Bernice and I went up to Zichron yesterday, as we have been doing every Sunday, to spend the day with Esther and Raphael. Esther’s very good about this, playing along with our charade of being keen to help her out during Maayan’s long day at work, even though anyone with an ounce of sense can see that Esther and Maayan already have this parenting malarkey down pat, and need no help at all, and all we’re really interested in doing is having cuddles with the baby. He, for his part, is unbelievably obliging, convivial and snuggly. Even when the outside temperature is in the 30s, as it was yesterday, and Raphael is like a very soft and gurgly hot-water bottle, still nothing can beat a good cuddle. The Welsh have a lovely word for it – ‘cwtsh’ (pronounced more or less to rhyme with ‘butch’). Happy days!

As I know I’ve mentioned before, on the journey up, while Bernice drives, I usually read aloud. As it happens, yesterday we finished reading Margaret Attwood’s The Testaments. It is such a good read that we had been trying to eke out the last pages, and only read one short section a day; however, with a journey of almost two hours in front of us, and the novel’s denouement tantalizingly close, we could not resist pushing on to the finish. Quite apart from the fact that we both thought it was a wonderful book, I’m not sure I have enjoyed reading aloud so much since I used to read Jane Austen to Bernice when we were first married. Indeed, the deliciousness of the reading was a very similar experience: one of the three narrators of the story has an ironic tone worthy of Austen herself. I was particularly struck by how effortlessly Attwood balanced delicious ironic humour with a nail-biting adventure story, all within a chilling yet cerebral novel of ideas.

Our return journey was, as usual, in the dark, which precluded reading – not that we would have wanted to start a new book so soon after finishing The Testaments. I suspect we may now have to reread The Handmaid’s Tale, to refresh our memory (as we should probably have done before starting The Testaments). However, I think we need a break before we plunge back into Gilead, and I rather fancy Bill Bryson’s further look at Britain, The Road to Little Dribbling. I’m a little concerned, after reading some reviews, that it will prove more curmudgeonly and less affectionate than the original Notes from a Small Island (‘rather like travelling round Britain with your grumpy father-in-law’, wrote one reviewer), but it’s still very likely to be laugh-out-loud and read-out-loud funny. Probably about as far from Gilead as it is possible to get, and probably not as many distinct voices for me to attempt to remember. (How did Stephen Fry ever manage the entire cast of the Harry Potter audiobook heptalogy?)

On our journey home, we initially resorted to talking, which we still occasionally do, although, to be honest, after almost fifty years, we feel we’ve said most of what we wanted to say to each other. So, after a while, I found a Joni Mitchell concert album on Spotify, including a couple of very unusual songs, one a capella, the other with piano accompaniment, both setting words to melodic lines by Charlie Mingus. For the piano accompaniment, Mitchell has one of the most one-upmanship intro lines I’ve ever heard: ‘I’d like to bring Herbie Hancock on’. I was struck, as I increasingly am, by how much fascinating music I have not become familiar with over the last 60 years. It is inevitable, I suppose, but no less tantalizing, that every path you take, in the arts as elsewhere, involves not taking at least one other path. At the risk of discovering that I’m the only person here who doesn’t know the album, here is a link to the second of these songs recorded Live at the Bread and Roses Festival 1978.

While we were chatting with Esther about the journey, she reminded us that when she and Micha’el were children we had a set of songs that we only sang in the car on long journeys. These were almost all, not surprisingly, songs with multiple verses, including Ilkla Moor baht ‘at (no complaints about misspelling, please: that particular rendering of Ilkley has been chosen after considerable research online). This Yorkshire folksong (although originally a Kentish hymn tune) is, of course, perfect wholesome family fun, being a tale of love and death with a quasi-cannibalistic twist at the end that never fails to appeal to the streak of savagery that runs through every healthy child.

We usually followed that up with Where Will We Be in a Hundred Years from Now, a song so ghoulish that you can probably be arrested these days for teaching it to your children.

Then there was Be Kind to Your Web-footed Friends, an early introduction to surreal lyrics, meta-referencing and, as each verse was pitched higher, falsetto singing.

When we tired of singing (which we seldom did) there was always I-Spy to fall back on. On one memorable occasion, when Micha’el was still too young to know his letters or, indeed, to fully grasp the nuances of the game, he announced, when it was his turn, that ‘I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with green!’ After several minutes of increasingly desperate guessing, when we had exhausted all of the obvious ideas – grass, trees, apple, frog – (whether we could actually see them or not) and were clutching at such straws as ‘a wide, toothy green’, we eventually all gave up, and asked Micha’el what he was thinking of. It was at this point that it became clear that he hadn’t actually grasped that the game required him to be thinking of something.

As the years passed, we reached what was, for me, a sweet spot: a window of opportunity when we could play the Hebrew game הוא והיא. For the benefit of those of you who don’t live in Israel, let me explain. All nouns in Hebrew are either masculine or feminine and, typically, feminine nouns end in an ‘ah’ sound. So, for example, ‘ish is ‘a man’ and ‘isha’ is ‘a woman’. The game consists of finding a pair that sound like a masculine and a feminine noun formed from the same root, but that are, in fact completely unconnected, and then offering a verbal description of each. The remaining players have to guess, from these descriptive clues, what the two words are. So, for example, ‘etz’ is ‘a tree’ and ‘etza’ is ‘advice’. You might then say: “He grows out of the ground very tall and she is something that a sensible friend might give you.” There was a period of a few years in their childhoods when my greater intellectual powers were perfectly balanced by the kids’ greater Hebrew vocabulary, and we were able to play the game on a fairly level playing field. Those days, sadly, are long past.

My own childhood car journeys were less musical and more exclusively cerebral. I can remember playing I-Spy, and, at a slightly later period, trying to complete my I-Spy books, as written by Big Chief I-Spy and his friends at the News Chronicle. This was, for me, a precursor to trainspotting, offering the challenge of ticking off items illustrated in the books as you spotted them in real life.

I also remember car number-plate games. At the time, British car registration-plates had a sequence of three letters followed by three numbers, and my favourite game was taking it in turns to pick a car and then think of a word that used the three letters of the number plate in the order in which they appeared, though not necessarily consecutively. For example: TWL 524 would yield ‘towel’.

Three numbers were not really enough to do anything useful with, but, when we travelled by bus, we were issued a ticket with a 4-digit number. We would first add the four digits. If the sum was 21, this was extremely good fortune. If it wasn’t (and it rarely was), we would then work at manipulating the digits, using the 4 arithmetic operations, to try somehow to arrive at 21. As our knowledge of maths grew, we would add exponentials, digit sums and factorials. (I clearly needed to get out more!)

Up to this point, when we have taken Tao on longer car journeys in Portugal he has usually fallen asleep, but I think he must now be getting to the age where we will be able to once again enjoy the pleasures of travelling with conscious and cognizant children.

Meanwhile, in case you were wondering whether we’re nearly there yet….we’ve arrived.

Trigger warning: This post contains serious content, which might shock readers expecting my usual flippancy.

Today I am a camel, and I want to tell you about the straw that broke my back last week.

Like all straws, it may seem, viewed in isolation, a wispy, lightweight thing, but I would suggest that, taken as the representative of the thousands of other straws in this particular camel-load, it is a very weighty matter indeed.

I want to explore with you the meaning of a good old Anglo-Saxon four-letter word: ‘safe’. Not much to get excited about there, you might think. It is, ostensibly, a fairly simple word with a straightforward meaning.

Come with me, if you will, to an unnamed private girls’ school in England where, a few months ago, a female member of the House of Lords was invited to speak to the sixth form (pupils in their last two years of high school). During the event, the speaker took questions, and one pupil questioned what she understood to be the speaker’s implication that (I quote the pupil’s words here): “critical theory took precedence over biological reality in defining women. When I questioned that, she said it wasn’t an issue of semantics. She said trans people don’t have basic human rights in this country.”

Without having been present, I can’t, of course, categorically state what the mood of the room was. However, I can offer you the assessment of the pupil who asked the question and the peer who answered it.

The pupil: “Afterwards I spoke to her and said I’m sorry if I came across as rude. We parted amicably.”

The peer: “I spoke about a wide range of human rights issues. One young woman challenged some of my views and was treated with the same courtesy as everyone else who took part. I was not aware of any consequences from our interactions and thought that we had parted on amicable terms.”

Later the same day, in the sixth-form common room, the pupil was surrounded by up to 60 other pupils who shouted, screamed and spat at her, accusing her of being transphobic. She escaped and collapsed, unable to breathe properly. Despite some initial support from teachers, the pupil was later told that she would have to work in the library if she said anything provocative in lessons, and she subsequently faced bullying and accusations of transphobia from pupils throughout the school. She spent break and lunch times in the library, rather than the common room. The girl left school in December and is now studying at home.

