It’s now 11PM on Monday evening. Having spent most of the last week finalising the layout and graphics for the shul magazine, I was able to proofread the galleys of the English half of the magazine today, which puts me, thankfully, ahead of schedule for our publication date.
However, when I came to sit down three hours ago to write this week’s blog post, I found that my brain had more or less turned to mush. Having spent the last two days trying, and failing miserably, to decide between another depressing post bemoaning how the world is going to hell in a handgun (yes, I know) and a short riff on the cultural significance, or otherwise, of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, when push came to shove I discovered that I couldn’t actually string two sentences together about anything. If I were a real writer, I’d say I had a case of block, but I don’t flatter myself..
Ando so, in what is disturbingly starting to look like a trend, I am actually going to admit defeat this week. Now that even we lie-abed Ashkenazim have started saying selichot, and I am having to get up twenty minutes earlier in the morning, I simply can’t stay up as late as I too often do.
If you’re looking for something to read this week, I recommend Gil Troy’s latest book, which goes by the least catchy title of the year so far: The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-Hatred. For those of you who don’t know him, Troy is an academic historian who has published several works about Zionism, and writes one of the two opinion columns in the Jerusalem Post that I feel is always essential reading. His latest book is short but typically authoritative and timely. This is a book that he wants to reach as many defenders of Israel and intelligent bystanders as possible, and so he has made it available to download for free. Here’s the link:
There you go: a gateway to considerably more than my usual 1500 words, and written by someone who actually knows what he is talking about.
I’d like to reassure you that normal service will be resumed next week, but I see that Rosh Hashana starts on Monday night, so, being realistic, and barring miracles,I think that my next post will be published a day before Erev Yom Kippur.
Until then, may I wish you and us all a happy and healthy New Year, a year in which we find resolution and closure to at least some of the conflicts that are afflicting us all, and in which the world as a whole starts to emerge from the nightmares that threaten to engulf us.
“Some days”, as a wise man once said, “you’re the fly, and some days you’re the windscreen.” The secret of a contented life, I suspect, is to acknowledge and accept the truth of that observation. Of course, that probably works better if the ratio of days when you are the fly to days when you are the windscreen stays closer to 0.5 than 0.
Of course, most of the time, a day is a very crude measure for this ratio. Any given day will offer plenty of situations in which you could be the fly or the windscreen, and, in my experience, most of the time they are more or less evenly balanced. You’re held up in traffic and you miss the screening of the film you planned to catch. However, this gives you the opportunity to take a delightful late spring hour-long walk through the park. You waste half an hour looking for the glasses that are on your forehead, but then a friend you haven’t spoken to for ages gives you a call and you have a lovely chat. You get the idea.
And then there are days like today (Monday), when the light tone of those first two paragraphs is so completely inappropriate. I have just been listening to a random 60 minutes of the mainstream TV station’s evening news programme. The broadcaster’s radio news channel carries the audio of that programme every evening, usually from 7:00 to 8:30, but this evening it stayed with the feed until 9:30. Today was one of those days.
At 6:00 this morning, Hamas operatives in the outskirts of Gaza City approached an IDF shelter. They made their way, undetected, up to a tank that was parked outside the shelter, with a full crew inside the tank. Apparently, the crew were not sleeping, but were checking their surroundings and reporting to their HQ. The terrorists managed to lob a bomb into the tank, which exploded, killing the crew of four: Staff Sergeant Uri Lamed, aged 20, from Tel Mond; Sergeant Gadi Cotal, aged 20, from Kibbutz Afikim; Sergeant Amit Aryeh Regev, aged 19, from Modi’in-Maccabim-Re’ut; and a fourth soldier whose name has not been released.
The question begs to be asked: how is it possible that they didn’t spot the terrorists? Is it just the case that, on Day 703, our soldiers can no longer maintain the level of alertness that the situation demands? Whether or not, these are another four lives, ended before they had done little more than begin; four unique life adventures that will now never be followed. I see no reference online to any of the four being married. Is this a blessing? They leave no widows or orphans. Or is it a curse? They are the end of their line. Nothing of them is left here for their parents and siblings, other than an entire world of memories to be cherished and shared.
These four boys/men are the 901st, 902nd, 903rd and 904th members of the forces to have fallen since October 7th began 23 months ago. Are all those lives paving the way to a better future? Today is not a day when I feel strong enough to contemplate that question too deeply.
And then, just a few hours later, three terrorists armed with automatic weapons infiltrated from West Bank villages, crossing the barrier at one of the well-known crossing points used by Palestinians seeking to cross the barrier illegally and work in Israel. They made their way to one of Jerusalem’s major junctions, to a busy bus-stop that serves multiple bus lines and where, at that hour of the morning, many people crowd the pavement waiting for their buses. There they boarded a bus and opened fire, killing six civilians and wounding at least 21 more.
The six who died were: Dr Mordechai Steintzag, aged 79, who made aliya from the US in his mid-40s, and, discovering there was no ‘healthy’ bread available in Israel, started a home bakery that now supplies supermarkets throughout Israel; Sarah Mendelsohn, aged 60, who was a worker in Bnei Akiva’s head office, and was eulogized today as “sort of the movement’s mother figure”; Levi Yitzchak Pash, a 57-year-old who learnt and worked at Yeshivat Kol Torah, and was eulogized as someone who always gave to others (he apparently had accepted a lift this morning at the bus-stop from a passing motorist, but, when someone else mentioned that he needed to get to Shaarei Tzedek hospital, Pash gave up his seat and thus met his death); Yaakov Pinto, a 25-year-old who came on aliya alone from Spain as a teenager, learnt and taught at yeshiva, and married just three months ago; Rav Yosef David, aged 43, a Torah student who leaves a wife and four children; Yisrael Metzner, aged 28, a Torah student of particular intensity, seriousness and modesty.
This list reflects the fact that the bus stop is at Ramot junction, and Ramot is a religious (largely Haredi) neighbourhood of North Jerusalem. In every other respect, this list is a random list. These very special, very ordinary people were not singled out by their murderers; they were just as ordinary, and just as special, as any six Israelis, any six human beings, are.
And then, as if the day were not black enough, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu arrived at the scene of the attack, and, of all the things that they might have chosen to say, and ignoring all the ways in which this tragic event might have given Bibi an opportunity to unite this fractured nation, this is how he, and Ben-Gvir, saw fit to mark this occasion. A little background is needed.
