Imagine, for a moment, that you are in the matchmaking business. (I can’t, by the way. The concept of taking responsibility for recommending which two people will live happily ever after is one I simply cannot grasp – how does anyone dare?) You decide to devise a simple quiz to help you find the perfect lid for each pot on your books: you will prepare a list of ten questions, each question selected in the belief that if a couple give identical answers to all ten questions, they will be a match made in heaven.

So, my question to you is: what are your ten questions?

As you start to think about that, those of you who are, or have ever been, married may find yourselves realising that this is in fact the list of ten questions that you wish you had asked your prospective spouse before the fact…and didn’t.

While you’re thinking about that, let’s consider the questions you probably did discuss: taste in music, literature, the arts; preferred holiday destinations and types; number of children you would like to have; political positions.

Far be it from me to denigrate this list, but lots of happily married couples conduct parallel but separate arts lives – there’s really no problem in feeling differently about ballet, Lionel Shriver or Phantom of the Opera, for example. Even holidays can be taken separately (although Bill Gates’ recent experience suggests that that is probably better if the husband’s holiday is not taken with an ex-girlfriend). Alternatively, they can go to Barcelona and she can lounge on the beach while he visits museums, or he can watch the bullfighting while she paraglides. As for children, there may be couples who discussed how many children they wanted, came to a joint decision, and ended up with that number, but my gut feeling is that life takes over in more cases than not.

So, I’m not at all convinced that these are the important questions. By now, you probably have at least two or three of your own questions in mind, and you may also have realized that they potentially say a lot about your particular marriage. I thought this week I might offer you some of mine. (Although I’m beginning to feel this is not one of my smarter thoughts.)

To make it more fun, I’ll give you the multiple-choice answers before each question, and, if you feel so inclined, you can try and guess the question before reading it.

Q1: 18; 21; 24; 27.
What is the optimum temperature for the air-conditioning thermostat?
I know that one partner can wear a thick winter sweater, or the other can strip down to Bermuda shorts, but the whole point of air conditioning is to avoid the need for that. Incidentally, this question is as relevant to office-sharing colleagues as it is to life partners. Those of you who have worked in mixed-sex office environments will, I am sure, be nodding in agreement at that last sentence. There is, apparently, a scientific reason why women prefer a higher room temperature than men.

Among other things, women have a lower metabolic rate, leading to less heat production, and they have a larger ratio of body surface to body mass, allowing for greater heat loss. If two people are the same height, weight and age, if you only change whether it’s a male or female, you expect 10% to 20% difference in metabolic rate. If you have a higher body surface area to lose heat relative to the volume available to produce heat, you tend to lose heat more easily and are more sensitive to cold.

Incidentally, a temperature of between 23^o and 26^o C is apparently acceptable to 80% of men and women. (You can read more about this here.)

Q2: Up; Down; As you found it; As you used it; The reverse of as you used it.
In what position do you leave the toilet seat after use?

Is it only chivalry that declares that toilet seats should be left in the down position? In a house occupied by two people, one of each sex, there is a case to be made for leaving the toilet seat down if you are the man and up if you are the woman. Not only does this show consideration to your other half, it also reflects the probability that the next user will be your other half rather than you.

Of course, there is an aesthetic aspect to this question, in addition to the utilitarian one, and I am prepared to accept that a closed seat is more pleasing to the eye.

Q3: Wardrobe; Chair; Floor.
When you undress, where do you put the clothes you intend to wear again?

Q4: Daily; Weekly; Monthly; Before parental visits.
How frequently do you clean the house?

I could go on…but probably not if I value my life.

Questions 3 and 4 are of particular interest in our marriage, because they represent that most dangerous of surfaces – a fluid playing field. Take Question 3, for example. Growing up, it is fair to say that Bernice and I were both the untidy sibling. We each shared a bedroom with our older, tidier sibling.

I understand that Bernice’s sister Sue drew an imaginary line down the middle of their bedroom and forbade Bernice to bring any of her stuff over that line. Martin was of a milder nature (as I grow older, and reflect on our childhood, I recognize and appreciate more and more the length of his suffering of me as a younger brother) and I had an easier time of it.

When we married, we each felt we had indeed found our perfect partner….someone just as messy and untidy. In our early married years, our bedroom – indeed, much of the time, our whole house – was a tip.

Over the last decades, something extraordinary has happened. We have both reformed, to the point where, in our own eyes, we are borderline obsessively tidy. Several factors have contributed to this admirable, if slightly disturbing, state of affairs. The departure of both children; the discarding of large quantities of junk; several waves of renovation, so that our kitchen and bedrooms now have sufficient storage space for all we possess. Growing older (some of us).