The story broke this week when a teacher at the school wrote an account of the incident for a blog published by Transgender Trend, a group whose website states: “We are an organisation of  parents, professionals and academics based in the UK who are concerned about the current trend to diagnose children as transgender, including the unprecedented number of teenage girls suddenly self-identifying as ‘trans’ (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria or ROGD). We are also concerned about legislation which places transgender rights above the right to safety for girls and young women in public toilets and changing rooms along with fairness for girls in sport.”

The teacher wrote: “There was a time when the school invited in Christian and other religious speakers to address moral and ethical issues and to provide food for thought and contemplation. It was usually the practice to follow these up with Q&A sessions during which the students could share their own feelings and opinions on the issues, and even disagree if they wanted to.”

He added that it was the similarity of transgender ideology to religious fundamentalism that “alerted me to the danger of what has been going on in our schools over the last few years. It was the whispered and frequent use of the terms transphobe and transphobic during that after-school activity that alerted me to the depressing fact that these girls were going along with the narrative that our heretic was, as far as they were concerned, indeed a heretic — and that she was thoroughly deserving of the roasting that she had just received before caving in and running off in a panicked and hyperventilating state.”

All of this is very disturbing. However, it saddens me to say that, since I have been following recent developments in Britain, none of it is very surprising to me. What disturbed me even more is what happened next, which was that the school headteacher issued a statement apologising for the school’s failure to maintain a “safe space” for students.

I thought this was simply a rather lame reaction, until I realised that the school was apologising not to the girl who was attacked for asking a question but rather to the 60 screaming, spitting attackers who have effectively driven her out of school. It was claiming that allowing the pupil to ask a polite and reasonable question about the relative significance of biological reality and critical theory in determining the sex of a woman made the school an unsafe space for the 17- and 18-year-old pupils.

In exploring what is going on here, I would like to call three literary expert witnesses. My first is Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking Glass.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

So, when the school authorities appropriated the word ‘safe’ in the phrase ‘safe space’, what did they choose it to mean? I suggest they meant something like ‘a place where you will never be exposed to a view that challenges the orthodoxy as determined by mob-rule’. However, that is not what ‘safe’ means, and certainly not in the context of an educational institution. I will return to this point later to explore it further.

My second witness is George Orwell, in 1984.

“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”

So, the ‘safe space’ that the school wishes to create is actually a dangerous space, a space where independent thought and open discussion are risky perilous activities. The school authorities deliberately choose this phrase as an exercise in doublethink because of the effect it has on the minds and actions of the students.

The time has come, I think, for us to examine what the purpose of a school is. There are, of course, several possible answers to that question, not necessarily exclusive or mutually incompatible. Bearing in mind that this particular school is a private school, I would suggest that some possible answers are:

To prepare its pupils to be leaders of society.
To develop in its pupils the ability to think logically and critically.
To foster in its pupils independence of thought.
To prepare its pupils to make intelligent choices in their future lives.

An essential part of all that, I would argue, is exposure to a range of different ideas. That, surely, is what distinguishes education from indoctrination. We presumably want the younger generation to have principles by which they live, but equally surely we want them to understand what leads different people to hold different principles, to adopt the principles that they believe in consciously and after due consideration, and to be able to defend those principles through reasoned argument.

My final witness is John Milton, whose Areopagitica is a pamphlet arguing against censorship and licensing of printing. It is an impassioned philosophical defence of the principle of the right to freedom of speech and expression, and a beautifully wrought piece of prose.

“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”

It is no bad thing to be taken out of your comfort zone, and to have your views challenged. The action of defending those views can clarify them for you and can reinforce your own conviction in them, or, alternatively, lead you to realise that you do not hold those views as strongly as you assumed you did.

Now, I don’t for one moment believe that the headteacher or the school authorities believe in the position that they have officially taken. They are all people who benefitted from a liberal education themselves, who were trained in critical thinking and in engaging in vigorous debate in defence of their beliefs.

No, theirs is, I am sure, an act of craven cowardice; they believed (with considerable justification, it must be said) that taking a stand against the mob that drove a classmate out of school would create so much trouble that they preferred to take the path of least resistance. Rather than disciplining the wrongdoers, and asserting the true function of the school, they chose to allow one innocent to suffer.

This is precisely why this single small act has affected me so deeply. The path of least resistance taken by the school will, I fear, be echoed – indeed, is already being echoed – in educational institutions, and workplaces, throughout Britain. In this way, transgender ideology will become further entrenched as the new orthodoxy.

The only way that this can be avoided, it seems to me, is if, very soon, a critical mass of educators and employers all act together to reject this ideology. Some brave individuals are standing firm, but, unfortunately, as individuals, they can all be, and indeed are all being, picked off one by one. University professors, school teachers, other professionals and industry managers are all being dismissed and are finding themselves unemployable.

Within a short time, no school-leaver or university graduate who rejects transgender ideology will choose to become a teacher. Once that happens, the conditions will exist for an entire generation of schoolchildren to be officially raised in the ideology.

I am very happy that I am not the parent of school-age children in Britain, and I worry about the world that my grandchildren will grow up into. I try to live in their moment of innocence, but it is not always easy.

First, I owe you an explanation as to why I have moved publication day from Monday to Tuesday. Sunday is Ma’ayan’s long day at work, and, therefore, Esther and Raphael’s long day at home alone together. Sunday has therefore become the day we spend with them in Zichron. We leave home after breakfast, around 10 (dawn doesn’t crack as early around here as it did when we were both working) and usually arrive at 12. We then tear ourselves away soon after Maayan returns home, around 7:30, and reach home again before 9:30.

One of the only two downsides to this arrangement is that we don’t get to spend more than a few minutes with Maayan, but we do get hours of time with Raphael, a chance to catch up with Esther, and even the opportunity to feel that we are virtuously helping her out, a story she is kind enough to go along with.

The other downside to this arrangement, and the one that is relevant here, is that Sunday has traditionally been my blog-writing day. I typically start thinking about possible subjects on Friday, and then, on my walks to and from shul on Friday night and twice on Shabbat, I decide on one topic and play around with ideas. Then, on Sunday morning, after breakfast, I sit down and start writing. In a good week, I have a draft to show Bernice by lunchtime.

If things are going less well, or if I need to do a lot of online research to keep up the appearance of being a remarkably well-informed fellow, it may take me until the evening, but, even on the hardest week, the post is done and dusted and ready to publish by mid-evening.

Since our Zichron Sundays started, before we moved the clocks, I sometimes managed to write my blog after Shabbat went out on Saturday evening. Over the last few weeks, I managed once or twice to get a complete and reasonable first draft before shabbat on Friday. However, last week we set out for Zichron on Sunday morning with me having no idea what I was going to write about. I took my laptop with, but wasn’t prepared to waste valuable grandpa time there hunched over a keyboard.

And so, at 7:45 last Sunday evening, we drove off home, Bernice behind the wheel and me behind the laptop. The prospect of the Monday morning deadline focused the mind, as it always does. However, the physical task of typing was not the easiest. As many of you know, I am not a touch typist, but rather a two-finger pecker (albeit a fairly speedy one), and typing while driving on Israeli roads presented something of a challenge. In fact, I’m inclined to suggest that motoring journalists, when comparing the suspension of various models, should use a tph coefficient, measuring the number of typos per hour made by a typist sitting in the passenger seat of a given car travelling at a given speed.

I might also add – treading just about as carefully as I can – that even a driver as defensively skilled as Bernice is sometimes compelled by other Israeli drivers to brake a little more suddenly than is ideal. If, as a front-seat passenger, you are watching the road, and, even more so, if you are gripping the side of your seat, as one does, then you can easily brace yourself against the impact of the braking. If, on the other hand, your eyes are focused on the laptop screen in front of you as your fingers stagger across the keyboard and your brain gropes unsuccessfully for the mot juste, then you are in grave danger of somersaulting over the screen and into the dashboard.

Suffice to say that I arrived home that Sunday evening just a tad frazzled. However, I was in significantly better shape than the blog. In fact, it took me another three hours at home, and an hour or so on Monday morning, to bring the post to a state where I felt I could publish it.

At which point I vowed that I would not go through that experience again. So, I decided that I would switch the publication date back to Tuesday, and that, in terms of the blog, Monday would be my new Sunday. Of course, when I mentioned this to Esther, she told me that there is a good chance that Maayan’s work schedule may be changing soon, and Sunday may no longer be her long day. In that case, we will probably be going up to Zichron on a different day, and I will probably change publication day back to Monday.

Meanwhile, since Shavuot, in two weeks’ time, falls on a Sunday, the switch to Tuesday will be doubly convenient.

So much for the theory. As I settled down to sleep last night (Sunday), I felt really good that I would have all day today (Monday) to write.

