Before we get down to business today, one quick piece of housekeeping, which is more Flaubert than Diderot.

Three weeks ago, I wrote about the walking stick that I was then using (I now have a silent stick), which ‘makes a rather audible tap on the pavement as I saunter to shul. I’m seriously contemplating acquiring a matching red and green parrot to wear on my right shoulder, and teaching it to say: ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’

The other evening, I happened to be in Rehovot, walking along a suburban street, when I was tapped on the upper back. Turning round, I discovered nobody there. Feeling a little puzzled, I turned back again and carried on walking. A couple of seconds later, I felt another tap. Turning my head (but, not, this time, my body), I discovered a red-beaked, green-bodied parakeet perched calmly on my upper back. I pride myself on not being, by nature, of a nervous disposition, but on this occasion I was prepared to make an exception. The moral of today’s lesson is, obviously, ‘Be careful what you wish for!’

And so to Diderot, the great 18^th Century French encyclopaedist and philosopher. The French, they say, have a word for it…although exactly what ‘they’ mean when they say it I am not entirely sure. They surely cannot mean that French vocabulary is richer than English: the word-count in the two languages’ vocabularies is estimated to be about 130,000 and 500,000 respectively.

In addition, French vocabulary is confined almost exclusively to words from the Romance languages, whereas English has the twin major tributaries of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. I sometimes suspect that the saying saucily refers to an era when French literature was more sexually explicit in its vocabulary than English – ‘where English has a row of asterisks, the French have a word for it’.

Either way, there is no doubt that there is at least one situation for which the French have a word – or, rather, a phrase – and the English can only translate it and recycle it; no original equivalent exists in English. That phrase is l’esprit de l’escalier, sometimes translated as staircase wit. The phrase was coined (or, at least, the scenario to which it alludes was first described) by Diderot, speaking, one senses, from the heart.

In his Paradoxe sur le Comédien, Diderot describes attending a private dinner party, at which a remark was made to him that left him speechless at the time, because, he explains, “a sensitive man, such as myself, overwhelmed by the argument levelled against him, becomes confused and [can only think clearly again when he] finds himself at the bottom of the stairs”.

In this case, “the bottom of the stairs” refers to the architecture of the kind of mansion to which Diderot had been invited. In such houses, the reception rooms were always one floor above the ground floor. To have reached the bottom of the stairs means to have definitively left the gathering.

I can easily sympathise with Diderot. Many is the time that I have thought of the perfect riposte in the car driving home….or the next morning…or, indeed, six months later.

Which, I guess, puts me in the same box as not only Diderot but also George Constanza in The Comeback, an episode of Seinfeld. You can view the relevant 5 minutes here.

Or, indeed, Humph. In one episode of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, which radio show I know I’ve referenced before, the late, lamented Humphrey Lyttleton mentioned that an interviewer said he was an “orthinologist”. Humph was on the way home before it occurred to him that the correct reply was “Not so much an orthinologist as a word-botcher”.

And here’s another tangent we can go off at (or off at which we can go, if you prefer). A not entirely dissimilar phenomenon is what is commonly referred to as fridge logic, first identified by Alfred Hitchcock. When asked about the scene in Vertigo when Madeleine mysteriously and impossibly disappears from the hotel Scottie saw her in, Hitchcock responded by calling it an icebox scene: a scene whose impossibility “hits you after you’ve gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox.”

For those last three references, I am indebted to an astonishingly well-constructed site I stumbled across, called tv|tropes, which names, explains and catalogues examples of tropes from popular media. To quote the site: ‘A trope is a storytelling device or convention, a shortcut for describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the audience will recognize. Tropes are the means by which a story is told by anyone who has a story to tell. We collect them, for the fun involved.’

And now, I’m afraid, you’ll have to hold that thought. We’ve reached a dead end. Just keep l’esprit de l’escalier in mind. We will get back to it at some point, and carry on from there.

I find myself these days musing about the reason why I keep writing this blog. More precisely, “Why on earth do I put myself (and sometimes Bernice) through this hell every week”. The answer I have come up with is, appropriately for this Franco-filled post, in three parts, just like ancient Gaul.

First, never say to someone who is competitive by nature: ‘I bet you can’t keep your hand in that flame for 10 seconds’. If possible, even avoid such sentiments as: ‘I don’t know how you manage to run 10 miles every day.’ So, my thanks to those who say similar things to me about my blog…I think.

Second, I read somewhere that one of the best ways to stave off Alzheimer’s is to challenge yourself mentally. I am particularly interested in retaining what mental faculties I have. I assume we all are, but I bet I’m more passionate about it than you are, because Bernice has made it very clear that, the day I succumb, she will ‘lockdown puppy’ me. In other words, she will drive me to the Jerusalem Forest, ask me to get out the car to have a look at the rear passenger-side tyre, which seems to have something wrong with it, and then drive off.

Unfortunately, crosswords and other logical puzzles, however convoluted and obscure, are apparently not enough to keep the brain active, because they do not unsettle you. I suppose I could have Bernice strap me into a chair from which she will release me only when I have completed The Times Cryptic crossword, and then set a timer for a crossbow-bolt to fire directly at my heart in 30 minutes’ time.

However, that seems like a lot of trouble to go to. I reckon that being reduced to a nervous wreck at 5pm on Monday when I still have no idea what to write about, and only finishing proofreading and uploading my blog at 8:58am on Tuesday, when I am publishing at 9:00, represents a sufficiently high stress level to keep dementia at bay.

However, these are reasons why I continue writing the blog; they do not explain why I continue to enjoy writing the blog.

To explain that, I have to go back to Diderot, after a short detour to take in Oscar Wilde. I watch The Importance of Being Earnest, and I am dazzled by the brilliance of the wit. The entire play is a string of sparkling jewels. At the same time, it is very obvious that a tremendous amount of work went into it. Wilde painstakingly revised the play, refined the speeches, tightened the action. The end result has the intricate multi-faceted richness of a Fabergé egg.

A blog, on the other hand, is more like a Picasso sketch: apparently improvised, intuitive, clean-lined. I have come to the conclusion that the blog is the perfect medium for me. In it, I can appear to be spontaneous: it all, so it seems, just pours out. However, what is wonderful is that I can revise, refine, find the perfect expression, while still, I hope, maintaining the illusion of spontaneity. Basically, I feel like Diderot playing the part of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, reliving the same day over and over until I get it right.

Of course, now that I have shown you how the trick works, the magic is gone. I’m going to have to ask you to forget everything you have read this week, and we’ll start next week with the illusion intact. Do we have a deal?

Meanwhile, here’s someone who always seems to have the perfect comeback.

One of those long, rambling, Errol Garner intros today, so you might want to get a cup of tea before we start.

Today’s subject is horticulture (or more specifically, arboriculture), and I toyed with a couple of titles that I then rejected, including: I am Boring, We Arboring (too laboured), and eventually decided on Matters Horticultural. This almost immediately put me in mind of Modern Major General, the party-piece patter-song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. (If you don’t know the song, you can see it performed here…and then you might feel you need to read the lyrics here. Incidentally, the ‘encore’ verses of this particular performance were, in the best G&S tradition, written specifically for this Stratford, Ontario production.)

Those of you who do know the song will not be surprised to learn that, since I thought of the title, I haven’t been able to get the blasted tune out of my head. This then set me thinking about the term – fairly recently coined (in English) – for a tune that you can’t get out of your head: earworm. I was then struck by this word and did a little Google research, the results of which I thought I might share with you. This led me to embellish the title of today’s post so that it now (almost) matches the metrical pattern of the song.

We’ll just wait here a second for the stragglers to catch up. All on the same page? Right!

Earworm, I discover, is a direct borrowing (first spotted in a 1978 novel) from the German for earwig, Ohrwurm, which (in Germany) has been used in this sense for about 70 years. Presumably, the intended metaphor is that some tunes crawl into your ear and nestle there, so that you cannot dislodge them, exactly as earwigs do. That, of course, is where the earwig gets its name from in English – its tendency to invade the human ear

Except, I now discover, that old wives’ tale isn’t where the earwig gets its name from. The Romans called the earwig auricula, from the Latin for earlobe, because they would dry earwigs and grind them to a powder which they then used to treat diseases of the ear. The entire folk myth of earwigs having a habit of invading the human ear evolved as a false explanation of the name.

Incidentally, the wig of earwig comes from an Anglo-Saxon word for insect, beetle, worm, and the English word wiggle almost certainly comes from this root.

OK. That’s enough etymology…and, come to think of it, enough entomology as well. Time to get to the actual topic of this treetise (apologies).

I was never particularly interested in gardening. I grew up in a house with a front garden that was largely paved, except for a number of flower beds that were home to rose-bushes that were my parents’ pride and joy. They produced vast, damask-petalled roses whose scent was sometimes so over-powering that it put you in mind of a six-year-old who had been playing with her mother’s perfume bottle.

