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.

So the election results are well and truly in, and now we in Israel wait with bated breath to discover what Macchiavellian schemes Bibi is planning to ensure that he ends up with a workable majority coalition in which none of his coalition partners have any real power and he is able to advance his own private agenda unimpeded. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, Bernice and I wait with bated breath to discover whether Micha’el and family will arrive in Israel safe and sound this week. Watch another bit of this space.

All of which means that I am free this week to write about something of no consequence whatsoever. The only trouble is that my head is full of speculation about the makeup of the coalition and the allocation of the various government ministries. At the same time, it is full of wondering and worrying about the myriad things that could go wrong in Portugal and prevent the family arriving. All of that leaves me with very little mental capacity for thinking about a light and trivial topic for this week’s post. Those of you who have seen me over the last few days may have found me unusually preoccupied, The fact is that in four days of hard thinking I have drawn a complete blank.

Well, not exactly a complete blank: I did toy briefly with the idea of writing about coincidence, which I believe I have touched on before. The fact is that I have encountered two coincidences in the last two days – which you must admit is a bit of a coincidence. Did you know that Richard Owen coined the word ‘dinosaur’ in 1841? It means ‘terrible lizard’, which is a pity, becaue dinosaurs, we now know, were not related to lizards, but there you go. I learnt about Owen in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I was reading over Shabbat.

A couple of hours later, I was reading the latest edition of the Jewish Review of Books.(Technically, this is not the latest edition, but, in fact, the Spring 2022 edition; however, since the magazine takes time to reach my mailbox from the States by snail mail, and since I am habitually one edition behind in my reading, it’s my latest edition.) Anyway, in this, of all unlikely periodicals, I read a reference to the fact that Richard Owen coined the term ‘dinosaur’, which, as you are aware, I knew already.

Then, this afternoon, I was due to call my brother for our weekly chat. So as not to disturtb Bernice, Esther and the sleeping Raphael, and since the weather was a delightful 25^o, I went out into Esther and Maayan’s garden. Finding a hammock in the shade of their treehouse, I eased myself onto it, displaying an agility I was not at all sure I still possessed, and settled down for a relaxing chat. (Unfortunately, when it came to dismounting from the hammock 30 minutes later, much of that agility seemed to have deserted me – but that’s a different story.) Life, at this point, felt pretty good. When I got through to Martin, he told me that his flowerbeds were starting to form pools of water after a night and day of ceaseless rain. At that point, I decided it would be kindest not to mention my precise, almost idyllic, location.

Now, I reckon I lie in a hammock, on average, once every, oooh, seventy years. So I was more than a little surprised when Martin, whose younger son’s birthday it was that day, described the card they had sent him; it apparently featured a man relaxing in a hammock. Not exactly The Twilight Zone, I know, but nevertheless….

However, in the end I decided that I had no idea what to make of these coincidences: what lessons to draw from them; what light they shed on the nature of human existence. So, I’ll leave them to one side and talk instead about nuts naked and dressed.

It seems to me that over the years it has become more difficult to find nuts (both tree-nuts and peanuts) sold in their shells. Before we go any further, let me clarify my terms. I will use the adjective ‘shelled’ to mean ‘having been shelled’, in other words ‘with their shells removed’. I will, similarly (by which of course I mean ‘oppositely’) use the term ‘unshelled’ to mean ‘having not been shelled’ in other words ‘still in their shells’. I do realise that one could make a strong case for the opposite meaning: ‘shelled’ could be used to mean ‘having a shell’ (as in ‘a shelled crab’) and ‘unshelled’ to mean ‘not having a shell’. It has long struck me as one of the minor delights of English that it boasts a number of such terms that lend themselves so delightfully to ambiguity.

As I was saying, it has become more difficult to find unshelled nuts. I suspect this is a question of catering to the perceived preference of the consumer. Well, let me tell you, the producers and retailers have misperceived the preference of this particular consumer. As far as I am concerned, shelling nuts is not only one of life’s hitherto unsung pleasures; it also has health and economic benefits. Anyone who has to crack a walnut, hazelnut or brazil before eating it is guaranteed to end up eating fewer nuts, which both saves money and, since nuts are criminally moreish, guards against over-indulgence.