And then….stuff, as they say, happened. First, I overslept, waking only at 8 in the morning. Despite the late start, I felt I really had to go for a walk, a daily morning regimen I restarted last week after far too long a break. By the time I got back from the walk, Bernice had left the house to meet a friend for breakfast. So I sat down to have a quick look at the paper before showering. The quick look, needless to say, became an in-depth read. Eventually, I tore myself away and went upstairs.

As I stepped out of the shower later, my phone rang. It was a travel insurance rep contacting me to discuss how large a mortgage we will need to take out to cover ourselves against all the dreadful disasters that lurk round every travel corner these days. I asked him to call back in 15 minutes, by which time I had managed to dress and to dig out my latest medical statement from my family doctor. Bernice’s state of health is laughably straightforward, but mine reads more like a Gothic novel, with multiple complications and convolutions.

While I was waiting for the rep to call again, I received a call back from the orthopaedic department of the hospital where I had my second hip replacement done, a year ago. I have been trying to schedule a one-year check-up. However, the secretary told me that I should make the appointment directly with the hospital clinic, and not through the department, so I tried to get through to them. Eventually, I got the option to leave my number for a call-back.

I then started chopping the fruit for breakfast. While I was halfway through this, the travel insurance rep called back, and I spent the next 20 minutes recounting my medical history. When I came to the end, and he asked: ‘Is that everything?’, I replied, as I always do: ‘Well, I think that’s enough, don’t you?’, and then, as they always do, he proceeded to read a list of other, more serious, conditions, and to ask me to interrupt him if I suffered from any of them. This was a chastening experience, as it always is, and at the end I apologized for my previous flippancy and acknowledged, as I always do, how lucky I am to have only the few conditions I have, all effectively controlled by medication. All that remained was for him to ask me whether we would be engaging in any extreme sports, as they always do, and for me to say, as I always do: ‘No, but thank you so much for asking’.

And then the bottom line, which our travel insurance agent, who was also on the call, assured me was a very competitive price. When I had recovered sufficiently, I accepted the price and returned to preparing breakfast.

By this time, Bernice had returned, and, since it was now about 12:30, she decided to join me in what would be for her lunch and for me brunch. Once that was out the way, we set off for a brisk visit to the local Rami Levi supermarket, ‘and then I really have to get down to my blog!’

The super wasn’t too crowded and we finished shopping fairly quickly. However, when we got to the checkouts, there seemed to be very long queues. After a couple of minutes, we discovered that the checkout we had chosen had a problem with connectivity to the store’s computer system, and the cashier was only accepting cash or cheques. Between us, Bernice and I had about 100 shekels in cash (for an approximately 600-shekel bill). We do still have a chequebook, but neither of us had brought it with us, obviously. As we checked the status of other tills in the store, it became clear that the system was down throughout the store. I asked Bernice whether she wanted to abandon the trolley and go home, or whether I should drive back to the centre of town and draw cash out of the bank ATM. We agreed that was the more sensible option, and so I set off.

As I drove away, I contemplated going to the liquor store (off-licence just doesn’t sound right) we sometimes use, buying a bottle of whisky and asking the owner whether he would let me have 700 shekels in cash on my credit card. I decided that would be putting him in an unfair position. A minute later, it occurred to me that there is an ATM at DCity, the brand new and very grandiose design centre that is only two minutes from Rami Levy. So I turned around at the next roundabout and headed back, trying desperately to remember where exactly on the sprawling campus I had seen an ATM.

Luck was with me. I parked right by an escalator that brought me to within 100 metres of the ATM, and, within minutes, I had withdrawn cash and was back at the supermarket checkout just as Bernice was unloading our trolley onto the conveyor belt. Of course, the cashier did not have any change, and had to go to the main desk to get a cash float. However, we were at least able to leave, eventually, with our shopping.

All of which explains why I am afraid that I simply have not had enough time this week to write a post. However, I hope that next week will prove a little less traumatic.

*In case you’re wondering what on earth the title of this week’s post refers to, it’s a typically arcane reference to the 1969 film: ‘If It’s Tuesday, This Must be Belgium’. If that means nothing to you, then a quick view of the trailer here will make you realise how lucky you are.

More for my benefit than yours, here are two happy reminders as to why we are only too willing to drive up to Zichron every Sunday and to endure the trials and tribulations of air travel to get to Portugal every few months. Both are absolute no-brainers,

We have to go to IKEA tomorrow! ‘Have to?’, I hear you ask, if you live outside Israel. (At least, I hope I hear you ask, otherwise I can’t continue the blog.) Yes, dear reader, have to: for paper serviettes (napkins), of course, as everyone always does (at least, in Israel, where the serviettes sold in most shops are the size of a sheet of toilet paper, and the thickness of a sheet of tissue paper)., for lunch (of course – no longer as good as it used to be, but still the cheapest hot salmon dish in Israel) and, as always, for at least one latest project.

Incidentally, I find much to admire about IKEA’s marketing. They manage to present as a new and exciting way to shop the concept that customers should collect their own furniture items from the warehouse, deliver them to their own homes, and then construct them themselves. This is a display of such stereotypically Israeli chutzpah that I can never quite believe that IKEA being a Swedish company is not just a story invented by the marketing department.

Offering lunch as a loss leader is a novel ploy that certainly works in Israel; we know people who will drive 45 minutes to IKEA just to eat lunch. However, their most impressive achievement, it seems to me, is that, having identified a niche market in thick, large serviettes, their stores are always packed with people who come for the serviettes, yet never manage to leave without also buying a bed, a wardrobe, a bookcase or, at the very least, a shelf.

So what, I hear you ask, is our latest project? (At least, I hope I hear you ask, as above.)

Well, since you ask, inspired by seeing them at Esther’s, sitting pristinely in the chest of drawers just waiting for a new baby to be changed on the top, the project is drawer insert dividers, or organisers, for our underwear and sock drawers.

I have a sock drawer, in which I neatly compartmentalise my balled pairs of socks into black, brown, dark blue and sundries.

(Sundries, since you ask – and I bless you again for asking – includes: a poppy red pair of socks worn with black trousers, a red silk-finish roll-neck shirt and a grey jacket for a wedding two decades ago…but seldom since; a pair of grey socks emblazoned with ruby-red hot lips, bought for me rather than by me and worn very rarely, you probably won’t be surprised to hear; another grey pair with an image of Grumpy, one of Snow White’s Disney dwarves, bought and worn as above; and a bottle-green pair that go with bottle-green flares that unaccountably shrank in the wash decades ago, and failed to meet at the waist to a degree that destined them for the recycling bin. The socks, curiously, still fit, and so, despite the fact that they go with no trousers in my wardrobe, they haven’t been discarded.)

The problem that I face on many mornings is that in the half-light, with the open wardrobe door blocking the natural light, it is not easy to tell the blue socks from the black. I have discovered that my socks are gregarious and multi-cultural fellows. Despite the fact that I arrange the brown socks as a distinguishable barrier between the blue and the black, when left to their own devices the black and blue will shamelessly intermingle.

So what I need is a system of corrals or pens, in the hope that the socks will not learn how to climb over the barriers. Hence the burning need to visit IKEA.

Last Thursday, straight after breakfast, Bernice disappeared upstairs to shower and dress. After about an hour, when I realised she still hadn’t reappeared, I thought I ought to go upstairs to check that all was OK. I discovered her in the bedroom, still not showered or dressed, with our bed entirely covered in jewellery. She was, she informed me, just organising her jewellery shelf. This was clearly a knock-on effect of our impending trip to IKEA.

I left her to it and, little more than two hours later, she staggered downstairs, carrying a large plastic bag with all of the jewellery that, she informed me, she was giving away to a charity shop. (I hasten to add that Bernice buys a lot of her jewellery in the cut-price accessories shops that abound in Israel. Part of her astute taste in fashion has always been the ability to recognise how good an item can look without being influenced by the price tag. I can no longer calculate how many thousands of shekels this has saved us over the decades.)

I then accompanied Bernice upstairs, to admire her now minimalist jewellery collection. I was more than a little surprised to discover that I couldn’t actually tell the difference. The shelf seemed to me to be just as full as before. When I questioned her about this, she explained that she wore almost all of what she had kept (although some of it is obviously for special occasions only). In addition, she has some pieces inherited from her mother, which she obviously wouldn’t dream of parting with, and some pieces made by the children when they were younger, which she equally obviously wouldn’t dream of parting with.

I was about to make some cheap comment about the senselessness of keeping all this stuff when I remembered the contents of my own equivalent drawer. I won’t bore you with all the details, but two items will serve to demonstrate that what we have here is a case of pots and kettles and accusations of blackness.

Exhibit A is the ties. In my defence, I got rid of all but 3 of my ties several years ago. However, since, at that point, it was about 20 years since I had worn a tie, this was less of an achievement than it might sound at first. Of the ties I kept, one goes with blue or black, one with brown or green, and one I kept for sentimental reasons. It is a tie with a pattern of two different parrots. This represents a level of flamboyance that is so atypical of me that I must explain why I bought it.