In the back garden, a line of giant sunflowers against the garage wall stood like a firing squad that had just been brought to attention. The garden itself was grassed, bordered with flower-beds that sported flowers of which I can remember nothing other than this. My brother and I would play garden tennis, with deckchairs propped on their sides for a net Sometimes a loose ball, or a clumsy foot, would crush a bloom. When that happened, it was best to keep a low profile.

When Bernice and I lived in Wales, I couldn’t really get excited about gardening. There was a very brief period when we started a vegetable garden, but it quickly seemed like a huge amount of work just to feed the local community of slugs, and I soon lost interest.

Then everything changed on my 50th birthday, when the family bought me a shesek (in Hebrew) or loquat (in English) sapling. Those of you who don’t live on America’s West Coast, or in Israel or Australia, may not be familiar with this tree or with its fruit, which is about an inch and a half long, rounded or pear-shaped, with a downy smooth skin that peels to reveal a soft flesh, with a flavour that I have seen described as a mixture of peach, citrus and mild mango. At the heart of the fruit is a cluster of, typically, 2-4 smooth, glossy, brown seeds, as handsome as horse-chestnuts.

Over the last 20 years, I have watched our tree grow, until it is now 4 metres tall (and will really need trimming after we have harvested this year), with a span of 2–3 metres. I have also, of course, watched the annual cycle. The tree flowers very early, with the first blossom appearing during winter, making it a herald of the new season of growth in the garden. Soon, the blossom is attracting bees, and the garden is full of activity from the stillness of the early morning and throughout the day.

The first fruit starts to appear around February, and ripens around April. At a certain point (typically a week later than we should) we net the tree, to prevent birds eating the fruit. This year, what with my bad hip, we actually waited until Esther and Maayan came to see us, and then prevailed on them to clamber up ladders and gateposts and fit the net – which they gamely did

With the tree as tall as it is, we have neither the netting nor the crane and platform to cover it all, and so I draw up a contract with the birds that we will leave them all of the fruit growing more than 2 metres above the ground, on condition that they leave the rest for us. I’m not always sure they fully understand the small print, but they actually are fairly well behaved.

Harvesting usually consists of one major sweep, and three or four smaller picks. The size of the harvest varies ridiculously. One year we had about 25 fruits, but this was presumably because the tree was gathering its strength for the following year, when I harvested a total of 20 kilo 12 kilo of it on one day.

So, what do you do with 20 kilo of shesek? Well, obviously, some of it you eat, and, every year, you are shocked by the difference between shesek you buy in the supermarket – small, mildly flavoured, dryish, with a shelf life of a couple of days (and an early season price this year of up to 50(!) shekels a kilo (that’s currently about £11 or over $15 – and the shesek you pick from your tree – big, hearty, bursting with flavour and juice, good for a week. Some of it you give away, although several of our neighbours also have shesek trees, so we don’t give much away.

The bulk of the harvest I freeze to make shesek ice cream. When I started doing this, I was very thorough: skinning the fruit, removing the stalk, then splitting it open to remove the stones and the thin membrane that separates the fruit from the stones. After 10 minutes of this, and viewing the mountain of shesek still to prepare and the tiny bowl that I had so far prepared, I retreated and regrouped.

After a little reflection, I realised that there was no need to peel the fruit. I know it has not been sprayed with any chemicals, my Vitamix blender can reduce the skin to pulp in micro-seconds, and the skin intensifies the flavour of the ice-cream.

I then found, on Google, a blogger whose tree yielded 70kg of fruit; he explained that, if you hold a shesek between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, place the thumb of the other hand on the calyx (the opposite end from the stalk), and push that thumb up through the centre of the fruit, the seeds, the membrane and the calyx will all emerge cleanly from the stalk end of the fruit. I tried this. It worked! Soon, I was cleaning fruit like a fully-paid-up member of the Loquat Gutters Union.

A few of the gutted shesek I set aside for skinning and making jam. Shesek has a very high pectin content, requires no sugar to be added, and its balance of sweet and sour makes a marmaladey-apricotty jam that is excellent.

Now that we have started composting….Let me start that sentence again: Now that Bernice has started composting, the stalks and calyx and membrane and skins can all go back into the ground. Immensely satisfying!

Which only leaves the stones; even they have a role to play, and a major one at that. It transpires that shesek stones are not dissimilar to almonds, or apricot stones, and, in Italy, they are used to make a liqueur that tastes remarkably like amaretto. I collect and wash the stones. When I have a jarful, I spread them out and leave them to dry in the sun for a week, then steep them in grain alcohol, with lemon rind and a vanilla pod. After a month in a warm place out of the sun, with the occasional vigorous shake of the jar, I dilute the alcohol with water (95% alcohol is tempting, but 35% greatly reduces the risk of blindness), and finally mix with a sugar-water syrup, then filter repeatedly until the liquid is clear (or, in my case, until I can’t be bothered to filter any more).

A litre of grain alcohol yields us 3 litres of what I wittily call shisky, although the Italians call it nespolino. Careful reading of multiple sources convinced me that the amount of cyanide leeched from that number of seeds was not harmful, and Bernice has been drinking the shisky for well over a decade now, with no visible effects, other than bumping into the furniture occasionally.

A few years ago, when we ‘upgraded’ our garden, we planted a peach and a nectarine, which each produce enough fruit for us to enjoy, every year, a wonderful week of rediscovering what summer fruits are supposed to taste like. We also planted a lemon, which has not yet realised what its function in life is supposed to be. We are still hoping that, one of these days, the penny will drop, and then we will doubtless drown in lemon curd, lemon drizzle cake and lemon meringue pie. I can imagine worse fates. 

Micha’el and Tslil decided not to wait until Tao’s 50th before gifting him a tree. On his first birthday, he helped them plant an almond tree, and for his second, a Portuguese berry tree. I have no photos of that second planting, so you’ll have to make do with screenshots of Tao WhatsApping with his Auntie Esther.

I may have mentioned previously my ambition to write the Great American Novel. I just wanted to bring you up to date. I’ve finally abandoned that ambition, because I’ve made a shocking discovery.

I naturally assumed that eligibility for writing the GAN followed the same rules as eligibility for the American Presidency. “In America, anyone can become president.” (Incidentally, I like George Carlin’s take on that: “In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem.” However, I think Adlai Stevenson’s wry comment is even better: “In America, anyone can become president. That’s one of the risks you take.”)

I now discover that, all these years, I’ve been taken in by that grand statement: “In America, anyone can become president” (or, indeed, write the GAN). There was I thinking to myself: “Fair enough! I’ll get an idea for a novel, go to America, write it, and Bob Louis Stevenson’s your uncle.” Turns out that I really should have read the small print, which states: “…a presidential candidate must be a natural born citizen of the United States, a resident for 14 years, and 35 years of age or older.”

I checked up, and apparently double credit for one of those three qualifications can’t be used to cancel out another, so my 70+ years don’t help me get over the hurdle of “natural born citizen”, even if I were prepared to live in America for 14 years (and if that’s not suffering for one’s art, I don’t know what is).

So, assuming the same rules apply for the GAN as for POTUS, I’m scuppered. This seems very unfair. After all, we Englishmen have always been very ready to celebrate such great English authors and playwrights as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Jonathan Swift. We have never held their accident of birth against them.

I must confess that I find this situation very confusing. In my heart of hearts, I never really believed I would write the GAN, but until now I always assumed there was a completely different reason why this was so.

All my thinking life (I leave my readers to decide how long a period of time that may have been), I have looked at novelists with a mixture of puzzlement and awe. I know we always say that not all fiction is strictly autobiographical, but surely that’s a…. fiction. And when authors are not trawling their own psyche to animate their characters, they are pilfering personality traits and mannerisms from all their nearest and dearest.

I have never understood how novelists could dare to bare their souls, expose their foibles, and betray the confidences of their family and friends. Where did Philip Roth, for example, find the courage to write Portnoy’s Complaint, knowing that, in all probability, nobody would ever be prepared to shake hands with him again? Can you imagine his first visit to his parents after they read the novel?

A considerable chunk of my leisure time over the last five decades has been spent contemplating writing fiction. It strikes me that, if I’d put half the effort into writing that I’ve put into thinking about it, and avoiding doing it, the world (or, at least, my filing cabinet drawers) would be richer by several execrable novels and a couple of slim volumes of unreadable poetry.

What has always held me back has been an almost total lack of self-belief. A few of you, who really know me, will not be at all phased to read that last sentence. I suspect, however, that many of you will be rather surprised. I offer in evidence of my condition this song by Flanders and Swann, whom I haven’t referenced in far too long.

This lack of self-belief is not a sound basis on which to build a career as a writer, for two reasons. First, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone will be the least interested in what I have to write. (I often don’t think I’ll be all that interested myself.) I am repeatedly amazed when friends tell me they enjoyed my last post or article for the shul magazine. (Amazed and delighted, so don’t feel you need to stop telling me.)

Secondly, I felt really uncomfortable exposing myself to my readers, and lacked the self-confidence to write only for myself, not really caring how others would receive it.

Careful readers may have noticed the shift in verb tense over those last two paragraphs, from present to past. The surprise is something I still experience every week; the discomfort is now almost completely behind me. The fact is that, to my absolute astonishment, I have found, over the 17 months that I have been writing this blog, that I have become more and more freely able to talk about my innermost thoughts and feelings.

