearly, does not know me at all) wrote to ask whether we would be attending the Boom festival. At the time, I had no idea what the Boom festival was. (My guess is that about 4% of you will be thinking: ‘Are you serious?’, 15% of you will be thinking: ‘No surprises there’, and the other 81% will be saying:’ What’s the Boom festival?’)

According to Wikipaedia (although I strongly suspect that anyone interested in the Boom Festival doesn’t look things up on Wikipaedia): it is ‘a transformational, multidisciplinary, psychedelic and sustainable festival that happens every two years in Portugal. Editions are in sync with the full moon. Born in 1997 in Herdade do Zambujal, Águas de Moura, Portugal as a goa trance psychedelic party, it has since then evolved into a global celebration of alternative culture.’ 41,000 people from 177 countries (third among which in number of attendees is, apparently, Israel) came this year to what is, by all accounts, a very well organised festival, with online ticket sales (sold out in 90 minutes), 21 official stages, 544 artists, 181 facilitators, 69 assistants and 100 therapists, and with art exhibitions, children’s activities and many other activities running throughout festival week. In addition, the festival has won several green festival international awards.

You can follow the link to find out more about this year’s festival.

Quite by chance, we almost crossed paths with the festival last week. The supermarket that the kids have started using since we were last here happens to be in the town – Idanha-A-Nova – on the outskirts of which the festival is held. This almost certainly explains the surprisingly large number of customers in the supermarket shopping in the organic food section and sporting a variety of tattoos and rasta hairstyles. It may also explain why this is the only supermarket in my experience whose car park features an open-air laundromat.

As if all of this excitement were not enough, the last few days have seen Penamacor come alive unexpectedly – at least, unexpectedly for us. The last week of July marks the local summer festival, promising all sorts of highlights. We became aware, on Thursday and Friday, that the village was filling up with visitors. People come for the last weekend in July from the coastal cities; some have bought second homes in the village; others have inherited their late parents’ houses, or are visiting their living parents. For the long weekend that they stay, the village takes on a new life.

Suddenly, our neighbours’ house came alive. Whenever we have visited before, it has been deserted. This weekend, two siblings and their families descended on it, in cars laden with equipment and supplies. They spent a few hours taming the back garden, and the next day barbecuing and attending the festival, before loading up their cars again and driving back to the big city this morning.

And what of the festival itself? Until today, our only direct experience of it was thumping music playing way into the small hours on Friday and Saturday night. (Fortunately for us, the open-air concerts are staged in a part of the village that the kids’ bedroom faces; in our bedroom, on the other side of the house, we could hear nothing – not that any concert half a mile away would keep either Bernice or me awake.) I must say, this seemed rather inappropriate for our sleepy corner of the country, but there is, we are beginning to notice, a younger population who, most of the time we are out and about are hidden away at work or school, and who come out just as we are crashing at what for us is the end of the day. Over the last week, we have seen many teenagers going to and from the municipal swimming pool, and playing football.

Today (Sunday) we decided to visit the festival, known as the ‘Lands of the Lynx’ fair, acknowledging that the national park a few kilometres from Penamacor is one of the natural habitats of the Iberian lynx, an endangered species. In 2015, the last known surviving wild lynx in Portugal was run over by a car. Since then, a programme of controlled release has been operating in a number of areas of Portugal, which is proving successful. There are currently over 100 animals that have been identified in the wild, consisting of 43 releases from captivity and 91 known births. Natural death, and some wild migration to Spain, has kept the net number in Portugal at a little over 100.

The fair was held in the small municipal park in the centre of the village – the Jardim da Republica – which boasts the village’s largest café, offering indoor and outdoor seating and liquid refreshment that was very welcome on a day that, when we arrived at 4:30, was nudging 39 centigrade. Around the park were arranged a number of very small marquees, each housing a display of very local produce – honey, cheeses, olive oil, sweets and liqueurs, reflecting the fact that the Portuguese have an incredibly sweet tooth. I was expecting the produce to have a very cottage kitchen home-made appearance, but in fact it was all packaged and labelled very commercially, less like an English village fair than a commercial farmer’s market.

In addition to the produce stalls there were some craft stalls, including one featuring the embroidery work that is traditional to the area (although Bernice detected that some of the items for sale were machine-embroidered, and there were some Disney characters featured there). There was also a medium-size inflatable bouncing castle (for any children who wanted to experience the equivalent of walking on red-hot coals), a face-painting stall, and a stall offering biscuits and craft work made by the children of the local forest school.

Wandering among the small crowd that had gathered were a number of costumed figures from Alice in Wonderland – the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat – and an itinerant gardener accompanied by a ballerina flower. The gardener offered to water the children from his can (a welcome relief from the heat), and encouraged them to then open out their arms and grow.

Musical entertainment was provided by a strolling guitar and vocal quartet. They were dressed inexplicably as a bumblebee, a cow, a dalmatian and a cockerel. (Inexplicably to me, at least; perhaps there is a local fairy tale about four such animals, but I rather suspect those were the costumes left in the dressing-up chest when they arrived. It is just possible that the animals reflect the source of the agricultural produce for sale, but I’d like to think that did not include any dogs.)

Just as I was beginning to feel that this was all a little inauthentic, another musical trio arrived, which proved to be the real deal, even down to the traditional costume. This was a gaita de fole (literally bellows harmonica) trio, comprising bagpipes, snare drum and bass drum, who played traditional folk tunes. Such a trio has, for many centuries (at least since the 1200s) been an indispensable part of village life, playing at weddings, fairs and religious festivals. The tradition is particularly strong in the northern regions of Portugal, bordering Spain.

Apparently, the tradition died out in the second half of the 20th Century, giving way to recorded music, and was consciously revived just before the millennium, in an effort to keep folk customs alive. It is, however, possible, that the tradition never really died out in rural enclaves such as Penamacor.

My research indicates that what we saw was the authentic Portuguese gaita de fole, made from a goatskin, with carved wooden chanters and single drone. Interestingly, the bagpiper performing here did not use the drone (which creates a continuous higher-pitched note to fill out the sound), but only played the melody on a single chanter. You can get a sense of the sound from this clip of a concert.

After we had spent about an hour and a half at the festival, we slipped away just as the sound stage was being equipped with amps for the evening’s main attraction – a performance by Augusto Canário & Amigos. Canário, I hardly need tell you, is a very popular accordionist and singer. Judging by the age of the villagers who were arriving as we left, his appeal is primarily to a more mature audience than had been the case with the previous night’s DJ, but nevertheless we decided to give it a miss. There’s only so much local colour you can soak in at one sitting, particularly when the temperature is close to 40 and you still have 152 steps to climb to get home.

I thought this week you might like to see the mothers who gave birth to our wonderful grandchildren.

One of the first things Bernice and Tao did after our arrival was to make a large calendar, on which Tao is marking off with stickers each day of our stay. Looking at it today (Monday), I see that we have already been here more than a week! This, of course, means that we have now known Ollie for most of his life, which is, in a sense, a bizarre thought. At the same time, he has changed considerably over the eight days we have been here, gaining weight very nicely and appearing more and more aware of, and interested in, these strange giant faces that loom over him and make strange noises at him. He no longer seems quite so fragile, or vulnerable, or lost, and Tslil, Micha’el, Tao and Ollie are already very definitely a family unit. As always, it is amazing how quickly human beings can move from being unable to imagine what life with another child will be like to being unable to imagine life without that other child.