It was principally as a lead-in to what I regarded at the time as a particularly brilliant piece of wit. Whenever I wore my parrot tie, I would explain to people that this was the tie I wore whenever I was abroad on business, because it reminded me of the family. This parrot, I would explain, is Polly Bernice, this smaller one is Polly Micha’el and the whole tie is Polly Esther. (I’ll get my coat, shall I?)

Exhibit B is my four pairs of cufflinks. Three of them were barmitzvah presents, and all have my initials on them. The fourth is a cheap, blingy, chunky gold pair I bought probably forty-five years ago. The only occasions on which I have worn cufflinks over the last 36 years have been barmitzvah and wedding parties in Britain, together with a dress shirt and dinner jacket. How many cufflinks does a man really need? Two, I suppose – unless he’s Lord Nelson. Of my four pairs, there is only one that I really like and that is the only one I would ever wear, yet I cannot imagine parting with any of them.

Now, four pairs of cufflinks is not the same as an entire shelf of jewellery. However, four pairs of cufflinks of which I will never wear three is at least recognizable as a symptom of the same reluctance to part with stuff. We all have our weaknesses. For some, it is electronic equipment that no longer works; for others, it is assorted screws that have lost a great deal of their cleanness of thread and slot through repeated use; for others, it is lengths of assorted string.

For me, it is all of the above and more. In my defence, I am a lot better than I used to be – or perhaps I should say that I used to be even worse than I am now. Unfortunately, in the intervening decades during which I have improved, I have accumulated so much more stuff that it is difficult to notice that improvement.

There is no cure, but we can only hope that IKEA’s organisers will offer me some level of remission.

This week’s photos offer not only our two grandsons, but also a first glimpse of our expected next arrival. It’s good to see everyone smiling!

We Jews tend to live our lives by the calendar. It’s not a very straightforward calendar, constructed as it is of the separate and disparately cyclical elements of the lunar month and the solar year. Alignment of the two requires some pretty nifty lunar footwork, in the form of two months of adjustable length (29 or 30 days) and seven inserted months in each 19-year cycle.

All of which accounts for the fact that this year (a leap year) Pesach was almost as late as it can be in the solar year and for the fact that I am writing this post at what could be considered one of the two darkest moments of the Jewish year. On the 9^th of Av, we mark the low point of the three-week mourning period commemorating the destruction of both Temples. On the 30^th of Nissan, today, we are in the middle of what I heard described last week as Asseret Y’mei T’shua, the ten days of redemption, a phrase coined as an untranslatable echo of Asseret Y’mei T’shuva (the ten days of repentance that start with Rosh Hashana and end with Yom Kippur).

This (actually eight-day) period in which we find ourselves started last Wednesday evening, as we entered Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Day, marked on 27 Nissan, and will end this Thursday evening, at the end of Yom Haatzmaut, Independence Day, marked  on 5 Iyar. The period alsocontains Yom Hazikaron, the Memorial Day for those who fell fighting for the establishment of the state, or in defence of the state, and for the victims of acts of terrorism in Israel. This last always falls on the day before Yom Ha’atzma’ut, and its dying moments lead, with no break, into the celebrations of Yom Ha’atzma’ut.

I know that there are many who find this juxtaposition jarring, and that there are bereaved families who find it difficult to navigate this transition. However, I believe that this very juxtaposition is the most Jewish expression of our understanding of the meaning of our life here on earth.

To explain what I mean, let me go back just over two weeks, to the evening when almost all of my readers (I suspect) sat down to some form or other of Seder night. At many of those tables, we will have told the story of the Exodus from Egypt. We will, however, have started the story much earlier, and covered the descent into Egypt and then into slavery. In this way, our retelling of the Pesach story traces the path from the nadir of slavery to the zenith of the parting of the sea, then looks forward briefly to Mount SInai and even hints at the continuation of our national story.

The slavery in Egypt was, indeed, revealed to Abraham right at the beginning of the Jewish story, at the Brit bein Habetarim, the Covenant of the Parts. We are, it seems, to understand that the slavery was an inevitable part of the historical process that led to the Exodus, the revelation at Sinai, the entry to the Land of Israel. This, we are called on to believe, is all part of the Divine plan, a plan whose intricacies we certainly cannot expect to be able to understand, but whose existence we are required to acknowledge as we go about our daily lives.  

I try to approach Yom Hashoah every year in this spirit: in the knowledge that the Shoah is incomprehensible and unfathomable, but in the hope that I may be able to draw from the stories that emerge from it some guidance as to how to live my life. What is remarkable is that, every year, new stories emerge and are revealed on Israel’s radio and TV and in the newspapers: stories of unimaginable heroism and inconceivable evil, of sacrifice and deliverance. There has been, in recent years, a increasingly tangible sense of urgency in the gathering and telling of these stories. The youngest survivors who can remember anything of the Shoah are now in their mid-eighties, and the point at which no survivors will still be alive is only a generation away.

This was brought home to us vividly this year. At the central ceremony that opens Yom Hashoah every year, each of six torches is lit by a different survivor, accompanied and supported by a second- or third-generation family member, as that survivor’s personal story is told in their own voice and family pictures. This year, one of the six survivors chosen died less than two weeks before Yom Hashoah, and his flame was kindled by his son alone, as we watched film of the late father narrating his account.

Some time soon, then, the Holocaust will become, in historical terms, like the Exodus; it will live on only to the extent that the folk memory is nurtured. The capturing on film of personal testimonies, the survivors speaking in schools and accompanying trips to the death camps, are all initiatives that were started many years, even decades ago. New initiatives are now being launched where individual youth ‘take responsibility for’ the story of individual survivors. In these ways, we must strive to guarantee that the story of the Shoah is passed from generation to generation, exactly as the Exodus has been. Over the approximately 3,500 years since our ancestors left Egypt, that story has been handed down through an estimated 130 or so generations. It always seems to me astonishing that such a small number of fathers to daughters, mothers to sons are needed to form links in a chain that can span that long a history.

When Bernice was working, she always taught her three- and four-year-old pupils about the Shoah. When parents came into the kindergarten and saw, for the first time, (age-appropriate) photographs on the walls, some were horrified. Bernice always pointed out that, for these children, the events of the Shoah were no more immediate than the events of the Purim or the Pesach story; Hitler was no less, and no more, incomprehensible a villain than Haman and Pharaoh. It is, of course, true that not all of the children grasped the story equally well. One came in one morning to tell Bernice that the previous afternoon he had watched with his family the musical Hitler on the Roof. However, it is undeniable that, if we understand that Haman and Pharaoh can be presented in some meaningful way to four-year-olds as villains, then so can Hitler.

There seems to be less complexity in understanding the significance in the path of our history of the deaths of those who fell fighting for the State. A few days after the United Nations voted to create the State of Israel in November, 1947, Chaim Weizmann, who was to become the state’s first president a few months later, famously warned of the bitter struggle that lay ahead, saying: ‘The State of Israel will not be given to the Jewish people on a silver platter.’ Journalist and poet Nathan Alterman, inspired by these words, composed the poem that has become one of the anthems of Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, when he imagined the young men and women who would soon step up and lay down their lives fighting for the creation of the state. Asked who they are, these future warriors – still alive in 1947 but soon to die – answer, in Alterman’s prophetic imagination, from beyond their future grave: “We are the silver platter / Upon which the Jewish State was served to you.”

What even Alterman may not have foreseen, but what his poem continues to prepare the nation for, is that each generation must still be ready to become the silver platter for the future.

That stark realisation informs a day that is composed of what seems an endless succession of individual stories of so often young lives, aflame with promise, cut off in, or indeed before, their prime, leaving entire families bereft: a day of parents grieving for children and orphans mourning fathers they never knew. Every year new names are added to the sombre roll call – the total has now reached over 24,000 security personnel. The transition from that national act of remembrance to the celebrations of Israel’s independence is not easy. However, it is an essentially Jewish transition.

I am writing these words on the first of the two days of Rosh Chodesh Iyar. Every month, we celebrate the New Moon, because we see in the monthly waxing and waning of the moon a metaphor for the waxing and waning fortunes of the Jewish people. If I look for the moon in the sky tonight, I will probably be unable to see it, but I know that, from this low point, it will grow stronger, brighter, more clearly visible, every night.

This last Shabbat, we read the Haftara, the extract from Prophets, that we always read when Shabbat is the day before Rosh Chodesh: the story of David fleeing from the wrath of Saul, a moment that marks a low point, perhaps the lowest point, in David’s fortunes. No longer adored as the slayer of Goliath, no longer able to soothe Saul’s troubled soul with his harp, David has only one friend in the world, Jonathan, from whom he must separate himself to run and hide.

