It’s been a week of pleasant surprises, starting with the weather, which has continued to be bright and sunny, with clear blue skies. Indeed, in the two weeks since our arrival, we have still not seen any rain, and, on Wednesday last week, the temperature peaked at an incredible 14^oC. Our house stays naturally cool, which is a blessing in summer but less so in January, particularly since the temperature at night falls to around 0-1 ^oC. At least, during the day, when the sun climbs over the house and shines directly into the back garden, from around 11 o’clock, we have something of a suntrap.

I’ve actually been proving my bread dough outside, very successfully. (When people ask me what aspects of life in Britain I miss in Israel – and even more so in Portugal – “The airing cupboard” is my standard answer. Not only is it perfect for bread dough, it is also the ideal environment for warming pyjamas and drying bath towels between showers.)

We’ve also unexpectedly enjoyed the generosity of neighbours, although I’m not entirely sure that ‘enjoyed’ is the right word. A couple of days after we arrived, a lady who lives round the corner arrived on the doorstep with a gift of a large shopping bag full of tangerines and a few oranges. We feel obliged to include a clutch in our breakfast fruit salad, squeeze several fruits every morning for fresh juice, and grab one every time we walk past the bowl in the kitchen. Nevertheless, we were still only two-thirds of the way through emptying the bowl when I answered a knock on the door a few days later to find the same lady offering another large shopping bag full of citrus. If only I had the Portuguese, I might have plucked up the courage to say the equivalent of “That’s very kind of you but we haven’t actually worked our way through the last lot you gave us”. As it is, my Portuguese only runs to “Obrigado”, which is how we ended up with a second industrial load of citrus.

Tslil assures me that most people in the village refuse to accept these gifts, because everyone has their own citrus tree. This particular lady probably knows that we only have a small and not very prolific satsuma tree in the garden, and also knows that we are now a household of five rather than three, and so she insists on showering us with gifts.

A third large shopping bag arrived on Friday, so I’ve been googling recipes for tangerine fritters and satsuma surprise, but I now basically despair of ever reach the bottom of the bowl.

Added to this, we have our own lemon tree, which grows close enough to the house to allow fruit to be picked from the balcony leading of the kids’ bedroom as well as from the garden itself. It is currently full of fruit, and so, since we arrived, I have made lemon curd and lemon ice-cream, and Tslil and Tao baked a delicious lemon cake for my birthday lunch on Shabbat. (This cake was, as Tao conspiratorially informed me a couple of days before my birthday, a surprise!)

My birthday was actually full of surprises, and not only for me. In the morning, nobody alluded to my birthday, but this was more or less what I had expected. We have developed a tradition in the family, over the decades, of ignoring birthdays until we have the time to celebrate them. So, for example, when we were working, we would wait to wish Happy Birthday and give cards and presents until we sat down to dinner together.

This Shabbat, around noon, Tslil came into the salon and said: “I haven’t wished you Happy Birthday yet!” When Bernice heard this, she almost collapsed, because, although she assures me that she had been aware of my birthday all week, she had in fact completely forgotten on the day itself. I’m trying to comfort myself with the fact that her average over the last 50 years is still 98%, which must be a pass mark.

Fortunately, the others hadn’t forgotten, and I received a lovely card, decorated beautifully by Tao, who, Micha’el assured me, had also decided on the exact wording of the heart-warming message inside.

The greatest surprise of the week took place outside the China shop. We were, of course, unable to get through the week without a couple of visits to the China shop. On this occasion, Bernice and I had popped down to pick up a bolt for the front door, some socks for Micha’el, and a connector to attach a hose to the bidet…and thereby hangs a tale.

You may remember that, during our last visit, we arranged for the bathroom to be renovated, and, a couple of weeks after we left, the job was completed…or, to be more precise, not completed. In the time-honoured tradition of British workmen, Mark the plumber and Eric the tiler had finished the job on schedule, other than connecting said hose to the bidet tap. They assured Micha’el that they would, when next at the building supplies store 30-minutes’ drive away, buy the requisite connector, and return to complete the job.

If we had been in Portugal then, I would have paid them the balance owing, less 100 euros, which I would have held back until the job was completed. However, I didn’t feel it was fair to expect Micha’el (who was holding the money) to do my dirty work, and so I told him to pay in full. Hands up all those who are not surprised to learn that Mark the cheery plumber and Eric the jovial tiler have not returned to finish the job…..Yes, I thought so.

Which explains why we were, unsuccessfully as it happens, searching for the right connector/adaptor (3/4” to 5/8” if you’re interested) last Thursday.

When we arrived at the shop, Bernice suddenly realised that, having come out without her handbag, she had no mask with her. (It is still a legal requirement to wear masks in shops in Portugal. In this part of Portugal, a lot of people wear masks in the street as well.) You need to understand that Bernice is rather like the Queen when in Portugal, in that she goes around with no money on her. I handle all that side of things. (On the other hand, she carries the passports and, in transit, the various papers that we need to travel these days.) So, I lent Bernice my mask for her to go into the shop and look for socks. She would then have the task of explaining to the shopowner that she was going to swap with me, so that I could come in to look for the bolt and connector and to pay for everything. (I’m not sure how we thought Bernice was going to explain that, but, since they had no socks in the right size, the question was academic.)

Anyway (and here we reach the point of the story, for the benefit of those of you who were beginning to despair of ever reaching it), while Bernice was inside, I was waiting outside, unmasked, pretending to study the display of artificial flowers outside the shop window, and carefully avoiding coming too close to any other pedestrians. I suddenly heard, from the road behind me, a voice call out: “Kvod Harav!” Before I had time to register how odd it was that someone should call out to me in Hebrew, let alone elevate me to the rabbinate, I turned round to see a couple of Breslov-looking hassidim in their thirties, sitting in an orange Transit van. (This is not, to be honest, a sentence I ever expected to write.) I think they were probably a little surprised to see a kippa-wearing Jew in Penamacor, but their surprise was as nothing compared to my total astonishment at seeing hassidim in Penamacor.

They stopped to chat for a couple of minutes, during which time I discovered that they are part of a community that has just bought a sizable plot of land outside a village about 10 minutes from Penamacor. Since they were stopped in the middle of the road, they didn’t have time to furnish any further details, but I shall certainly be trying to find out a little more about them. There, as they say, goes the neighbourhood.

And that’s about it for this week. As you can see, this trip has no major projects, just a daily portion of fun and games, stories and make-believe, cooking and baking, which is, after all, what we are here for.

It’s a little after eight on Sunday morning. Bernice has just gone downstairs with Tao, who has taken to joining us in bed every morning for a book or two and sometimes a matching game. They have now left me to try to dash off this week’s post before we all have breakfast and drive down to the land for the morning. All, that is, except for Tslil, who is off to a meeting of her women’s group.

Somehow, a week has flashed by since we left Ma’ale Adumim – a week in which not a great deal has happened. We haven’t ventured out of Penamacor, and have visited the local supermarket only three times (which may be a personal record: we have been known to go every day, as we suddenly realise new items we are missing). On our first visit, the day after we arrived, we were armed with half a yard of shopping list. Unfortunately, it being Monday, there was no fresh fish at all and not a huge variety of fruit and veg. However, we were still able to spend over 100 euros.

The next day we returned and Bernice chased down some more items, while I spent my usual ten minutes at the fish counter with google translate, coming away with beautiful, fresh salmon, Nile perch and sea bream. No trout, unfortunately, which will probably have to wait until we get as far as Castelo Branco.

All of this saw us through until Friday, when I popped out to top up the fruit and veg. This time I was able to find delicious strawberries and broccoli, but, astonishingly, no cucumbers, which are clearly not as popular here as they are in Israel, or indeed Britain. Tslil believes that they are a largely regarded as a seasonal veg here, and that locals use a large, dark-green variety of courgette as a winter substitute.

Apart from that, we have paid one visit to the China shop, where the owner greeted us as warmly as ever. We only needed a couple of small items, and, with a mixture of searching and sign language, we were able to track down a plate stand for the havdala dish we brought out this time and clips for kippot. (We had to compromise, and settle for clips decorated with a strawberry pattern, but nevertheless we were, as always, impressed that the shop hadn’t let us down.)

In addition, on Shabbat afternoon, we took a walk down (almost everywhere is down from our house) and then up, to a spur at the northern corner of the village. Up a long flight of stone steps is what looks like a church, which however has only one small window at the side. The large metal doors are always locked, Tslil tells us. I suspect it may be a chapel of rest for a coffin before burial.