Tao has adapted very well to his role as older brother and genuinely understands how Tslil in particular needs to share her time between Ollie’s needs and his. It is, of course, a tremendous benefit that Micha’el has, so far, been available 24/7. From tomorrow, he is planning to resume his online English teaching. Fortunately, Tao is more than happy to spend time in the company of his nana, who has a seemingly bottomless pit of stories, songs, art projects and other activities to share with him, and, failing all else, his grandpa, who has a far more limited range of age-appropriate skills. If I can only hang in there, I’m planning to come into my own around 2032, when he wants to discuss the finer points of the pluperfect subjunctive. Actually, judging by the speed with which his language is developing, he may even be ready before then.

For example, yesterday I was reading to Tao the book Queenie, a tale of a bantam hen who is saved from drowning and taken in by a family who own a dog, Bruno. Queenie sleeps in the dog’s basket until the family return her to her home farm. When I scanned the next sentence in the book, I decided it was probably too advanced for Tao, and so I said: ‘Bruno got his basket back,’ to which Tao instantly and indignantly responded: ‘Reclaimed, Grandpa!’ Silly me.

Tao’s Hebrew is keeping pace with his English, and his Portuguese is also developing. While the family were on holiday in May, Tao started watching Portuguese children’s TV, and now, every day, he is allowed a short Portuguese video. The other day, I watched Noddy with him, which was interesting for two reasons. First, it appears that, in the last 66 years, Big Ears has been declared a non-person. Presumably, any reference to him is now considered aurist. Secondly, in the course of watching for 15 minutes, the only words I could distinguish were ‘Noddy’, ‘hola’ and ‘obrigado’. When I mentioned this to Micha’el, he agreed that spoken Portuguese is incredibly difficult to distinguish; it is a language of much elision, and considerable inconsistency and counter-intuitivity in the pronunciation of certain letters and combinations of letters, depending on their position in the word. He was kind enough to say that he understood very little of Noddy. (Tslil, on the other hand, claims to understand a good half of Noddy, but then she’s not a blood relative and feels less obligation to be kind to me.)

Last week, I reported a temperature of 33 in Penamacor. Almost immediately, the temperature rose to 39, and stayed there for the rest of last week. This led me, before shabbat, to go out to buy another fan, for the kitchen. Since the air conditioner there does not have a timer, we would have had to keep the AC on for 25 hours. So I visited one of the small Aladdin’s caves that Penamacor boasts: a tiny hardware store that stocks an incredibly wide range of kitchen, camping, and home electrical equipment. As always, I had done my Google Translate homework, so I was able to ask for a ventilador. One of the boons of shopping in Portuguese in Penamacor is that the shops tend to offer no choice, and, indeed, this shop had one floor-standing fan and one table-top model. This meant that we avoided any fruitless attempts at discussing the relative merits of different models: kilowattage, number of speeds, size of sweep arc, and so forth. My only choice was white or black. ‘White’, I knew, was ‘branco’, because the regional capital is Castello Branco (white castle, so named for the obvious reason). ‘Black’, I hazarded, was ‘negro’. I decided that black would suit the house’s general decor better, and so I stuck my neck out. I now know that the correct word is ‘preto’.

As the shopkeeper took my money, we had a lively conversation on one of the few subjects that an Englishman feels comfortable discussing with strangers – the weather. ‘Muito calor’. ‘Sim, muito calor’. ‘Madrid – mais calor – quarenta e três’. By the way, please don’t be deceived. What I actually said bore little more than a passing resemblance to this correct (I hope) written Portuguese. However, the shopkeeper seemed to understand me, and we parted good friends.

Once back at the house, I explored the etymology of preto, which I was unable to link to any related word in French or Latin, which are my two Romance languages. (Please don’t be deceived, again; what that means is that I have absolutely no Spanish or Italian, and so the tiny smattering of French and Latin that I remember makes them my Romance languages.) I soon discovered that the etymology of preto is disputed, with two rival, and, to me, equally tenuous theories.

Some claim it derives ultimately from the Latin pressus, meaning ‘tight’ or ‘compressed’, because when it is dark we have to squint – pressing our eyes almost closed – in order to see anything. Do you buy that? I thought not.

Others believe it derives from pectus, the Lain for ‘chest’. The explanation here may be that when you keep something close to your chest, it is under your toga. What do you reckon? Me neither. OK, then, how about this, which is the last possible explanation I found? A man’s chest is hairy and therefore dark. I reckon these are getting more and more desperate.

Anyway, interestingly, in Portuguese negro is used to describe skin colour. Preto is, in Portuguese, a more pejorative term than negro, in the reverse of what is currently true in English. In the kind of linguistic complexity that makes anyone trying to learn a language despair, several football teams in Portugal that play in black and white are known not as the brancopreto (as you would expect, if you have been paying attention), but as the alvinegro. Go figure!

I’m pleased to report that this week is expected to be cooler than last, and, certainly, at 7:30 this morning, when Lua the dog and I went out for our walk, it was pleasantly warm, with a lovely breeze that stirred the wind turbines on the next ridge over. As I write this, at 6pm, it is just starting to cool again, after a 4pm high of about 34.

Not unrelated to the sweltering heat is, of course, the constant threat of forest fires. I was quite apprehensive about the drive from Madrid, because I had been unable to find online any map indicating the current state of affairs in Iberia, by area. On the motorway from Madrid, we passed signs warning ‘Significant fire hazard’, but giving no indication of what we should do with this information. I was reminded of Michael Flanders` remark regarding the similar road warning: ‘Beware low-flying aircraft’. ‘What am I supposed to do? Apart, I suppose, from taking off my hat.’ I kept one hand close to the windscreen washer lever, but I didn’t really believe that would help much in a genuine emergency.

In the event, our journey passed without incident. However, it really is no laughing matter. In fact, the day we arrived, friends of the kids, who live about 45 minutes away, in a house in the middle of a large piece of land that they have been working for two years, were resting at home. The husband and older child were sleeping; the wife and younger child were awake, when she became aware of a noise and looked outside to discover that the house was completely surrounded by fire. They managed to escape, safe and sound, in their car, and their house and other vehicle are, thankfully, intact. However, the mature orchard they bought and the market garden they have cultivated over the last two years have all been lost, and they now face the prospect of starting again from nothing.

Unfortunately, it seems that many Portuguese who own land either do not take the threat of fire seriously, or remain stoical about it. Regulations about regularly clearing brush, and leaving empty space around dwellings, are often ignored by landowners and not enforced by the authorities. I read this week that 90% of those who staff Portugal’s severely under-funded and poorly equipped fire service are volunteers. Perhaps the fires that have been raging in recent weeks throughout Mediterranean Europe will trigger some action at the level of the EU.

On a happier note, all three of our grandsons, each in his own way, have made significant progress this week. Tao, for example, mastered the roly-poly, or forward somersault. Another momentous milestone!

Last week’s post ended with a gnomic ‘Nothing more to report at time of writing’. As most of you know by now, that wasn’t strictly true, because, by the time I posted on Tuesday morning, our newest grandson was already 10 hours old. However, an editorial decision was taken not to ‘hold the front page’. This means, of course, that I have a fairly obvious subject this week, and, astonishingly, it isn’t Madrid, where Bernice and I spent the past week having a proper holiday. I may tell you more about that next week, but, for the moment, having driven from Madrid to Penamacor yesterday, there can really be only one subject this week.