As we read this story, we know that David will rise from these depths to a glorious future as the King of Israel, the conqueror of Jerusalem, the author of the psalms that give eternally magnificent expression to all of humanity’s hopes, despair and triumphs. This story, too, is emblematic of the entire sweep of Jewish history.*

I find myself thinking of the quote made famous by Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

At first sight, MLK seems to be encouraging complacency. If, indeed, the arc bends towards justice, then all we need is patience. However, both his life’s work, and the original sermon from which he adapted the quote, make it clear that he saw it as his followers’ duty to use the faith and optimism that this belief gave them to fuel their actions as they made their own contribution to bending the arc. As the well-known joke has it: ‘Who do you think sent the boat and the helicopter?’ [In the unlikely event that you don’t know the joke, just google: ‘ Who do you think sent the boat, and take your choice of the versions offered.] It is, I would argue, the Jewish way to see the seeds of redemption even in the suffering of exile, and to strive to maintain the faith to act in such a way that we help to hasten that redemption. As we read in Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers: “Rabbi Tarfon would say: ‘It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it’.”

It remains only for me to wish you all a meaningful Yom Hazikaron and a celebratory Yom Ha’atzma’ut….and, speaking of helicopters….

*For these insights on the haftara, I am indebted to an essay by my friend Mark Schneider.

If, at night, you drive east from Swansea (Wales’ second city), round Swansea Bay, with the Bristol Channel on your right hand, in just a few miles you will catch your first glimpse of what could almost be mistaken for fairy lights shimmering in the distance. As you get closer, you realise they are, rather more mundanely, the lights of the Port Talbot steelworks. Port Talbot is home to some 37,000 people, and has, since the 1920s, been producing high-grade steel. From its peak in the 1960s, when it employed 18,000 people, the steelworks has scaled back its workforce, but still employs 4,000, and is one of the largest steelworks in Europe, producing over 3.5 million tonnes of steel annually, and capable of producing almost 5 million. However, the current owners are threatening to close the works. What that will mean for the town is unimaginable.

Apart from steel, I can think of only two things for which Port Talbot is noteworthy. One is the Baked Bean Museum of Excellence (a classic celebration of British eccentricity). The second is the number of prominent people who have emerged from this South Wales industrial town. Let me pick out two politicians. The first is Geoffrey Howe, Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, Deputy Prime Minister and, arguably, the man who triggered (possibly unwittingly) Thatcher’s stepping down from the leadership election after her leadership was challenged following Howe’s resignation from the Government.

The second is George Thomas, a Labour politician who became a government minister and later won even greater national prominence as the Speaker of the House of Commons when the proceedings of the house were first broadcast on radio. His call for “Order! Order!” delivered in his distinctive South Wales accent was instantly recognizable.

It is in fact three other Port Talbot boys with distinctive voices that I particularly want to focus on this week: Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Sheen. Only one of them (Hopkins) was actually born in Port Talbot, but the other two were educated and grew up there, and I do believe that education, in the area I am focusing on, matters more than accident of birthplace. Interestingly, Hopkins, the one who was born there, was educated elsewhere in South Wales.

If you are a South Wales actor with a glorious voice, then, at some stage in your career, you are going to take on the biggest role in Welsh theatre: a role known, prosaically, only as First Voice. It is the senior of the two narrators in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices. For those of you who don’t know it, Under Milk Wood is an evocation, through glimpsed scenes from the lives of its inhabitants, of the vibrant life of Llareggub, an imagined small South Wales rural fishing and farming town.

Conceived as a radio play, it has, in the 69 years since its BBC premiere, been adapted for the cinema twice. The 1972 production was very prestigious, starred Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O’Toole, and is a classic illustration of a particular kind of cultural tone-deafness.

Dylan Thomas had a poet’s eye for the telling detail and a poet’s ear for the words to capture that detail. Here are the opening lines of Under Milk Wood, as spoken by Voice One. You may want to listen to Dylan Thomas himself speaking these lines in a live performance. (The audio quality is pretty poor, so reading along is advised. This speech is from 0:00 to 2:06.)

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

Word pictures tumble one after another out of these lines. Thomas has sufficient confidence in the power of his words to ease up, and let them speak for themselves. Now take a deep breath and see how the cloth-eared makers of the 1972 film sought to ‘enhance’ these pictures with their own, and I hope you will agree with me that not only are these pictures superfluous; they are also inaccurate and distracting, and they actually weaken the impact of the language. Here is the opening scene of the 1972 film. (2:45-4:38).

Turning to the work as a whole, there is a tendency, I suspect, to play up the humour of the piece. Many of the characters certainly have a comic side to them. The piece is built in such a way that disparate characters appear fleetingly and the narrators offer the only obvious over-arching structure. This makes it easy for the cast to play up the characters’ idiosyncrasies, and go for easy laughs; it also makes it easier for the audience to treat the characters as objects of amusement.

And yet…

If you have ever lived in South Wales, then you will know that none of these characters is as much of a caricature as they might appear to outsiders. There is something about life in the small towns and villages of the South Wales valleys that breeds larger-than-life characters, each with her own distinctive voice, each determined to live his life according to his convictions and passions.

The South Wales valleys were, traditionally, coal-mining valleys, and every town had its own male voice choir and rugby team, and many had their own brass band. If you spend upwards of 55 hours a week underground breathing coaldust, and working some shifts in a Welsh winter you go a week without ever seeing the sun, then you want to run free on the rugby field or fill your lungs and let your voice ring out when you do emerge from the pit. If your working week is spent risking your life in an environment fraught with danger, then you want to be sure to live to the full what precious time you get above ground.

In Under Milk Wood, I would suggest, Thomas is seeking to capture a world that was already disappearing, a world that celebrated life with such gusto. He relished the memories of his own childhood, and, particularly on his last, fatal tour of America, he must have felt very much severed from his roots. The humour in the piece must not, I feel, overwhelm the feeling that these are people whose lives have value, that they represent a world that is fading and that we should strive to keep alive. I have read that learning about Hiroshima and Auschwitz made Thomas acutely aware of the fragility of local culture and drove his desire to immortalise the Wales in which he had grown up.

Bernice and I saw a stage production in London, decades ago, that was very enjoyable, but that did not really acknowledge that side of the piece, and, indeed, many productions do miss that. In fairness, both the original Burton radio production, and a production released on CD starring Anthony Hopkins, largely avoid this trap.

The reason why I am writing about the play now is because last week Bernice and I watched, on our National Theatre at Home subscription, Michael Sheen as First and Second Voice in an innovative production which reopened the Olivier Theatre after Covid as a theatre in the round. This was really an adaptation, adding a framing story to the play. While critics were unanimous in praising Sheen’s performance, opinions were divided about the framing device. I, for one, think it was a brilliant concept and superbly executed.

The production is set in an old age home; one inmate, who is suffering from dementia, receives an unscheduled visit from his estranged son (Sheen), who is, we learn, a writer with, it appears, drink and anger management problems. (There is no great leap of imagination needed to identify the son with Dylan Thomas himself.) Desperate to connect and reconcile with his father, and unable to get any response from the old man, the son eventually tries painting, for his father, the picture of the town that features in his father’s old photo album, from the father’s own childhood as the son of the town preacher. At this point, the son launches into the opening lines of Under Milk Wood, only speaking them with a passion and intensity that reflect his need to get some reaction from his father. At this point, the other inmates and the staff of the home assume the characters of the inhabitants of the imagined/remembered town, and the play continues to its conclusion.

This framing device seems to me a magnificent metaphor for Thomas’s desperate attempt to preserve/revive the South Wales of his (imagined) memory. It also invests the characters with a great dignity. Ultimately, their vivid creation has the power to restore the father to an awareness that makes it possible for him to fleetingly remember his past and, momentarily, even recognize and  embrace his son, before slipping again into oblivion, making it possible for the son to leave, at least partly comforted.

Excellent ensemble playing includes Sian Philips, now 88, improbably but utterly convincingly playing the young promiscuous unmarried mother Polly Garter, who declares:

Me, Polly Garter, under the washing line, giving the breast in the garden to my bonny new baby. Nothing grows in our garden, only washing. And babies. And where’s their fathers live, my love? Over the hills and far away. You’re looking up at me now. I know what you’re thinking, you poor little milky creature. You’re thinking, you’re no better than you should be, Polly, and that’s good enough for me. Oh, isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?

However, this production is, more than anything, a celebration of the incredible power of Sheen’s performance. Here he is delivering, again, those opening lines, and not holding back!

Sheen’s evocation of an entire world not only brings the father back from oblivion for a short time, but also holds the audience spellbound for 90 minutes that feel like half that time.

If, after reading this blog, you would like the full experience of Under Milk Wood, then you could do worse than take out a subscription to ntathome. Failing that, I strongly recommend the 90-minute 1954 BBC radio production with Burton: a straight performance that celebrates the pure power of Thomas’s prose-poetry.

Meanwhile (you knew that was coming), Tao is designing his own tractor, and Raphael is working on perfecting his facial expressions. There’s no such thing as down time!