The walk was very worthwhile, because the top of the spur commands a view past the edge of the village and over the valley to the east, and, thirty yards away, a view to the west over the valley in which the kids’ land lies. We arrived there just 45 minutes before the end of shabbat, and the pinkish-purple misty evening light over the distant foothills of the Serra da Estrela was a very welcome reminder of the beauty of creation. Nothing like a dose of nature to restore one’s sense of perspective.

Our only other major outing this week was a drive down to the land, with Micha’el, Tao and Lua, the now-hulking still-puppy. We didn’t stay long, but were able to admire the cob floor of the tipee, which constituted our first surprise. When we were last here, the floor was level after the application of the last full layer of cob. There were, however, several cracks, because in the unusually dry and warm weather the cob had dried quicker than the kids had hoped.

In the last two months, they have filled the cracks and fed the cob with several coats of linseed oil. As we walked into the tipee last week…. Correction, as we bent double to duck under the entrance flap, which is more or less ideal for Tao, easily negotiable for his yoga-practising parents, and manageable for his pilates-practising nana, but a humiliating crawl on all fours for his decrepit grandfather (who nevertheless expects, after a few weeks of boot camp, to be able to limbo dance his way through)….As we went into the tipee last week, our eyes, and our feet, were met by a smooth, rock-hard floor, that nevertheless gave the sensation of having a very slight give in it. It seems to be almost as durable as concrete, but considerably warmer, and it makes the tipee feel cosy and much closer to completion.

The next stage in making the tipee completely habitable is the cob stove, which Micha’el is making good progress on. In typically symbiotic fashion, the clay soil for the cob comes from the digging out of the swales, the channels that will carry the rainwater away from around the tipee and down to the area that will need to be irrigated.

The main reason for our trip to the land today is because Tao didn’t get to spend much time there last week, and really wants to go, not least to take us on his special walk through the jungle (which the kids assure us is less terrifying than it sounds). Lua never needs to be asked twice. Spending much of the day lazing around the house (although she gets taken up to the forest for a good walk twice a day), she adores running free on the land, chasing shadows, hunting and dismembering twigs, following rabbit trails.

Micha’el may manage to get some more work done on the land today, and I may even be able to help. In addition to digging the swales, sifting the soil to produce the cob, and building the stove, the kids have been gifted what Tslil feels may be something of a white elephant – a young, but nevertheless fairly substantial, olive tree. It is, at the moment, lying on its side just off the path to the tipee, and the kids plan to plant it fairly close to where it is lying. This, of course, entails clearing a circle of land and digging a dauntingly large hole to sink the tree in. In a moment of weakness last night, I heard myself volunteering to help Micha’el in this effort.

On a walk with Tao on Thursday, we spent some time playing football on the five-a-side open-air pitch and watching the excavator and dumper-truck at the site at the top of our street where a major renovation of the police headquarters is taking place. Tao was also able to go rock-climbing on the piles of excavated gravel, as his grandpa filmed and his nana had her heart in her mouth.

Fortunately, and, again, unexpectedly, the weather this entire past week has been beautiful: sunny every day, with almost entirely clear skies and no rain. It has been cold, particularly the last couple of nights, when the temperature fell to -3^oC. Before my Canadian and Eastern seaboard US readers start sneering, let me emphasise that the significant factor in our house here is not outside temperature, or wind chill, but insulation. The difference between the outside and inside temperature is not always as great as we would like.

Having said that, the new stove we bought when we were last here does a great job of keeping downstairs cosy. (It also has eliminated the unpleasant smoky atmosphere in the salon.) Over shabbat, when we could not feed the stove, the meicham (electric urn) and platta (hotplate) warmed the kitchen, while a three-bar fire warmed the salon. It is only in the five minutes between coming upstairs last thing at night to get undressed, and slipping under the very efficient duvet, that we feel cold.

I usually daven on the glazed-in balcony off our bedroom (the solarium, as the estate agent might term it). It faces NNE, so that the early morning sun streams in through the side window. In winter, it is challengingly cold, but, inspired by our shabbat davening outdoors during the first year and a half of COVID, I donned my coat, cap and gloves, and grew cosy enough to be able to doff the cap, remove the gloves, and even unzip my coat after a while.

For the most part, this first week has slipped by in a whirl of stories, cuddles, games, cooking and baking, playgrounds, catching up, and generally having a good time. Nothing wrong with any of that. And now it’s 9:40, so I really must stop here and get ready for another week full of everyday pleasures.

I’m writing these words while cruising in afternoon sunshine above the clouds in mid-Mediterranean. Yes, we’re on our way to Portugal!

There’s a good story to tell about our negotiation, over the last few days, of the various obstacles placed in our way by a range of commercial and governmental interests. However, as I said to Bernice, I can’t possibly expect you all to sit through another catalogue of bureaucratic woes, not least because, at the end of the day, we actually made it into the air.

So, let’s just say that the last three or four days lasted, for Bernice and myself, about a month, and aged us about a year. Still, no complaints. The actual airport process today was remarkably smooth; ground staff were efficient and helpful; and when we presented the printouts of our Passenger Location cards, the El Al check-in desk clerk held them aloft and announced to the passengers checking in at adjacent desks: ‘You see! This is the document you need.’ I told her that I had never been singled out as the star pupil before, and she promised that after the lesson she would give me a sweet….but did she? Did she heck as like!!

We left Israel at an interesting time, The media today are full of speculation that Bibi Netanyahu is about to strike a deal with Attorney General Mandelblit to avoid serving prison time. Since Mandelblit leaves office at the end of January, this is probably a story that will dominate the Israeli media for the next two weeks, which seems like another good reason to fly to Portugal.

COVID, principally Omicron, is spreading at an alarming rate in Israel…and, indeed, in our own community. Over the last few days we kept hearing about friends and acquaintances who have tested positive. I’m inclined to believe that the wider Omicron spreads the better. Who knows: by the time we return Israel may have achieved close enough to herd immunity for the country to decide that the pandemic is over. Yet another reason to see now as the perfect time to retreat to rural Portugal.

Even the weather decided to encourage us to leave. We had been enjoying an early winter that largely ranged from crisp and clear mild winter weather to warm and sunny, and that featured, at least in our area, only a little, occasional, mostly night-time, rain,

Then, on Friday, winter arrived, even in Ma’ale Adumim. Plummeting temperatures; thick, dark cloud; then heavy driving rain and strong, swirling winds. Staid olive trees, usually the model of sobriety, were tossing their canopies as if they were frisky fillies, and their leaves were chattering like a flock of bickering starlings. My wide-brimmed leather hat, which had spent the previous three years gathering dust on a shelf in the wardrobe, had soon doubled in weight as it drank rainwater. I realise, of course, that I am writing for a worldwide audience, and some of you in North America will be telling me that I don’t know what winter is. However, we all know that there are other factors in determining how wintry it feels. Just as the wind-chill factor can make it seem several degrees colder than it actually is, so a lack of adequate home insulation and suddenly realising that you left your really warm coat in Penamacor can have the same effect.

The end result is that my walk to and from shul on Friday evening was Dickensianly bleak.

If you are reading this on publication day, then you may know that this day is Tu b’Shvat, the 15^th day of the Hebrew month of Shvat, which is regarded as the New Year for trees. The reason why trees warrant a New Year is that there are many Jewish laws, of tithing and of enjoying the fruit of trees, that require determining which year of growth the tree is in. Tu b’Shvat marks the beginning of another year in this calculation.

The reason why Tu b’Shvat is chosen for this purpose is because it is taken to mark the transition from winter to spring. Here we come to one of the curious features of the Hebrew calendar. It is largely a lunar calendar; however, it is also a calendar that, in many of its festivals, is agriculturally based, which means that it needs to be a solar calendar.

The way in which these two are reconciled is that, in every cycle of 19 years, there are seven leap years, in which not a single extra day but an entire extra month is added. This creates an irregular pattern in which, typically, for a couple of 12-lunar-month years the Hebrew calendar edges ahead of the Gregorian, so that Pesach, for example, can end up falling in later March and Rosh Hashana in early September. There then follows a leap year, and suddenly Pesach is in mid-April and Rosh Hashana in late September.

It so happens that this year is a leap year. In two weeks’ time a leap-month will be added. This means that, this year, Tu b’Shvat is close to being as early as it can be in the solar year. As I walked to shul on Friday, with the freezing rain driving horizontally into my left ear, I wondered in what sense this could be considered to be two days before the end of winter.

Then, as I walked back from shul, with the freezing rain driving horizontally into my right ear, I started to see that this can serve as a reminder that we cannot take the patterns of the natural world for granted. The uniqueness of the Jewish calendar accentuates this, and makes it clearer for all to see; but we all know, even following the solar calendar, that we can have an Indian summer, that we must ne’er cast a clout till May be out (don’t strip off a layer of clothes before June), and so on.