On Sunday this week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Israel Prison Service is failing to carry out its legal obligation to provide adequate and nourishing food to security prisoners (most, though not all, of whom are, of course, Palestinians). The minister responsible for this issue is Ben-Gvir, who, at the scene of the terror attack, accused judges of encouraging terror to “raise its head”. Bibi then added to his prepared remarks by endorsing Ben-Gvir’s remarks. “With regard to the court,” he said, “you are also in this war, and we don’t make things easier for our enemies; we hit them as hard as we can, and that’s what you ought to be doing as well.” So outrageous and divisive is this that my online search shows that the mainstream media decided it would be better not to report these words.
It is worth pointing out that the law that the court found that the Prison Service and Ben-Gvir are ignoring is, of course, a law that Netanyahu’s government introduced.
Those of us with memories that go back earlier than last week will recall that, in opposition, Ben-Gvir, and Bibi, were always very quick to lay the blame for Palestinian terror attacks in Jerusalem on ineffective government. This, apparently, is no longer the case.
No, it’s been a very dark day here in Israel. The only things to raise the spirits were two statesmanlike pronouncements. The first was from Abu Mazen who was quick to condemn any attack on Israeli or Palestinian civilians. Does this include, I find myself wondering, the murderers of Israeli civilians that he pays terrorists lifetime stipends for perpetrating?
The second was from President Macron, a man of whom it might be said: ‘To lose one Prime Minister may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose three looks like carelessness.’ He looks at Palestinians murdering Israelis and sees this as an indication that now is the perfect time for a two-state solution. “What,” he has presumably asked himself, “could possibly go wrong?” There speaks a man whose country’s civil struggles were with populations conveniently separated from France by a body of water considerably wider than the Jordan river, or possibly a man who has studied no history.
Tomorrow, by the law of averages, I should be the windscreen. And so to bed.
It used to be that becoming the greatest in the world at your sport was something you pursued privately, individually, obsessively, and in a markedly low-tech manner. Don Bradman famously played no competitive cricket as a child. Instead, he spent hours throwing a golf ball at a curved irregular brick wall in his back garden and hitting it on the rebound with a cricket stump. Among other things, this gave him an extraordinary ability to react very quickly to uneven bounce, which probably accounts in part for the fact that any discussion of the greatest batsman ever is a pointless exercise.
If we judge batsmen by their average runs scored, then competition is very fierce through the ages. 45 batsmen in the history of test cricket have averaged 50 or more. 44 of them average between 50.06 and 62.66 runs, which is very respectable. And then there is Bradman, so far out on his own that he doesn’t really belong on the same chart, with a test average of 99.94. Here’s a thousand words-worth of graph to hammer the point home:
The real picture is actually even more dramatic than that. Can any of you cricket fans name the batsman with the second highest average? It’s actually PHKS Mendis of Sri Lanka, and, if you didn’t get that right, it will be partly because Mendis, in common with the next three names on the list, played fewer than 24 tests. You have to go down to No 7 Sutcliffe to find another batsman who played a statistically significant number of tests.
So that’s what used to be. Spend 12 years in your back garden with a golf ball and a stump, and, if you have the innate ability to build on, you may just end up existing in a league of your own.
Needless to say, those days are long gone. In the modern world, sports teams, and individual sports stars, hire managers and trainers and separate coaches for each set of skills, and dieticians and physiotherapists and psychotherapists and doctors and witch doctors and goodness knows what else.
In the world of motor sports, of course, we are well used to this obsessive attention being lavished not only on the players but also on the machines, and the F1 competition is arguably as much about technology as it is about driving talent and skill. The same is true, of course, of cycling, yachting, and, to a lesser degree, any sport that uses equipment.
The dramatic improvements in personal best times in swimming in the 2010s were all attributable to developments in swimsuits. First, variable elasticity of the material compressed the body, making it more streamlined and hydrodynamic. Then, newly developed water-resistant microfilament fabrics reduced drag by up to 8%. The use of bonded rather than sewn seams reduced drag by a further 6%. The impact that this had on the 2009 World Swimming Championship times was such that one particular full-body suit was banned by the sports’ authorities in 2010.
You may also remember the Nike Vaporfly controversy. In case you don’t, we are talking about a running shoe whose advanced technology, specifically carbon fiber plates and specialized foam (don’t ask me; I just google this stuff) gave runners a significant advantage in bounce off the track. The shoe, basically, was providing some of the energy that would otherwise be provided by the athlete’s muscles.
You can, of course, argue that all of these are examples of difference in degree and not kind, and that equipment developments have always enhanced and will always enhance performance. If the developments are open to all, they should be welcomed. Faster running track surfaces are an example of an even playing field. (Did you like what I did there?)
Certainly, the modern cricket bat has effectively brought the boundary rope ever closer to the batsman’s crease, as the number of 6’s scored in the average innings these days will testify. Mind you, Gary Sobers’ performance for Notts against Glamorgan at the beautiful, and now sadly no-longer, St Helens’ ground, hitting Malcolm Nash for six sixes in a single over in 1968, still stands supreme, considering the bat he was using. St Helen’s was, it is fair to say, a bijou ground, but nevertheless what an achievement!
Welcoming back my readers from beyond the reach of the old empire and the greatest game: If you’ve ever upgraded your tennis racquet or sports shoes, after an embarrassingly long time, you will doubtless have experienced first-hand the impact of advancing technology. For those of us who don’t change our car every three years, it is much the same experience, something akin to suddenly finding yourself in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
You may, by now, be wondering what has set me off on this flight of fancy. Well, it is the news that I read today that science is currently engaged in pushing back the boundaries of sport in ways that I wasn’t previously aware of. Gabriel Vichera was a biotech doctoral student in 2010, when his attention was caught by a story about a cloned polo horse that had been sold for $800,000.
Polo is, of course, an elitist sport that attracts many wealthy players, not least in Argentina, and cloning, typically from highly valued polo ponies, had been developing since 2003 in Argentina. Vichera founded a company, Kheiron Biotech, with financial backing, and is now breeding and selling cloned horses, at an average of $40,000 dollars a horse. This year the company expects to produce 400 horses by cloning.
However, the interesting part of this story is that the company is also conducting research into gene editing. The company is using a technology known as CRISPR, which works like genetic scissors. (I told you not to ask me!) They are experimenting with reducing the body’s expression of the myostatin gene, a gene that limits muscle growth, with the aim of producing a polo pony that is unnaturally fast and strong.
The sports’ authorities have not yet authorised the introduction of genetically engineered ponies into the sport. What is clear is that many polo pony breeders are, understandably, very much against the development, which may produce stock that is both more improved than breeding techniques can ever hope to achieve, and that is ‘brought to market’ very much faster.
So here is a subtle philosophical question. Polo pony breeders use scientific knowledge gained over generations (and also their intuitive gut feelings) in an attempt to engineer, through selective breeding, polo ponies that are closer to the ideal. Is the use of cloning technology qualitatively different from that, or is it just a more modern iteration of it? And, today’s big question, is genetic engineering through CRISPR qualitatively or only quantitively different?