Of course, almost all of the time I write about these things in a flippant tone; but I have long warned people that the things I discuss seriously seldom mean very much to me, but the things I joke about are the ones I really care about. So don’t let the lightness of touch fool you.

Several times over the last months, I have finished writing and editing a post, and then read it through one final time and been amazed that not only do I think it’s not half bad, but in addition I am comfortable about sharing all this with what may not be a large readership, but, more tellingly, is exclusively not an anonymous readership. I find myself wondering how it is that I am comfortable with this.

When I put that question to Esther, she said that she felt this simply reflected a change that I have undergone over the last eight years. Esther and Micha’el are both convinced that my diagnosis of bladder cancer caused me to reflect and recalibrate in all sorts of areas, and that feeling more comfortable with myself is part of this change.

I don’t reject that idea, but I also have been wondering whether something in the medium itself encourages this openness. This blog is a complex thing. On the one hand, I can reach a large audience immediately and effortlessly; composing and posting the blog could hardly be easier. At the same time, the medium makes the entire process remarkably impersonal, sterile. There is no personal contact; indeed, my readership is completely invisible to me. I suspect that there is something of the church confessional in this setup: author and reader are each isolated in their own cell; the grille between them allows the message to be transmitted, but prevents any other contact.

I find that there is also, in this experience, something of diving into a swimming pool on a cool day. Getting in is not easy, but once you are in, it quickly becomes comfortable. Every week, clicking the Publish button takes a little effort: there’s always a moment’s hesitation, as I stand at the end of the diving board. However, by the time the first reaction comes back, I’m feeling much more at ease.

So, please keep those reactions coming, and I’ll do my best to keep up this dance of the seven hundred veils.

Meanwhile, some people are engaged in much more healthy and much less cerebrally complicated outdoor pursuits. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t lent Micha’el my copy of the novel Holes. It would be child slavery if Tao didn’t beg to be allowed to help.

Whenever I get together with the group of friends that I was in Israel with on a year programme 53 years ago, there is one member of the group who always reminds us of his rule: each of us is allowed to show just one photo of their grandchildren, and to talk about just one of their medical conditions. As regular readers will know, I hardly ever break the first rule, and, until now, I have attempted to avoid completely boring you with details of my physical state. (My mental state, on the other hand, I regard as the natural habitat of the blog.)

However, today I do plan to talk about one of my medical conditions (and, Heaven knows, there’s lots to choose from). I do this purely to explain why you received notification of this post an hour earlier than usual. The reason for this is that, at precisely 09:00 IST, I expect to be sitting in the office of my orthopaedist, listening to him telling me that yes, he agrees, the time has come for me to have my right hip replaced, to match the left, which I had done about 7 years ago.

When I first saw the orthopaedist, 18 months ago, he suggested a range of treatments aimed at deferring the inevitable carpentry. (For carpentry is exactly what hip replacement is, if we’re going to call a spade a spade….or, in this case, a saw, a chisel and a mallet. I had the surgery under an epidural, which meant that, despite the best efforts of Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites through my earphones, it still sounded as though I was in a carpenter’s workshop. This time, I plan to take Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.)

Guided by the orthopaedist, I had a short course of Feldenkrais, which served principally to confirm what I had long known – that I spend my days walking around blissfully out of touch with, indeed almost completely unaware of, the state of my body. Quite how unaware I was, I discovered when I had a 24-hour Holter ECG heart test shortly after being diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. (Incidentally, for years I thought it was called a halter test, because the recording device is carried on a strap round the neck. Fortunately, I resisted pointing out to any medical staff that they were all misspelling the name, because I then discovered that the test was devised by, and named after, experimental physicist Norman J. Holter.)

When the technician attached the apparatus and briefly ran it to test it was working, she said: ‘Is your heart-rate always like this?’, to which I replied, in my blissful ignorance: ‘Like what?’. When I saw my cardiologist later, he informed me that I had reached, at one point during the 24 hours, a maximum of 230 heart beats per minute, which is usually accompanied by total unconsciousness. In my case, it was accompanied only by total unawareness, which, they tell me, is not the same thing at all.

So, the Feldenkrais was not a total success; I felt a little like someone with severe hearing loss being asked to comment on the second theme in a Schubert string quartet. Parallel to that, I underwent a course of acupuncture, which pierced both my skin and my scepticism, followed by a brief course of physiotherapy.

Although this multi-pronged attack gave me some relief, the pain still flared up occasionally, and, at one point, I started using a stick/cane. While this made walking easier, it did nothing for my equanimity. Several times, on the bus into Jerusalem for treatment, strapping teenage boys would fail to offer me a seat, which really depressed me. Occasionally, women and men in their 80’s would offer me their seat, which depressed me even more.

Around this time, we celebrated Esther and Maayan’s wedding. As a precaution, I took the walking stick to the wedding, but left it in the boot of my brother-in-law’s car, because I was not keen for my day to be spoilt by a constant stream of solicitous enquiries. Unfortunately, I didn’t explain to my brother-in-law that I had left it there intentionally, and he spotted it and very kindly brought it to me. The expression of shock on my cousin’s face confirmed, for me, that I would rather hop all day than walk around with a stick. Fortunately, I had a very good hip-day and really didn’t need the stick.

After a while, I found that the daily stretching and strengthening exercises that the physiotherapist had given me hurt considerably more than the hip, and (I admit shamefacedly), I gradually gave them up. I then enjoyed a year or more of very little pain, and I learnt to adjust to the restricted mobility. Summer was much easier: once the colder weather came, and I had to allow an extra five minutes for putting on socks every day, life became more challenging.

Over the last month or so, I have felt less convinced that I can rely on the hip, and, although I still suffer very little pain (unless I have to spend two hours changing the kitchen back after Pesach – but how often does that happen!), I have started using the stick again, particularly for the uphill walk to shul on shabbat, a walk which I used to describe as taking 12–15 minutes, but now takes 20–23 minutes.

The first time I used a stick, I borrowed a sober dark-brown one from Yad Sarah, the Israel-wide charity that lends out a full range of medical equipment. This time, I have started using my late mother-in-law’s stick. This has a rather jazzy paisley design in red, orange and old gold, on a vibrant green background. I feel I am of an age when I can start seriously cultivating a certain understated eccentricity, and this seems like a good start. (I can remember, as a child, playing with my grandfather’s walking stick, and rather fancying I cut a Fred Astairean figure.)

Unfortunately, the rubber ferrule (the cap on the bottom of the stick) must be wearing a bit thin, and it makes a rather audible tap on the pavement as I saunter to shul. I’m seriously contemplating acquiring a matching red and green parrot to wear on my right shoulder, and teaching it to say: ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’ Walking has been reduced to a choice between no stick and stick: that is, between Boris Karloff in Frankenstein and Robert Newton in Treasure Island.

Speaking of parrots, and other pets (effortless segue, as ever– how do I do it?), the family in Portugal has just acquired a new member. Lua is only 4 months old, so she looks as though, as she gets older, she’s going to need wide open spaces: it’s just as well that the kids plan to spend more time in the tipi on their land.

There was a moment, about 15 years ago, when I felt I had reached probably as far in my klita, my absorption into Israeli society, as I am ever going to get. At that point, I knew that I had to choose my battles (or, rather, those areas where absorption was even conceivable). I am never going to recognise many popular Israeli singers (I’m pretty good on Arik Einstein, and Kaveret, but not much beyond that). But, then, I am never going to recognise many popular British singers, either. (Even in the 60s, my knowledge was embarrassingly partial.)

Similarly, I’m never going to become a fan of basketball, let alone Israeli football. At least 30% (and sometimes considerably more) of any Israeli stand-up artist’s routine, and most Israeli sitcoms and satirical programs, are always going to fly over my head.

At the same time, by 15 years ago Bernice and I were following not only Hebrew-language but also original Israeli theatre. I still invest time in wrestling with modern Israeli literature. Above all this, I still harbour hopes of improving my own Hebrew.

So it was that, 15 years ago, I made my first pun in Hebrew, and native Hebrew-speakers laughed. In the screening-room of my mind, this moment in my life-story plays out in glorious, celebratory slow motion, like the opening sequence of Chariots of Fire.

All of which is relevant only as a preface to explaining that anyone trying to tie the title of this week’s blog to the subject is faced with a challenge. Our subject is, broadly speaking, the answer to the question that has been on everyone’s lips in Israel this last two or three days. I apologise, in advance, for rubbing salt water into the wounds of our co-religionists in Britain and elsewhere. The fact is that, last year, most of us in Israel celebrated the Pesach seder alone or with our partner, whereas this year we were allowed to extend the seder table to accommodate the wider family. So, the question everyone is asking is: ‘Did you prefer last year’s two-person seder, or this year’s 12 (or 22, or 32) -person seder?’