However, these indirect benefits are not, for me, the main point. The simple fact is that I find shelling nuts an extraordinarily satisfying experience. First, there is the protracted search for the elusive perfect nutcracker. In my callow youth, I was seduced by a variety of gadgets, most notably the wooden straight-sided small bowl, with a threaded wooden bolt running across its centre. You placed a nut between the bolt and side of the bowl, then turned the bolt by means of a wooden handle outside the bowl.

On paper, this device ticks lots of boxes. It is a simple, basic technology, elegantly packaged in natural material, Unfortunately, in too short a time, it proved to be not a device for cracking nuts, but a device to be cracked by nuts. Eventually, the cracker met a nut tougher than itself, and it was the side of the bowl that cracked under the pressure, and not the nut.

Even before then, this nutcracker proved unsatsfactory. The mechanism placed too much machinery beween the operator’s hand and the nutshell. I found that all sensitivity was lost and it was extremely difficult to move beyond the point of the first crack in the shell without reaching the point of rupturing the shell and crushing the nut.

The wisdom of age has taught me that nothing can match the sensitivity, strength and simplicity of the pincer design. With a good nutcracker of this kind, I can control the amount of pressure, and release it in an instant, enabling me to repeatedly crack the shell in several places and allowing me eventually to lift the pieces of shell away, leaving a perfect, whole, unblemished nut.

Such is my love of the pursuit of the perfect shelling that I am happy to spend a couple of hours shelling nuts for the whole family. If you share my enthusiasm for eating nuts, but get no pleasure from shelling them, I am available for small intimate gatherings as a service to friends. (Oranges, pomelos and mangoes also peeled.)

Meanwhile, as of the time of writing, the kids in Portugal have reached Lisbon, where they are staying overnight prior to their flight.

P.S. The kids took off a bit late, and landed a bit early, and arrived at our doorstep, weary but well. The parents, who haven’t slept since Heaven knows when, have both crashed, which means Bernice and I have full unmonitored access. Excuse me while I just turn a cartwheel or two in relief and joy.

P.P.S. Bibi’s machinations have begun, but not ended. Wiser heads than mine have counselled waiting and seeing, and accepting that, part of the social contract when you live in a democracy is that you have to accept that the people decide. I may reflect more on this later…or I may not, if something more urgent comes up, such as a revolutionary new method of shelling nuts, for example.

As Bernice set off for coffee with a friend last week, I found myself marvelling, not for the first time, that she is able to maintain so many friendships, and that she is happy to invest time and effort in nurturing them. I reckon that life is considerably simpler if you can count your friends on the fingers of one hand…and that preferably a hand belonging to a sloth.

When I first thought of a subject for today’s post, I initially rejected it, for the obvious reason, but then realised that I should embrace it, for the same reason: after I publish it, and you read it, I will probably lose a number of friends. Besides, I find that I really cannot bring myself to write about anything else on this of all days, and so, I present… my take on the Israeli general election (for which the polls opened less than two hours before the publication time of this post).

It goes without saying that this is just my personal view: a view, I must add, that is offered with the caveat that I have never taken as much interest in politics, or involved myself in the political life of the country, as a responsible citizen living in a democracy should. Quite apart from any disagreement you may have with my beliefs or conclusions, you may well take issue with my representation of the facts.

Please feel free to respond – although I hope that we can keep any discussion in the Comments way above the gutter level of the Comments usually offered on political issues in the Times of London. Please also bear in mind that by the time you give me the benefit of your political wisdom, I will already have cast my vote, and I may not have another opportunity to exercise that right for, oooh, maybe as much as six months!

Just a very quick background for anyone not overly familiar with the Israeli system. It is a nationwide closed-list proportional representation system, with, this time round, 20 parties submitting lists of candidates to compete for the 120 seats. Any party (or alliance of parties) that gains less than 3.25% of the vote (representing, in effect, 4 members) sends no members to the Knesset.

Percentage turnout remained in the high 70s until 2003. Over the last four elections (held over a period of less than three years!), turnout averaged just under 70%. None of these elections produced a result that allowed a long-term viable coalition government to be formed. Now read on.

How does one (or, rather, how do I) pick a winner from a field of 20 parties? This is a multi-step process. The first three steps are, for me, always the same, regardless of the specific parties running in any given election.