Tslil and Micha’el had always planned for the birth to be at home. They found an English doula who lives locally. They also said that they wanted to have a week or two after the birth alone as a nuclear family, before any grandparents descended. Our week in Madrid was timed to end two weeks after Tslil’s due date. In the event, the due date was a week early, but, fortunately, after a week of bonding alone, both Tslil and Micha’el felt ready for us to parachute in and chip in with the family chores.

The birth went very smoothly, and was, if anything, even quicker than Tao’s. For the first week, their circle of friends rallied round, dropping in with meals and making sure the dog, Lua, got her regular walks. As Micha’el pointed out, having such helpful neighbours is not that unusual, but when these ‘neighbours’ live on plots of land 20 or 30 minutes’ drive away, it means a lot that they are happy to make the effort.

Now that we have arrived, the friends are taking a step back, but at least one has already said: “In a month, when your parents leave, that’s when you’re really going to appreciate some help, so we’ll be ready.” It is wonderful that they have made such good friends, many of whom also have young children.

And it’s not only friends that have reached out. Word of the birth somehow reached the head of the Community Council in Penamacor, who contacted Micha’el and said that he would like to meet him. So, Micha’el dressed in one of his two smart outfits, pulled back his hair, and went to meet him. The official expressed great interest in Tslil and Micha’el’s story, and very much welcomed a new baby being born in the village. He was also very interested in helping them, and Micha’el even returned home with an invitation to a party next week.

Soon after we arrived, Tslil and Micha’el made a final decision about the baby’s name. Unlike his big brother, who makes his way through life with a single, three-letter name, the baby is going to have a name in English/Portuguese and a name in Hebrew! While I’m sure nobody will believe doting parents and grandparents, we are all agreed that he is already, at just under a week old, showing considerable physical strength. They have therefore chosen the name Ollie, short for Oliver, primarily because ‘oliveiro’ is ‘olive tree’ in Portuguese: solid, strong, rooted in the earth, and native to Portugal. His Hebrew name is Sol, with its echoes of the sun (he was born on a blazing hot day in July), and also ‘soul’ and ‘sole’, which are two concepts that resonate with the kids.

So what can I tell you about Ollie Sol Orlev, on the basis of 24 hours’ acquaintance? He is a very placid child. Even when hungry, he does not get upset, but just gets the message across by loudly sucking his fist. He is infinitely snuggly, and is very comfortable being cradled or shouldered by a standing or (big bonus here) sitting grandfather. Asleep, he is blissfully peaceful; awake, he is calmly interested in whoever is talking to him.

As for Tao, in the five months since we were last here he has progressed from having a large vocabulary to being a genuine conversationalist. He is fond of a cuddle, but still insists on “No kissing!” He has the energy of a three-year-old (unsurprisingly), and this first day has been just a little over-excited by our arrival. We flatter ourselves that it is not just the gifts we bear (on our own and others’ behalf) that excite him, but also our company. He is as helpful as ever, explaining things to us, taking us round the supermarket, suggesting we put music on the radio in the car, and choosing, from the various options, Brahms’ First Symphony. What’s not to love?!

The weather in Penamacor is about 10 degrees cooler than Madrid (33 instead of 43), but the house is not quite as cool as our aparthotel. However, the air conditioner in the kitchen (which, I had been led to believe when I first viewed the house, did not work) is actually very efficient, and at the moment, sitting at the kitchen table typing this at 5:00 p.m., I am very comfortable. Sadly, our bedroom has no air-conditioning, but last night neither Bernice nor I needed any rocking, and everybody slept on this morning, thankfully.

This afternoon, several members of the household also enjoyed a siesta, something which the Zichron grandson hasn’t yet really mastered. This gave me the chance to write my blog. However, everyone has now woken, so I have to cut this short and get back to burdensome grandfatherly duties. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

I suspect this post is going to take rather longer for me to write than normal, because of the circumstances in which I am writing it. You see, I’m going to have to stop writing every couple of minutes, in order to pinch myself. At 11:10 this (Sunday) morning, Bernice and I drove away from home in Maale Adumim. Less than six and a half hours later, we were seated on a Boeing 737 as it lifted off from Ben Gurion airport, and we are currently cruising above the Mediterranean, winging our way to Madrid.

At no point in those six and a half hours did I actually believe that we would take off: the media have been full of stories of El Al flight cancellations to various European destinations, and friends have been kind enough to share with us horror stories of flights being cancelled, in one case after the passengers had been sitting on the plane for over an hour.

While that last scenario probably represents something fairly close to the innermost circle, the particular hell that air travel currently seems to aspire to become also includes several outer circles, less dire, but still a long way from looking like any sane person’s ideal Sunday afternoon. So, we were fully expecting to experience a slow death by queuing today, having heard horror stories of three- and four-hour queues, stretching out of the airport terminal entrance.

If any of you are Britons who have never visited Israel, then you may well be thinking to yourselves: ‘Well, I can think of many worse ways to while away a few afternoon hours than standing quietly in a queue making new friends, discussing Wimbledon and trading a cheese sandwich for a scotch egg.’ If that’s what you’re thinking, then let me disabuse you.

A queue in Israel is nothing less than a field of play on which a deadly serious contest is fought. Points are awarded for queue-jumping, ideally without being detected by those whose place you usurp. However, if you are detected, you can gain extra points by bluffing – ‘I just want to ask one quick question’; ‘I was actually in the queue here, but I just went to help an elderly gentlemen who was having breathing difficulties’– or, if that fails, by imposing your greater force of personality on the (usually native-English-speaking) wimp whose place you have taken: ‘No! You’re wrong! I definitely joined the queue ahead of you’.

If the competition seems to be lacking sufficient liveliness, then the referees (those ‘managing’ the queue – cashiers, receptionists, stewards and suchlike) are expected to stir things up, either by shouting at the competitors indiscriminately, or by siding with the most blatant queue-jumpers.

Bearing all that in mind, Bernice and I had very low expectations of today. Advised by the travel authorities to arrive at the airport four hours before our flight departure time, we arrived, as planned, and as per Bernice’s insistence, five hours before. Our first experience was slightly ominous. There is a vehicle checkpoint at the entrance to the airport, which is often busy. However, today there were longer queues than I have ever seen. Of course, we are at the peak of the Israeli summer holiday season, so this was not completely unexpected. At least the traffic was flowing fairly smoothly through the checkpoint, and we soon arrived at the terminal, where we were pleased to see that the queue did, at least, not start outside the building.

When we first arrived, our flight was, unsurprisingly, not yet displayed on the departures board. However, after only ten minutes, it did appear (which, of course, totally vindicated Bernice’s insistence on our arrival time). As a result, we were about tenth in the queue for check-in, and the process, from security questioning to checking in luggage and receiving boarding cards, took only 15 minutes.

The queue for screening hand luggage was very, very long, and that leg of the process took 40 minutes. However, everyone in the queue was very well behaved, probably because most were in a holiday mood. In addition, the queue was excellently stewarded, and all of the staff did all they could to make the process as efficient and calm as possible,

This stage of the queuing included a priority queue for the infirm; when Bernice shuffled over to ask whether, as a couple in their 70s, we qualified, she was politely told that the minimum age for qualification was 80. I wanted to ask the steward whether, if we were still queuing when I turned 80, we would then be allowed to upgrade to the priority queue, but Bernice advised against it.