And, for those of you looking for a plotline for your next thriller, is a mad scientist somewhere, as we speak, applying CRISPR technology to produce the next heavyweight boxing champion of the world?
Let us end with a couple of reminders of times when the world of sports was more innocent, and certainly less driven. Angela Mortimer died last week. She won the Wimbledon Ladies Singles title in 1961, beating crowd favourite Christine Truman in the first all-British final since 1914 (and, to date, the last). As well as holding the trophy for a year, she also won a £20 voucher for Lillywhites, a West End sports shop, equivalent to just under £400 (1800 shekels, $535) today. This year, Iga Świątek won £3 million. Yes, but is she happy?
And finally, it is fair to say that the England cricket team of the 1980s lacked something of the dedication and discipline of more recent years (although the early 2000s had some characters as well). Allan Lamb, a magnificent batsman and a real character, recalled this week playing a tour match against Western Australia.
The Americas Cup was being held in nearby Fremantle, and one evening, after a day’s cricket, several team members met up with the English sailing team, who were sponsored by a whisky distiller. Ian Botham was involved in a whisky drinking contest, among other pranks, and was so hungover the following day that when he went out to bat he forgot to take his bat with him, and someone had to run out to the middle with it. However, being Botham, he still managed to top score with 48 off 38 balls. Golden days!
Join me next week for, possibly, another self-inulgent nostalgic wallow in another part of the gene pool. Or, just possibly, something completely different.
A week ago, I stated, in response to a comment from a friend who was having difficulty making the words of the sedra names match the tune of America, that I had actually made a recording, but that my voice was so ropey that I wasn’t prepared to share it. (I think I have air conditioning throat.)
Now here we are, a week later, knee-deep in medical appointments (just routine check-ups; all is well), magazine editing, and preparing for when we kidnap Raphael and bring him back here on Tuesday for some nana and grandpa time. All of which means that, even though I had a topic in mind for this week, I’m going to take the embarrassing but easy way out and share with you my croaky voice.
Suffice it say that Tom Lehrer remains unchallenged. I’m not giving up the day job just yet.
Normal service will, I hope, be resumed next week, but meanwhile, you can suffer the rendition here. If you feel cheated this week, just drop me a line and I’ll send you a complete refund of your subscription fee.
My big brother is getting more assertive as he gets older. Last week he set me two tasks. Normally, I don’t take kindly to being told what to do, but the first was so enticing, and his logic for suggesting the second was so persuasive, that I find myself compelled to act like a submissive younger sibling.
First, he came up with a cool idea (he didn’t actually use the word ‘cool’. He spent over 40 years as an actuary in the world of insurance, so ‘cool’ isn’t in his vocabulary.) Inspired by my rekindling of memories of Tom Lehrer last week, he suggested that, for Simchat Torah, it would be fun to set to music the names of the 54 weekly Torah portions.
So, on Sunday, instead of working on the shul magazine, I spent the day doing just that. It was an interesting challenge. First, I grouped the names of the portions into their rhyming families. I used what I hope is the standard Israeli Ashkenzi pronunciation; the last group in the following list contains all the unique final sounds that have no rhyming partner.
Having done this spadework, two things were obvious. First, this was unlikely to be as daunting a task as I had first feared, because there were six groups with at least four rhyming names, which would allow for four-line verses with an AAAA rhyming scheme, and, with luck, an internal rhyme as well.
Second, thirty of the names were three-syllable words, only four were four-syllable words, fifteen were two-syllable words and one was a monosyllable. Only two of the others were six syllables long. All of this suggested that it would not be complicated to fit the names into the pattern of a song with a triple rhythm. My first thought was the theme from The Lone Ranger, or the William Tell overture by Rossini, to give it its highbrow name. I eventually rejected that because of the complicated and long finale. Then it struck me: there was a perfect triplet patter song that could tolerate the throwing in of an extra syllable here and there, pacy and racy.
If you start by singing the first two lines below to the end of the intro to America from West Side Story, starting at the line “I like the isle of Manhattan”, and then sing the four lines of the main tune (starting “I like to be in America”, followed by the first variation “I think I go back to San Juan”, followed by the main tune twice, you will find that the following arrangement works.
I have taken the same liberty Lehrer allowed himself, by throwing in a ‘ve’ or an ‘u’ (and) at the beginning of the occasional name, to aid the scansion (cf ‘and anthramum and osmium’):
בלק, ויחי, אחרי מות, שלח, משפטים, ראה, וזאת הברכה, שמיני, ובא, בהעלותך, כי תבוא.
There. That’s a little gift to you, my loyal readership. There’s plenty of time for you to memorise that and polish your performance before you amaze your friends in shul on Simchat Torah.
Unfortunately, the second task does not, in prospect, seem quite so much fun. However, Martin pointed out that I have, from time to time, ventured into the realm of geopolitics, and since, last week, Maale Adumim became the centre of the Middle East conflict for a day, he felt that I really couldn’t not write about the Israeli government approval for the planned development of the area that has been known for years as E1, that is now renamed T1 (in recognition of Trump’s support for Israel), and that will, in the future, be known, apparently, as Mevasseret Adumim, which we can translate as the Herald or Harbinger of Adumim. (Mevasseret Yerushalayim is a town on the main road to Jerusalem, the first point on the road from which you can see Jerusalem as you approach on the road.)
The development of T1 will add 3,400 housing units to the city of Maale Adumim. A new suburb within Maale Adumim is expected to add an additional over 3,500 units. Together, these two suburbs should see the city’s population grow from about 40,000 to around 75,000. Provided that this development is achieved with commensurate infrastructure development, this should be good news for the city. It certainly will bring to an end a long period when young citizens could not find affordable homes within the city.
However, none of this is the reason why the world is focused on E1. On a scale that is out of all proportion to its size, the area represents a huge battleground over territorial contiguity. The development of E1 will effectively turn Maale Adumim into what will be potentially a suburb of Jerusalem.
Incidentally, this will probably lead to a significant increase in our arnona (property tax), because the per capita sum raised by Jerusalem municipality from among its citizens is significantly less than the corresponding figure in Maale Adumim, a city with a prop-ortionately large working-age and working population. At the same time, we may find that the market value, and the saleability, of our house both increase.
Of course, contiguity of Israeli housing will result in discontiguity of Palestinian housing. For the last decades, Palestinians have maintained illegal facts on the ground, in the form of housing, to ensure that the southern part of a putative Palestinian state (including Bethlehem) is not cut off from the northern part (including Ramallah) It’s worth bearing in mind that, despite the dramatic sound of the phrase’cut off’, we are talking about a very small parcel of land.