We begin with a medical bulletin. Thanks to the wonders of antibiotics (see last week’s post) and her inner strength, Bernice bounced back from her bout of strep throat in good time to pull her weight in last week’s preparations for Pesach. (Just as well: I would have felt bad leaving her at home with a packet of matza and a flask of tea while I went to a hotel for chag.)

Instead, we turned down numerous invitations from family and friends. With Micha’el and family celebrating with other Israelis in Portugal and Esther and family (I rather like the sound of that) celebrating with Maayan’s parents and siblings, Bernice and I held a seder-à-deux (thereby turning the enforced format of 2020 into a voluntary tradition in 2022).

No arguments about who was going to sit next to who; nobody fell asleep at the table; Bernice recited Mah Nishtanah faultlessly, found the afikomon very quickly, and was not unreasonable in her ransom demand; there were very few arguments about whether we fill the third cup now or later, and at what point we sing what. All in all, a very satisfying evening, and we even both managed to find the time on Friday afternoon to prepare new insights to bring to the table.

(My insights, incidentally, were gleaned from the amazing Lamm Heritage Archives, of which I was, to my shame, completely unaware until last week. This is a collection of PDFs of Rabbi Norman Lamm’s original typewritten sermons and addresses, complete with his pencilled emendations, spanning over 50 years from the middle of the last century. As a pulpit rabbi, and as the president of Yeshiva University, Rabbi Lamm brought a fierce intelligence, immense scholarship, and an insightful awareness of the significance of current events to his sermons. If there is anyone out there who is unaware of this amazing resource, as I was, and who might be interested, I cannot recommend it too highly.)

Looking back again to last week’s post, allow me to brag about the fact that I achieved a very significant milestone last week. I believe I became a social media influencer (even though I’m not at all sure what that is). It came about in the following way.

You may remember (but probably don’t) that I made a passing reference to the Waddington board game Buccaneer in last week’s post. A dear friend posted a comment saying; ‘My favorite game ever. ! played for many wonderful hours…. I often wish I still had it to play with the grandchildren.‘

Reading that, I went back to eBay, where I had found the illustration I used in my post, and sent her a link to one of the several boxed sets available for sale. I of course selected one of 1958 vintage, which I knew would be the set she remembered, as it was for me. The same day she WhatsApped me to say: Awesome idea !!!!! Brilliant! We‘ll get on it !’ and, a little later: ‘Done !’ She was even thinking of buying another one to send to her cousin as a birthday present.

This all left me a little dazed, not least because I had only sent her the link as a joke. I now begin to feel a terrible weight descending slowly but inexorably onto my shoulders. Am I going to have to start weighing my words now, and considering what effect my careless trifles might have on impressionable readers? Am I acting irresponsibly when, every Sunday morning, I just sit down at the keyboard and just allow myself to be led wherever the fancy takes it? Do I need to consider more responsibly my target readers and my relationship to them?

To which, after due consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the only answer is: Not bloody likely!

(Far-from-brief editorial aside: I am allowing myself to sully my post with this expletive, since it is a quote from one of the classics of English theatre – George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’. Eliza, in her first public attempt to pass herself off as a lady, responds to an enquiry as to whether she plans to walk home across the park: ‘Not bloody likely! I’m going in a taxi.’

In 1914, when the play was first staged, theatre censorship was a legal requirement, and all plays had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s office for pre-performance approval. The office’s report included the following:

The Play is entirely without offence, except perhaps to the opinions of old-fashioned people who must be accustomed to having their opinions offended in modern dialogue. [Ed. Note: There really is nothing new under the sun.] I notice, however, one detail. On Page 46, the word “bloody” slips out of the as yet only partially educated Liza and on the next page a silly young woman uses it under the impression that it is part of the new “small talk”. The word is not used in anger, of course, and the incident is merely funny. I think it would be a mistake to be particular about it, but since the word has been forbidden in other plays– in a different sort of connection, however– I mention it.
Recommended for license.

Although the word stayed in, and no less an actress than the great Mrs Patrick Cambell, playing Eliza, uttered it on stage in London and, later, New York, the usage gave rise to a delightful euphemism. For some time after the premiere, Londoners, in print if not in speech, favoured the expression: ‘Not Pygmalion likely!’)

While I was trying to decide who my target audience is, a phrase came into my head that I have not heard for some time: the man on the Clapham omnibus.

[Editor’s notes:

‘Omnibus’ is the correct word for which ‘bus’ is merely an abbreviation. It is Latin and means ‘to or for, by, with or from everybody’, which is, as Michael Flanders pointed out, a very good description.

Clapham is an area of London which, when the phrase ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ was first used in a court of law, was a lower-middle-class commuter suburb with reasonable access to the financial and legal district of the City of London. We can picture the nominal ‘man’, therefore, as an office clerk. (These days, to be able to afford to live in Clapham you are far more likely to be a lawyer, accountant or stockbroker than a mere clerk.]

Possibly the first use of the phrase as we know it was in 1903, when Lord Bowen, hearing a case of negligence, said: ‘We must ask ourselves what the man on the Clapham omnibus would think.’ In other words, what a reasonable layman of reasonable intelligence would think. The phrase is often used when arguing how to interpret a less than clearly written text, for example.

Incidentally, the Clapham omnibus itself features in a much earlier reference. I don’t know how much of a comfort this will be to any of you reading my blog while stuck in London traffic, but here is a quote from 1857: ‘So thoroughly has the tedious traffic of the streets become ground into the true Londoner’s nature, that … your dog-collar’d occupant of the knife-board of a Clapham omnibus, will stick on London Bridge for half-an-hour with scarcely a murmur’. [Ed. Note: There really, really is nothing new under the sun.]

Since his first appearance, the Clapham commuter has travelled around the world, putting in appearances (so Google tells me) in Australia – as the man on the Bondi tram (Sydney) or the man on the Bourke Street tram (Melbourne), or the man on the Prospector (a rural passenger train) to Kalgoorlie (Perth) – and even in Hong Kong, as the man on the Shaukiwam tram.

One final diversion, if I may. Apparently, ‘a moron in a hurry’ has recently emerged as the obverse of the man on the Clapham omnibus, in cases where intellectual property rights may have been infringed. If I try to flog really bad copies of Nike shoes, for example, and Nike take me to court, the judge may dismiss the case, claiming that only a moron in a hurry could possibly confuse my ‘knock-offs’ for the real thing.

Of course, my dark secret – as I am sure all of you realise – is that I am not writing for the man, or the woman, on the Clapham omnibus or, for that matter, John or Jane Doe or Fred Bloggs. I’m writing for David Brownstein. If John, or Jane, or Fred, or, indeed, you, want to eavesdrop, then you’re all more than welcome.

Meanwhile, in Zichron, Raphael is taking an increasing interest in the world around him, and, in Penamacor, Tao shared one of his new books with us last week during our video call.

In the dark days, and the long, dark evenings, before the internet, folk used to gather round the encampment fire as the chill evening closed in, and either play board games or hold philosophical discussions. Board games probably gave you a better insight into human nature: Warren Buffet, so they say, played, and won at, Monopoly as if his life depended on it, relishing every opponent he bankrupted, while Alexander the Great was more of a Risk man himself. Personally, I enjoyed Buccaneer, with its miniature pirate ships laden with gold bars, rum barrels, rubies and pearls.  Whether that had more to do with the accumulation of riches or the harsh chafe of leather jerkin against bare chest is for me to know and you to guess…

And, as the evening wore on, and the conversation started to droop a little, someone could always be relied on to ask: ‘So, tell us. What/Who do you think is the greatest….’ Depending on the particular slice of the population gathered round the fire, that might be greatest England forward line, or non-German-speaking composer, or Cadbury’s item of confectionery, or whatever.

For our present purposes, dear reader (in case you were wondering where I was going with this) the question is ‘What is (or, as I suddenly realise we now need to say, ‘What was) the greatest human invention or discovery?’ Interestingly, Google seems largely incapable of distinguishing between inventions and discoveries. Many of its lists of the greatest inventions include discoveries.

The Atlantic magazine, in a 2013 article, wrote about the greatest ‘technical breakthroughs’ since the invention of the wheel: ‘technical breakthroughs’ seems to me a neat bracket term for inventions/discoveries. The article is a very interesting read; this is partly because it discusses in detail the methodology used by the magazine to arrive at a top 50, and the variety of ways in which the experts canvassed interpreted the guidelines they were given. It also explores, in interesting ways, some individual breakthroughs that performed better, or worse, than you might have expected.

For instance: “Considering how often the modern era has been called the “television age” and how much time people now spend before a variety of screens, it is notable that television comes in only at No. 45. Many years from now, perhaps people will regard the second half of the 20th century as the brief moment when broadcast TV could seem a dominant technology. With its obvious-in-retrospect limitations, like one-way information flow rather than interactivity, and dependence on heavy hardware for best display, maybe TV was bound to be a transition to some other system more tailored to individual tastes.”