Step 1: Eliminate the parties that are too far out there for me to relate to. (Ed. Note: It’s my process, and I get to decide what constitutes too far out there – for me.) This time round, these include Fiery Youth, a party led by a 20-year-old protest candidate known for TikTok videos.

Step 2: Eliminate the parties that I judge will not reach the electoral threshold. I know that this is a difficult step to defend as set policy:  if everybody who didn’t vote for Party X because they didn’t think it would reach the threshold voted for Party X, it would reach the threshold. This step is made easier for me because I have yet to encounter a party that I do not think will reach the threshold and whose policies I very closely and strongly identify with.

Step 3: Eliminate the parties that I believe represent exclusively a specific consistuency, at the expense of other constituencies, and whose constituency I do not consider myself a core member of.

These three steps, this time round, eliminated 13 of the parties. (You might want to amuse yourself by guessing which parties those are.) The remaining steps address the particular circumstances of this specific election.

For me, the blight over this election, as he was over the previous four, is Bibi. This time around, there are two clear issues around Bibi. The first is that I believe, in the current political, security, social and economic situation, the healthiest way forward for the country would be as broad a coalition of parties as possible. The last year has shown that this is not an impossible dream, although, given the slenderness of the last coalition’s majority, and the size of some MK’s egos, the last government proved unsustainable in the long term.

Unfortunately, there is no chance of a coalition including all of the largest parties because none of the centre-left and left parties will contemplate joining a coalition with a Likud party led by Bibi. Since Bibi has spent his entire time at the helm of Likud stifling any potential successor, the party has no charismatic candidate for successor, and all of those in positions of influence in the party are Bibi yes-men (and yes-women).

If the election results in a government coalition led by right-wing Likud and including (as it would) the extreme right-wing Religious Zionism alliance led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, then it seems clear that Bibi will further his personal agenda. The first item on that agenda is to make the criminal case against him go away, by passing legislation outlawing such cases against a sitting Prime Minister. The second, and, in my eyes, even more worrying, item is to increase executive power, by passing legislation such that if the Supreme Court blocks any Government legislation, the Knesset will have the power to ‘reject’ the Supreme Court’s decision by a simple majority of 61 votes. That seems to me a move that would seriously endanger Israel’s democracy, by removing one of the pillars of the principle of checks and balances.

On a personal note, Esther and her wife, Maayan, are currently jumping through the many, many bureaucratic hoops set by the Government to enable Maayan to be formally recognised as the adoptive parent of Raphael, to whom Esther gave birth seven months ago. Last week, they were warned by their lawyer that, if a right-wing coalition is formed, the process is liable to become even more difficult, protracted, unsympathetic and obstuctionist. The religious right-wing parties’ hatred of the LGBTQ community is no secret.

All of which explains why I will not be voting for Likud or Religious Zionism.

For those of you who are still reading, the next step is a bit painful. At one point, I greatly admired centre-right Ayelet Shaked, for her work as Justice Minister. However, she seems to have demonstrated a lack of the political awareness that a leader needs, and to have become very leaden in the last months. She has, I’m afraid, lost my confidence.

This leaves five parties, which can be described broadly as left and centre. As will be clear, if I don’t want a Likud-led coalition, the only alternative is a centrist-Yesh-Atid-led coalition. It is possible to argue long into the night as to where I should place my vote for it to be most effective in ensuring the outcome I want. Until I few days ago, I considered voting for centrist National Unity, believing (or perhaps only hoping) that, if Benny Gantz flipped again and joined a right-wing coalition, he would be a moderating force within that coalition. This belief probably represents the triumph of optimism over experience.

In the end, however, I decided to keep things simple. If I want Yair Lapid to have as strong a coalition as possible, then the best foundation to that is to have a Yesh Atid that is as strong as possible. I honestly believe that, in the Israel of 2022, the most pressing problems that Israel faces, at home and abroad, can best be addressed by a left-leaning, centrist, broad-based Government.

As Sherlock Holmes almost said: ‘When you have eliminated all which is unacceptable, then whatever remains, however unexpected, must be the best solution.’