Perhaps the period in the Jewish year when we feel this most strongly is the period when we throw ourselves on the mercies of Nature most explicitly. In Sukkot, when we move out of our houses and into our booths. I know this doesn’t hold true in Montreal, for example, but in Israel, Sukkot can bring almost any weather. There are years when we have to retreat from the sukka because the sun is relentless. And then there are the years like one of our first Sukkot in Maale Adumim, when the heavens opened halfway through our first night meal, and the storage compartment under the sofa bed became a swimming pool in a matter of minutes.

Experiences like these remind us that we are not the masters of Nature, and that Nature possesses the force to nurture us or destroy us. Such reflections serve to curb any hubris we might otherwise feel, and make us appreciate all the more sweetly the bounty of Nature when we are privileged to enjoy it.

P.S.: It’s now 7:45 here (here being in a very warm bed in a very cold house in Penamacor) or, in other words, 45 minutes past posting time. Since my body, despite its long day yesterday, thinks it’s 9:45, I can no longer attempt to get back to sleep. So I thought I would send the blog out.

We landed on time and were swiftly through the airport rigmarole and driving across Portugal on a very dark but still and dry, though cloudy, Portuguese night. We arrived around 10:15 local time, and, after the warmest of welcomes from the kids’ dog Lua, who clearly remembers us, and a brief catch-up with Micha’el, we collapsed into bed.

However, since Tao has not yet crept into our bedroom this morning, and we haven’t yet had a chance to see him since we arrived, you’re going to have to wait to see him as well. No pictures this week, I’m afraid.

P.P.S.: Just as I was about to post, someone wandered into the bedroom, so you, and we, have struck it lucky.

Goodness me, what a hectic few days we currently find ourselves in the middle of. We had just about reconciled ourselves to not getting out to Portugal, when Israel last week moved Portugal, together with a generous handful of other European countries, as well as the whole of Africa, from the group of Covid red countries to the group of orange countries.

Fairly soon afterwards, Israel removed even the US and the UK from the red list – in effect, cancelling the red list. This sounds like good news to start the week, doesn’t it?

(For those of you who think this actually is good news, let me point out that all it actually means is that Israel is just as red as these countries, and there is therefore little point in closing our borders to them.

For those of you who think that is actually bad news, I’m going to stick my neck out and say that the whole world catching the Omicron variant may be the best outcome at this stage. Please feel free to tell me I don’t know my as-ymptomatic from my ebola. But I don’t believe the free world can sustain this level of alert for a lot longer.

There was an interesting article in The Times (ToL, not NYT, but you’d guessed that) last week that suggested the pandemic will be over when we decide we’ve had enough of it dominating the news. You probably can’t read the article here, because The Times guards its articles for subscribers, but here’s a brief extract:

“We are on the next stage now,” Krastev says. “Which means trying to understand a world where we are not focused so much on the pandemic. It doesn’t mean that nobody is going to be infected, nobody is going to die, but suddenly your life is not dominated by this fear.

“I think this is how pandemics fade away. It is partly about disease statistics, but not simply that. Suddenly the experience of the pandemic loses centrality. There was a moment when people met, the only questions they asked were, ‘Have you been infected? How are you affected?’ That’s not the case any more. Even when you talk to people that are sick at this very moment you don’t have that kind of urgency. Fear is a very intense emotion, it can’t go on for too long.”)

Anyway, immediately after Portugal was taken off Israel’s red list, family and friends started WhatsApping us with the good news. We slept on it, and, the following morning, we discussed whether we wanted to book again and risk another disruption (even before feeling in our sweaty palms the full cash refund from TAP for our cancelled trip – hold that image). It didn’t take us long to realise that the answer was a fairly resounding ‘Yes!’

Esther then sent me a link to a string of short break return flights to Lisbon from El Al, priced as if they had fallen off the back of a 707. Needless to say, when I actually went online, there was no way to negotiate a longer trip at the same kind of price. Nevertheless, I was able to book. We are due to depart next Sunday, as planned, and return a few days earlier than originally planned.

In the space of a couple of hours, I was able to do everything. I booked the flights. I then took out travel and medical insurance, which thankfully did not involve any long phone interrogations, or declarations from our doctor, because our last trip was recent enough for all the approvals to still be valid.

Finally, I booked a car. After our experience with a puncture last time, I was looking for an alternative to Europcar, and found one that was a little cheaper, had an even better customer rating, and also offered pickup from the airport. The company is not a name I recognized, and I won’t be surprised if, when we arrive in Lisbon, the desk handling this company’s reservations will, in fact, be the desk of one of the big boys – Europcar, Sixt and the rest.

My suspicion is that the rental car setup in Lisbon is the same as what I am convinced is true of the stonemasons at the main cemetery in Jerusalem. As you drive towards the main cemetery gates, you pass a parade of 10 or 12 stonemason’s yards, offering a wide choice. I am prepared to bet that, if you were allowed to walk through the reception area of one of these, and out the back door, you would find that there is just one stonemason’s yard, and all of the dfferent shopfronts are, indeed, just a front. See the Beatles film Help for another example.

As I was booking our flight, I discovered that TAP and El Al appear to have, eminently sensibly, merged their flights. We are, in fact, booked on TAP, which, of course, means that we could have requested a voucher from TAP rather than a cash refund. Heigh-ho! Oh! While we’re speaking of that, let me bring you up to date on the cash refund.

A couple of days after a rep on the phone had opened the refund request for me, I searched online, using the Case ID he had given me. However, I was unable to locate the request. So I phoned TAP to clarify. After 20 minutes waiting on the phone, I got through to another rep, who was able to confirm that the previous rep had not, in fact, submitted the refund request! (No, I don’t know why, either.) While I waited on the phone, this second rep created a new case, with a new Case ID. The following day, after 20 minutes waiting on the phone, I got through to yet another rep, who was able to confirm that the second rep had, this time, submitted the refund request!

Then, last Thursday, just a day after I had made the booking, two emails from TAP arrived in my Inbox: one for my ticket and other for Bernice’s. The message heading in each case was: TAP Reembolso/Refund – Voucher. I immediately started composing in my mind the enraged conversation I was going to have with the TAP rep (who, I already knew, would be unable either to help me or to pass me on to a supervisor who could help me). ‘I have an email from you expressly stating that I can request a full cash refund, not just a voucher!’ (As my brother later pointed out, they stated that I could request it, not that they would grant the request.)

However, when I read the actual email message, I found it contained, in each case, a voucher for ₤56.14. (Please don’t ask why a Euro-based company selling a ticket to a shekel-based customer prices the ticket in sterling. I do know the answer, but your time is too precious.) ₤56.14? Where on earth did they get that figure from?

After a couple of minutes, the penny (or, in this case, 11,228 pennies) dropped. After our June 2020 flight was cancelled, TAP gave us each a voucher for 110% of the cost of the ticket. We redeemed those vouchers against our October 2021 ticket purchase, and there was a remaining credit balance of ₤56.14 on each voucher. When we booked our original January 2022 tickets, we redeemed that balance. (Don’t worry; I have a slide for this that will make it clearer.)

Now, TAP have astutely said: ‘Wait a minute. We’re not going to cash that voucher in for you. Do you think we were born yesterday? We’ll give you back the voucher!’ I hope and believe that they will refund the balance in cash. Bernice, who is becoming, with regard to TAP, Eeyorier the longer this saga goes on, thinks we’ll never see the money. I’m decidedly Pigleter in this regard.

So, we’re booked and now desperately getting ready to go. This involves a certain amount of scrambling. Bernice has been conducting her grand tour of Maale Adumim toyshops, and has tracked down everything, including little people and picture dominoes. She has also gathered together the disparate items on our food shopping list to go, which includes items Tslil misses and items I want for baking, and Bernice for cooking, that are either unobtainable or of unclear kashrut status in Portugal: vacuum-packed dates, caraway seeds, balsamic vinegar, yeast; that kind of thing.

In her brief spells at home to rest from this running around, Bernice has been clicking away with the needles, in order to finish the sleeveless sweater she is knitting for Tao.

And what, you ask, have I been doing while Bernice is engaged in all this activity? Well, I’m glad you asked. Last time we were in Portugal, Tao and I spent a lot of time on the floor, devising increasingly complex structures from Magnetiles and Duplo. Just before our flight, we built an airport, with an immigration desk, luggage carousel, passenger steps, luggage van and trailer, and a magnificent aeroplane with passenger and luggage compartments.