In the map below, the Jerusalem municipality is in beige, Israeli population centres are shown in blue, Palestinian population centres are shown in brown and E1 is shown in red. The map clearly shows that, if pigs were to be seen flying tomorrow, and an agreement were reached over a Palestinian state, it would be very easy to build a tunnel under E1 providing contiguity to the two parts of Palestine. It would scarcely need to be longer than the new tunnel underpassing French Hill, which has shortened our journey to Jerusalem and beyond by at least ten minutes.
So, what is the real significance of this announcement? Here, for what it’s worth, is my take. First and foremost, this is not a maverick act by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Even though he was the government representative at the official ceremony announcing the approval of the development project, and even though he is undoubtedly personally delighted by the decision, and more than ready to take credit for pushing it through, let no one be in doubt. It is Netanyahu who has blocked the development for a couple of decades, and it is Netanyahu who has now decided that it will go through.
I believe that this change in tactics is part of Netanyahu’s concerted attempt to increase pressure on Hamas. If Hamas intransigence results in loss of Palestinian land, that represents a far greater humiliation for Hamas than the mass losses among its forces, the hardship suffered by the Gaza population (obviously) and even the elimination of multiple layers of Hamas leadership. Martyrdom is a badge of honour for Hamas: not only, I suspect, for the foot soldiers, but also for the senior leadership. They genuinely see their cause as greater than themselves and they regard it as a religious duty to be prepared and proud to die for the cause. They will embrace death.
Loss of Palestinian land, on the other hand, hits Hamas where it hurts, at the very heart of their cause. In addition, if Palestinians in the West Bank join the dots between the failure of negotiations in Gaza and the development of E1, this is potentially very bad news for Hamas.
That represents about the extent (to be honest, considerably more than the extent) of my willingness to comment on the situation. At the end of the day, I’m much more comfortable playing at making patterns with words.
I wrote last week that my reflections on the death of Tom Lehrer would “have to wait for another time”. I feel as though I want to make this week that time, not because my mind is now cleared of all that was occupying it last week; it isn’t. Nor because things on the national and international front look much rosier this week; they don’t. If anything, things are even worse. However, there’s only so much doom and gloom I can wallow in, and I really feel as though I want to escape to somewhere more….innocent? Not the first word that springs to mind when considering Lehrer. Somewhere more civilised, certainly; more urbane; less intense. More ironic.
I’m not quite sure how to approach the subject of Tom Lehrer. I doubt if there are more than a handful of my readers who are not familiar with Tom Lehrer and his modest (in size), but wide-ranging (in subject-matter) oeuvre. If the name means little to you, then perhaps the best thing you can do is go to YouTube, search for him and spend an hour or four, letting him, in his own words: “… take you now on wings of song as it were and try and help you forget, perhaps, for a while, your drab, wretched lives.”
Which leads me neatly into two initial observations. First, four hours is all you will need, more or less, to listen to Lehrer’s entire musical oeuvre, even including all of the pirated videos from live appearances. A few of Lehrer’s songs were not initially issued on record – either because of issues of good taste (of which more later) or arcaneness. At a shockingly young age, Lehrer grew tired of performing, and stopped writing songs. As he later remarked: “Satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Secondly, once you start listening to Lehrer, you find that almost everything he wrote in his songs and his equally polished introductions to them is eminently quotable and, after a few repetitions, unforgettable. The comments below his obituary in The Times were full of people doing little more than sharing their favourite quotes from the songs.
Okay. Assuming the few of you who needed to do a pre-term make-up class in Lehreriana have done so, and are now back with us, I can now attempt to explain why I am convinced that his contribution to the comic song repertoire was unique and magnificent.
Let’s get the least memorable, but still essential, element of the Lehrer cocktail out of the way first. Tom, as I cannot imagine anyone referring to him (Tom is for ordinary folk like Hanks, not elite near-geniuses who skip a year of high-school for three consecutive years and win a place at Harvard at age 15, on the strength – if we believe the internet – of an application letter in the form of a poem) was born into a nominally American Jewish home, in which the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan were often on the gramophone. Here, one assumes, Lehrer developed his ear for a good tune and his recognition that in comic song the music has as key a role as the words.
Fortunately, Lehrer was also a sufficiently accomplished pianist to be able to execute what he had written, and to do so with such effortlessness that his whole attention appeared to be focussed on his verbal interaction with the audience. Which brings me to another point. Lehrer began his career performing his songs for fellow-students at parties, and he exudes the same relaxed and comfortable aura of being among friends even when he is performing for an audience in a large theatre (and even when the audience are not native English speakers and miss some of the cultural references). In one of his in-house performances at Harvard, he reprised a song by Noel Coward, and he shares with Coward an apparent social ease.
Enough, I think, of skipping round the edge of the lake, admiring the grassy verges and the ornamental bridge. The time has come to plunge in, and talk about the lyrics. The first point to be made is perhaps the breadth of the range of subject-matter. While Lehrer wrote for a season of That Was the Week that Was and dealt, there, with social, political and geopolitical satire, he felt free to range very much further afield. Indeed, since he had no sense of propriety (a word he rhymed with ‘impiety’ and ‘variety’ in one of his memorable triplets), the world was his oyster. Few writers of comic songs cover such topics as necromancy, drug peddling, sado-masochism and what we used to call venereal disease but is now apparently known as STD (which, when I was a boy, was a feature of the telephone system and stood for subscriber trunk dialling).
Consider these lines from I Got it from Agnes (the STD song):
Max got it from Edith Who gets it every spring She got it from her Daddy Who just gives her everything
She then gave it to Daniel Whose spaniel has it now
In many ways, this is an uncharacteristic lyric from Lehrer, in that it is not self-consciously clever. However, when he wants to, Lehrer can be cleverer than anybody else in the room. Consider this quick-fire rhyming pattern from a Gilbert and Sullivan parody recounting the story of the last verse of the story of Oh, my darling Clementine!
Though I missed her, I kissed her Young sister named Esther This mister to pester she tried. Now her pestering sister’s a festering blister You’d best to resist her, say I!
Two rhyme sounds there: one used in six different words (plus one repetition), and the other in four different words (plus one repetition), all in the space of thirty one words. If you think that sounds easy, please try it at home.
But of course he made it sound easy. He made it all sound easy. I knew that Daniel Radcliffe (possibly better known to you as Harry Potter) was a bear of little brain when he woked all over JK Rowling, the woman who gave him fame and fortune, on the occasion of her pointing out that ‘woman’ is a word with a biological meaning. However, you can also get a measure of Radcliffe’s maturity from the fact that, like many of us, he has learnt the lyrics of Tom Lehrer’s Elements song, but, unlike the rest of us, he considers it suitable for trundling out not only at parties but also on prime-time television. Having admired Lehrer’s faultless, unruffled and clearly enunciated performance (while playing the piano), contrast it with Radcliffe’s fumbling, mumbling, bumbling, gauche ineptitude here. One wonders what party pieces he rejected because they weren’t quite polished enough!