Optical lenses, on the other hand, made it to #5 on the list. I must admit they would not have been something I considered, probably because there is a sense in which they do not seem very dramatic, especially these days. However, the author argues that “the adoption of corrective lenses amounted to the largest one-time IQ boost in human history, by expanding the pool of potentially literate people”. That seems an argument that is hard to dismiss, even if John Milton managed to cope with late-onset blindness by dictating Paradise Lost to his daughter without writing any of it down himself. There are people the inside of whose heads is a land impossible to imagine.

One more interesting aside from this list (since my spyware tells me that hardly any of you click on my links). Having only fairly recently wielded a wheelbarrow in Portugal, I can attest to both its almost-elegant simplicity of design and its tremendous labour-saving potential. Why, then, was it invented only thousands of years after the wheel?

Turning to the pointed end of the list, my attention is drawn to #3. Since I’m sure you’re dying to know, #1 is the printing press – although I suspect that future digital generations may find it as limited and transient as the television. #2 is electricity.

And #3? Bernice reminded me this week that the answer is probably the one always given by our dear friend and family doctor in Wales, Louis Saville z”l. Louis grew up in the Glasgow of the 1920s, studied medicine, and practised as a family doctor for many decades, spanning the introduction into general medicine of what he always claimed was the single greatest discovery of the 20^th Century – penicillin. It was certainly not easy to argue with someone who had wrestled with the daily stark reality of family medicine before antibiotics, and lived to see their routine adoption as a first line of defence against infection, turning deadly diseases into minor unpleasantnesses.

When Bernice took herself to bed last Tuesday with a very sore throat and flu symptoms, we knew this was serious. Bernice, let me explain, is one of the world’s worst patients, since she has had so little practice at it. A veritable fusion of Edith Cavell and Florence Nightingale whenever anybody else takes ill (with, as she pointed out to me when she previewed this post, more than a dash of Matron Hattie Jacques, or possibly even Nurse Ratchet thrown in), she is incapable of judging the severity of her own symptoms. When her gall stones triggered a life-threatening infection a couple of years ago, it took me a day to drag her screaming to the emergency clinic, and even after she had been admitted to hospital and started on medication as a precursor to surgery, she was still protesting that she was over it now and could she please go home.

Having languished in bed for a day and a half, barely able to swab her own nostrils for the rapid flow tests that all came out glowingly negative, she finally agreed to allow me to make an appointment to see our family doctor, and a second appointment for a PCR test (since we all know that the rapid flow test is not worth the mucus it is written in). We saw the doctor that same afternoon. He was able to confirm that she had strep throat, and to start her on antibiotics – although he was very impressed that her own immune system was already doing a valiant job of fighting the infection.

Back home, Bernice started the course of tablets and cancelled her PCR. By the following morning, the sore throat was gone, and she felt well enough for a full story-time and conversation with Tao.

It is unfortunate for many of the most significant of human breakthroughs that, not long after they are achieved, they go almost unnoticed. Antibiotics are such a part of everyday life now that it is very difficult for those of us who do not remember life before them, in other words anybody under 90 years old, to appreciate how dramatic was the change they made. We can read about medicine before antibiotics, and understand intellectually their contribution to human well-being, but very few are still alive who can argue as passionately as Louis always did that they represented, unequivocally, the greatest human achievement of the 20^th Century.

Before I close, some other personal reflections on the list in The Atlantic. Weighing in at #11 is nitrogen fixation. Well, I don’t know about you, but to the best of my knowledge I have never heard of that one. It is, apparently, the heart of the ammonia-synthesis process, which was used to create a new class of fertilizers central to the green revolution. #37 is cement, the literal foundation of civilisation. Anaesthesia only made it to #46; as the author of the article pointed out, having had dental work before the NHS authorised the use of novocaine, he would swap his personal computer (#16) for anaesthesia in the blink of an eye.

Finally, and appropriately for my last post before Pesach, I started this week with sliced bread (since which all of the above were claimed to be the greatest thing). So let me finish with the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, who had neither wheelbarrows nor wheels (the Egyptians having not yet discovered them). Instead, they almost certainly relied heavily on #48 in The Atlantic‘s list, the lever.

Of course, no human achievement can come close to the everyday achievements of human life: a child’s smile, for example (even if (see right) wind-induced).

At this stage of the week, I’m usually desperately poking around the deepest crevices of my mind with a cerebral toothpick, hunting for crumbs of ideas to winkle out (You can tell we’ve started cleaning for Pesach, can’t you?) and serve up as my latest post. On a good week, I come up with one idea. On a stellar week, I start off thinking that one idea might turn out to be a good idea, rather than simply coming to the conclusion that I don’t know of a better ‘ole.

This week, uncharacteristically, I feel spoilt for choice. It seems that, everywhere I look, there is the kernel of an idea that seems worth teasing out. How did a film musical that Bernice and I found it difficult to get into manage to win us over and sweep us along for two hours (Tick, Tick…Boom!)? Exactly why did we find the Hebrew stage adaptation of a film we both loved so leadenly disappointing (Hooked Up to Life – adapted from the French film The Intouchables)? What lessons can we draw from the fact that, of the 11 people murdered in Israel this week by terrorists acting against the Jewish state, one was a Druse border policeman, one was a Christian Arab policeman and two were foreign workers from Ukraine?

And then, of course, there’s the extraordinary story of the slap heard around the world. 1500 words? That story must have 15,000 words in it!

But in the end, I’ve decided to opt for a small story that caught my eye online today, and another story that that one led me to, about two people who, six years apart, raised all sorts of interesting questions about the nature of art. Both were, coincidentally, women (always assuming I know what that word means – there’s another subject for a post right there) and both were described, in the news reports I read, as pensioners (although I’m not sure of the relevance of that fact).

Our story begins, however, with that infinite group of monkeys, eternally and uncomprehendingly pounding on an infinite number of typewriters – or, I suppose, these days, keyboards. Eventually, so I was always led to believe, one of their number would randomly type out the text of Hamlet, or, I suppose, another, as yet unwritten, masterpiece of the theatre. My question is: Would that manuscript be a work of art? Let me ask the more generic question: Must a work of art necessarily be the result of a conscious act of creation? You may be inclined to dismiss the question as trivial, since it arises from a completely unrealistic situation. (Where are you going to house this infinite number of monkeys? How will you persuade them to keep typing away? How are you going to afford to buy all the bananas you’ll need?) However, let me give you a far more plausible example.

You can occasionally find, on certain seashores, a washed up, twisted piece of driftwood that is aesthetically very pleasing. Imagine taking such a piece home and placing it on display. A friend walks in and admires what she calls your ‘new artwork’. Is she mistaken? Or do you feel that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck – in other words, if it has beauty, is interesting to look at, can stir the observer’s emotions, stimulates reflections on the transience of form or the ceaseless passage of time – then it is indeed a work of art (or, perhaps, a duck)? 

And so to our first pensioner, a retired dentist who, in 2016, visited a Nuremberg museum and stopped in front of an art exhibit in the form of a crossword puzzle with clues in English, which was captioned “Insert words” and “so it suits”. Since this 91-year-old knew English, she started filling in the answers, as she believed she had been invited to. She even used a ballpoint pen! She was then accused of damaging property – the 1977 artwork was valued at £68,000, and was on loan to the museum from a private collector.

When questioned, the woman pointed out that, if the museum did not want people to follow the artist’s instructions, they should have placed a warning notice alongside it.

Her lawyer later produced a seven-page rebuttal, arguing that, rather than harming the work, her actions had increased its value by bringing it to public attention, and, furthermore, her “invigorating reworking” of the exhibit meant that she now held the copyright of the co-created artwork, and perhaps the collector should sue the museum for destroying the co-creation by erasing the ballpoint pen additions.

You may find the lawyer’s rebuttal too clever by half, but is it any more so than the original work?

And then, in the Picasso Museum in Paris this week, a 72-year-old noticed a blue overall hanging on a wall. Assuming it had been forgotten, she took it, tried it on, found it was too big, and asked her tailor to shorten it. When she revisited the museum a few days later, she was arrested for art theft. The overall was, in fact, Old Masters, an example of the artist Vilanova’s “critical yet lively reflection on issues such as the role of images in transmitting culture and cultural values”, according to another gallery.

The pockets of the overall were full of the postcards that Vilanova collects in flea markets and which are a major theme of his work. The garment was intended to be unhooked and handled, and the postcards studied.

Prosecutors accepted the pensioner’s explanation that she had no idea she was stealing an artwork, although she confessed to the theft. She was let off with a warning. The museum is now left with an artwork 20cm shorter than originally. Is it still a work of art? Is its value reduced by the alteration? Was the alteration an act of vandalism, unintentional damage, or, indeed, artistic collaboration?