When we first arrived, as this was the first time I had ever seen Magnatiles, Tao was much better at this than I was. By the time we left, I was starting to realise the impressive versatility of Magnatiles, and I was able to more than keep up with Tao. I do realise that it’s not a competition, and I do know that there is something pathetic about a grandfather in his 70s comparing his performance with that of his grandson who is not yet three years old.

However, just in case at some point in the future it does become a competition, I want to make sure that I don’t let myself down. After all, Tao will have been practicing for the intervening two and a half months.

So, I’m spending my time sketching out some ideas on paper, and practising getting down onto, and back up from, the floor, with the minimum of moans and creaks. What with that, and counting the hours until we fly, I’ve barely had time to write this post!

Lots of ground to cover today, so let’s get started.

First up: I took a certain amount of (albeit muted) flak from one or two people the other week when I made a passing reference to the fact that Esther is pregnant. They were surprised that Bernice and I had not told them earlier that Esther and Ma’ayan are expecting; Esther is due in mid-March. So, my first New Year’s Resolution for 2022 is to tell people earlier when we are expecting a grandchild.

This is actually very exciting, because this is a resolution which I am able to keep, within the first week of the new year. I’m delighted to tell you that Micha’el and Tslil are also expecting. Tslil has just completed her first trimester, so we are looking forward to somewhere in early July. 2022 is already shaping up to be a busier, and better, year than 2021.

If we’re already talking about Micha’el, Tslil and Tao, then you might like to know that they have a new, 30-minute(!) video on their YouTube channel, which will take you through the whole process of what they have been doing on their land over the last year or more, with a particular focus on all the work involved in erecting the tipi. (As you can see, I still can’t decide how to spell ‘tepee’. I must say, using a variety of spellings makes me feel rather Shakespearean.) You can find the video here. (And for those of you who are less interested in teepees than in Tao, he features as well.)

But, getting back to resolutions, the end of January will mark four years since I retired – or approximately 9500 working hours, but who’s counting? Reflecting on those four years, I remembered the witty little ditty I composed for my farewell party at work, in which I shared some of my plans for retirement. I’ve just revisited the poem, and I’m afraid it looks remarkably like all those New Year’s resolutions I used to make before I made a New Year’s resolution not to make any New Year’s resolutions (which is, unsurprisingly, just about the only New Year’s resolution I had ever kept until just now).

I planned, for example, to finally read Ulysses. I dutifully bought the book, although I did not help my chances by choosing, from the various options, the Oxford edition that reproduces the original 1922 text, typographical errors and all. What I hadn’t realised until the book arrived was that this copy also faithfully reproduced the original font, in its original size. This makes the actual physical task of reading, in your 70s, just a little more of a strain. If there’s one thing you don’t need as you wade through Ulysses, it’s a little more of a strain.

This volume also boasts multiple aids to reading, prepared by the scholarly Jeri Johnson: a 50-page introduction, three appendices, and 218 pages of explanatory notes. A point can be reached where the distinction in meaning between ‘reading aids’ and ‘reading impediments’  becomes blurred.

Not content with that, I also bought, as recommended, Harry Blamires’ excellent The New Bloomsday Book, and then, when I found a second-hand copy of Anthony Burgess’ legendary guide to Joyce’s work, Here Comes Everybody (albeit hiding under its American title of ReJoyce), how could I resist it?

I made a noble start. I read Johnson’s 50-page introduction, then decided, on the basis of recommendations online, to tackle the novel not from Page 1, but, rather, by cherry-picking the more accessible chapters first. I started at the end, with Molly Bloom’s famous monologue (whose driving rhythm I rather unfairly hampered by flicking to and fro between text and notes).

After another chapter, I decided that I would actually prefer to read from beginning to end, and managed to negotiate four or five chapters. This involved prepping from Burgess and Blamires, and keeping one finger in Blamires’ notes and another in Johnson’s, while reading the text.

Around this time, I discovered RTÉ Radio’s 1982 dramatisation of Ulysses. Broadcast to celebrate the centenary of Joyce’s birth, it is widely regarded as the definitive adaptation of the work. It is faithful to the text, being basically a dramatized audiobook, rather than an adaptation, with actors taking the parts of the narrator and the various speaking characters.

Having come across it, I wrestled for a couple of weeks with the philosophical question of whether hearing a book read constitutes reading the book. Having decided that it did – good heavens, I have read several books this last year to Bernice, and she certainly qualifies as having read them – I now find myself liberated.

I am ingesting Ulysses through my ears rather than my eyes, in a far more authentic Dublin accent than my imagination could ever conjure. (I’m currently reading Shuggie Bain aloud to Bernice – another laugh-a-minute novel – and my working-class Glasgow accent makes even me wince.)

I highly recommend the experience of the radio dramatization. The Irish national broadcaster RTÉ offers a very spirited performance of the book, with very few distractions from the words themselves. You might want to pay it a visit (as long as you have 29 hours and 45 minutes to spare, for that is its total running time). At this rate, 2022 may well be the year of War and Peace, if I can only find an unabridged reading.

Another of my self-assigned post-retirement projects was to explore in depth Schubert’s Winterreise – Winter Journey, a cycle of 24 songs for voice and piano that reflect on the last stage of life and the movement towards death. (Oh yes! We love our light comedy!) It took me a long time to grow fond of classical song, particularly for male voice. Decades ago, I bought Bernice a CD set of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert lieder, including Winterreise. It is only in recent years that I have started listening to it.

I then learnt about the phenomenon that is Ian Bostridge, an Oxford history professor, who transitioned from academia to professional singing in his thirties, bursting onto the scene with an acclaimed Wigmore Hall performance of Winterreise (a work which has fascinated him since his youth). He is a very dramatic performer, fully playing a character rather than simply singing the song.

So, I downloaded Bostridge’s Winterreise, and also bought his highly praised study of the work, Schubert’s Winter Journey – Anatomy of an Obsession. (You may be detecting a pattern here: ‘first buy a book’ is the part of every project that I can manage without any difficulty.) I fully intended to work through the cycle, song by song, comparing Fischer-Dieskau’s interpretation with Bostridge’s, and accompanying each song with the relevant chapter from Bostridge’s book.

I still do fully intend to do that, and in fact I’m tempted to make that a 2022 resolution. If I aim to explore one song every fortnight, I should finish the cycle by the end of the year.

As I talk about it here, part of my heart soars at this exciting prospect. Bostridge writes beautifully: his translations of the poems are poems in their own right, and his exploration of his own reflections is fascinating. In addition, the two singers, Fischer-Dieskau and Bostridge, have such contrasting styles that listening to them in tandem will be a wonderful way of helping me determine what I feel is the essence of each song.

At the same time, another part of my heart sinks. I can’t escape the feeling that I am setting myself up to disappoint myself again. I am reminded of Che Guevara’s words (although I may have slightly misread the quote):

“The resolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”

But who knows? Perhaps 2022 will be the year when I really, finally, manage to shake the resolution tree hard enough for lots of apples to fall.

Either way, 2022 is a year I intend to embrace with both arms. (Can you embrace with one arm? I wonder how Nelson managed with Lady Hamilton. But I digress.) Whatever! I close by wishing you all a wonderful 2022. May you always feel confident in your own skin; and remember: what looks like a pile of dirt might turn out to actually be fine-sifted soil perfect for your tipi floor.

But before we get to that….

Housekeeping 1: I apologise for being, as one of my readers put it, a ‘despondent Penamacorrespondent’ last week. A couple of people contacted me clearly concerned that they might have to talk me down from the window ledge. Please always remember, dear reader, that this blog is, as they say ‘based on real events’, but might sometimes take liberties in order to create a more interesting story. It’s probably fair to say that the ‘low’ I sustained over 1400 words last week represented a low that I was in for only a few moments in real life, but I decided that it made good copy.

Housekeeping 2: Last Monday morning, I was able to get through to TAP on the phone. I explained the situation, and was assured that I could request a refund on our entire ticket (both outgoing and incoming flights). The rep explained to me that, if I requested the refund on the phone, I would incur a service charge, but, if I did it online, there would be no charge. So, I naturally hung up and attempted to request a refund online. However, at the critical moment, the website informed me that I could not complete the process online and I should contact the carrier.

I phoned TAP again, and, astonishingly, was again connected within seconds. I told the whole story again, and the rep was happy to process my request. When I asked about the fee, and pointed out that TAP was directly responsible both for causing me to request the refund and for forcing me to request it by phone, the rep assured me that there would be no fee. So, it looks like a good result. Now ask me whether we have received the refund yet….Not yet. Watch this space. The opera isn’t over till the fat lady sings.