If, against all odds, that is what I wake up to on Wednesday morning, then perhaps it will be followed fairly soon by the Likud Knesset rank and file finally showing some backbone and forcing Bibi to retire. I do, of course, acknowledge that a far more likely outcome is a right-wing coalition led by Bibi (my personal bet is a coalition bloc of 63 members), and then I do fear for the country’s short-term future. This, I suppose, means that, astonishingly, a hung Knesset and the prospect of another election in a few months doesn’t look like the worst result.

As I pointed out to someone last week, every time we have an indecisive election result, it at least pushes us a little closer to deciding that the electoral system itself needs to be revised, which may be the only long-term path out of this chronic stalemate. The discussion as to what form that revision should take will have to wait for another time.

To the four of you still reading, I thank you for your perseverance, and promise you (God willing) something considerably more upbeat next week!

Meanwhile, we can at least end on a positive note. Raphael can’t decide where to put his cross, but he has at least put down lots of noughts.

And so we leave the frenetic holiday season and settle into the long haul until Chanukah. (Actually, I’ve just checked on the calendar, and that unbelievably long stretch of nothing appears to be just nine weeks! I’m sure it was longer in my youth.)

One of the last flourishes of the festival season on Shmini Atzeret/Simchat Torah is the prayer for rain. Although fairly short, this prayer is charged with significance. As an indication of the seriousness with which we are asking for God’s favourable judgement regarding rain for the coming year, the chazzan leading the prayer wears a kittel, the white cotton or linen robe worn on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur,

In a world where few of us are farmers, it is easy to underestimate the significance of rain, in the appropriate season and in the appropriate quantities, for an agricultural society. However, in 2022, when we are being warned that events in the Ukraine may lead to a world grain shortage, the potential impact of crop failure may soon be brought home to us.

The immediate effect of saying the prayer for rain is that we change the relevant one-line addition to the amida prayer that we say three times daily from ‘He causes the dew to fall’ to ‘He makes the wind blow and the rain fall’. You might expect that a reasonably intelligent human being would be able to make this switch without too much difficulty. However, the cumulative effect of reciting the summer formula three times daily, day in, day out, for the previous six months, embarrassingly often means that people make a mistake.

As the days go on, the mistakes (one hopes) become rarer; there is usually a point where you switch from being fairly sure you used the wrong formula to being completely unsure which formula you used (probably the most humiliating state), and then, some time later, being fairly confident you used the right formula. Of course, if one always recited the Amida with full mindfulness and intent, and if one always read every word from the prayer book, one would be much less likely to slip, but…

(Ed Note: Perceptive readers will have realised that, in the previous paragraphs, ‘people’, ‘you’ and ”one’ are all euphemisms for ‘me’, ‘myself’ and ‘I’.)

The change in our prayers is utterly dependable. However, in Israel, the change in the weather is considerably less so. This year has been, in this sense, immensely satisfying. In the days following Simchat Torah, we have been blessed – even in edge-of-the-desert Maale Adumim – with rain. Those of us who were sufficiently on the ball to take down our sukka (or at least the decorations) soon after the festival managed to beat the rain, at least here, which made me, for one, feel very smug.

This is, incidentally, quite separate from the smugness I feel because I don’t actually have anything much in the way of a sukka to take down. Our sukka is defined by three sturdy and permanent walls and our pergola roof. Decorations are about all I have to put up and take down, apart from a straightforward symbolic removal and immediate replacement of a few pergola slats to represent placing the schach (roof covering.

The initial rain was a drop or two, nothing more. Then, on Thursday evening, just as Bernice and I were finishing supper outside in our backyard, I felt a drop of rain on my arm. This was followed by a long minute when Bernice was not fully convinced that the drop was no more than hallucination on my part – and, to be honest, even I was starting to have my doubts – but then there were a couple more drops. We decided a move inside would be judicious and, not long after we had cleared up, we had several minutes of light rain, even accompanied by a distant rumble of thunder, but no lightning.

It rained on and off through the night, with, this time, thunder and lightning, allowing me to calculate that the centre of the storm was nine miles away. What an excellent investment my copy of the Schoolboy’s Pocket Book was in 1961. Of course some of its information is now out of date: it still lists the Commonwealth’s monarch as Elizabeth, for example.