Of course, The Elements is an atypical Lehrer song, for several reasons. He composed neither the music nor the words. All of our delight is in the delightful and delighted execution, and the effortless way he has rearranged the elements into an order that may have no chemical elegance, but has a literary elegance.
It is also atypical in that it is not, to some degree of gentleness or sharpness, poking fun at attitudes, institutions or personalities. All were grist to Lehrer’s mill. To illustrate this, I am going to offer links in this section rather than quoting lyrics, because Lehrer’s relish in his skewering of targets is so tangible.
If the tunes were Lehrer’s piano, then the words were his forte.
The inevitability of the nuclear apocalypse might not seem an obvious topic for a comic song, but if you ensure the rhymes are tortuously brilliant, you can pull it off.
If you attend a funeral, It is sad to think that sooner o’ l- ater those you love will do the same for you And you may have thought it tragic, Not to mention other adjec- tives to think of all the weeping they will do
Pe4haps the best marriage of form and content in his body of work is in the setting of a song that purports to give an example of what the Catholic church should have been aiming for in its (then) desire to modernise the liturgy is Vatican Rag. The ragtime tune rings absolutely authentic, and Lehrer sets himself increasingly stiff rhyming hurdles, all of which he effortlessly sails over.
We come next to Lehrer’s other career, as a mathematics professor. Although he eventually abandoned his PhD studies, he was no slouch, and he wrote several amusing songs about mathematics. They were mostly written for consumption within the Harvard math department, but he eventually found one topic that non-mathematicians could relate to, since a whole nation of parents were being exposed to and befuddled by it in their children’s homework: new math. Now, obviously, you cannot write a comic song about new math that actually demonstrates and explains the underlying mathematical concepts of new math and is at the same time hilarious. Except that Lehrer did, of course. (I think I recommend listening to this without watching the annoying animation whose primary effect is to ruin the timing of Lehrer’s delivery.)
And now here we are exactly where I knew we would be: very nearly 1500 words in and there are at least another 15 songs that I absolutely have to talk about. You know what? Go back to YouTube and listen to the master himself: Poisoning Pigeons (with its rhymes for both ‘strychnine’ and ‘cyanide’, Alma (every word of which has historical authenticity), My Home Town, Wernher von Braun, Smut (the perfect mismatch of tune and lyric, and the best collection of rhymes on the first syllable of a word that breaks across a line). Anything, really. There are no duds here.
Lehrer’s greatest line? I’ll offer two contenders, one from an introduction to a song, the other from a lyric to a mock Harvard anthem.
I’ll just leave you with Lehrer’s purported admission poem to Harvard, written, remember, at the age of 15. This sounds like an urban myth, but it appears that it was definitely written by Lehrer, even if he did not use it ashis application letter, but simply an amuse-bouche for his fellow high-school students. Either way, it is the earliest record of his precocious and formidable talent. It is interesting to note, by the way, that long before Lehrer rhymed ‘Harvard’ with ‘discovered’, he rhymed it with ‘larva’ed’, which is less humorous but almost as impressive.
Dissertation on Education Education is a splendid institution, A most important social contribution, Which has brought about my mental destitution By its own peculiar type of persecution. For I try to absorb In the midst of an orb Of frantic instructors’ injunctions The name of the Fates And the forty-eight states And the trigonometrical functions, The figures of speech (With the uses of each) And the chemical symbol for lead, The depth of the ocean, Molecular motion, The names of the bones in the head, The plot of Macbeth And Romeo’s death And the history of the Greek drama, Construction of graphs And the musical staffs And the routes of Cortez and da Gama, The name of the Pope, The inventor of soap, And the oldest American college– The use of conceits, The poems of Keats, And other poetical knowledge. I’m beginning to feel I don’t care a great deal For the reign of the Emperor Nero, The poems of Burns, What the President earns, And the value of absolute zero, The length of a meter, The size of a liter, The cause of inflation and failure, The veins and the nerves, Geometrical curves, And the distance from here to Australia, Reproduction of germs, Biological terms, And when a pronoun is disjunctive, The making of cheese, The cause of disease, And the use of the present subjunctive. I wish that there weren’t Electrical current, Such places as Rome and Cathay, And such people as Watt And Sir Walter Scott And Edna St. Vincent Millay. I don’t like very much To learn customs and such Of people like Tibetan lamas, And I’d like to put curbs On irregular verbs And the various uses for commas, International pacts All historical facts, Like the dates of Columbus and Croesus, Bunker Hill, Saratoga, And Ticonderoga, The War of the Peloponnesus. But although I detest Learning poems and the rest Of the things one must know to have “culture,” While each of my teachers Makes speeches like preachers And preys on my faults like a vulture, I will leave movie thrillers And watch caterpillars Get born and pupated and larva’ed, And I’ll work like a slave And always behave And maybe I’ll get into Harvard…
As I was going down the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish that man would go away!
In another week, in another universe, I hope that I will be in a mental place where I can share with you the origin story of the surreal poem from which that is a stanza. This week, however, my mind is elsewhere.
One of the places my mind is, or was until a few days ago, is the death of Tom Lehrer. My reflections on that will also have to wait for another time, other than to say that, towards the end of last week, I found myself wishing passionately that Lehrer were sixty years younger, and alive, so that he could capture, in his inimitable fashion, the full irony of the surreal geopolitical reality we are living through.
Last week, as you will doubtless be aware, France announced that it plans to recognise the state of Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly this autumn. Then Britain made a similar announcement, making its declaration contingent on Israel failing to carry out a number of measures before then. Then Canada and Malta followed suit.
I have a little skin in the UK game, and I wouldn’t have expected anything else from Macron, Malta has no muscle at all, and Canada…is Canada. So my attention is directed at Sir Keir Starmer. A cynic would argue that the timing of his announcement reflects his desperation as he struggles to fend off challenges from within and beyond the Labour Party he leads. I would like to believe that his announcement is driven purely by political expediency and cynicism. The idea that he might actually believe that such recognition of a Palestinian state is a good thing for the world, for Britain, or even for the Palestinians, is too worrying to contemplate.
Anyway, Tom Lehrer I am not, but a verse came into my head as I attempted to digest this news.
As he was going down, Sir Keir Recognised a state that wasn’t there. IT WASN’T THERE! He knew full well. I wish Sir Keir would go to hell.