Nor, indeed, is the musical – of which Bernice and I have seen two in the last couple of weeks: one on the big screen and the other on the stage. These were two very different experiences, for a number of reasons, and I have found myself thinking about the nature of the musical, and how I feel about it.

Our first outing was to the cinema, to see Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story. (Spoiler alert: he still dies in the end; she still doesn’t – of which more later.) Bernice had been very keen to see this, while I was a little less sure. I found it hard to believe that the remake would be very different from the original, with its various strengths and weaknesses, and I suspected that I would not get very much new from the evening. However, I’m very glad we did go. It was an evening whose plusses, for me, far outweighed its minuses.

Let’s start with the weaknesses of the original. Roger Ebert revisited the 1961 version in 2004, to mark its DVD release, and concluded his review with the following paragraph:

“So the dancing is remarkable, and several of the songs have proven themselves by becoming standards, and there are moments of startling power and truth. West Side Story remains a landmark of musical history. But if the drama had been as edgy as the choreography, if the lead performances had matched Moreno’s fierce concentration, if the gangs had been more dangerous and less like bad-boy Archies and Jugheads, if the ending had delivered on the pathos and tragedy of the original, there’s no telling what might have resulted. The movie began with a brave vision, and it is best when you sense that vision surviving the process by which it was turned into safe entertainment.”

I think I would agree with all of that. Now, let me work through Roger Ebert’s checklist to see how the 2021 remake measures up.

So the dancing is remarkable: We both felt that the dancing was, if anything, even better this time round, especially in the outdoor scenes on the actual streets of New York. Less explicitly ‘balletic’, and more street-muscular.

Several of the songs have proven themselves by becoming standards: It’s still Bernstein and Sondheim, so of course the songs are still sensational (especially the music). Even better, in fact, because the actors all do their own singing. However, I was sorry to hear that Sondheim’s original, 1961-risqué lyric was not restored. Anita, looking forward to a night of passion with Bernardo, still sings

He’ll come home hot and tired.
Poor dear!
No matter if he’s tired
As long as he’s near.

rather than, as originally written:

He’ll come home hot and tired.
So what!
No matter if he’s tired
As long as he’s hot.

There are moments of startling power and truth: Here, the new version adds several extra layers. The social context of the Puerto Rican and Polish gangs is fleshed out with multiple pieces of back-story; there is a very real sense of the whole extended Puerto Rican community. All of the dialogue has been newly written by Tony Kushner, and, largely through this process, the film becomes darker, richer; it becomes less of a vehicle for knee-jerk sympathy than the original, and a slightly more nuanced discussion of the urban reality of about-to-be-redeveloped Upper West Side.  

One particular decision I felt was very effective. A lot of the dialogue among the Puerto Ricans is in Spanish, and Spielberg refused to subtitle this in English. I believe the reason given was to avoid English being seen as the default, natural or superior language. The consequence of this for me is that I experienced the ‘otherness’ of the Puerto Ricans; particularly the one new ‘song’, an alternate, revolution-minded version of La Borinqueña, the Puerto Rican national anthem, comes across as remarkably threatening. It is very unsettling to be unsure whether and just how the Jets are being insulted and jeered at by this song.

Moreno’s fierce concentration: Ariana DeBose in the role of Anita is as fiery as Rita Moreno was, and that’s saying something

If the gangs had been more dangerous and less like bad-boy Archies and Jugheads: Done! The weapons the gangs arm themselves with, the fighting that is shown, the attempted rape of Anita in the final act, some of the dancing, are all uglier and more threatening this time round. Even the light and mocking comicality of Gee, Officer Krupke is made a little more serious by the trashing of a room in the police precinct building.

If the ending had delivered on the pathos and tragedy of the original: Here, sadly, Hollywood still hasn’t grown up. In 2021, much to my disappointment, the same unforgivable mistake is made as in 1961. Shakespeare knew that Juliet could not contemplate life with Romeo dead; she had to commit suicide. Hollywood thinks it knows better. I ask you: if Juliet/Maria survives, where do you see her in 5, or 10, or 20 years’ time? There is no reasonable answer to that question.

I was willing Rachel Zegler to turn Chino’s gun on herself and pull the trigger, but I’m afraid she didn’t.

Setting that one lapse aside, I heartily recommend the 2021 West Side Story. Do yourself a favour, and see it on the big screen, with the big sound system.

Bernice and I followed this, last Thursday, with a trip to see an amateur production of Annie. Now, I’m not going to lie to you. We wouldn’t have gone to see it had it not been for the fact that no fewer than three of our great-nieces were among the orphans. Now, I’m still not going to lie to you. A cold and wet early winter evening found me still hoping against hope that the Israeli government would announce an immediate Covid shutdown of all places of entertainment. But, it was not to be, and so we made the trek to Jerusalem.

The first pleasant surprise was that the theatre in the Masorti school in Talpiot is a rather splendid small theatre, with a seriously raked auditorium. We were almost in the back row, and it brought back fond memories of sitting in the gods in the West End.

I came to Annie almost as inexperienced as Maria in West Side Story. I could hum Tomorrow, and I knew that our heroine is rescued from the orphanage by Big Daddy, but that was it. Bernice had clear memories of us seeing the film together, but in the end she grudgingly conceded that she may have gone with Esther.

The second pleasant surprise was the level of professionalism of the whole production. Of course, all three of our great-nieces were magnificent, but almost everyone else was very good as well. As is always the case with this particular theatre company, a huge amount of effort had been put into all of the technical aspects. The mere logistics of dressing and making up a cast of 63 adults and children are daunting.

A creative set and spirited performances were enhanced, as usual, by a professional live nine-piece band. It’s fair to say that the performances were a little uneven, but everyone was in very good voice and a couple of the cast would not be out of place on the professional stage.

All of which makes me feel that I can offer some comments on the musical itself. Annie is set in the New York of the early 1930s Depression era. A bald account of the plot would suggest that it is very dark. At one point, our heroine wanders the streets and encounters a group of homeless people surviving by beggary and theft. Another scene shows FDR and his advisers wrestling with the nation’s economic problems.

However, the musical itself does not really take these situations seriously; they are little more than the backdrop against which the fairy-tale story plays out. I do not offer this as a criticism, but simply as an observation. Many musicals are set at a time of social upheaval and transition. Some of them are vehicles for examining and critiquing that situation. Others use the situation simply as a way to drive the plot. Oklahoma and Paint Your Wagon, for example, recreate an America settling the West. However, they do not overly concern themselves with that. Annie belongs in that group. Even the songs whose subject-matter is bleak cannot resist cute lyrics.

Prosperity was ’round the corner
The cozy cottage built for two
In this blue heaven that you gave us Yes!
We’re turning blue!

They offered us Al Smith and Hoover
We paid attention and we chose
Not only did we pay attention
We paid through the nose.

West Side Story, particularly in its 2021 version, captures New York at a time of transition, and has at least some serious things to say about the impact of that transition on the local population. There are, of course, musicals that involve themselves much more deeply in similar serious questions. One obvious example is Cabaret. Another example, and one that always surprises me by the depth of its examination of real issues, is Fiddler on the Roof. These are two examples of serious musical theatre and each, in its own way, demonstrates how song can add another layer of atmosphere, emotion and context to serious drama.

And speaking of musical comedy (as we almost were):
– Do you know you’ve still got your coat on?
– No, but you sing the first verse and I’ll join in the chorus.

In any normal week, Sunday morning finds me leaping upstairs after breakfast, taking the steps two at a time, my twin titanium hips working overtime to get me seated in front of the computer with not a moment wasted, as I struggle to keep the ideas that are bouncing around my head from bubbling over before I can capture them on the screen.

Not this week. This week I have taken pains to put off the moment when I flip open the laptop, open a new file in Word, and start to write my post. I lingered in shul after the morning service today. Once I got back home, I found various ways to delay starting to dice the fruit for our breakfast, even emptying the dishwasher, taking care to count the various types of cutlery, to ensure that nothing had gone missing.

After breakfast, I disappeared upstairs to do some vital filing until it was time for us to leave for the trip I had insisted we take today to IKEA. Because we were looking for items for ourselves and also for Esther and Ma’ayan, this involved over two complete circuits of the store, and then, of course, it made no sense not to stay for lunch. As soon as we arrived home, I simply had to assemble the standard lamps we had bought for the salon.

The result of all this elaborate avoidance strategy is that it is now gone 7 on Sunday evening, and I am only now starting to write.

Why, you may be asking, this unaccustomed reluctance? I could pretend that it is purely out of consideration for you, because this will, I’m afraid, not be the usual jaunty laugh-a-minute cheerful-chappie piece, but something rather bleaker. The fact is that I’m not looking forward to writing it any more than I’m looking forward to you reading it.