However, much of its information is still jolly useful for all sorts of projects: I find it hard to imagine, for example, going through life without knowing that the bending allowance for a metal sheet with an S.W.G. of 22 and a 1/16 inch rad. is 0.115. (Don’t write to ask me – I have no idea. And don’t write to tell me – I have no interest.) Suffice to say that if you ever need to know the frequency in Mc/s at which the BBC broadcast radio from Crystal Palace, or the system used for numbering steam engines on the Southern Region railway, I’m your man! But I digress.

For someone who lives in Manchester (or even Seattle), it is not easy to explain the impact of this first rain of the winter in Israel. It has its own name – yoreh – and, indeed, it seems to have its own ‘green’ smell as it freshens the plants in the garden. It is usually gentle, short-lived, temperate (where our mid-winter rains, even in Maale Adumim, can be skin-tinglingly, bone-chillingly icy, driven almost horizontal by fierce winds, and sometimes falling as stinging sleet or hail). It feels absolutely like the blessing that we pray for, holding, as it does, the promise – albeit not always fulfilled – of rain in its season throughout the winter and a good harvest next summer.

Our only personal skin in this game is a small garden of mostly green plants with an automatic drip-irrigation system and four trees – a loquat, a lemon, and small peach and necatrine (which last two yield only about 25 fruits between them). At a push you can count the synthetic grass, since it also looks considerably perkier after the rain. However, even for us, seeing, hearing and smelling the yoreh is deeply fulfilling.

Here I should pause to apologise to Micha’el and the family in Portugal. When I wrote on our family WhatsApp group on Thursday evening with the exciting news about our first rain, Esther chipped in enthusiastically from Zichron where it had also just started raining. The following morning, Micha’el informed us that Penamacor was on its third day of non-stop rain. As we say in the prayer for rain: ‘For a blessing and not for a curse.’

The rain (in its season) is only one aspect of the natural cycle of the year that is so central to Jewish liturgy and religious practice. This last shabbat we announced the new moon that will be born (as the Hebrew has it) on Tuesday morning, shortly after this post is due to be published. Growing up traditional but not observant in Britain, I admit to having had no idea when the new moon fell. Nor did I ever realise that the moon rose in different parts of the sky and at different hours, at different times of year. I never even noticed that the orientation of the crescent of the moon towards the beginning and end of each lunar month was different at different times of year.

I have just checked, and even my Schoolboy’s Pocket Book completely ignores this topic. (I think I shall ask for my money back.) All I will say in my defence is that, growing up in suburban Ilford, not much of the sky close to the horizon was visible. Of course, in the words of the music-hall song, ‘Wiv a ladder and some glasses, you could see to ‘Ackney Marshes, if it wasn’t for the ‘ouses in-between.’

Now, of course, we live in a city that offers unrestricted views over the Judean desert toward the Dead Sea, and, in the other direction, indeed from the window of the room where I am typing this, a view of the hills between us and Jerusalem, eight miles away. In Maale Adumim, and living a life more in harmony with the rhythms of the natural world, nature seems very much more immediate than it ever did in Ilford.

Meanwhile, in rainswept Penamacor, the brothers are keeping each other’s spirits up, despite being confined indoors with the sniffles.

51 weeks ago, I offered you A Healthy Portion of Salmagundi, being a ragbag of odds and ends. I find myself having to resort to the same cheap trick today. I thought the least I could do is find a different dish this time, and so I offer you a gallimaufry.

What a gallimaufry is is a hash of various kinds of meat, and what this post threatens to be is a hash of a number of stray thoughts that, despite several trawls of a brain addled by 25 hours of Shmini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, are all that I can manage to dredge up. I apologise in advance for the lack of internal cohesion – and possibly interest – but the fact remains that some weeks this blog virtually writes itself, and other times it….doesn’t.

Incidentally, my research suggests that the probable etymology of ‘gallimaufry’ is the Old French ‘galer’, meaning ‘to have fun’ or ‘to enjoy oneself’ and the Old Northern French (or Picard) for ‘to eat gluttonously’. (Presumably, Picard was the language spoken in the region of France where the First World War Battle of the Somme was fought and, more felicitously, where roses are blooming.)