The hand luggage check itself was the most efficient I have ever seen at any airport. My two titanium hips of course set off the metal detector, as they always do. However, since I had previously removed my watch, belt, wedding ring, keys, change purse, phone, glasses and kipa clips, we were able to complete the personal frisk swiftly. Passport control (biometric, with no human involvement) was almost instantaneous, and then there we were in the departure lounge.

We needed to select some kosher wine to last us the five shabbatot of our trip, and the queue for the duty free checkout was the least ruly of the whole day, with many passengers playing the supermarket trick of one traveller holding a place in the queue with a trolley containing one bottle of whisky, and the other traveller foraging for perfume, cigarettes, toys and chocolate, and scurrying back to the trolley every few minutes with another treasure.

However, by this stage, we knew that we would have plenty of time to kill, so we were no longer stressed. Indeed, we had time for a leisurely lunch at Aroma before sauntering to our gate for a final wait in Israel. The flight was called almost on time, and, apart from a couple of ugly arguments with passengers whose carry-on cases were clearly too large for the luggage bins, and who were required to hand over the bags to be stored in the hold, boarding passed without incident, and, as I say, we were soon airborne, and winging our way to Madrid.

‘And why Madrid?’ you ask. I’m glad you asked. Since we last flew, TAP has stopped flying from Israel, and now offers only a code-share on an El Al flight. El Al is the only carrier that still flies direct to Lisbon, and I suspect they would like to drop the flight, and concentrate on their more profitable North American routes and flights to more popular European destinations such as London. It will of course be easier for them to justify axing the route if they can demonstrate that it is not popular, and they have come up with a smart way to create a lack of demand. For a return flight to Lisbon, they now charge over $1200, which is as much as or a little more than they charge for some transatlantic destinations.

El Al flights to Madrid, however, are less than half that price, which is why we are flying to Madrid. The drive to the kids is almost an hour longer than from Lisbon, but it is, by all accounts, a very attractive drive. We decided to take advantage of this change of plan, and have a week in Madrid before crossing the border. This also means that I ought to feel more rested before the drive.

All of which means that next week I might have something to say about Spain’s treatment of the Jews – as a change from Portugal’s. We will, by then, have reached Portugal as well, so I can bring you up to date on Tslil and Micha’el and Tao. Who knows, I may even have some extra family news to share with you. But for now, I’m going to stop here and start worrying about whether our luggage is currently flying to Madrid as well.

Quick update on Monday evening. We, and our luggage, moved fairly swiftly and uneventfully through Madrid airport and arrived at our hotel in good time. Nothing more to report at time of writing, so the usual two photos this week: Tao enjoying a good story, and Raphael just enjoying.

This week’s offering is rather a gallimaufry, a mish-mash or confused jumble of various things. I am passing it off to you as a considered and polished thing, but you will probably already have deduced that, like many a hash or ragout, it basically consists of whatever scraps I was able to find lurking in the corners of the fridge of my mind. And none the worse for that, say I.

Incidentally, while no one seems too sure what the etymology of gallimaufry is, a best bet is that it is derived from two Old French verbs – galer and mafrer – meaning to have fun by eating well. As lifestyle choices go, that seems pretty sound to me.

So, we start today with a little housekeeping. Let me bring you up to date on the Velcro front. (I know some of you have been losing sleep over this.) Last week, quite by chance, Bernice was in our local mall and happened to bump into one of our friends – one of you who never bothers to read my blog but just jumps straight to the photos.

This friend was on her way to the cobbler. I thought the cobbler had closed his business, but it transpires that he has, in fact, simply relocated from a totally unsalubrious cubby-hole near the toilets to a rather grander broom-cupboard strategically close to the entrance from the car-park. The point of this story was that our friend was picking up a pair of sandals on which the cobbler had replaced the original Velcro.

You can imagine how my heart leapt when Bernice relayed this news to me. The very next day, I dropped off my sandals, and, within an hour, they had been given a new lease of life, for a price that makes an annual refreshing, should that prove necessary, a viable proposition. Of course, while this was yet another piece of evidence that we live in what may well be the best of all possible worlds, I was reminded that very evening that the world is still not perfect.

Bernice usually retires to bed before me, and is often asleep by the time I go upstairs. The tenacity of my new Velcro is such that I now have to go out of the bedroom to rip open my sandals, for fear of waking Bernice. Still, this is a small price to pay for regained podal security.

Our cobbler is, I believe, a Russian, and as I stood just outside his tiny workspace waiting to be served, his country of origin and the semi-ordered clutter of his workshop put me in mind of another Russian artisan in Maale Adumim.

For years, the city was served by a watch repairer – Gregory – whose tiny workshop was a heaving mass of watch straps, glasses, hands, winders, screws and clips. He was the living embodiment of the old joke about the widow who, going through her late husband’s suits, finds a receipt from the cobbler for a pair of shoes that her husband took in to be repaired two years previously. When she takes the receipt to the cobbler, he looks at it, then hands it back to her, saying: ‘They’ll be ready tomorrow.’

If Gregory told you your watch would be ready on Tuesday, then, when you came to his shop on Tuesday (or, indeed, Wednesday or Thursday), he would tell you that it would be ready in an hour, and it would be! However, he was blessed with such an impish sense of humour, and such irrepressible good spirits, that you could not get annoyed.

When he collapsed and died suddenly a few years ago, it seemed that everyone in Maale Adumim was in shock. Even those of us who knew him only from a handful of brief interactions over the counter of his shop felt that we had suffered a personal loss. His death was a reminder of how far-reaching an impact any individual can have in making the world a slightly better and more friendly place for everyone.

Speaking of etymologies (as we were, briefly, five paragraphs ago), my nephew Saul sent me a link this week to a New Statesman article about the ongoing work on the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. What made him think I might be interested in this I can’t imagine, but nevertheless….

Among the many revelations in the article that I found fascinating, one in particular took my fancy. You may be aware that the method by which the OED was first compiled was by the general public being invited to submit to the editors, for any word that they came across in their reading, a postcard-sized piece of paper giving the word, with a reference to the work in which it was found, and its perceived meaning. The public responded with enthusiasm, in their thousands, and, as a result of the millions* of submissions, the OED documents, for any word, the first recorded use, and the development in meaning of that word over time.

One such word is astirbroad, which appeared in the 1885 edition. It is an adverb meaning ‘stirring abroad’ or ‘moving from place to place’ and the citation given was from a book printed in 1643: ‘The grasshopper…singeth astirbroad; the cricket at home’. However, when an editor came to revise the entry in 2019, it was discovered that the word was actually a typo: the typesetter 370 years earlier had dropped the word ‘stir’ into the middle of the word ‘abroad’ in error. However, it is OED policy that once a word has appeared in the dictionary, it is never removed, even if the original entry was an error. And so, ‘astirbroad’ is a word, albeit an obsolete one, in English.