A couple of other observations. First, let’s look at Starmer’s statement that this recognition will take place unless the Israeli government “take[s] substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza” (no clear statement about what precise situation Starmer is referring to, because that might involve considering at whose feet the responsibility for the “appalling situation” can be laid), “agree[s] to a ceasefire and commit[s] to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution. And this includes allowing the UN to restart the supply of aid” (which hasn’t stopped) “and making clear there will be no annexations in the West Bank”.
Here he virtually makes explicit the fact that he is motivated not by any sense that recognising the state of Palestine is the morally correct thing to do at this point in time. He presents it as merely a tactic to persuade Israel to act according to his will. Either he believes Britain has a moral duty to recognise the state of Palestine, in which case he should recognise it, unconditionally, or he does not believe that, and has no justification for recognising the state. To use recognition of Palestine purely as a stick to beat Israel with is indefensible.
At the same time, he has demanded that Hamas “must immediately release all the hostages, sign up to a ceasefire, disarm and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza”. However, he has not made his government’s recognition of the state of Palestine contingent on Hamas meeting those demands. Only the goose gets the sauce, not the gander.
So, with your permission, let us step back for a moment from Starmer’s delusional universe into the real world. Imagine, for a moment, that you are one of the Hamas executive enjoying the hospitality, protection and financial support of that upstanding nation, Qatar. Sitting in your seven-star hotel room, you read Starmer’s demands. “So”, you reflect, “unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire, Britain will recognise Palestine, regardless of how we act. Well, then, all we need to do to guarantee that outcome is withdraw from the ceasefire talks.”
My second observation is this. What, in the name of all that is logical, does “recognising the state of Palestine” mean? A purely hypothetical entity with no borders, no system of government or administration, no diplomatic service, is not a state, and cannot be recognised as a state. (“I met a man who wasn’t there.”) That’s not just my opinion, by the way. Under international law, the Montevideo Convention of 1933 gives the following minimum requirements for a recognised state: a defined territory, a permanent population, an effective government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. (One out of four apparently doesn’t qualify you.)
The good news is that 40 peers from the House of Lords have written to the UK Attorney General pointing this out, and concluding that, therefore, for Britain to recognise Palestine “would be contrary to the principles governing recognition of states, according to international law”. The bad news is that it is far from certain that the Attorney General will so advise the government, and even further from certain that the government will take his advice.
A tiny part of me, of which I am not excessively proud, would like to see France, UK, Canada, Malta, and everyone else, “recognise” “Palestine”, and then for Israel to “recognise” “Palestine”. When, a couple of hours, or days, or weeks later, a terrorist attack (correction, an enemy invasion) takes place in Israel, or a rocket is launched from Gaza (correction, Palestine commits an act of aggression against Israel), as it inevitably will, Israel can declare this an act of war from a foreign state and conduct a war against that foreign state, thereby sidestepping all of the arguments about supplying humanitarian aid to the enemy and about innocent civilians. Even this very small part of me is, I wearily acknowledge, too big for some of my readers to stomach, and I apologise to them.
There was a brief period when I thought the above was going to be the story of the week. However, another story has loomed into view that towers over it, especially in the week that marks our annual commemoration of the disasters visited upon the Jewish people throughout history. The last couple of days have marked a new low in the moral depravity of the once-civilised world.
Hamas, taking their lead from the Nazi death camps, are systematically starving at least some of the “hostages” (surely we can find a word that better captures their desperate situation). This should, perhaps, surprise nobody. However, Hamas has judged that its cause will be best served by publicly flaunting this starvation. It has published videos in which the victims of that gradual starvation speak about their plight (one of them, Evyatar David, speaks while, barely able to stand, he is digging what he has been told will be his own grave). The benefit to Hamas of releasing these videos should be clear: their effect on the morale of the man in the street in Israel. The last couple of days have seen entirely understandable calls, from hostage family members and many others, for Israel to recognise that it cannot win the war, to lay down its arms, to bring the hostages home through an agreement, and then and only then, if it wishes, to resume the war, unfettered by responsibility for the hostages.
What is chilling about the release of the videos is not the cynical way Hamas seeks to manipulate Israeli public opinion, but its judgement that, at this stage, the decades-in-the-making worldwide propaganda campaign that the jihadi regimes have financed and orchestrated has been so successful that releasing video of its inhuman, obscene, calculated, cold-blooded murder of Israelis by slow starvation, and its (I assume deliberate) inclusion in the video of a muscular, well-toned Hamas bicep handing the emaciated Evyatar a tin, will not lose Hamas any significant amount of sympathy around the world.
At the time of writing, this calculation by Hamas seems chillingly, horrifyingly, accurate. If that does not keep you awake at night, if that did not inform your reading of every kina (every liturgical poem of lament) in shul yesterday, if that does not make you contact the Jewish Agency representatives in your home country to inquire about Aliyah, then I don’t know what will. Our safe Jewish future here is not yet certain, but our unsafe Jewish future anywhere else is increasingly certain.
May we all hear better news this week, and may I feel able to write about happier topics this time next week.
The Great Depression was, ultimately, a good thing for Ole Kirk Christiansen, a Danish furniture maker. In reaction to his business struggling in 1930, he started building miniature scale models of his various designs, to show to potential customers. This inspired him to branch out into toys, and, in 1934, he gave his company a new name based on the Danish for “play well”. In 1947, injection moulding as an industrial process was introduced to Denmark, and Christiansen, ever enterprising, bought an injection moulding machine for his company. In the same year, he obtained samples of plastic, interlocking Kiddicraft bricks. In 1958, he patented a toy brick with cylindrical protrusions on the top face, and hollow tubes on the undersides, and Lego, as we know it, was born.
Fast forward to 2025 and Lego seems to have weathered several storms. Despite its patents having expired all over the world, and competition from many copycat manufacturers, Lego is still a prestige brand, and, astonishingly, manufactures more tyres every year than any other company in the world. The question of copies is ironic, since Lego arguably copied the interlocking concept from Kiddicraft.
All of which is an introduction to the fact that one of this Portugal trip’s greatest hits was a non-Lego rip-off pirate ship kit that Bernice spotted in Maxstock. Tao is a great Lego fan, and we have been fairly impressed with the quality of the significantly cheaper copies we have bought him a few of in the last year or so. The pirate ship was a particular hit, not only because it feeds into one of his favourite imagination games, but also because the ship comes equipped with an anchor that can be wound up (not, sadly, by turning a capstan in a horizontal plane, but rather by turning a cog-wheel in a vertical plane, but you can’t have everything). It also features a ship’s wheel that actually turns, a rudder that moves from side to side, a trapdoor that reveals a treasure chest with jewels, and, the cherry on the top, a cannon that actually fires a Lego cannonball an impressive distance. This guarantees hours of fun as you fish under the cupboard with a broom handle, in an attempt to locate the fired cannonball.