Let’s tuck in, starting with Simchat Torah. I speak here only for myself, of course. The idea that the Torah can make me joyous is one that I can certainly understand. The idea that I would be led to express that joy by dancing with the scrolls is one that I personally find I cannot connect with. The 19^th-Century Anglo-Jewish artist Solomon Alexander Hart portrayed The Feast of the Rejoicing of the Law at the Synagogue in Leghorn, Italy. I present his painting here as evidence that I am not alone in finding it difficult to summon the requisite joy. Perhaps I should find an Italian shul to go to on Simchat Torah.

Clearly the Italian tradition is rather different from the (presumably Spanish-Portuguese) that Samuel Pepys witnessed when he had the (mis)fortune to visit a synagogue on (of all days) Simchat Torah. I quote from his diary entry for Wednesday, 14 October, 1663 (in case you were wondering when Simchat Torah fell outside Israel in that year).

And anon their Laws that they take out of the press are carried by several men, four or five several burthens in all, and they do relieve one another; and whether it is that every one desires to have the carrying of it, I cannot tell, thus they carried it round about the room while such a service is singing. But, Lord! to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this.

Many would argue that Simchat Torah is a festival primarily for the children. When I was a young father, I certainly played the part. (But it was always conscious and self-conscious; any joy that I felt was in seeing the children’s excitement and in feeling a part of the community; none of it really had much, if anything, to do with the Torah.) These days, I choose to make a very early and, I always hope, discreet, exit from the festivities, and sit upstairs in the (appropriately named) sanctuary, reading one or other of various commentaries on the Torah.

This year I read a number of the refreshingly short chapters in Rabbi Sacks and the Community We Built Together, a tribute collection to Rabbi Sacks z”l in which some one hundred rabbis and other members of the Anglo-Jewish community who knew him professionally and personally share teachings of Rabbi Sacks that speak to them, and record their appreciation of him. The contributors range from dayanim to the publishing manager of Rabbi Sacks’ prayer book for children and one of the Rabbi’s protection officers.

As is almost always the case when I study Rabbi Sacks’ insights into Judaism and Torah, there were one or two moments yesterday when I did indeed feel joy at the truth and resonant clarity of his insights. What also comes through powerfully from this collection is Rabbi Sacks’ extraordinary ability to connect warmly with a very wide range of people. Not for the first time did I find myself wishing that I could take on board not only more of his extraordinary teachings, but also more of his humanity.

Before and after the chag, I have been busy preparing for our shul’s annual general meeting tomorrow night, which I have reluctantly agreed to chair, and which will see us appoint chairman and board for the next year. Reflecting on that, I thought about writing this week about leadership struggles, what with the ongoing fiasco that is the Conservative Government in Britain, and the relentlessly acrimonious and cynical Israeli election campaign, which is entering its final two weeks before the November 1 general election.

However, even in my wildest fantasies I don’t rate myself as a political commentator. Let me simply say that it seems to me that in Britain as in Israel, the standard of national political debate and leadership has shown a steady decline in the last 20 years. It is not easy for me to see a way back from the current abysmally low state of discourse in either country. In comparison, our shul seems a model of functioning democracy.

Moving swiftly on: when I bought a macchinetta in Madrid, it did not occur to me that I would be able to use it on chag. Then, when Esther and Maayan were here on Rosh Hashana, they found that the electric hotplate we use on shabbat and chag was hot enough to boil the water in the macchinetta. So, my Sukkot was enhanced by fresh coffee. All that is required is the foresight to grind a sufficient quantity of beans before the chag, and to remember to put the macchinetta on the hotplate sufficiently early, before it is extinguished by the timeswitch.

That certainly sounds easy as I write it here. In fact, I am very proud to say that so far I have remembered every time to grind the coffee before chag, and have a 50% success rate with timing the actual heating. Now, all I need to do is to find a rabbi who will agree that I can perform the same trick on shabbat.

It appears that not only is this week’s dish a gallimaufry, but it is also one influenced by cuisine minceur, being served in a noticeably smaller portion than usual. I vow to make every effort to offer a full-size helping next week.

I can at least offer you two photos. Raphael reached another milestone this week: he is now seven months old. He has recently mastered sitting up, although he still seems to be even happier lying down.

Three weeks ago, I invited you to accompany me on the first three days of our stay in Madrid. You left us recovering on the coach after a half-day trip to Toledo on the Wednesday. I know that some of you have hardly been able to sleep, waiting for the other shoe to drop. So today, as a public service, I bring you another day and a half in the Spanish capital.