This OED policy seems to me eminently sensible, because English is littered with words that were originally errors. ‘An apron’, for example, is etymologically linked to a ‘napkin’. ‘Nap’ means ‘cloth’; a ‘napkin’ is a small cloth, and ‘an apron’ was originally ‘a napron’. Over time, the ‘n’ of ‘napron’ moved across to the word ‘a’. Once a mistake has been adopted by a critical mass of people – or immortalized in the OED – it cannot be ‘corrected’.

The policy also seems to me to be a powerful metaphor. It is never possible to take back a word said or an action carried out in ill-considered haste. We can strive to make amends for our mistakes, to apologise for our slights towards others, to declare our linguistic miscoinings obsolete, but we cannot remove them from the OED of life.

If that’s all a bit heavy for you, let me say that Bernice and I have now finished reading Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling. We had been warned that Bryson is rather curmudgeonly** in this book, but we in fact found him just as delighted by the eccentricities of life in the British Isles as he was in Notes from a Small Island. What resentment he expresses over changes for the worse in the decades since he first arrived in England we found that we whole-heartedly share.

It was, however, possibly a bad choice for reading aloud. As I am reading I, naturally, look ahead to the next line, to prepare for speaking it. With this particular book, glancing at the next line, on far too many occasions, left me helpless with laughter and unable to spit the words out without repeatedly corpsing. This meant that Bernice’s enjoyment of the book’s humour was, I fear, considerably less than mine, although she was almost completely understanding about my complete helplessness.

It was, we found, both a very funny and a very generous-spirited book, in its celebration of all that is best, and its mocking of all that is worst, in life in 21^st Century Britain. For our next read, we have selected The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, which has the virtue of being, at least in its first 50 pages, totally devoid of laugh-out-loud humour.

Meanwhile, in Portugal Tao is raising Micha’el’s head to new heights of tonsorial elegance, and in Zichron Raphael is working on raising his own head.

* This is not hyperbole. The submissions continued for decades, and peaked at over a thousand a day.

** I wanted to give you the etymology of ‘curmudgeonly’. I’d like to tell you that it is derived from Holland’s 1600 translation from Livy, in which he renders the Latin ‘frumentarius’ (corn-merchant) as ‘cornmudgin’; the word then acquired its present meaning since corn-merchants are notoriously discontented with how the vagaries of the weather (or, indeed, geopolitics) play havoc with the price and supply of corn. Unfortunately, the OED gives the first recorded use of the word as considerably earlier than 1600.

Let me try again. I’d like to say that ‘curmudgeonly’ is an anglicization of the French ‘coeur méchant’ meaning ‘’wicked heart’, but, sadly, this is now dismissed as a false folk etymology.

It transpires that the etymology of ‘curmudgeonly’ is unknown, which seems to me strangely unsatisfying. Still, as I already mentioned, this can be the best of all possible worlds while still not being perfect.

Just before we start, I wish to complain to the management. Raphael, Esther’s baby, has started teething in the last couple of weeks, and, while he is by no means in constant discomfort, and is still his usual sunny, smiling self a lot of the time (see below for photographic evidence), nevertheless, when it hurts, it clearly does hurt.

Now, it seems to me that, by this stage in human evolution, what is clearly a design wrinkle should have been sorted out by the manufacturer. Why has no Mark II model been launched? Where is the software upgrade? This late in the game we should be well over such teething troubles (Oh! Good heavens! These really are teething troubles.)

Having got that off my chest, I’ve checked back, and it is now, incredibly, over 10 months since I last posted about sport, so it seems to me high time to rectify that. My thoughts have, understandably, been turning to sport, what with a British triumph at the US Open Golf championship two weeks ago, a revitalized England’s hugely entertaining victory (indeed whitewash) over New Zealand in the cricket Test series, and Wimbledon tennis starting this week.

As it happens, those are the three sports I want to talk about today, because they have all been in the news recently and not, it must be said, in a very positive way. Let’s start with golf. Earlier this month, a new professional golf tour financed by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) held its inaugural tournament.

Saudi Arabia, through its PIF, has also been investing heavily in other sports – football, cycling, wrestling, boxing, Formula 1 – but it is fair to say that by and large these investments have benefitted the sportsmen and women while also benefitting, or at least not harming, their sports. However, the LIV golf tour is qualitatively different from all of these other initiatives. It seems to be threatening not just to shake up the PGA, but possibly to attempt to replace the PGA as the major force in world golf. Its only weapon, as always, is an obscene amount of money. Here’s what the PGA Tour’s commissioner had to say, when announcing a lucrative new series of PGA events:

“Let me be clear, I am not naive. If this is an arms race and if the only weapons here are dollar bills, the PGA Tour can’t compete. The PGA Tour, an American institution, can’t compete with a foreign monarchy that is spending billions of dollars in attempt to buy the game of golf. We welcome good, healthy competition. The LIV Saudi golf league is not that. It’s an irrational threat; one not concerned with the return on investment or true growth of the game.”

The Saudis have been tempting the world’s top golfers with a dual enticement. First is, of course, the money. This comes in two mouth-watering packages. There is the $255 million of prize money split between this year’s 8 LIV events (which, in itself, represents some $10 million more at each event than the PGA currently offers for its prestige events).

Then there is the appearance money. Dustin Johnson (world ranked 16) and Phil Mickelson (84) reportedly signed 4-year contracts worth $125 million each. Tiger Woods reportedly turned down a deal worth close to $1 billion. Even allowing for the fact that this would not quite be doubling Woods’ net worth, it is still a serious sum of money. However, it is certainly true that few, if any, of the players ‘bought’ by LIV actually needed the money.

The second enticement – and it is quite possible that for at least some of the players this was the more tempting – is the reduced workload. A professional golfer who plays the circuit spends a huge amount of his time on the road, living in hotel rooms and, if he makes the cut in a tournament, flying on to another destination on Monday. The entire LIV schedule is 8 tournaments in 2022, rising to 14 events in 2024. In addition, each event is played over 54 holes, or 3 rounds, as opposed to the 4 rounds of PGA tournaments.

Furthermore, each round has a shotgun start, meaning that each threesome starts its round at a different hole and all threesomes start at the same time. In PGA tournaments, players can find that they are drawn to tee off very early in the morning, or, conversely, that they finish their round only in the evening. In all, the LIV schedule is much less demanding than the PGA schedule.

Of course, the catch is that what these men are doing is, to a degree, selling their soul. They are putting themselves into situations where, in response to questions from the media about the Saudis’ human rights record, they say things like what Greg Norman said, speaking of the assassination of journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi: “Look, we’ve all made mistakes, and you just want to learn by those mistakes and how you can correct them going forward.”

Having watched some of the initial tournament (available free of charge on a YouTube channel, in stark contrast to the closely guarded screening rights for PGA tournaments), I can say that I found all of the tweaking and innovations detracted from my enjoyment. With all 48 players starting simultaneously, it was impossible to get a sense of either the course’s character or the flow of any individual player’s round.

The coverage, with a huge number of cameras, was disjointed, jumping all over the course all the time. With the (LIV-employed) commentators’ feverishly attempting to whip up enthusiasm, the whole event was a shameless self-promotion, and the televising of the PGA’s genuinely thrilling US Open tournament a couple of weeks later was the most eloquent rebuttal.

Turning now to cricket, I must admit that, despite initial reservations, I have been almost won over by the limited overs format. While nothing will ever replace the multi-faceted and labyrinthine unfolding over 5 days of a Test match, I can enjoy a 50-over international. T20 (20 overs) is a bit bang-crash for me, especially with the fireworks, cheerleaders and blasting music of the IPL, the Indian League.