It was probably a mistake to follow up the pirate ship (which was our last Shabbat’s present to Tao) with a film night on our very last night in Portugal (Sunday night) that featured Disney’s 1952 animated Peter Pan. While Tslil was a little concerned by the darkness of a few moments, and I was appalled by the shameless sexism of the portrayal of Tinkerbell, the mermaids, and even Wendy, Ollie enjoyed his first entire film, particularly the ticking crocodile, and Tao was captivated by Peter’s antics, delighted laughed hysterically at Smee’s bumbling ineptitude, and completely captivated by Captain Hook’s suavity and sinister aura.
What this meant on Monday morning was that Tao insisted on wearing his magician’s cape – inside out, so that the scarlet lining was on the outside; he also insisted on a long-sleeved t-shirt (despite temperatures in the high 30s), because it enabled him to hide his hand and clutch a terrifying hook fashioned from a tube game. Hardly any area of the house was safe; at any given moment, the sofa, or the kitchen table, might be requisitioned as Hook’s pirate ship. Unfortunately, his pirate’s hat has, over the last months, been ravaged in numerous near-fatal encounters with opposing navies and other enemies, so we will have to be sure to bring out a sheet of black sol (a kind of centimetre-thick, rubberised foam sheet, a little more flexible and durable than card, that can be easily cut, shaped and stuck, and is used in craft projects) for making a tricorn.
In all of these games, as in so much of their lives, Ollie is both a valuable playmate and an eager sponge. By osmosis, he seems to be absorbing more and more of Tao’s knowledge of arithmetic, as well as his abilities for very rich imaginative play and construction work, with Magnetiles or Duplo. He also unerringly echoes some of Tao’s favourite phrases, with very accurate intonation. As the boys grow, one of the great pleasures during our visits is to see how well they get on together.
On Sunday afternoon, we all went down to the gym for a private unveiling. After huge efforts over the last couple of weeks, with Grandpa chipping in as floor-layer’s first mate, and Micha’el and Tslil putting in long hours, the gym is now virtually ready to open, and they hope to start taking paying customers in another week or so. It certainly looks and feels a very professional space, and, having tried out, for the briefest of sessions, the multigym and the rings, I can vouch for the enthusiasm and positive attitude of the personal trainer, as well as the challenge of bodyweight training.
This family outing was also an opportunity for a whole range of family photos. Needless to say, we have taken hardly any photos on this trip, but we certainly made up for it on Sunday, and have a number of great shots to take home.
Apart from pirates, Monday morning was spent packing, clearing away, ticking our way through our ‘leaving Portugal’ checklist, and wondering whether the industrial action at Lisbon airport would affect our flight. I am writing this from the departure lounge. So far, things have gone smoothly (although I am once again reminded of the man dropping past the 29th floor of the Empire State Building). If you are reading this on Tuesday morning, then you will know that we are safely back in Israel, in Zichron Yaakov actually, ready to resume our adventures with Raphael and catch up with Esther and Maayan. All the family within 24 hours! Bernice and I never dreamed we would have so much to look forward to in our retirement.
Philosophical question. If I tell you that a post headline is clickbait, have I effectively de-baited it. Whether I have or no, this week’s post title is unabashedly clickbait. I’m here to talk about life in rural Portugal. Gotcha!
I was reading the Penamacor municipality’s glossy twice-yearly magazine the other day (that Google Lens is pretty good at translating while standing on one leg!) and my eye was caught by an article describing a public meeting in Penamacor, presenting a report commissioned by the inter-municipality of Beira Baixa.
Since Beira Baixa is not a name I have dropped in these pages much, if at all, over the last five years, let me bore you with a brief description of Portugal’s political structure.
All of Portugal is divided into some twenty provinces (seventeen more than Gaul). Penamacor is in the fourth largest province (in terms of area): Castelo Branco (which is also the name of the province’s capital city). Each province is divided into municipalities. The village of Penamacor, with a population of about 6000, is the largest parish in, and the ‘capital’ of, the municipality of Penamacor, which is itself part of the inter-municipality, or district, of Beira Baixa, a looser association formed to formulate and carry out policy common to several municipalities (in Penamacor’s case, 8) within a single district.
Castelo Branco is Portugal’s fourth largest province in terms of area, covering almost 7% of Portugal’s total land mass. However, its population of 226,000 represents only about 2% of the country’s population. This reflects the imbalance in the distribution of Portugal’s population. The metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto together constitute only 5% of its total land area, but they contain almost 45% of the country’s population.
This uneven distribution is largely a result of the economic boom that began in the 1960s and led to mass migration from the hinterland, especially the rural North (where Penamacor is situated) to the urban centres. This was coupled with a drop in the birth rate to well below natural replacement levels,
So, back to the report commissioned by Beira Baixa. The authority commissioned the Castelo Branco Polytechnic to conduct an analysis of population change in the district. Specifically, the report focussed on the immigration situation and dynamics in Beira Baixa from 2008 to 2023.
The report revealed that recent migration has played a fundamental role in reshaping Beira Baixa’s population dynamics, reflecting growth trends that contrast with the region’s historical recession. The total population of Beira Baixa is just over 80,000, having dropped by about 10,000 in the decade before 2010. However, the number of legalized foreigners living in the inter-municipality was 1,856 in 2008. By 2023, it had grown to 6,786, a 265% increase. In Penamacor itself, over the same period, the number grew from 58 to 440, a 758% increase. Since Ollie is a Portuguese citizen, our family has contributed only 3 to this figure.
If the kids’ subjective perception is a guide, this number has increased considerably in the two years since the survey was completed. Even on our visits, when I venture no further afield than the supermarket and the dog walk to the forest, I almost always come across at least one or two new faces during every trip.
Due to this growth, the real population in the territory of Penamacor, in 2023, increased by 49 inhabitants, resulting from a positive migratory balance of 130 inhabitants, as opposed to a negative natural balance of 81 inhabitants. This growth and population inversion is happening for the first time in the last 50 years and enhances the development strategy of the municipality, reinforcing the growth of the school community in the last three years.
The report also indicates that the United Kingdom and Germany are the countries that supply the most new residents to the municipality, although other North European countries are also well represented.
During the preparation of this analysis, about 400 surveys were carried out with immigrants residing in the territory, which showed that, despite the structural challenges, Beira Baixa has been attractive to immigrants and has the potential to deepen this path of animating development at local and regional level. Researchers also carried out interviews and focus group sessions with a very large number of local interviewees, from a variety of institutional and business spheres, and the general perception of immigrants was positive in most municipalities, highlighting their contribution to the local economy and to the maintenance of essential services.