Having reached the tranquillity of our hotel room, there was just time to shower and change, and coo over some photos Micha’el had sent of the new baby (who, it now seems almost inconceivable, had, at this stage, no name that we were aware of) before walking again to the kosher hoomusiya (which is actually a level or two above a plain and simple hoomusiya). We arrived a couple of minutes before the restaurant opened and struck up a conversation with an Israeli woman in her thirties who was also waiting for opening time.

She was, at that stage, two months into a trimester in Spain, in connection with her post-doctoral research into the relationship between the Jewish communities of Iberia and the authorities in the period before the Expulsion. She was very much enjoying the wealth of archive material that she was able to study first-hand, while at the same time she was clearly missing speaking Hebrew, being in Israel, and, she had been amazed to discover, cooking. We invited her to eat with us, and spent an enjoyable evening gaining insight into such topics as the Spanish academic work ethic (‘Come in to the office at 9’ is apparently Spanish for ‘Someone else may possibly arrive before 10’) and the local Jewish community (very warm and welcoming).

Having checked how far our hotel was from the synagogue, and having decided that a walk of that length in Shabbat clothes in 43^o heat was out of the question, we had already decided that we would spend Shabbat in the hotel. In fact, since the hotel corridor featured motion-sensitive lighting, we had realised by this stage that we would be trapped in our hotel room for the whole of Shabbat.

To put that into context: we would be confined to a spacious air-conditioned apartment with a kitchen, a sofa and armchair, and a view of the city, and would be completely deprived of walking around in the searing heat, unable to carry with us a bottle of water or to buy one. Since we had by this stage (in the 3 days since landing in Madrid) walked 50,000 steps, we reckoned we would be ready for a relaxing Shabbat by Friday evening.

So, before settling our bill at the end of another delicious meal, we ordered some hummus, felafel and pitot ‘to go’. Armed with these contributions to our Shabbat table, we parted from our unplanned dining companion and set off at a gentle pace for our hotel room, air conditioning, and a comfortable bed.

The following morning (Thursday), after breakfast we walked to the Prado Museum, for which we had booked tickets online. We had actually tried to visit on Tuesday afternoon, after I had discovered that there is free admission for the last two hours of visiting every day. This seemed like a good idea at the time. However, when we arrived at the museum two hours before closing time, we discovered that we were, astonishingly, in the height of summer, at the 13^th most visited museum in the world, not the only cheapskates in town. It took us five minutes to walk to the back of the queue, which snaked round two sides of the museum and around the adjacent park.

After a few minutes waiting in the still fierce sunshine, and having calculated that, since only a limited number of queuers were let in every 15 minutes, we would probably not reach the front of the queue before closing time, we decided to bite the bullet and book a mid-morning timeslot as paying customers. Incidentally, as senior citizens, we enjoyed a healthy discount.

This gave me the time to do my homework online on Tuesday evening, which involved as a first step locating a map of the Prado, which I asked the clerk at reception to print out. (This has long been one of my measures of the quality of a hotel’s service. Over the years, reactions have ranged from ‘Yes, of course!’, through ‘I’m really not sure. I’ll have to check’ to ‘I’m afraid that we have no facility to do that’ to ‘No’.) On this occasion, I was delighted to get a ‘Yes, of course’.

Further online research involved a comparison of a few sites listing the 8/12/15/20 ‘must see’ paintings in the Prado, and the selection of the 12 most frequently cited ones. All I then needed to do was mark on my map the locations of the 12 paintings, plan a route through the museum (taking note, of course, of the location of public toilets) and read up enough about each painting to be able to amaze Bernice with my erudition.

In the event, we hired excellent audio guides, and enjoyed a wonderful and uplifting two-and-a-half hours in the museum. From the moment you begin the ascent of the grand staircase that leads to the entrance, the building’s scale and classical architecture help to put you in the right frame of mind for a stroll past some of the greatest artworks ever created. The measured admissions every 15 minutes ensure that there is never too much of a crowd around any one painting, and walking through the high-ceilinged colonnaded galleries is a pleasure in itself.