Then, last year, England launched The Hundred (20% shorter than T20 and faster flowing) with its sacrilegious tampering with over lengths, and my blood boiled. Now, I have discovered that since 2017 there has been another new, even shorter, format: T10, with games lasting 90 minutes, or approximately 1/20^th of the length of a test match. This is ADHD cricket, and I want nothing to do with it!

I have also, over the years, had to suffer people tampering with tennis. The rot really started when the tie break was introduced, initially at the US Open in 1970. However, the latest development has nothing to do with tie breaks. The Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) rulebook states: “Players shall not receive coaching during a tournament match. Communications of any kind, audible or visible, between a player and a coach may be construed as coaching.”

The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) has, for the last couple of years, allowed coaching other than at Grand Slam tournaments, The issue came to the forefront at the 2018 U.S. Open, when Serena Williams’ coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, acknowledged trying to send her a signal during the final. The umpire penalised Williams, who reacted very strongly to the penalty. Also, in the Australian Open semi-final this year, Stefanos Tsitsipas was penalised for a coaching violation by his father, and failed to win a single game after the penalty.

The fact is that hand signals and other clandestine coaching are used all the time during Grand Slam tournaments, but are only very, very rarely penalised, and there is now a growing movement to legalise what is being practised anyway. It has now been announced that, at this year’s US Open, coaching will be allowed in both women’s and men’s matches. The announcement included the following statement: “In addition to ensuring consistency across the sport for the benefit of players and fans, the trial aims to create additional points of intrigue and insight to enhance the fan experience”.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I’m opposed, for a couple of reasons. First, this will not ensure consistency. Top players travel with a permanent coach. Players lower down the pecking order cannot afford that luxury. However, that is not my major objection. There is something dramatic about seeing a player, between games, sitting at the umpire’s chair, wrestling alone with his or her inner demons.

I can still remember Arthur Ashe, in the 1975 Wimbledon final, meditating at his chair, eyes closed, head back, and beating brash, extrovert, wonderful Jimmy Connors with his deliberate, ‘safe’, play, taking the pace off the ball. He certainly did not need any coach.

Other players read notes for inspiration (‘Watch the ball.’ ‘Run down every ball.’ ‘Have fun.’) or cut themselves off from the distractions of the crowd by covering their head with their towel. Pete Sampras, in his final Wimbledon final, read a letter from his wife; Jim Courier once read a novel! I think that watching the isolated player is all the intrigue and insight I need to enhance my fan experience, thank you very much!

And now, as promised, a smiling Raphael, who seems blissfully unaware that he will probably grow up in a world where tennis matches consist of 5 sudden death points, cricket matches involve one ball per batsman per innings, and golfers play just one hole, for $10 million per shot. I also offer you a rather more serious Tao, who may be starting to realise how sport is, tweak by needless tweak, changing for the worse.

This last week, our younger grandson turned three months. It scarcely seems credible. Heavens, I can remember when he was only a day old, and now here he is, already a quarter of the way to his first birthday.

Meanwhile, we are only four weeks away from seeing our older grandson (three years and three months this last week) and, please God, his about-to-be baby brother, in Portugal. All of our arrangements and bookings are more or less in place, and it is now only a question of holding our breath and waiting to see whether we are prevented from flying by a new, improved, wave of COVID-19, or the inflammatory heatwave that is currently raging through Spain, or the escalating industrial action by El Al pilots, or Russian-invasion-induced aircraft fuel shortage, or possibly abduction by alien lizards or the earth being hit by a giant meteor.

I actually went onto Google Maps this morning to check whether forest fires have closed any of our intended driving route from Madrid to Penamacor. I was, to be fair, motivated largely by curiosity as to where exactly the affected region is in Spain; it seems to be, reassuringly, a hundred or more miles north-west of Madrid. Bernice, on the other hand, is spending an unhealthy amount of time following the vagaries of the industrial dispute between El Al management and pilots. I’m honestly not sure what state we will be in after another three weeks of this obsessive behaviour.

The only comfort I can currently take from the whole sorry state of the world is that, if our trip were to be cancelled, we would not then have to shlep from the airport two cases weighing, at current projections, somewhere between 22.7 and 23.0 kg each, two pieces of hand luggage weighing probably around 12 kg each, and two coats whose pockets will doubtless be filled with all sorts of additional ballast.

There will, eventually, I fear, come a time when we will no longer be physically capable of lifting this luggage over the lip of the rental car boot, and we will then, presumably, have to do a lot more shopping in Portugal and shipping from Israel, or possibly look into renting a sled with a much lower cargo-bed than a car, and, rather appropriately, driven by a team of reindeer.

But to get back to the grandsons. The wonderful thing about going up to Zichron every week to spend the day with Esther and Raphael is that, at his age, every week we see very obvious developments. Some, to be honest, are more welcome than others. This week we found Raphael sucking his fist and drooling, so it seems that teething (or, perhaps more accurately, pre-teething) has started.

On the other hand, every week he seems to have added at least one more sound to his vocal repertoire; the stories he tells us grow more interesting every time. We also noticed this week that he is experimenting with variations of intonation. Clearly, living in a house where music is an almost constant presence is already influencing him.

Watching this week-by-week miracle of how much Raphael is absorbing so quickly, and with such apparent ease, I am constantly struck by the fact that I seem to have slept through my own children’s babyhood. Bernice has photographic recall of this period; she can instantly list illnesses, behavioural differences between the kids, early-manifested likes and dislikes, sleeping and feeding patterns, favourite toys and songs.

I, on the other hand, can state with absolute certainty that Esther was born first, and in Wales, whereas Micha’el was born next, and in Israel. Beyond that, I remember how verbal Esther was from a young age, and how Micha’el did not speak until very late. (At the time, we didn’t realise what halcyon days they were; once he started, he didn’t stop…and still hasn’t.)

And that’s about it. I know that Bernice was home with the kids 24/7, and I was out hunting sabre-toothed tigers and waiting in line in Government offices, but nevertheless….So, I’m trying to make up for it with the grandchildren. I already know that Tao was born first and…

This week’s WhatsApp video call with Tao was interesting. (It’s interesting every week, of course, but…) We have settled into a routine: we start by chatting about what he has been doing or plans to do. In a very short time, Tao tires of this and asks whether he can have a story. Bernice has always pre-selected four books: typically three that he knows and one new one.

The rules allow Tao to choose what order he wants the books in. Until now, he has always chosen first the books he knows. Bernice and I then read a book each, in turn. We then have a musical intermission, where we sing a song together; this is followed by the other two stories and, if we are lucky, a catch-up chat with Micha’el and/or Tslil.

This week, Tao uncharacteristically chose to start with a book he did not know: John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat. This happens to be a great favourite of ours, although it is rather darker than most. It deals with selfish and selfless love, with John Brown, a dog, being initially unwilling to share his owner with the cat that appears outside the window, but eventually recognizing how much Rose wants to adopt the cat, and letting the cat in. It is an uncluttered story, told in simple, strong prose, with the message left implicit, and the book is beautifully illustrated. I would have judged it to be a little old for Tao, but was very happy to read it.