I feel that over the past week this bloody pandemic has caught up with me. Let me make it clear, quickly, that neither Bernice nor I nor any of the family have caught Covid, in any of its Greek alphabet strains. No, it’s just that everywhere I look there are Covid aggravations, and it’s really getting me down.

I can actually put my finger on one specific straw that broke this camel’s back. Last Thursday, we received an email from TAP. Now, when the Portuguese airline writes to me out of the blue, it is seldom in order to tell me that I have won this month’s raffle, or that Bernice and I have been upgraded to business class. As I glanced through the email, my eye was caught by the subject – Cancelamento devido a nova variante do CoronaVírus. Even your Portuguese must be good enough to get the gist of that. The text of the message began: Operação Suspensa: Lamentamos informar que… You surely get the picture.

So, our flight from Tel Aviv to Lisbon on January 16 has been cancelled. The good news is that we are eligible for a voucher to the value of 110% of what we paid, or a full refund. The bad news is that the email makes no mention of the status of our return flight from Lisbon on February 13.

Since receiving the email, I have spent hours on the phone, trying to speak to TAP. On one occasion, I even got through to a rep; however, when he put me on hold, while he was retrieving the details of our booking, TAP’s system bounced me to their automated customer survey, asking me how satisfied I was with the way my problem had been resolved. (On a scale of 1 to 5. When are they going to invent a phone keyboard with negative numbers?) From there, I was, of course, disconnected. On Saturday and Sunday, they do no work at all (hands up if you sang that line with me), so tomorrow (as I write), Monday, will find me wasting the day trying to establish whether all flights out have been cancelled, or we can reschedule, and whether we are entitled to a full refund for the return flight that may, now, be of no use to us.

In today’s news, we learnt that Portugal is on an extended list of countries that Israel is contemplating declaring to be red, and also that the Israeli government is considering closing the airport completely for a week or two.

We would probably be a lot more devil-may-care about flying out, and risking being stranded in Portugal, were it not for the fact that Esther is due to give birth in March, and we (particularly, but not exclusively, the Bernice parts of we) feel that we must be sure of being in Israel to offer help and support and, b’ezrat Hashem, to shep nachus (something that can only properly be done in Yiddish, of course).

So here we are, faced with the task of attempting to make a decision when we are not in possession of any of the relevant facts that might inform such a decision.

Please don’t think that this is just a moan about poor little me, or even poor little us. I’d like to crave your indulgence while I extrapolate. Our problem, writ large, is the problem faced by Naftali Bennett and his corona cabinet, by Boris Johnson, and, indeed, by every world leader. They, like us, are all being asked to decide on the best course of action when nobody honestly knows enough about the situation we find ourselves in.

For Bernice and myself, dithering for a few days, or even a week or two, is very draining, and is already making us very tense, but at least the eyes of the nation are not upon us. For our elected leaders, the situation is very much more fraught. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that for a long time we have been led to believe that modern science provides us with the tools that enable us to make scientifically sound decisions in all fields. Suddenly confronted with the clear fact that it ain’t necessarily so (a song for every occasion), we feel at best cast adrift, at worse betrayed. (A friend pointed out to me over dinner on shabbat that while this is true for part of the population, there is another part that rejects entirely the validity of all science. This certainly doesn’t help the situation.)

Initially, way back in what now almost seem like the halcyon days of early-to-mid 2020, the zigzagging of governments and the tension between politicians and scientists could sometimes raise a laugh, or at least a wry smile. But now? Lately, I look around me, and, indeed, inside me, and see only frustration, frayed tempers, intolerance, embittered skepticism. I listen to radio interviewers not attempting to conceal their anger or contempt for civil servants outlining plans currently being implemented; I see friends falling out over restrictions; I hear and read inflammatory language from those on both sides, on all sides, of the debate about how to handle the crisis, even about whether there is a crisis.

We are told that, in many cases, the long-term effects of Covid may be worse than the symptoms experienced when the virus infects an individual. I am genuinely afraid that the social effects of long Covid may be equally serious. As we approach the end of Year 2 with no end in sight, I fear for the entire fabric of society.

So, perhaps, making our way to Portugal and living off the grid in a tepee is the best thing we can do. It certainly looks nice and cosy.

So here we are, eight days before the shortest day in the year and about ten days after the earliest sunset in the year. (For those of you whose intuition is that the shortest day of the year should be the day when the sunset is latest, let me point you to the least incomprehensible explanation I have found of the phenomenon known as analemma.)

(Of course, a small but select portion of my readership should substitute ‘longest’ and ‘latest’ for ‘shortest’ and ‘earliest’ in the above paragraph, but if you think I’m going to do that for you after what you did to us at the Gabba….)

However, despite what the calendar says, the weather feels much more like autumn, at least here in Maale Adumim. In fact, as I write on Sunday, it feels like an Indian summer. (Which I just googled, incidentally, to discover that it has nothing to do with the Raj, as I always thought, and we should probably be calling it a Native American summer.)

All of which has nothing to do with this week’s topic (so don’t stop reading, even if you’ve understood next to nothing so far). It was only the thought of leaves that enticed me to precede them with ‘Autumn’, so that you would never guess just what I plan to share with you, which is, in fact, some reflections on the books I happen to be reading (or, ‘leafing’ through – d’ya geddit?) at the moment.

In the past – and certainly until I retired – I would only ever read one book at a time. At that stage, almost all of my reading was fiction. Sometimes a complete working week would go by without me finding (or, perhaps I should say, making) time to read at all. I then discovered, if I attempted to read two novels simultaneously, that characters from one would start sneaking through to the other, until I reached the point where I was no longer sure who belonged where.

Once I retired, however, I started to stretch myself, and also began reading far more non-fiction than ever previously, to the point where I now feel confident in juggling up to four books simultaneously, rarely, if ever, fumbling any of them. This feat is undoubtedly made easier by the fact that two of the books are what I am reading aloud to Bernice, and all four books are from very different genres.

Having made a conscious decision a year or so ago to read more poetry, our (theoretically daily) reading sessions begin with a poem. Perhaps, on reflection, our current volume of poetry might more accurately be called verse. My brother and I grew up with a volume of light verse first published in 1933 and, in our edition, revised in the early 1950s. It was written by literary siblings Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon.

An aside: It’s incredible how much cultural background you need in order to understand immediately the social significance of such things as personal or street names in England. To give just one example. A British TV sitcom of the 1960s starred Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques, who lived in Sebastopol Terrace, Acton, London. The Siege of Sebastopol (1854–5) was a major campaign in the Crimean War. Over the next 40 years, London grew 500% in area. This meant that, in every new district, large numbers of names had to be found for new streets. Crimean War victories were an obvious candidate for commemoration in this way. By 1960, the houses in these new districts were 80 or more years old. As a result, ‘Sebastopol Terrace’ was a recognizable shorthand for a rundown street of Victorian houses in a neglected area of London. Similarly, all three names ‘Herbert’, ‘Eleanor’ and ‘Farjeon’ together place the siblings firmly in the upper-middle classes of the first half of the 20^th Century.

The book of verse we grew up with was Kings and Queens, which offered, for each of the English (later British) monarchs from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth II, a one-page poem summarizing the highlights of the reign. These poems captured, mostly wittily, the popular perception of each monarch. If provoked, Martin and I are still capable of boring people at parties with recitations of the half-remembered verses.

Martin saw, and bought me for my last birthday, a follow-up volume, Heroes and Heroines, which dissects in a similar fashion such diverse figures as Robin Hood, Napoleon, Pocohontas and Florence Nightingale. Currently, Bernice and I are reading a poem a day as an amuse bouche before we read a chapter of a novel. Like so many sequels, Heroes and Heroines does not always reach the heights of Kings and Queens, but it is nevertheless a very enjoyable read, and I have learnt what Lady Hester Stanhope – who was previously just a name to me – is famous for.

The novel we are currently three-quarters of the way through is Lisa Ko’s The Leavers, whose central characters are an illegal Chinese immigrant in New York and her son. The novel is written from the viewpoints of both the mother and the son, and it movingly and powerfully explores the very real emotional and material hardships that many immigrants face. It is clearly very thoroughly researched, but never feels didactic, and the author’s control over how and when the elements of the story are revealed is masterful.

However, the first 280 pages have been almost relentlessly bleak. Indeed, Bernice feared that there would no redemption. I, on the other hand, have been waiting in expectation of a happy ending, and, in the last 20 pages, we both feel that we can see a faint pink glow that suggests that the sun may eventually shine again.