Looking again at the title: to understand it, you need to translate it into Hebrew, which will give you misparim sidduri’im, which is a play on the phrase misparim sedari’im, which you could translate as seder-y numbers. Like all jokes, this gains little by having to be explained. Having to be translated makes it even feebler. I’m beginning to wish I had called the blog Seder and avoided this whole tortuous ramble. Let’s move on quickly!

Turning again to the question: What is the ideal number of participants at a seder? I have heard conflicting answers from different people, and I am not quite sure what my own answer would be. Instinctively, I expect myself to prefer a large, inter-generational, extended-family seder. This is, after all, the seder I grew up with.

In my childhood and youth, every year, we held seder with my mother’s family. She was one of four siblings, and each year, two of the four would each host one seder. With the addition of survivors of the generation above, this meant that our sedarim typically comprised somewhere around 18 people, one or two grandparents, 8 parents, 7 children, and, often, one other couple, sometimes with children. All of my parents’ generation had grown up in observant homes, and were, themselves, traditional, though almost none of them were observant. They belonged to Orthodox shuls, and, like so many of their generation, were unabashed in their non-observant identification with Orthodoxy.

All of this meant that our sedarim were what, on reflection, seems a curious blend. We always recited every word of the Haggada, for the most part in unison, and typically with a good majority of the participants taking a fully active part. However, there was, as far as I can remember, absolutely no commentary or discussion on the text. Younger children were guided by their parents, obviously, but as soon as we could read the text ourselves, we were more or less on our own.

What replaced the commentary were the family traditions. My maternal grandparents had belonged to a London shul whose rabbi was, for the time, very progressive with regard to women’s place in Judaism. (He had a daughter who was an exact contemporary of my mother, with the result that my mother, and the rabbi’s daughter, had a proper batmitzva ceremony and celebration in shul. Let me assure you that in 1932 London this was not the norm!)

Another mark of his progressiveness was that he was not opposed to girls singing in the shul choir. I believe that, when the Chief Rabbi spent a shabbat at the shul, the girls would move from the choir-loft to the adjacent women’s section of the shul, and sing from there.

As a result, my mother and her sisters were all choristers. Our seder was, accordingly, fairly ‘High Church’. The highlight of the evening was probably the last four verses of Psalm 119 (beginning Baruch Haba B’shem HaShem). Traditionally, these four verses are sung as a bride processes down the aisle of the shul to stand under the chupa. As you might expect, this was a high point of the choral contribution to a wedding. Psalm 119 forms part of the Hallel that is around the middle of the seder, and the entire family used to give it everything. The setting is perhaps, the closest Anglo-Jewish liturgy came to the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. I have hunted in vain for the exact version we grew up singing, but this one is very, very close, and gives you a good idea of what I meant earlier by ‘High Church’.

One other feature of the seder that sticks in my mind is a very long-standing family tradition. As a child, my mother would have seder with her aunts and uncles and cousins, just as we did. Her youngest cousin, who had a fairly strong working-class London accent, would, apparently, sing Shochen Ad Marom v’Kadosh Sh’mo with great gusto, pronouncing each of those ‘o’ sounds as an Eliza Dolittle ‘O-o-w-w’. This young boy’s pronunciation was mimicked (affectionately) at every year’s seder as I was growing up, and still lives on in our sedarim, although the ‘boy’ himself is now over 90 years old.

When Bernice and I married and moved to South Wales, we at first always went to friends for seder night: one night at the parents of Bernice’s closest friend, and the other night at their elder, married daughter’s. Even to me, the outsider, these were people who were more like family than friends, and this felt like an extension of my childhood sedarim. Of course, the traditions were not all the same as those I had grown up with. The paterfamilias was one of the least musical people I have ever known, and I attended seder there for years before I realised that the tunes that he sang, and which he had taught the whole family, were, in fact the same as those I had grown up with, though no longer recognisable.

It was not until the early 1980s, after we had been married for something like 10 years, that we actually hosted our own seder for the first time. This was therefore the first opportunity that we had to use the rather grand seder dish that we had been given as a wedding present. When we pulled the dish from its box, a small gift card emerged with it, inscribed from Morry and Jean to Suzanne and Daniel. (The names have been changed to protect the guilty.)

This was interesting since, not only did we have no idea who Morry and Jean were; we could not even think who Suzanne and Daniel might be. The provenance of this seder dish is a mystery to this day. My suspicion is that either the dish was not to Suzanne and Daniel’s taste, or possibly they received three seder dishes as wedding presents. In either case, I guess that they sold the dish at a discount to friends who were planning to buy us a wedding present, and this third couple did not check the box for tell-tale evidence.

When we first came on aliya, once again we initially became seder guests, spending first chag with Bernice’s sister Sue and her family. Once again, we were at a sprawling, multi-generational family seder, with, sometimes, three grandparent couples, two parent couples, and six children. These sedarim were subtly different from my childhood sedarim, in that the balance of power had shifted from parents to children, and much of the leading, and most of the discussion, increasingly came from the older children, rather than the adults.

Gradually, as Sue and David’s children married, and started their own families, we moved to making our own sedarim again. (There is a critical mass at which the family naturally splits again.) Since then, numbers have been considerably more modest. We have sometimes invited another family, which usually opens us to new experiences. When, one year, as I usually do, I asked each of our guests to bring a thought, idea, topic or other contribution to the seder, I wasn’t expecting to hear a rendition of Ma Nishtana in Klingon. But ours is an ecumenical table.

Last year, of course, Bernice and I were alone together, which made for a slightly more subdued seder with quite a lot of discussion. This year, Esther joined us. (She and Ma’ayan felt that they should, for this year, each spend time with their own parents, having seen so little of us during the year.) This made for a slightly more lively seder. Esther is so much better at the hand gestures for Echad Mi Yodea than I am. It also meant that the reading burden was shared a little wider.

So, that’s my personal; seder history. Having reviewed it, I am still uncertain which style of seder I prefer. However, I do know that my ideal seder would have (as of now) seven participants, and span three generations. That’s my personal L’Shana Haba’a.

Meanwhile, 5000 kilometres away, a family has taken a big step towards their own Exodus from the fleshpots of Penamacor to their own promising land, by erecting their tipi, with, of course, expert assistance.

I have a theory. No, don’t laugh! You haven’t even heard it yet!

It seems to be the case that among prominent figures in the worlds of arts and sciences, Jews can be found in greater numbers than their representation in the world’s population would lead you to expect: 0.2% of the world’s population is Jewish, and over 20% of Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish. Many suggestions have been made as to why this is so.

Perhaps it is a result of generations of Talmudic study, sharpening mental faculties and encouraging analytical and critical thought. Or it could be because when the Cossacks may be coming at any time, and you have to be ready to drop everything and flee, you know that you won’t be able to take land or industrial plant with you, but you will be able to take ideas and talents.

I’d like to suggest another possible reason: Pesach. Or, more precisely, Pesach cleaning. Rather than explaining my theory in the abstract, let me give you some concrete examples that have sprung fully clothed into my imagination.

Imagine, if you will, that it is a week or so before Pesach, and a Jewish mother is talking to her son.

Mother: Felix, have you finished checking those books for chametz yet?
Mendelssohn: Almost, Mama. I’m looking at this volume of Shakespeare. I never realised how much fun A Midsummer Night’s Dream is. I think it would make a wonderful ballet and I’ve just thought of a great theme for the overture. I must just write it down before it goes out of my head.

Or:

Mother: Albert, have you finished cleaning he cooker?
Einstein: Well, it’s interesting. While I was cleaning, I found that the faster I moved, the heavier I felt. I’m sure there must be some kind of a relationship between the two, and it probably has something to do with how much energy I’m using up. I just have to go and think about this for a while. I’ll finish off later.

Or:

Mother: Have you swept behind the fridge, Franz?
Kafka: I was just doing that, when I found this huge cockroach in the corner. It’s given me an idea for a story. I must just jot it down.

In other words, confronted with a numbingly boring and mindless task such as cleaning for Pesach, most of us will clutch at any idea that might get us out of having to help, and feel a burning compulsion to apply ourselves immediately, and exclusively, to developing that idea, however much hard work that entails. Cleaning for Pesach is therefore the ideal springboard for both the 1% inspiration, and the 99% perspiration, that, according to Thomas Edison, combine to form genius, . 

Which more or less describes my situation a couple of weeks ago. With the latest edition of the shul magazine put to bed, just before Purim, and this year’s shul mishloach manot project successfully completed shortly afterwards, I allowed myself a week or two of indolence. Before I knew it, the season of Pesach cleaning was on us, and I knew that I had to find some new project to occupy my time, if I was going to stand any chance of getting out of my share of the work.

The project I found is one which has been in my desk drawer (or, more accurately, staring accusingly at me from the floor of the wardrobe in the spare bedroom) for over 26 years. In November 1995, we sat shiva after the death of my father z”l. His younger sister produced, and very generously gifted to us, a bundle of letters that Dad had written home to his mother and siblings during his army service overseas, in the Royal Artillery, from 1942 until June 1945.

It is not clear to me, and now there is nobody left alive to ask, whether Dad only started writing to the family when he embarked for the Indian sub-continent in January 1942, or whether his earlier letters simply went missing. I suppose it is just possible that he relied on phone calls home while he was stationed in England. Either way, we have almost 80 letters covering 2 years and 5 months of the Second World War.