The authors also highlight that, from the community’s perspective, this immigration represents an opportunity to revitalize the economy and combat depopulation, but it requires effective inclusion strategies, with the most pressing challenges including housing, language barriers, and access to public services.
From our limited perspective, it seems to me that Tslil and Micha’el and the boys are integrating successfully in the local community, meeting all of the above challenges successfully. I suspect, looking at their circle of immigrant friends, that their integration is well above average for the immigrant community. They certainly deserve for it to be, because it is something whose importance they have long been aware of, and they have invested considerable time and effort in ensuring their successful absorption in the local community.
Which is just as well, because Micha’el’s parents have made hardly any effort. We can still barely scrape together two words of Portuguese, and our interactions with the village include a lot of Bom diases or Boa tardes (depending on the time of day), a fair number of Obrigados and Desculpas, and an inordinate amount of smiling and nodding, but precious little more than that. Almost everyone we meet knows who we are; half the time, Lua, or the boys, are our calling card. We, on the other hand, know very few locals, beyond shopkeepers and the kids’ immediate neighbours. Fortunately, being the kids’ parents wins us a fair degree of affection and regard with no effort required on our part.
As I have grown to know Bernice better over the years (indeed, let’s be honest, decades), one of her qualities that I have grown to admire more and more is the extraordinary intelligence she shows in understanding people, their emotions and their motivations. If I cast my mind back, I think it was something that I was aware of even way back when, but, with each additional year, I grow more acutely aware of it, and admire it more and more.
In fairness, there are times when I admire it more, and times when I admire it less. As it happens, last week marked one of the latter occasions. Micha’el and Tslil are very much occupied with the final stages of renovation of the premises they are renting for their gym and studio, and, when Micha’el announced that the studio walls were ready to be painted, I offered to help. Quick as a flash, Bernice observed that I was only volunteering because it would look good in the blog, a remark no less hurtful for containing just a sliver of truth in it.
Micha’el and I had a very productive couple of hours, and completed the painting of the upper half of the walls, which, because it is a very attractive mid-grey with a slight bluish tinge, being painted on top of a not dissimilar existing grey, required only one coat. I’m hoping that we will be able to repeat the double act on the lower half of the walls in the next day of two. Since this will not require me spending extended time on a stepladder, it promises to be kinder to my calves. Mind you, if you spend a couple of hours in a gym, I suppose you should expect to come away feeling achy.
Since a couple of you have asked me privately for an update on this exciting project of the kids, this seems like the perfect time. To put the story in context, you have to remember that their efforts to register the business are being conducted in Portugal…and, in provincial Portugal at that….and, to make matters even more interesting, in rural provincial Portugal.
By this time, the kids had hoped that they would already be up and running, but there are two inter-connected obstacles that are preventing that. The first is the question of obtaining a licence. They are renting two premises opposite each other on a narrow side-street very close to the centre of Penamacor, a street that, in a normal town, would be an alley leading nowhere with no passing trade, but that, remarkably, in Penamacor enjoys a fair amount of pedestrian traffic throughout the day.
One space, which they will use as a studio for private lessons, was fairly recently renovated; the other, which will be the gym for general use, and will include a small office, the owner had been using for storage.
Ready to lay the floor
In order to start trading, the kids have to register their business and obtain a commercial licence. Micha’el accordingly arranged a meeting with the municipality, at which he submitted all of the necessary documentation. Extraordinarily, all of the paperwork was in order and he had brought all of the paperwork needed. It only remained for the clerk to determine into which category of commercial business the gym falls, and to issue the appropriate licence. Unfortunately, it appears that nobody had ever sought to register an equivalent business in Penamacor, and neither the clerk, nor, after consultation, his colleagues, were able to decide exactly which licence was appropriate. Currently, the problem has been kicked up the bureaucratic chain, and the kids are waiting for a decision. However, the municipal architect has given them the go-ahead to begin operating regardless; if there are any issues down the line, they will be addressed as and when they arise.
To complicate matters, the premises do not have a valid electricity clearance. This is much less serious than it sounds. Between the time that the building was renovated, a few years ago, and today, the regulations for electricity supply have changed, and the owner needs to arrange for the electricity company to carry out the necessary, but minor, adjustments required.
All being well, this should be resolved very soon, and then Tslil and Micha’el will be able to launch their business with an easy mind. They already have a number of potential clients interested in group classes. Increasing numbers of locals are asking the kids when the gym is going to open. Micha’el has actually already started individual training sessions with one client, and is offering a free assessment session to a second. While neither of them is in the kids’ target customer group (family men and women in their thirties), they both seem keen. One is in his fifties and the other in his seventies, and Micha’el is enjoying the challenge of building an individual program that is age- and fitness-appropriate, as well as the challenge of polishing his Portuguese. After his first sessions, he realised that he needs to strengthen his body-part vocabulary, but, as I pointed out, at least when he needs a word he has the necessary body-part on hand (or foot, or torso) to demonstrate.
When Tslil and I were at the pool with the boys last Thursday, a woman she knows from Pilates and from the forest school that Tao attends came over. She is currently launching a program of free classes for local residents to be offered by the municipality, and asked Tslil if she was interested in teaching a yoga class. Since this offers a steady income and no need to find students or chase them for payment, Tslil is understandably keen.
So, things are developing: a little slower than hoped, perhaps, but reassuringly steadily. You have to learn to adjust to the rhythm of Iberian life. Meanwhile, both of the kids are continuing with their existing work – Tslil teaching yoga and Micha’el teaching English online to Israeli schoolkids.
The other major development is that Tao is now officially registered in the Portuguese home-schooling program. In practice, this means that, starting in September, he will be taught at home, following the Portuguese school curriculum, and required to sit the national school tests. He is registered with the local school, which means in practice that he is eligible to participate in extra-curricular school activities. Tslil and Micha’el plan to teach him themselves, as well as hiring a tutot for the Portuguese-based subjects (language and culture/history). This last will almost certainly be online.
All of this means that at any time in the coming years, Tao will be able, should he wish to, to transition to merging into the formal school system, or, if later, to apply to university. The formal scheme offered by the authorities allows the kids to home-school while keeping all options open – the best of both worlds.
Which more or less brings you up to date, other than to say that last Friday we celebrated Ollie’s third birthday, a day of balloons and cake and a lot of wonderful presents. It is heart-warming to see how Tao and Ollie are very ready to share their birthday and un-birthday presents with each other – they do play together really well.
By the time this post is published, we will, astonishingly, be halfway through our four weeks here. It feels as though we only just arrived!