We have both been reflecting on the fact that almost all the novels we have read lately (and much of the non-fiction) ranges between depressing and gut-wrenching. It seems to me that this is not just a question of the narrative. In many Dickens novels, almost all of the storyline is bleak; however, there is a relish in the storytelling that lifts the spirits. That celebration of the form sometimes seems to me to be missing in contemporary literature.

As a counterweight to this, I started reading Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue: The Story of the English Language. I am a great fan of Bryson (who isn’t?), both in his explicitly comic (Notes from a Small Island) and his more ‘serious’ (The Human Body) modes. I must admit that I initially found Mother Tongue a little plodding, with somewhat of a shopping list of examples and observations. I wonder whether that is because I know considerably more about the English language than I do about the human body. (Mind you, I know considerably more about most things than I do about the human body, even my own.) However, I am now warming to it rather more. Bryson is certainly a master of the casual comic aside, and, at his best, breathes real life into dry facts and statistics.

My fourth current book – designated as shabbat reading – is Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z”l’s last book, Morality. Let me lay my cards on the table. If there exists, at this moment, a more important book, a more enlightening book, a book better able to make sense of what ails the Western world in these troubled times, and to offer hope for our future, then I am not aware of it.

What makes this book so special? There are, I believe, a number of elements. Rabbi Sacks was both an academic philosopher and a deeply religious man. This combination gave him both the perspective to recognize, and the tools and vocabulary to analyze and discuss, the moral challenges of our age. Plagued (or blessed) with insomnia, he read very widely and voraciously, enabling him to bring a wealth of wide-ranging and relevant classic and contemporary sources to the discussion. A man of great modesty and intellectual honesty, he was incapable of subordinating the facts to his position on any issue. Above all, perhaps, he possessed what just might be the greatest gift an intellectual can have. He could see clearly to the heart of an argument, and was able to explain and discuss profound ideas in language of absolute clarity and simplicity.

In Morality’s 23 chapters, each only 10 or 20 pages long, Rabbi Sacks revisited several themes that had long been at the centre of his understanding of Judaism and its contribution to the world – family and community as opposed to the individual, covenant as opposed to contract, guilt culture as opposed to shame culture, choice as opposed to fate. In Morality he fused these and other elements into a single, unified approach to understanding and addressing the challenges of the modern age.

If you are concerned by the path Western society seems to be taking, and if you are looking for one book to read to make sense of what is happening, and to suggest how current trends might be reversed, then I cannot too highly recommend Morality as that book. Its subtitle is ambitious – Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times – but this only reflects Rabbi Sacks’ optimism and his overwhelming belief in man’s capacity for good. To read the book is to feel simultaneously saddened by all that the world has lost with his death and gladdened that he managed to leave us so rich a legacy of thought.

I pray that society will adopt his recommended approach, and thereby make the world an even better place for Tao to grow up in.

Meanwhile, Tao is channeling his energies into helping seal the cob floor of the tipee with linseed oil: repairing the world one coat at a time.

Castelo Branco is the major city of the district in which Penamacor is located. The municipality has over 50,000 inhabitants, and is home to a polytechnic college, and some manufacturing industry, providing components to the car industry. When we first visited, the city also boasted at least two strictly vegetarian restaurants, both of which we sampled.

The more modest establishment traded under the name Namaste, which won it no prizes for originality. (A quick Google research reveals that in almost any self-respecting town in England you will find a Namaste restaurant.) It was a no-frills establishment, offering, each day, a different set menu with no choices. The food was tasty, if relatively unexciting, and incredibly good value for money. The ambience was relaxed and casual, and the decor was similarly laid back, offering an eclectic choice of chair styles and cutlery.

All of that last paragraph is written in the past tense because, sadly, Namaste became one of the victims of Covid-19. On this last trip, however, we found that, as is so often the case, another similarly modest establishment has sprung up. Eschewing the Indian vibe of its predecessor, this trades under the unabashed name Fast Vegan, and what they say is what you get. When we went en famille to Castelo Branco, we planned to eat at the other, rather more up-market, vegetarian restaurant, but, in the event, my navigation brought us to Fast Vegan Café.

This was a slight disappointment because Michael and Tslil had explained to Tao the concept of choosing one’s meal from a range of dishes offered on a menu, and he was rather intrigued by the prospect of this novelty. However, Fast Vegan offered, again, a no-choice menu (with the exception of dessert). Fortunately, the main dish of the day was rotini (or pasta twirls, as I have always called them) in a vegan Bolognese sauce, accompanied by a simple but very fresh salad, all of which Tao heartily approved of, as, indeed, did we all.

The day out had begun with a visit to the municipal park, which boasts a very good adventure playground as well as a small wooded area, a cafe and several feature fountains. The plan had been for us to split up after lunch, with the kids going shopping for work clothes at a large outlet, and Bernice and I shopping for bathroom accessories at a nearby store. In the event, Tao was fairly exhausted from the park, and we all agreed that we would call it a day after lunch.

This meant that the following day Bernice and I returned to Castelo alone, to complete our shopping. After a successful morning, we drove into the centre of the city and went in search of the other, posher, eating establishment – Restaurant Mãos de Horta, which sounds to my ear considerably more enticing than Fast Vegan Café. Incidentally, I just Google translated Mãos de Horta; it apparently means ‘Hands to the Vegetable Garden’. Then I googled Mãos de Horta in the hope of finding out what ‘hands to the vegetable garden’ is supposed to mean. I came across a book of the same name, which is a ‘How to’ book for Portuguese aspiring backyard vegetable gardeners.

This turned out to be in the same location as the restaurant we had eaten in for my 70^th birthday: another story of a restaurant closing and another opening.

Online, the previous evening, I had established that the restaurant was open from 12 noon until 2AM, Tuesday to Saturday, with live music and what I am unreliably informed is a ‘funky vibe’ in the later evening hours. We reasoned that at 2PM, when we planned to arrive, the vibe, if there was one, would be rather more subdued. Unfortunately, the previous evening was Monday, so we were unable to phone to confirm those opening hours. However, we decided to take our chances.

We approached the restaurant door through a very pleasant outdoor terrace, where tables with linen tablecloths were warmed by autumnal early afternoon sun. This looked promising.

When we arrived at the door, it was closed but unlocked, which we took to be a good sign. Inside, there were no customers, and no staff in sight, which we took to be a bad sign. And yet, a recording of a very easy-on-the-ear jazz piano trio was playing in the background, which was surely encouraging. When a pleasant young man appeared behind the well-stocked bar in response to my ‘Hola!’, our spirits rose. However, when he explained apologetically that they had just closed for lunch until 6PM, our spirits fell again.

Rather uncharacteristically, I decided that I wasn’t prepared to fold in the face of what might be a bluff. I knew that the alternative to a meal on a sunlit terrace, washed in jazz piano, was a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate, and a couple of handfuls of peanuts and almonds, sitting in the car. I put on my most pitiful face and asked whether there weren’t any crumbs from the floor that they could offer us. The young man immediately disappeared to ‘ask the chef if there was anything he could do’ (Hurrah!) and returned a minute later, looking, again, a little apologetic (Oh no!) and explained that the only thing the chef could offer was the set menu of the day. (Yes!!) Without even asking what that was (there are few disgusting surprises that a vegan restaurant can offer), we gleefully accepted, and stepped back outside to choose a table.

Over the next 40 minutes, we enjoyed a delicious, if luridly purple, beetroot soup, followed by a main course that consisted of four separate dishes on a single rectangular plate. The presentation was unflashy but very tasteful. A mound of thin spaghetti with peanut and leaf in a beet sauce; a fresh-tasting mangold salad; a cylinder of plain perfectly boiled rice topped with a chewy mushroom sauce; a salsa-topped salad crowned with one perfect fresh raspberry. The dish was a delight to the eye and then the palette. Each of the four dishes offered a combination of contrasting and complementary textures and flavours. Taken together, the four presented a very rich and varied meal. Bernice chose to accompany this with mint tea, and was brought a proper china pot that yielded four cups. I chose a refreshing iced tea.

Bernice passed on dessert, but I was tempted by one of Portugal’s typical custardy dishes, which was fine but unexciting, and an excellent espresso. As we waited for the bill to arrive, we played our usual game. ‘What would you expect to pay for that meal in a similar restaurant in Israel?’ This was not an easy question to answer. The standard of food presentation that we had enjoyed, the fine linen and tableware, the easy charm of the waiter, tend to be found in Israel only in restaurants that are more up-market than this one ostensibly was. However, since all of those apparent peripherals actually contribute significantly to the pleasure of the dining experience, it is not unreasonable to take these factors into account when ‘pricing’ the equivalent meal in Israel.