When we had finished, to our astonishment, and for the first time ever, Tao asked whether we could read it again. (This was actually just as well because, the first time, we had inadvertently turned over two pages at once, and missed out one page.) I find myself wondering what, in the book, spoke to him so strongly that he wanted to hear it again immediately. Whatever it was, it is further evidence of his love for books, and it makes my heart leap.

Speaking of leaping, after one more book we took our usual mid-call break for a song, which in this case was about swimming. Rather than singing, Tao insisted on spreading a sheet out on the floor as a swimming pool and jumping from the sofa into the pool…repeatedly. Shortly after that, the call rather fell apart, and we never got to read the other two books.

While reading on WhatsApp is wonderful, it is rather artificial, particularly since our technique is for the reader to sit behind the phone while the page-turner sits in front of the phone and shows Tao the pages. This of course means that the reader is getting no immediate feedback of Tao’s engagement or otherwise with the story. I simply can’t wait until we can read with Tao in the traditional fashion, with him sitting on my lap and instantly conveying every squirm of delight or moment of frozen rapt attention.

Meanwhile, there is a broad consensus in the family that, whereas both of the boys have inherited my nose, their smile is, in each case, entirely their own.

You may remember…. Who am I kidding? You almost certainly won’t remember that last week’s post dealt with the fact that, to quote a wise man (me) ‘what increasingly passes for progress these days… is actually nothing other than sales generation.’ Vance Packard, over 60 years ago, coined the term ‘planned obsolescence’ to describe what was even then a disturbing trend.

As I was pondering what to write about this week, it struck me that there was at least one more excellent example of one step forward, two steps back that I had originally planned to discuss, but had eventually left out, and, also, that there were a couple of follow-ups to last week’s post that I could easily bring up.

It then occurred to me that if, in a constant search for a new topic, I discarded a perfectly good topic from last week that still had lots of wear in it, I would be committing the same offence as the plastic packagers of batteries and the manufacturers of Velcro-fastened sandals.

So, in the interests of saving the planet, and to avoid appearing a hypocrite, I offer you a recycling of last week’s post.

First, let’s revisit the sandals. Lots to report here. I adopted the suggestion of my friend Joe in a comment he made last week, that I comb the Velcro to remove the fluff. Sadly, my last comb was sent for recycling decades ago. However, we still have, for no good reason, a nit comb, and so I have been dutifully combing my sandals. (Fortunately, I have a spare couple of minutes in the morning that I don’t need to spend combing my hair.) I must say, the Velcro is now sticking better, and it is a comfort to know that my feet will no longer face the threat of being attacked by lice. Thank you, Joe!

However, this feels like a short-term solution, and so on Sunday, as part of an exhaustive and exhausting day’s shopping in Jerusalem, I decided to pop into a long-established family shoestore in the city centre, to ask whether they had any sandals with a buckled heel-strap.

Of course, just before walking in I had to consult Google Translate to discover that the Hebrew for a buckle is ‘avzam’. Armed with this nugget, I walked in, and the first person I saw was, I assumed, a little boy whose mother had brought him in because he had grown out of his sandals.

I had to revise this assumption when he asked whether he could help me. I asked my buckle question, wondering whether he would even know what a buckle was. I was smugly gratified to note that he couldn’t answer my question, and had to ask the owner, who advised him to show me the Shakespeare model from the summer catalogue.

While I was trying to think of marketing puns for a Shakespeare sandal (I couldn’t come up with anything better than Two Gentlemen of Veruca, which can’t be easy to put a positive spin on), the infant found the catalogue and showed me the sandal, which did, indeed, sport a fine buckle. Before even bothering to ask to try it on, I asked the price. On discovering it was 450 shekels, I feigned a sneezing attack and beat a hasty retreat.

If past experience is anything to go by, I will hunt unsuccessfully elsewhere for a few weeks and then make my way back, wearing a mask this time so as not to be recognized, try them on, fall in love with them and buy them. (Oh! An-toenail and Cleopatra.)

And so to yet another backwards advance. Imagine, for a moment, that you have recently bought a new car. After a few weeks, when the weather suddenly gets much hotter, you decide you should really check the air pressure. So, when you are next filling up, you drive on to the air-pump, tooty down (that’s another wonderful Welsh word, particularly favoured in South Wales, that rhymes with ‘footy’ rather than ‘booty’, and that describes squatting, while sounding much more affectionate and less ugly than ‘squat’.)

You tooty down, as I said, by the front passenger tyre and search for the air valve. After a minute of fruitless searching, you decide to move to the rear passenger tyre, so you painfully pull yourself up by the door handle, wondering how South Wales miners were able to tooty down effortlessly for hours on end, well into their 70s) but on the rear tyre, as well, there is no air valve to be seen. Eventually, you call over an attendant, and, rather embarrassedly, explain your predicament. ‘I can’t seem to find the air valves.’ He looks at you as at a very young child, and calmly explains: ‘That’s because there aren’t any.’

‘What do you mean?’
‘There aren’t any air valves.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the tyres on this car don’t have them.’
‘But then, how can I check the tyre pressure?’
‘You can’t.’
‘So how do I know if the tyre needs more air?’
‘The tyre goes flat.’
‘Anod how do I top up the pressure then.’
‘You can’t.’
‘So what do I do then? I can’t drive on a flat tyre.’
‘You buy a new tyre.’

I realise that this sounds completely surreal. I couldn’t really believe it myself as I was typing it just now. But think for a minute. This is exactly the stunt that the manufacturers have pulled on us, except they have pulled it not with tyres but with batteries.

Decades ago, you always carried in your boot three topping-up liquids: a bottle of water for the cooling system, a can of engine oil, and a bottle of distilled water, bought from the garage for a few pence, for topping up the cells of the battery. Dutifully unscrewing the cap of each of the six cells and carefully topping each one up made even me feel like a bona fide car mechanic. At some point, the six caps were replaced by a single bar with the six caps affixed, and removing and replacing the caps became a simpler task.

And then, suddenly, batteries were sold that had no removable caps, and we discovered that we were no longer able to top them up. The reason, we were told, was because the battery no longer required topping up; it would run, we were encouraged to believe, forever.

Except, of course, it doesn’t. Instead, it waits for the first wet November evening when you are 100 kilometres from home on an isolated and unlit stretch of the Jordan Valley road, and, if you are foolish enough to stop the car to hop out for a bathroom break, you find that the car won’t start again. Of course, the battery cannot be repaired. It is a sealed unit. You have to throw it away and buy a new one (which comes in considerably more expensive than a few bottles of distilled water, let me tell you).

Is there any logic in this, other than maximizing battery sales. And if that is the only logic, how long do you really think it will be before you are sold your first no-maintenance tyre, which never loses air,…until it does? Exactly.

(Ah! Awl’s Well that Ends Well and The Taming of the Shoe.)

I’ve just discovered another benefit of recycling last week’s topic. I already have a new topic for next week! Watch this space.

Finally, in the spirit of this week’s post, I am tempted to reprint last week’s photos of our two grandsons, but I couldn’t do that to you. So, instead, here are two brand-new holiday snaps (from two separate holidays).

I don’t know about you, but I seem to have spent a lot of my life repeating the mantra: Life’s too short. Whether it is washing up as you go along, or cleaning out the boot of the car, or staying in touch with people I used to be friendly with but drifted away from (none of whom, I rush to add, are reading this blog), I have always been very ready to conclude that life’s too short to bother with that; I have far more important things to do…such as sorting my blue socks from my black, or completing today’s Quordle.