The side of the argument that I instinctively find myself on will not, I suspect, surprise many of my readers. Art, I would argue, requires artifice. That is a word that usually carries a negative connotation. Merriam-Webster notes:

‘Artifice’ stresses creative skill or intelligence, but it also implies a sense of falseness and trickery. Art generally rises above such falseness, suggesting instead an unanalyzable creative force.

As a counter-argument, I would cite Picasso’s comment that:

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth – at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

There are, I believe, two points to be made here. One is that art is always the result of a conscious act of creation as creation. For me, driftwood can be beautiful, but it cannot be art. Even the tailor’s handicraft is not part of the overall as a work of art; it is conscious, and indeed skillful, but it was not intended as art; it was not carried out to enhance the truth contained in the piece of art.

The second, not unconnected, point, is that art has to be cooked, not raw. Of course, just how much preparation is required to constitute ‘cookedness’ is a moot point. I was recently at a meal where one of the guests was very sceptical whether steak tartare could be called a food dish. (This scepticism meant, I am pleased to say, all the more for me!)

In a similar way, I am not sure whether an overall hung on a hook requires sufficient, and sufficiently skilled, preparation to ‘earn’ the status of art. There is a continuum: at one end (for me, at least) is a late Rembrandt self-portrait; at the other is an entirely blank, untreated canvas, hung in a gallery. Somewhere along the continuum a line needs to be drawn, dividing art from non-art. I don’t really feel qualified to decide where the line should be drawn, although I know that if I were forced to draw it, my line would be much closer to the Rembrandt than modern art experts argue. I am certainly out of kilter with the times; fortunately, galleries have not discarded their genuine old masters to make room for such work as Old Masters. There is still plenty for me to see when I visit a gallery.

Speaking of beautiful pictures (I keep doing it!), here’s two more. Tao clearly found this week’s stories more amusing than last week’s, and Raphael continues to thrive under tender, loving care.

But first, the announcements.

Last Friday morning, our younger grandson (I rather like the sound of that), who up until then had been known only as the baby (or, by his three-year-old cousin on Maayan’s side, as Jo-Jo), was brought into the covenant of Avraham and given the name Raphael (not, under any circumstances, to be shortened to Rafi, as Esther (not, under any circumstances, to be shortened to Esti, as David (not, under any circumstances, to be shortened to Dave, as my late mother always made very clear) made very clear) made very clear). Raphael, as you can see, comes from a long line of people whose names are not to be shortened. (Whether his cousin will be allowed to continue to call him Jo-Jo is still under discussion.)

The name Raphael has no familial significance; it is, rather, the name that Esther and Maayan increasingly felt, during that crazy week between his birth and his brit, belonged to him. Esther and Raphael continue to do well, thank God, and they and Maayan are starting to get used to their new life together. Thank you all for your many good wishes, expressed publicly, in comments on last week’s blog, and privately. The wonderful thing about good news is that, when you share it with others and see them take pleasure in your joy, it simply redoubles your joy.

The brit itself was held in Esther and Maayan’s home; we were only 10 adults and one child (not counting a baby and a mohel, of course) just the mothers, grandparents, and two of Maayan’s siblings and their spouses. The quiet intimacy of the occasion seemed very fitting, to be honest. We brought some gooey cakes, and Maayan’s parents provided the savouries, including cheese and wine. I cannot recommend too highly having at least one of your children marry the daughter of a Frenchwoman who enjoys the pleasures of the table.

And now to this week’s other big story. As we were celebrating Raphael’s birth, I was also witnessing the death throes of my laptop. It has been showing signs of its advanced age (only five years, for Heaven’s sake!) for some months now, and I have been googling and YouTubing patches and workarounds and solutions.

First, booting and shutting down started taking a little longer, and then the laptop’s response time in general started to become a little sluggish.

Next, the battery started playing up: the laptop would show 50% of battery left, and would then shut down suddenly. I eventually bought and installed a new battery, which represented, for me, an achievement the equivalent of assembling a precision Swiss watch while blindfolded. When I switched the laptop on after installing the battery, and it didn’t explode, I kept waiting for the Cape Canaveral control centre to break out in applause and whoops.

Then I started having problems with internet connection. The laptop started failing to recognise any Wi-Fi signal. The ‘solution’ I found was to carry out a network reset and reboot, something I ended up having to do sometimes two or three times a session. Eventually, I started connecting my phone by USB cable to the laptop and using my phone as a hotspot, which worked okay, although, for some reason that I never really understood, in this configuration the laptop was unable to recognise the network printer. (If you happen to understand why this happened, please don’t feel a burning need to explain it to me.)

Last week, the laptop refused to shut down, looping round to a reboot every time.

It was around this time that I started feeling like one of those frogs that is prepared for the dining table by being boiled alive. Popular legend has it – at least among those who enjoy eating frogs, but not, I suspect, among vegetarians – that, if you gently lower the frog into a pot of cool water, then gradually increase the temperature, the frog easily adjusts to each increment, and never actually notices as the temperature reaches boiling point. At no point in the gradual decline of my laptop was the extra work (the extra workaround) that I was now required to do so burdensome as to make me stop and think that it was unacceptable.

Finally, last Wednesday morning, I was unable to switch the laptop on. I spent three frustrating hours following a couple of helpful YouTubers (one probably from West Africa and the other certainly from the Indian sub-continent) who offered the six things you can try before you have to bite the bullet and clean or replace your hard drive. I tried all six. None made the slightest difference, although in one or two cases the laptop toyed with me, pretending that something momentous was about to happen before admitting failure. Since cleaning or replacing the hard drive would involve losing all of my applications, I felt I had reached the point where I really needed to call in someone who knew what they were doing.

This, incidentally, is a point I reached with household plumbing some years ago. After the second occasion on which my attempting to fix a small problem had resulted in the need to call in a professional to fix the now larger problem my attempt had created, and after our plumber had assured me that his foreign holidays are all sponsored by people like myself, I vowed never again to boldly go round the bend. The humiliation of discovering how easily the problem is fixed is no worse than the humiliation of having to admit that my efforts have made the problem much worse, and I no longer have to get filthy dirty and/or soaking wet as a prelude to humiliation.

So, at lunchtime on Wednesday, I called a computer technician who came highly recommended. In an unexpected development, I did not have to explain to her where we live, which is in a one-way street at the very edge of one of the older areas in Maale Adumim. If you don’t live there, you never pass the street, and many people don’t know where it is. However, this lady happens to live in the street off which our street runs, so she needed no directions, and arrived within five minutes of my phone call.

Unsurprisingly, none of her quick fixes worked, and so my laptop went off on the equivalent of a gurney. She was able to copy all of my data, in preparation for a re-installation of Windows. All she needed from me (and you’ll find it hard to imagine the depth of the irony in that word ‘all’) was a complete list of the applications I had installed on the laptop, together with usernames, registration codes and passwords.

I mentioned this to a number of people the following day, so I think I can imagine the expression on the faces of at least some of you as you read that last sentence. (Some of you will, of course, be looking very smug. If you value our friendship, don’t tell me who you are.) How lucky I am that I now have a mobile phone on which I can access my Gmail account, and how doubly lucky I am that I never delete emails. By searching by name for the apps I could remember, and then searching for ‘software’, ‘download’, ‘registration’, ‘application’, I was able to locate emails for almost all of the software that I had bought.

How trebly lucky I am that my passwords are always predictable. I was able to remember virtually all of the ones I needed.

So, while we drove up to Zichron to visit ‘the baby’ (as he was then known) on Thursday, I spent a couple of hours trying to remember whether I had forgotten any vital applications in the list that I sent the technician. We stayed overnight in Zichron, and, by the time we arrived back home after the brit, the backup was complete and the reset had started. After shabbat, the technician phoned to say that everything was ready. This morning (Sunday), I have been test-driving my rejuvenated laptop, which is now noticeably faster and not at all quirky.

I have managed to reinstall three or four applications that I had forgotten about, and everything is looking good. Well, as good as it looked before. It would have been wonderful if it had been possible to copy back all of the data, all of those thousands of files in their hundreds of labyrinthine folder structures, in a slightly more methodical configuration. Unfortunately, I am still confronted by the coral reef of data that has sprung up over the years on my laptop. The technician did a wonderful job, but she is not, sadly, a miracle worker.

My takeaway from all this, of course (and you might want to make it yours as well), is to keep, in my sock drawer, a written list of all my applications, registration codes and passwords, ready for the next time something similar happens, as it doubtless will. Norton 360 LifeLock, with its password vault, is a wonderful thing, but, if I can’t reinstall Norton without the password, it’s not a lot of use.

Amidst all this excitement, we only managed to squeeze in a short video call with our big boy this week, but, as you can see, it was long enough for him to be totally absorbed, as always, in a story his Nana read. Meanwhile, I finally managed to catch our little boy with his eyes open.