This is, of course, a game that we play with marked cards, because we are smugly confident that, in inland Portugal, we are going to be pleasantly surprised by how cheap the meal will actually be. However, in this case, the degree of our surprise surprised even us, if you follow me. For 21 euros, the two of us ate a meal that would, we reckon, have cost us at least 65 euros in Israel. We also came to the conclusion that, although the restaurant had changed, the chef almost certainly had not, since the style and the considered presentation of the food, coupled with the delicate flavourfulness of the meal, reminded us of the meal we had eaten in the same location 20 months earlier. We are fairly sure that this is a case of rebranding to reboot as Portugal emerged from lockdown. Unfortunately, the waiter could not confirm our suspicions, since he had only arrived in the city, and started working in the restaurant, a couple of weeks earlier.

At this point, I hope that at least some of you are puzzled by the apparent dissonance between my enthusiastic review of the meal and the contemptuously dismissive title of this week’s post. Well, the time has come to tell you more of the dietary preferences of the kids’ dog, Lua. She has a regular diet of dogfood and water, which she eats with what seems more a sense of duty than real pleasure. On the other hand, she will turn metaphorical somersaults for fish skin and bones, which, sadly, the kids never provide her with. Fortunately, while we are there, we eat fish regularly. If, on our return in January, she remembers us and greets us warmly, I for one will not be fooled; I can recognize cupboard love when I see it.

Lua’s other favourite treat is dairy. She will lick a butter wrapper or a yoghourt carton so clean that you could eat your dinner off it, as it were. However, on our first expedition to the supermarket on this last trip, we accidentally bought vegan yoghourts. Almost everyone was perfectly happy with them, but when Bernice tossed a finished carton to Lua, she took one sniff and walked away in disgust. She is a dog that (hands up those Brits with long memories) can tell Stork from butter….without even tasting it.

Tao, thankfully, is a considerably less fussy eater.

Quick update: It is with much satisfaction and no little sense of relief that I announce that I have now received, in my credit card account, a full refund of our original payment for car rental. The final chapter has now been written in the entyre, tyring, tyre story.

When we bought the house in Portugal, Bernice and I originally had plans to convert the third bedroom into a bathroom, and reduce the downstairs bathroom to a toilet and washbasin. I even sketched out a plan to steal the rest of the fairly long, narrow bathroom to make a dining alcove extension to the kitchen. We actually contacted the firm of contractors we had called in to survey the house before we bought it and asked them to offer an estimate for this work.

Once we had bought, and the kids had moved in, we decided that we would not rush to carry out any major conversions, but would, instead, give them, and us, a chance to live with the house as-is and then make a decision. It is true that living, for a month, with five people sharing one bathroom that includes the toilet occasionally presents its challenges, we have found that it is doable. I now view going up and down the stairs to the toilet three times a night as valuable cardio-vascular exercise, rather than a right pain. (Truth to tell, I view it as both.)

More important than all this is that, over the two years (Two years! Where did they go? Oh yes, I remember: they were, for the most part, flushed down the toilet by Covid) over the two years, as I say, that the kids have been living in the house, they have colonised the third bedroom, turning it into an office/recording studio/storage room. When we first arrived for this trip, I could not negotiate all the accumulated ‘stuff’ in this room to get to the wine rack (disaster!) and the printer (less critical, but still awkward) that were against the far wall of the room.

A few days after we arrived, Tslil took command. She asked us to amuse Tao (she didn’t have to ask twice, of course) while she and Micha’el disappeared into the ‘stuff’, paying out a ball of string behind them so that they would be able to find their way out. A mere hour or so later, they invited us up to admire their industry. We opened the door onto a room that was a vision of order. Musical instruments now hung neatly on the walls. The computer desk was absolutely ready for business. The floorspace could have accommodated a ballroom dancing exhibition. We were amazed and delighted and, of course, this finally persuaded us that the dream of an upstairs bathroom was unrealistic, and would be very unfair to the kids.

What this meant, of course, was that we now needed to consider renovating the downstairs bathroom. This featured a toilet that more than occasionally leaked; a cracked, but working, bidet in a garish purply-chestnut-brown and white; a bath that leaked, with a plug that failed to keep the water in and water pressure that found climbing to the top of the shower head an all-but-insurmountable challenge; and a sink where the water pressure was so poor that it failed to trigger the gas water heater, so that you could only wash in cold water. All of this was set off by shocking pink wall tiles that, for some reason, Bernice found unattractive, ornate, dull bronze towel rails and a free-standing toilet-roll and toilet-brush holder that had seen many, many better days.

A friend of the kids was able to provide the name of a pair of professionals – a plumber and a tiler – who worked together. She had not actually used them herself, but she knew several people who had, and who recommended their work. So we asked them to come round, assess the job, and give an estimate.

I’m not sure what we were expecting, but what we got was a couple of chirpy Cockneys: Mark, dapper, spruce, diminutive, and Eric, rather more rotund and balding. They took a quick look at the bathroom, as we explained that we wanted a fairly low-budget job, replacing all the fixtures and fittings, replacing the wall tiles, adding a glass shower door, repainting the walls, but not touching the floor tiles, which, as they are throughout the house, are a warm terracotta in fairly good condition.

We have our more high-end bathroom in Israel, and we weren’t looking to rival that. As far as Bernice was concerned, white, leak-free fittings and everything clean and bright was the name of the game. As for me, I also wanted to know that they could resolve the water pressure issue. That was, of course, something they couldn’t guarantee, but they seemed fairly optimistic.

Eric measured up to price tiles. I was a little unimpressed that he asked to borrow a tape measure (he had left his in the car and it was raining heavily), but, other than that, they certainly seemed to be able to talk the talk. They quoted a price for bath, toilet and bidet that seemed ludicrously low. (One of the advantages of living in Israel is that so many goods and services seem very reasonable in Portugal.) Then, pausing only to pocket the tape measure, they left.

They contacted us a couple of days later with a total quote for the job that we were quite ready to accept. We agreed that they would buy all of the white goods and taps, while we would look for towel rails, toilet roll holders and so on. However, a few days later, they called to suggest that we meet them to buy all of the goods. This actually suited us, and we arranged to meet them a couple of days later, outside a large DIY store 40 minutes’ drive away.

In the course of an hour or so, we bought everything we needed. Their estimate for materials had not been far off the mark. Going round the store, we learnt something of their back stories. They had met in Portugal through a common friend, and teamed up. They both have homes in England, and are in the process of buying, and building homes on, quintas (estates) near Penamacor. They both plan to shift their centre of activity from the UK to Portugal, although I am sure they will both continue to return to the UK for short-term lucrative one-off contracts.

There are (or, at least used to be) a number of American medical professionals who came on aliya, worked year-round in the Health Service here, and went back to America for a month a year to earn enough to enable them to live the rest of the year here in the style they were accustomed to. Clearly, the same can be true for skilled artisans coming from the UK to Portugal.

I’m reminded of the story of a homeowner who calls a plumber for an emergency job. The plumber completes the work in a few minutes and presents a hefty bill. The home-owner says: ‘Good grief! That’s more than I earn, and I’m a brain surgeon”, to which the plumber replies: “It’s more than I used to earn when I was a brain surgeon.”

I think it’s fair to say that Eric and Mark have not yet fully integrated into Portuguese life. From what little I heard, I think my command of the Portuguese language is at least as good as theirs (and I don’t speak or understand at all). Going round the store, I heard them discussing prices and comparing them to UK prices.

I noted that they were quoting prices in sterling: ‘Blimey! That’s only 2 quid a piece!’ I was very impressed to see that they were able to convert effortlessly from euros to pounds. Then I noticed that the item they were referring to cost 2 euros. They weren’t converting; they were simply using the words ‘pound’ (or ‘quid’) instead of ‘euro’. Such is the extent of their lack of integration.

At the end of the shopping expedition, Mark loaded everything onto his van (which was actually his motorised caravan, in which he is currently living on his land), and, later that day, they brought all of the materials round to the house, to be stored until the following week, when they were going to carry out the work. It is fair to say that theirs is a low-overhead business! Unfortunately, Eric forgot to bring back the tape measure.

They started work the Tuesday after we left Portugal, and managed to finish in five days. They also managed to resolve all the problems, and Eric finally remembered to bring back the taper measure. I think it was my telling him that I would deduct it from the final bill that did the trick.

So we now have what is (or at least looks in the photos to be) a much more respectable bathroom.

An added bonus of this renovation was that in the shopping mall where we went to buy the bathroom fittings and materials, we also found a Zara Kids store, with a discounted coat that was just what Tao needs for the Penamacor winter. Truth to tell, there’s room for him to grow into it (or, indeed, to wear something underneath).