After the death of my mother z”l, in 2005, my brother Martin found, among her effects, a further 240 letters, postcards, air letters and telegrams from Dad, covering the period from July 1940 (after he returned from France as part of the British Expeditionary Force) until, again, June 1945, when he started the long voyage home from India. Martin very kindly let me take charge of all of this correspondence, and I always planned to do something with it.

In the last 15 years, I have made one or two attempts to review this correspondence, and mulled over how I could make it easily accessible to Martin (and anyone else who might want to read it). However, there were always more pressing projects (such as earning a living, for most of this period), and my attempts over the years were rather half-hearted.

I did at least manage to sort all the letters into chronological order and to remove them from their envelopes and insert them into clear plastic sleeves in a ring-binder. I even started to dip into them. That was as far as I had got until a last May, when I started thinking about tackling the project methodically.

I quickly realised that, because of military censorship, it was not always clear where Dad was stationed in India and Burma, and that his letters did not always, or even, often, focus on the big picture. So, we applied to the Army Personnel Centre for details of Dad’s service record. Unfortunately, during the pandemic, this centre is working with a skeleton staff (if at all) and, ten months after writing, we have still not received any information.

Meanwhile, I have started transcribing the letters. Once they are in digital form, they will obviously be much easier to share, and also to cross-reference. You have probably heard about the exciting advances that have been made in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, and it seems that there is software now available that can make a reliable job of scanning PDF documents and images and producing text files (for example in Word), even reproducing graphics.

If you believe the hype, some of this software can also recognise handwriting and convert handwritten notes to editable Word files. This is exactly what I was looking for.

When I started experimenting with freeware, and with free trials of commercial software, what I soon discovered was that, while this software may be able to cope reasonably well with neat, block handwriting, it cannot handle fully cursive handwriting of the 1940s, such as this.

Not relishing the sheer drudgery of typing out 320 letters (some of them running to 7 or more pages), I decided to take a quicker, if more circuitous route. I started using the Google voice capability on my phone – dictating an email and sending it to myself, then opening the email on my laptop, copying and pasting the dictated text into a Word document and editing it there. I’ve used this method for the first 10 letters, and it works fairly well, although, not unreasonably, the dictation app stumbles over Dad’s occasional Yiddish term, and fails to recognise the names of some of the smaller villages in Berkshire and County Durham where Dad was billeted at various periods in 1940–41.

I have just switched to using the Voice Typing tool in Google Docs in Chrome, allowing me to dictate directly on the laptop, and copy-paste from there into Word. This should be faster and, initially, seems a little more accurate. It also has the advantage of correctly interpreting more spoken punctuation commands, correctly reproducing brackets and paragraph breaks, for example.

(If anyone out there can recommend more effective software, I would be thrilled to hear…although, to be honest, reading all of the letters aloud means that I do not miss any nuances, and gives me a much better feel of the tone and content of each letter.)

When I check the digital text against the handwritten letter, to correct any errors, I also make a note of placenames and people’s names. I am building an Excel of links to Google Maps for all of the locations where Dad was stationed.

I have also started thinking about possible readership. At least two of Dad’s grandchildren have already expressed an interest in the letters, and I am trying to bear in mind, as I read the digitized letters, what references they might need help in understanding. So, at the moment, as I go along, I am adding footnotes.

Juggling these different tasks, reading from my own perspective and also attempting to read from a younger generation’s perspective, is proving a stimulating exercise. However, in addition to that, I am finding real pleasure in discovering and savouring each of these letters in turn.

It has become a cliché that email and social media have killed the art of letter-writing. The first point most people make when bemoaning this is that it will be very unlikely that anyone’s accumulated emails will survive to be handed on to another generation. They will almost certainly have been deleted long before then.

What is also striking to me, as I read, is that letter-writing is a completely different activity from writing an email. First, when a letter is sent it is not instantaneously received; rather, time (days, or sometimes weeks) pass between sending and receiving. This gives the author incentive to be a little more reflective, to compose the letter, rather than firing off an email. It is the easiest thing in the world to send a second email immediately after the first, mentioning what was forgotten. However, nobody wants to have to send a second letter so soon after the first.

In addition, when we send a letter, we know that the reply will take time to arrive, whereas emails are responded to increasingly quickly. A snailmail correspondence is to be savoured, whereas an email correspondence is usually more pragmatic and prosaic. (Both of those last two points are, of course, even truer for SMS and WhatsApp messages than for emails, and undoubtedly even more truer for social media that I haven’t even heard of.)

Incidentally, please don’t write to point out the grammatical error in the phrase ‘even more truer‘. I am well aware of it; it’s just that:
a) I am writing for comic effect;
b) I enjoy winding some of my stuffier readers up (sorry: …winding up some of my stuffier readers);
c) I find myself increasingly sympathetic to Humpty Dumpty’s approach to language:

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

But I digress.

To read Dad’s letters is to glimpse a more leisurely, less frenetic world of social intercourse: one that was more considered and nuanced, less direct, blunt and instantaneous. 

However, the real joy for me in reading this correspondence lies in the insight the letters give me into not only Dad’s personality and interests, but also the bond between Mum and Dad. This young man (21 years old when his letters to his future wife begin in 1940) both is, and is not yet, my father. There are many traits and mannerisms that I instantly recognise; there are also, fascinatingly, hints of characteristics that are less familiar to me.

I feel extraordinarily privileged to have this opportunity to enjoy Dad’s company again. My sole, but immense, disappointment is that I am missing the other half of this correspondence – Mum’s letters to Dad. He sometimes makes tantalising references to the content of those letters, but, sadly, they did not, apparently, survive the twin journeys from India to England, and from the 1940s to the 1990s.

Meanwhile, even to process just one side of this correspondence is, I suspect, going to keep me occupied for many enjoyable and satisfying months to come.

Back in Portugal, Tao may be nowhere near ready to read his great-grandfather’s letters yet, but, on his second birthday last week, he looked as though he could have helped him out cutting herring in the shop!

*

If the title means nothing to you, then you really should read Jonathan Swift’s great satirical work, (under 3,500 words) here. And that’s the last high-brow reference today.

Is it a bit early to be writing about Pesach?

I’m prepared to bet none of you who think so are religious. The only good thing is that most of those who would have laughed out loud at the question are too busy to read my blog this week, since their every waking hour is devoted to cleaning for Pesach. Some of them are, at this very moment, standing in the kitchen, trying to work out how it is that they have dismantled the cooker, cleaned it thoroughly, and then precisely reversed their actions to reassemble it, and yet, having finished, they are left with one piece still sitting on the floor, and they have no idea what it does or where it goes.

Being men, they will quietly check that their wives are busy upstairs extracting imaginary leaven from the window-frame in the spare bedroom that nobody has slept in since the Shavuot before last. They will then back away a foot or so and, using a broom handle, turn the cooker on. Then, having satisfied themselves that everything works properly, and they have not blown up the house, they will quietly gather up the ‘spare’ part, and put it at the very back of the cupboard under the stairs.

Incidentally, if you have the feeling that Pesach cleaning begins too early in your home, let me tell you of a friend who can never enjoy Channuka, because he knows that every year, as soon as the Channukiyah is put away, he and his wife will start cleaning for Pesach. There’s always someone worse off than you.

It’s not actually Pesach cleaning that I wanted to talk about, but rather Pesach shopping. This is a surreal experience. Throughout the year, a trip to the supermarket is an exercise in replenishment: we buy what we either are soon to, or have already, run out of, and maybe one or two special things not on the list. Pesach shopping, however, is a completely different exercise, comparable only to the first shopping trip when setting up home for the first time. (Incidentally, when Bernice and I set up home in Bridgend, over 49 years ago, we went to Woolworths in the high street and bought all the household cleaning equipment we needed, brooms, buckets, bowls, dustpans, cloths and so forth. I remember the bill came to ₤1.50 and we were horrified.)

A Pesach shopping list, similarly, has to include everything from almonds to Zinfandel, via alumin(i)um foil, cling film (shrink wrap), and toothbrushes (toothbrushes). It is a list that goes on and on, and includes certain items in quantities that you would regard as laughable at any other time of year. (One more memory: my father z”l had a customer whose Pesach order was always larger than anyone else’s: she had a large family and was a very keen cook. She invariably ordered a long hundred of eggs (120 eggs). I remember one year her order came to over ₤21, or about ₤300 in today’s prices. Bear in mind that this was only for groceries and did not include fresh meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, or wine.)

This situation leaves us all with one main existential question: Do we go minimalist or maximalist? In other words: Do we buy everything that we might possibly need, or fancy, over Pesach? The upside of this is patently obvious: our chag is enhanced and we enjoy seven (or, outside Israel, eight) days of self-indulgence (knowing that the diet will start the day after Pesach). The downside is that we have to find somewhere to store all of this stuff.