As for the artworks, they are for the most part the Royal Spanish collection. Not only does the museum boast, unsurprisingly, the most comprehensive and finest single collection of Spanish art in the world; it also, largely because of Velasquez’ stature and influence among his contemporaries, boasts the finest collection of Italian classical art outside Italy. For me, it was an experience like reading the King James Bible or watching Shakespeare: as we made our way from one of our featured paintings to the next one, we would find ourselves time and again passing at least one masterpiece that we immediately recognised. Like the National Gallery in London, the Prado is full of the pictorial equivalent of famous quotes.

None of the paintings that I had selected disappointed either of us, and several of them were thrilling. The brilliantly intriguing composition of Velazquez’ Las Meninas I found magnificent, especially since, I am ashamed to say, it was not a painting I had previously known other than very sketchily. Here, the audio guide was particularly enlightening. Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, on the other hand, felt like old friends, although, as always, seeing the real thing after so many reproductions and interpretations was a slightly surreal experience.

If you ever visit the Prado, I recommend taking the lift to Gallery 11B. Once you are in the lift, make sure you are standing facing the lift doors, since, as they open, you will be overwhelmed by the painting on the opposite wall: the huge, sumptuous expanse (almost three metres tall and over nine metres(!) wide) of The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist and Herod’s Banquet by the Silesian artist Bartholomeus Strobel. This glorious feast of composition, with its richness of detail, is a painting whose every mini-grouping vies for your attention.

Your eye is probably drawn first to the dazzlingly lit female figure left of centre near the end of the table, with her elaborately pouffed hairstyle. You may then notice the partly mirroring female figure of Salome right of centre, carrying the tray with the grey head of John the Baptist. From there you may be drawn to the turbaned Herod at the head of the table, shying away from the disembodied head. It will probably be some time before you look to the right of the column that isolates the right-hand edge of the painting; in that corner, the executioner poses, with an ugly grin, over the blood-drained headless corpse.

Wherever you look, there are tiny points of interest: a few of the 80 or so figures portrayed stare straight at you, some in unabashed innocence, others in curiosity, a few in sneering disdain; a lapdog poses on its hind legs; a richly-bearded figure reaches forward to remove a cloth covering the platters of fruit on a side-table. On almost every figure there is an embarrassment of richness of highly-decorated cloth. It is indeed a banquet, not only for Herod, but also for our eyes.

Feeling suitably sated, we left the Prado, and, just outside, caught a tour bus, which took us on a 90-minute circular route with an audio commentary that was clearly controlled by GPS, so that the correct piece of commentary started playing whenever the bus approached a site. Unfortunately, the traffic was, presumably, not quite as heavy as expected, with the unfortunate result that repeatedly a commentary would be cut short and the recording would jump to the next segment. Despite this rather disorientating and disconcerting fact, the tour was informative and enjoyable. (By this stage, anything that involved a seat was automatically enjoyable.)

We then walked back to the hotel. When we had walked this route previously, we had passed the Madrid City Council Debating Chamber, where a television outside broadcast unit was setting up, and a few police vans were parked. On this occasion, we had to make our way through the dispersing crowds from a demonstration outside the chamber.

I snapped a couple of pictures of the ubiquitous tee-shirts and banners of the demonstrators, and, when we were back in our hotel room, a couple of minutes with Google and Google Translate were enough to establish that the CCOO, the Spanish communist trade union federation, was demonstrating against what it called the plan to destroy the viability of the public mail service. (The slogan sounds punchier in Spanish, I’m sure.)

This was a timely reminder that, however relaxed, fun-loving and 21^st Century Madrid is, it was only in 1977 or 8, a couple of years after Franco’s death, that Spain fully transitioned from a dictatorship to a democracy. The CCOO was, unsurprisingly, banned under Franco, and only relegalised after his death. From a brief conversation with our walking-tour guide, I gained the impression that the political activism of madrileños (the citizens of Madrid) is still coloured by the fact that their parents lived their lives under the repression of Franco, and that Madrid is, not far below the surface, a city that likes to confront authority.

On that note, let’s take a rest, and save our last couple of days in Madrid for another time.

Meanwhile, in Penamacor, it’s good to see that Tao was paying attention to all those nursery rhymes we never tired of reciting, and is putting his knowledge to good use.

If you listen carefully, you may notice that Tao, for whom ‘roast beef’ is a meaningless concept, has vegetarianised it. Personally, I prefer my version, but I’m in a minority in this family.