Numbered in recent decades among the things I believed life was too short for was foot care. I can offer two arguments in my defence. First, the concept that my feet needed taking care of was novel to me: for my first four or five decades, my feet seemed perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. They didn’t bother me, and so I saw no reason to bother them, Second, just at the time that my feet started to become an eyesore, I was seeing less and less of them, because they seldom peeked out from under the cover of my corporation. When I did start to notice them, the simple solution was to wear closed-toed sandals, and spare the world’s sensibilities.

Then, a couple of years ago, Bernice started expressing a reluctance to share a bed with my feet, and I decided to give them a long, hard look, I found that I didn’t actually want to share a bed with them either, and so, overcoming a certain Neanderthal instinct that footcare was a sure sign of a testosterone deficiency, I booked myself in for a pedicure. Discovering that what I wanted was called a medical pedicure offered me a comforting figleaf.

Over the following months, my life was transformed. My chiropodist was able to assure me that her footstool was constantly occupied by the deformed toes of countless men of a certain age dragged to her treatment room by their disgusted wives. Within a short time, I was able to see genuine improvement in the condition of my feet. As a bonus, once I had managed to more or less control the extreme ticklishness of my tootsies, I found the pampering care very soothing.

After many months, the condition of my feet was so improved that I felt able to once again unveil my toes to a waiting world, and so I treated myself to a decent pair of open-toed sandals. Since I live in sandals for about eight months of the year, I looked for a sturdy and well-made pair. In one of our local shops, I found just what I was looking for. The shop manager – a man almost my age – was wearing an identical pair and told me how reliable, hard-wearing and comfortable they were. I was convinced, and, always a good sign, decided to go home wearing my new sandals, and carrying my old, closed-toed ones.

For the rest of that season, I scarcely took the sandals off, and I couldn’t wait to start wearing them again this spring. After a long, hard spring, summer, autumn, they were showing little sign of wear: the soles are hardly worn, and the beige leather has resisted scuffs reasonably well. So, as soon as the season turned, I resumed wearing them, as my toes revelled in their newly regained freedom.

However – and you surely knew there was going to be a ‘however’ – after I had worn them for a couple of days, I discovered that the Velcro grip that secures the heel-strap started working loose. I would be striding down the street, only to discover that one sandal was flip-flopping off my foot. No matter how firmly I clamped the Velcro tightly closed again, it would keep working loose. When I complained to Bernice, she pointed out that this always happens with Velcro after a time. The hooks of the one piece of Velcro keep latching onto random little pieces of loopy fluff floating around, leaving insufficient hooks free to actually latch onto the loopy piece of Velcro. I bowed to her greater experience, reflecting, as it did, the hard-won world-weary wisdom of a woman who spent much of the last decades of her working life refastening the Velcro straps of twenty-five four-year-olds’ sandals.

As yet unperturbed, I revisited our local shoe-shops, in search of a pair of sandals with a heel-buckle. What I quickly discovered is that there ain’t no such thing. In the name of progress, the labour-saving, instant-close, one-handed-fasten Velcro strip is the only option available.

I am old enough to remember the period when Velcro first took off commercially, which was not until just after the patent taken out by George de Mestral in 1958 expired in 1978. It was in 1941 that he had first been intrigued by the way that burrs stuck to the coat of his dog and to the fabric of his own clothes, and, under the microscope, seen how the hooks of the burr attached to the loops in the fabric. But before he could produce Velcro commercially, he first had to develop a new machine to duplicate those loops and hooks.

The fashion industry, to de Mestral’s disappointment, spurned the new product as bulky and ugly, and the first commercial application of note was in astronauts’ clothing, Velcro being so much easier to fasten and unfasten than buttons or zips when wearing thick gloves. Gradually, other non-clothing applications were discovered, such as airline-seat headrest anti-macassars. In 1984, demonstrating its properties was still considered enough of a novelty to be legitimate content for The David Letterman Show. It was around this time that manufacturers of both children’s clothing and toys and games started using Velcro more widely.

And now, at least in my neck of the woods, Velcro has beaten out the opposition in men’s sandals, despite the fact that it breaks down after a year, and leaves you with no option but to buy a new pair of sandals. You can’t clean the fluff off the Velcro. You can’t even take your sandals to a little, old, balding shoe-repairer, with an off-white full-length apron, a workshop that smells of leather and glue, a beautifully shaped and aged wooden last, a mouthful of tacks, a delicate hammer and a pair of half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose.

It strikes me that this is just one example of what increasingly passes for progress these days, when it is actually nothing other than sales generation. We bought a new ceiling fan with integral light fitment for our salon a while ago. After a few days, we decided that we really needed a stronger light, and so I removed the glass shade to check what kind of fixture the bulb needed to be. I discovered, to my horror, that, rather than a bulb, the light was provided by an LED unit. This unit resembled a small section of the console of Apollo 11, and so, when we next needed an electrician, we also asked him to take a look at the ceiling fan, and tell us what we needed to buy. He removed the shade, took one look, and informed us that it was a sealed unit that could not be replaced. So, we decided to live with subdued lighting. Fortunately, the ceiling fan itself is both elegant and efficient.

When, a few weeks later, the LED unit first faded and then, after a couple of days of grudging intermittent illumination, finally died, we realized we would have to return the entire unit to the shop to be exchanged under guarantee. The wiring, of course, was far from straightforward and I am no longer as devil-may-care as I was when, near the start of our married life, I snipped through a live wire with pliers and sent myself recoiling across the room. So, replacing the unit would inevitably involve paying an electrician to remove the unit (250 shekels), driving an hour to Rehovot (where, for reasons that I won’t go into here, I bought it in the first place), arguing with the store (‘You’ve been using this light, haven’t you!’), eventually, if I was lucky, getting a replacement, driving an hour back home (50 shekels in petrol for the round trip), paying an electrician to refit the unit (250 shekels), and expecting to have to repeat the whole sorry procedure every few months thereafter.

In the end, we just went to IKEA and bought two standard lamps (75 shekels each). We now have the ability to vary the room lighting almost infinitely (with each lamp having an upward general light and an adjustable reading spot-lamp); I can have enough light to read without Bernice feeling that she has stumbled into a marijuana greenhouse. In addition, we have saved ourselves 400 shekels, and a trip to Rehovot. Best of all, these lamps use light bulbs, which can be replaced even by me at minimal risk of electrocution,

I could go on, and talk about batteries, which used to be sold individually, and now come in ‘handy’ packs of ten, or, if you are really lucky, five, which means that you can attempt to open the pack without ripping it, fail, because the handy, improved, see-through plastic cannot be opened cleanly, take out the one battery you need, discover that the pack is not resealable, and put it in the kitchen drawer where two batteries will roll out of the unresealable pack and hide until next Pesach in the back left-hand corner of the drawer, one of the other batteries will corrode in the condensation of the kitchen, and the last one will frustratingly turn out to be an AA when you next need an AAA, or, for the sake of variety, an AAA when you next need an AA.

Clearly, ‘handy’ is a word the meaning of which has changed in the last few decades.

However, there are still some things that come in small, and even not so small, packages, and that are the very best.