The alternative is to buy what we need, reassuring ourselves that we can easily do without mixed spice, or two kinds of chocolate, or coffee, for a week. The downside here is that we spend the entire week looking for goods that we have forgotten that we didn’t buy, or opening the fridge, standing in front of it, and moaning: ‘Why is there absolutely nothing to put on a piece of matzo?’ or, at best, ‘Cheese again?!’

Revisiting that last paragraph, you might realise that there maximalism has other downsides. The first is that, when you reach the checkout, and the cashier tells you the amount to pay, you wonder for a moment whether they have accidentally charged you for a modest compact car as well as the contents of your trolley. The second, and the one that actually troubles me today, is that you know that, at the end of Pesach, you are going to be left with Pesach residue.

To give you a better idea of what I mean, let me tell you about some of the fallout from Pesach in our house.

The biggest single item is horseradish. Now, I know that there are strong arguments for using lettuce as your maror (bitter herbs) on Seder night, and I fully accept that, whereas lettuce can be bitter, horseradish is actually hot, spicy, pungent, rather than bitter. (Is there, I wonder, any other religion whose rituals involve tasting notes?) Nevertheless, horseradish is what we were brought up with at seder, and so horseradish is what we use. There is only one problem with this.

In my childhood household, we held two seder nights of about 20 people, in other words 40 servings of maror. Last year, Bernice and I held seder alone (as most of you did, I am sure), and, of course, in Israel we celebrate only one seder, so that is 2 servings. Unfortunately, when we went looking for maror in the supermarket, all we could find was great gnarled roots of horseradish, that looked as if they were hewn from Jack’s beanstalk: brewer’s dray carthorseradish, whereas what we really wanted was Shetland ponyradish. The solution we found was to get together (virtually) with a group of friends, and each buy a part-share in a root of horseradish.

A couple of days ago, it struck me that there is no reason why this solution should be confined to horseradish. There are all sorts of other things that we are forced to buy in much larger quantities than we need for Pesach. Most of them, I must admit, involve the baking that I do for Pesach.  

My cinnamon balls, for example, require one tablespoon of cinnamon, a spice that we use quite often but very sparingly through the year. I can’t tell you how many drums of cinnamon we have in our spice drawer. All I know is, if some freak tropical storm hits the cinnamon crop the way it hit the Madagascar vanilla crop a couple of years ago, bringing scarcity and rocketing prices, we will sell our stock and our children will never need to work again.

Or take potato flour. Please take potato flour! How many kilo did you want? My French chocolate cake takes 50 grams of potato flour, but our supermarket only stocks it in 500-gram bags. We currently have over 1½ kilo of potato flour, and we never use it other than at Pesach. This time next week, we will have over 2 kilo.

Vanilla essence? Throughout the year, we make our own essence from vanilla pods, but, at Pesach, we buy a small bottle, of which I use 4 drops in my almond macaroons.

Dessicated coconut? 200 grams for the pyramids, leaving 200 grams to sit unused in the bag.

For years, I bought a bottle of Israeli brandy every Pesach. For the sake of the 3 or 4 tots I would have over Pesach, I was never prepared to spend what a half-decent bottle would have cost me, so I ended up with firewater that sat in the cupboard all year. There’s only so much brandy butter you can make!

Ando so on, and so on.

Suddenly, this week, the solution sprang, fully-formed, into my consciousness. Google docs! This is how it works.

A Modest Proposal: For preventing the purchase of Pesach groceries from being a financial and spatial burden on purchasers, and for making it beneficial to the shul.

Step 1: A Pesach food spreadsheet! In every shul, a couple of weeks before Pesach, every family submits a form listing the goods they always buy but never finish every Pesach, stating the unit size of the product, and the quantity they actually require.

Step 2: The data is collated to produce a master list of the numbers of units the community requires.

Step 3: The shul buys the goods, and the members come to shul with their Pesach Tupperware and ziplock bags, take what they require of each item and leave a suitable donation to shul funds.

End result: A reduction in everyone’s shopping bills, an end to over-buying, probably a profit for the shul, nobody going without because the supermarket sold out of chraine. Win-win-win-win!

Despite my early start, perhaps a tad too late to implement this year, although we will be posting individually on our shul WhatsApp, offering 450 grams of potato flour, 6 inches of horseradish, and so on. And next year, I expect to see this proposal adopted by shuls worldwide.

Note to self: Sell shares in cinnamon.

Meanwhile, all around the world, Jews are using up their open bags of flour.

My first memory of live theatre of any kind is of going en famille to the London Palladium to see a pantomime (I think Cinderella), sitting spellbound in a box (like the one the Royal Family sat in). Incidentally, a handy tip. If you ever book tickets to go to the Palladium, avoid booking a box: they are right at the side and the seats are set back, so that your view of one front corner of the stage is blocked by the wall of the box. On one or two occasions during the afternoon (this was, of course, a matinee), below us and to the left apparently hilarious or shocking things happened of which we remained completely unaware.

My second memory of live theatre – and here we inch inexorably closer to our subject this week – is of The Mousetrap, the Agatha Christie murder mystery which opened in London’s West End on 25 November 1952, and ran continuously until 16 March 2020, when the thing I promised last week not to mention for a couple of weeks forced the closure of London theatres. That’s worth restating: an unbroken run of over 26,000 performances, spanning a period of more than 68 years. That is a world record. (Incidentally, the radio news bulletin that is heard at one point in the play was originally recorded by Dereck Guyler, whose name and distinctive voice will be known to many of you. Guyler’s original recording has been used throughout the 68-year run.)

How to explain the production’s longevity? I’ll offer three suggestions.

First, the Ambassador’s theatre, where the play opened, seats 444 patrons, and the next-door St Martin’s theatre, to which it transferred without a break in 1974, seats 550 patrons, both of which are small full houses by London standards (the London Palladium, by contrast, holds over four times as many), so it was bound to take longer to exhaust its potential audience.

Second, since its opening it has been very cleverly marketed. When patrons leave the theatre, they are requested not to reveal the surprise ending. In addition, in the United Kingdom, only one production of the play in addition to the West End production can be performed annually, and, under the contract terms of the play, no film adaptation can be produced until the West End production has been closed for at least six months.

Finally, the play is very English, evoking an England fondly remembered, not overlong, and, while it is a detective mystery, it is not, in terms of language or plot development, complex to follow. All of this meant that, once it had earned a reputation for being long-running, it became a popular theatre choice for foreign tourists.

None of which is the reason why I brought The Mousetrap up. Here comes the reason. I can remember almost nothing of that production, other than the opening moments, which represent a wonderful moment of theatre. (Spoiler alert: if you plan to see the play when theatres reopen in London, skip to the next-but-one paragraph.) The audience settle in their seats; the lights go down; we wait for the stage to be lit. There is an awkward pause. The audience starts to wonder whether there has been a technical glitch.

We are now sitting in total darkness, waiting for something to happen. We hear the notes of Three Blind Mice being picked outonthe piano. The effect of the music is chilling, sinister and menacing., Then, after a further silence, a single pistol shot rings out. The audience land back in their seats, having leapt a foot or two in the air, and, here and there, patrons fan fellow-theatregoers with programmes, in the hope that they will regain consciousness.

And so, today’s question is: Why? Why the piano? This choice is not arbitrary, as I first became aware several years ago, when I started walking the wadi paths around Maale Adumim several times a week, and wanted something to listen to. Music was out, because the extraneous noise would ruin my appreciation of music. I soon discovered that radio drama represented the audio content that combined maximum interest (to make the time fly) with optimum level of concentration required (so that I neither lost sight of the flora and fauna around me nor lost the thread of the plot).

As a consequence, I listened to a great deal of BBC radio drama in a fairly short space of time. (I had my 45-minute Afternoon Theatre walks, my 60-minute Saturday Night Theatre walks, and even my 90-minute Drama on 3 walks.) One thing which I noticed over time was that different instrumental arrangements lent themselves to different genres. My most striking observation was that the piano is the best accompaniment to psychological drama or mystery of any kind.

Why is that? Well, as you know, I’m never loath to offer a theory, so here goes. I would suggest that it lies partly in the qualitative nature of the sound of a note played on a piano, in contrast to, for example, a violin.

The soundwave that a violin produces is much more complex (you could say much richer) than the one produced by a piano. The violin strings and soundbox add resonance to the base note, to create a multi-layered sound. The following soundwave simulations make the point visually.

Here is the sine wave that would represent a single ‘pure’ note.

When that same note is played on a violin, although the pitch is the same as the basic wave (as shown by the fact that the length of the wave is the same), the shape of the wave is far more complex.

In contrast, here is the soundwave produced by a piano.

While more complex than the basic wave, it is far less complex than the wave produced by a violin. The piano produces a sound that you could describe as ‘cleaner’ than the violin’s.

I’m going to suggest (in only the very loosest sense, and with all the requisite caveats, and recognizing that it is a ridiculous generalization) that the violin is emotional, artistic, and the piano is intellectual, logical. Yes, I know about Chopin’s Ballade in A flat major Op. 47; I even know that Liszt, in his piano recitals, was the first genuine music idol, with society ladies screaming, swooning and fighting each other for a handkerchief that he had held.

I also know that the Chaconne from Bach’s Second Partita for solo violin is, according to Yehudi Menuhin and Joshua Bell, “the greatest structure for solo violin that exists” and “structurally perfect”. Nevertheless, I’m going to stick by my broad generalization: the violin is the instrument of the heart; the piano of the mind.

Three hundred words back, I suggested that the piano’s distinction from the violin “lies partly in the qualitative nature of the sound”. My more careful readers have therefore been waiting for me to suggest what the other part is. So here goes. It lies, I am convinced, in the silence, the gaps between the notes. If a reticule is a network of holes held together by string, then piano music is, to some extent, a series of gaps separated from each other by notes.

This simply isn’t true of the violin. Listening to the violin, I often feel: the song has ended, but the resonance lingers on. Here’s Itzhak Perlman, (in the first 40 seconds) illustrating my point with his customary charm and humour. On the piano, however, unless the pianist uses the damper or sustaining pedal, then, as soon as she releases a piano key, the string stops vibrating. This produces extraordinary clarity of sound and makes it possible to isolate single notes very cleanly.

Let me approach this from a different direction, with all of my arrogance as a non-musician. My favourite pianist is Alfred Brendel: I could listen to him all day. (I would certainly rather listen to him than watch him, because of his facial contortions, which I find very distracting. See, for example, the 30 seconds from 12:56 here.) I have a 5-CD set of Brendel playing all of Beethoven’s variations and bagatelles. Some of this is great music (for example, the Diabelli variations), but some of it is less so (the variations on God Save the King, for example). However, Brendel’s playing exposes and celebrates the sublime structure of all of this music.

Now, the piano, unlike the violin, is not a difficult instrument to produce music on. Some years ago, I started learning piano. (It was a short-lived experiment, but that is another story.) To my astonishment, I found that I was able to produce sounds that did not disgust me, almost from the very start.

The piano requires none of the violinist’s skilful control of bowing and fingering, none of the embouchure and breath control of the flautist, to produce notes of music. All of the hard work at that level is being done by the instrument itself. This leads me to ask: where, then, does the greatness of a pianist lie, and what is it that we prefer about one pianist’s playing?

Well, obviously, there are technical matters, such as span and speed of fingering. There is also, undoubtedly, delicacy of touch. However, there is primarily sensitivity of interpretation, and I believe that a lot of that sensitivity is exhibited in precisely those spaces between the notes.

Consider Mozart. I am sure that I once read a quote from a great pianist that Mozart’s piano music is so simple that it takes a genius to play it. However, I haven’t been able to trace the quote online. Be that as it may, it is certainly true that Mozart is offered up to beginning players (like a sacrifice, I often feel), because the notes are usually very easy to play.

The pianist Artur Schnabel’s comments are relevant here: “The sonatas of Mozart are unique: too easy for children, too difficult for adults. Children are given Mozart to play because of the quantity of notes; grown-ups avoid him because of the quality of notes.”

The composer Gabriel Fauré wrote: “Mozart’s music is particularly difficult to perform. His admirable clarity exacts absolute cleanness: the slightest mistake in it stands out like black on white. It is music in which all the notes must be heard.” That exposure is most pronounced on the piano.

The pianist Wanda Landowska wrote: The works of Mozart may be easy to read, but they are very difficult to interpret. The least speck of dust spoils them. They are clear, transparent, and joyful as a spring, and not those muddy pools which seem deep only because the bottom cannot be seen.”

In conclusion. I believe I might be able to distinguish between different great violinists by hearing them play a few unconnected chords. I am much less confident that I would be able to distinguish between great pianists on that basis. On the piano, the differentiation is on the basis primarily of phrasing, and phrasing is, of course, a consequence of the gaps between the notes.

And that seems like as good a place as any to pause…for just the right length of time…and offer you a different kind of skilled fingering.

Clearly, in delicatessen, his father’s son, his grandfather’s grandson, and his great-grandfather’s great-grandson,

This was going to be a post about piano music, and on Sunday this week I spent a couple of hours attempting to write it. Quite by chance, over the weekend I discovered exactly the right expression for what I went through on Sunday, in my own modest way. In Friday’s Times (of London), ex-England captain Mike Atherton (if you have to ask ‘Ex-captain of what?’ then please skip to the next paragraph) attempted to make sense of the extraordinary events over the previous two days in Ahmedabad. (Root’s first innings stats alone are enough to set your head spinning: 17 and 5 for 8? What’s that supposed to be?) In his match-end summary piece, Atherton quoted Red Smith: ‘The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.’

This quote intrigued me, because I was curious to know more about Red Smith. (Atherton simply identified him as an American sportswriter – which I now realise is the equivalent of identifying Atilla the Hun as a bit of a bully.) Anyway, to get back to the second diversion: Red Smith. (And before you smile at that so-American nickname ‘Red’, bear in mind that you might have adopted something similar if your parents had had the insensitivity to christen you Walter Wellesley.)

For 50 years, Smith was recognized as “the greatest sportswriter of two eras” (at least in America – remember, he overlapped with Neville Cardus – perhaps the only sports correspondent to double as a reviewer of classical music.). Google soon revealed that the ‘…fiction is dead’ quote came from his coverage of Bobby Thomson’s 1951 home run. The actual home run starts at 1’40” on the video, but the whole video is great fun.

And then, I stumbled across another quote from Smith. There is actually some debate about the originator of the quote. What seems most likely is that the kernel of an idea was written in the 19^th Century, and picked up by a number of other writers, then developed, principally by Paul Gallico, in the mid-20^th Century. However, Red Smith’s newspaperman’s phrasing is, unsurprisingly, sharper and pithier than any other I have seen. When asked about the challenge of writing a daily column (and, faced with my weekly post, I understand the challenge), Smith replied: ‘Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.’

Which is more or less – without wishing in any way to over-dramatize – what I did on Sunday. After two hours of torture, I spent the rest of the day in avoidance mode – suggesting to Bernice that we read, breaking off to make sourdough crackers, watching I Care a Lot, a film which we both knew, from the reviews, Bernice would find unbearably unpleasant. After watching it, I told her there was one 30-second patch during the entire two hours that she would not have been disgusted by, but, on reflection, there wasn’t even that. I found it well-made and well-acted, although a little too slick. I prefer a bit of grainy, myself.

However, what is most striking about it is that if you’re looking for a film that will restore your lack of faith in humanity and leave you wanting to take a shower immediately after viewing, look no further. I see that Rosamund Pike won the Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) for her role in I Care a Lot. I’m not entirely sure whether I missed the singing and dancing or the humour in the film; all I know is that I certainly didn’t experience any of either.

Right. I think that’s it. We have explored all the interesting byways, and now, finally, we can get started on this week’s actual blog.

Those of you with elephantine (that’s what we in the lit biz call foreshadowing – hold that thought) memories will recall that, just six months and one day ago, I wrote about my favourite authors with the first name John. Today I plan to revisit, at least in spirit, one of those Johns – John Irving.

As those of you who are fans will know, Irving is an astonishingly consistent author. With him, you know exactly what you are going to get in every novel; and what you are going to get is at least one elephant, a circus, and wrestling. Even I, knowing what was coming there, find that last sentence astonishing. You can’t make this stuff up!

So, as my humble cap-doff to a great writer, I offer you an elephant, a circus and some wrestling.

The elephant is, as it has been for a year now, the one in the room. I have tried to avoid mentioning the coronavirus in my blog – I’m sure we all get enough of that from the media and in our zoom calls with family and friends in other countries. However, as I discovered on Sunday, I don’t seem able to focus on anything else at the moment.

As the weeks go on, our desire to visit Portugal grows and grows, just as our belief that we will be able to do so shrinks and shrinks. Until now, I have been, as I usually am, the pessimist, but even Bernice is now wondering when it will be even possible to go. One thing for sure is that the risk of travelling is becoming less and less of a deterrent. If we were able to fly directly to Lisbon, I don’t think we would hesitate at this stage.

Still, there was one ray of sunshine last week. Bernice and I had an exciting experience. We were in our own shul again for Purim and Shabbat.

We went back to our own synagogue for the first time together since February 1 2020, just before we flew to Portugal. Our shul has reopened at 50% capacity, for certificated double-jabbees and recovereds. We were expecting a far better attendance, but apparently more than a few people are understandably reluctant to ‘desert’ the prayer quorums they have been attending in people’s backyards, and most people with young families are unable to bring them to shul. In addition, I was amazed to discover that at least a few of our members, and not only younger members, were refusing the vaccine.

Nevertheless, I expect that the trend of the last couple of weeks will continue. The government is easing some restrictions for those who have had the double vaccination, and this is encouraging some reluctant younger adults to take the plunger. In addition, there have been a number of ‘campaigns’, such as employers arranging for (voluntary) mass vaccination of employees onsite, and offering t-shirts and shopping vouchers. Astonishingly, or perhaps not so astonishingly, the take-up in these campaigns has been high. It seems that many people couldn’t be bothered to make an appointment and drive 10 minutes for a vaccination, but if it is offered to them with no effort, they are happy to go along with it.

And so to the circus, which is, sadly, the only way to describe some aspects of the handling of the crisis by the Israeli government. This is, it hardly needs saying, a circus with only one ringmaster, but a whole gang of clowns, and a couple of high-wire artists. I certainly don’t envy Netanyahu, or the leader of any other nation, the task of handling this pandemic. There was no playbook for this. However, I believe that it would have been possible, in an alternate universe, to co-ordinate the activities of the various key players, to make decisions and abide by them, to give the public a sense that the Government had a clear strategy.

Instead, far, far too often, the people have felt confused and betrayed by their leaders, and have therefore been unwilling to play their part. We have all been involved in a wrestling match, between different sectors of Israeli society, between different factions in the government, between the powers-that-be and the people.

I said, right at the beginning of this terrible year, that the very first appointment the Prime Minister needed to make was a behavioural psychologist, who would be able to advise on how best to encourage the public to follow guidelines and instructions. Instead, the Prime Minister issued guidelines that were ignored, the Government policy stood no chance of success, and we now find ourselves at a point where civil disobedience is a very real threat.

I am really sorry to have laid all this woe on you, dear reader. I undertake to make no mention of the elephant for at least the next few weeks, and to revert to the normal trivial musings. Meanwhile, at times like these I find performing routine household chores often helps to lift my spirits. Or, indeed, watching someone else perform them.

For those of you planning to come on aliya, let me offer one observation. The speed and thoroughness of your klita (absorption, acclimation) will depend on two things above all. The first is very general. The world is divided into two groups of people: those who, when a day has gone badly, come home and laugh with their partner or friends about it, and those who, when a day has gone badly, come home and cry with their partner or friends about it.

For an oleh, in many respects things have improved greatly in Israel, since the early 50s, and even since the mid-80s, when we arrived. Nevertheless, bureaucracy is still bureaucracy, and its impenetrability for Anglos has not been helped by the fact that English has had to cede some of its place in Israeli officialdom to Russian, Amharic, and, lately, French.

So, any oleh has to be very prepared for frustrations and setbacks. The best you can do is take comfort from the fact that you are accumulating stories with which you will be able to bore your grandchildren.

It is, of course, not easy to change your character. If you are a weeper or ranter, then developing a zen approach to the vagaries of aliya and klita is not easy. In contrast, the second factor on which a successful aliya depends is much easier to control. It all depends on a five-step plan that couldn’t be simpler.

1. If you are married to a fellow English speaker, then, as soon as you come on aliya, get a divorce.
2. Start mixing with, and dating, native Israelis, preferably ones who (or at least whose family) do not speak English.
3. Get married and have children, with whom you speak Hebrew, as soon as possible.
4. Meanwhile, find a job in an exclusively Hebrew-speaking environment.
5. Lastly, find all of your friends from within the non-Anglophone community.

In this way, you will be well on the road to mastery in Hebrew, or at least to a level of fluency in Hebrew from which you can see that most of the population doesn’t speak Hebrew any better than you do.

Now, I must add a disclaimer here. I can’t actually guarantee from personal experience that this method works. What I can state, categorically, is that if there is not a single one of these five steps that you manage to nail, your Hebrew will be embarrassingly weak.

‘Embarrassingly’ is, of course, a relative term. Some of our Anglo friends think that my Hebrew is pretty good. I am reminded of the joke about the little old Jewish man (these used to be jokes about someone other than myself) who comes to his wife sporting a smart cap, edged with brocade, and with the word ‘Captain’ emblazoned across the peak. “So, Sadie, what do you think?”, he says, to which his wife replies: “Morry, by me you’re a captain, and by you you’re a captain, but by a captain are you a captain?”

I freely admit that my ambitions in Hebrew are very….ambitious. (I hesitated there about whether to write ‘were ambitious’, but I’m not too old to harbour, indeed nurture, unfulfilled ambitions). I want to have the same command of Hebrew that I have of English (even though I realise that is, at this stage, less an ambition than a delusion). We have friends who came on aliya 10 or 15 years earlier than we did, who followed every one of the five steps above, and, as a consequence, who have an enviable command of Hebrew.

I admit that my Hebrew is not bad. I had a couple of head starts. First of all, a decade in Hebrew classes three times a week, and a childhood of going to synagogue on shabbat, and actually praying much of the time, meant that I had a sound basis in reading, writing and grammar.

Next, I spent a ‘gap’ year in Israel that included three daily hours of intensive Hebrew, six days a week, for five months. In addition, while visiting Bernice’s sister Sue and her family in Israel in 1985, we decided to come on aliya the following year and I started preparations to revive the Sleeping Beauty of my Hebrew.

In preparation, I took home with me 3 weeks’ copies of the Shabbat supplement of the popular newspaper Yediot Acharonot, and a novel in Hebrew. I read and reread those supplements, and they brought back a lot of my Hebrew. The novel was less successful. I had chosen Amos Oz’s My Michael, on the basis of reading the fist page and a half in the bookshop and thinking: ‘Well, this is pretty straightforward’.

What I failed to realise, until I was back in Wales, was that the opening of the first chapter finds the narrating central character in a state of traumatic shock, and barely able to articulate. From halfway through page 2, the sentences become more complex, and the vocabulary ever richer and more literary. Round about page 5, in my very own state of traumatic shock, I finally gave up. I must confess that, although I have read some short story collections and even one or two novels in Hebrew, Oz’s work is something I still read and enjoy exclusively in English.

For our first year in Israel, I taught in primary school, where I soon became aware of the importance of register – the style of language, the level of formality that one uses. Teaching a class of sixth graders, I used the word emesh, which had always been a favourite of mine. It means ‘last night’, and I was always taken by the fact that Hebrew managed to achieve with one word what would otherwise take two. When I used the word in the classroom, the class responded with derisive laughter. I discovered later that the word is fairly high register and a little old fashioned, and, on my pupils, it had the same effect as ‘yesternight’ might have had in English.

After that first disastrous year of teaching (which I might tell you about some other time, when I’m fully recovered from it), I worked almost exclusively in English, and, as a result, my conversational Hebrew failed to continue to develop as it might otherwise have done, At that time, almost my only regular reading in Hebrew was the weekend edition of Ha’aretz, a paper that I enjoyed principally for its arts and culture coverage.

This helped to create a situation where, after a few years in Israel, I could more or less hold my own in a discussion about Hebrew theatre or Beethoven‘s late quartets but, if I went to buy groceries at the corner store, I would find a friendly chat with the shopkeeper very challenging. Of course, as some of you know, the same is true for me in English, so maybe it’s not really a language thing at all.

This is an illustration of the fact that what we think of as command of a language is not exclusively determined by one’s knowledge of the language. It is, rather, bound up with an understanding of the culture. When I hear Hebrew stand-up, or watch a satirical show on TV, a large part of the challenge for me is that I am not familiar enough with all of the cultural references. Oddly enough, these days I have a similar experience when I listen to English stand-up or watch a British satirical show. I no longer know anything about British popular culture, and I have never fully immersed myself in Israeli popular culture.

Of course, to some extent, the same is true of language in general. Every time I go back to England, I encounter more and more vocabulary in the press and on TV that I am unfamiliar with.

The novelist Anthony Burgess left England in 1968 to avoid paying 90% income tax, and from then until his death in 1993, he lived in Malta, Italy, Monaco, Switzerland, moving whenever his outrageous outspokenness offended the local authorities or the actions of the local authorities in each country offended him.

Over those 25 years, Burgess apparently waited anxiously for the publication of each new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which he had sent out to him. On receiving anew edition, he would turn immediately to the supplement, dedicated to “the treatment of those accessions and words which have become current over the last twenty years”. In my 1979 edition of the dictionary, the supplement runs to 324 pages.

Burgess would religiously scan these pages for terms and usages he was unfamiliar with, and in this way he ensured that he remained abreast of the language and could continue to write his wonderful sweeping novels in contemporary English. (At some point, I must devote at least one post to favourite authors of mine whose first name is not John.)

On a similar theme, we have good friends whose children grew up in Israel trilingual, speaking their own native Hebrew, their mother’s native American English, and their father’s native Danish. (For most of you, that probably narrows the field to either one family or none.)

I mention this because, as the children were growing up, whenever the family visited Denmark, people found the children enchanting, because they spoke the Danish that had been current among adults when their father had come on aliya a decade or more earlier, and, in the intervening period, Danish had replaced a lot of Danish vocabulary with English. If I remember accurately, barbecue and swimming pool were two examples. From my experience, in many languages such borrowing is regarded, at least in some milieux, as chic, and sometimes even de rigueur. It’s part of some groups’ weltanschaung. Capeesh?

To return to my theme: I find myself, at this stage of my life, growing no closer to an understanding of popular Israeli culture, and, consequently, contemporary Hebrew language. At the same time, I am being left further and further behind by the developing language and popular culture of the land of my birth. At this rate, Bernice may soon be the only person I can hold a coherent conversation with, and after the last year we’re starting to run out of stuff to say to each other.

And on that happy note….

Still, all of this may mean that I have more time to stop and smell the flowers.