Magically, Bernice and I have progressed along this path in extraordinary unison; at no point has it been one of us dragging the other screaming into a more ordered world. It’s true that I had a brief flirtation with KonMa, the Japanese decluttering method described in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (which manifested itself in my case more in tender rolling of individual socks and less in laying teeshirts out and listening to discover which of them spoke to me).

However, Bernice was very tolerant, and hardly laughed at all, and resisted the temptation to gloat when I gave the whole thing up as a load of nonsense a short time later. Apart from that brief aberration, we have consistently seen eye to eye on what is a desirable level of order in the home.

Which brings us, sadly, to Question 4. This is the fatal question for us, because we have drifted apart, particularly over the last couple of years. I would be the first to admit that Bernice has always been more troubled by household dust than I have. There is a part of me that admires Quentin Crisp’s discovery that the cumulative weight of dust compacts the pile, so that it never gets deeper. (You can hear his message of hope at 2:00 minutes into this documentary.) However, I am not proud of that admiration, and, while much more than the lion’s share of cleaning (indeed, of all the housework) has always been Bernice’s, I’ve tried to play at least some part over the years.

In the last decade, our circumstances have changed. With just the two of us here, there are rooms that are hardly used. We are also both retired now, and, theoretically, have more time for housework. At the same time, we are not as young as we once were, so that housework now looms as a much more formidable task.

I also have to say that, when the stairs and first floor were carpeted throughout, the dust was much less visible, and the question of dust could be addressed less frequently. Now that our floors are tiled or parqueted throughout, every mote of dust is visible. Add to that the desert exposure of Ma’ale Adumim, and you have a situation where there are a mighty mount of motes.

When Bernice’s Mum, z”l, used to complain that, as she dusted a table, she could see the dust settle again before her eyes, we used to laugh. Now, to my horror (and, I believe, to hers) Bernice has been infected with the same madness. There are some days when she seems to divide all of her time between bemoaning how filthy the house is (which it never is), bewailing the fact that cleaning is a Sisyphean task (which it certainly is), and cleaning (which never seems to me to be as urgent a priority as it clearly is to her).

Currently, I have a get-out-of-jail card – my crumbling hip. However, next Monday I am due to have it replaced (of which more next week). Once I have fully recovered, I can see that I will not be able to continue to get away with refusing to be associated too closely with cleaning the house.

I am, it is fair to say, a major contributor to the dirt: in the kitchen, particularly, I leave behind me a trail of destruction: I almost always do all of my washing up (although occasionally some of the doughier items are a bit curate’s-egg-y). I make a reasonable-ish job of the work surfaces. However, I leave the floor looking like CIS have just sprayed their magic spray and switched on the ultra-violet lamps.

Meanwhile, Tao is enjoying the latest toy/piece of equipment his father has made for him. Fortunately, they won’t be bringing it when they come to stay (of which more next week); if they did, I suspect cleaning the house might be an even more daunting task.

Question: What do you call leftovers of a traditional English dessert consisting of a mixture of strawberries, meringue, and whipped cream?

Answer: Read on to find out. (Although, if you don’t recognize the dessert, you might want to google “strawberries, meringue, and whipped cream” to give yourself a chance of working out the answer.)

This blog-writing is a rum business. As last week drew to a close, I realized that publishing the blog this week would be a challenge. With Shavuot falling on Sunday night and Monday, and Sunday taken up with baking challa etc., making chopped herring, and sundry other chores, I had limited time for writing a post. (How fortunate it is that we count the Omer and get plenty of warning about when Shavuot is coming.) So, I spent last Friday deciding on a topic for this week, and some of Friday evening and Shabbat afternoon plotting out in my head how I was going to tell this week’s story.

Sadly, I woke on Sunday morning, with a sinking feeling and the realisation that I was less than happy with what I had planned to write; on the other hand, I didn’t feel there was time to regroup. And then, as I was doing something in the kitchen (of which more later), a whole other post leapt almost fully formed into my mind. So, there you have it! Sometimes I choose the post, and sometimes the post chooses me. This week is definitely one of the latter.

I feel sorry for Bernice (not as sorry as she would sometimes want, but she’s learnt to take what she can get). When we married, she didn’t know how to boil an egg, as it were, having been raised by a mother who firmly believed that “you’ll have plenty of time to cook when you’re married”. I did know how to boil an egg, and also how to poach a whole salmon (it’s a long story that will have to wait for another time), but little more than that.

Now, almost 49 years later, I bake the bread, brew the beer, mull the wine, make the liqueurs and a couple of flashy desserts – ice cream, chocolate meringues, tiramisu – and pickle cucumbers, leech olives, make piccalilli, chutney and jam…and chopped herring. (All of which, I hasten to add, I only started relatively recently.) So, I basically do all the fun stuff that’s high-profile and gets noticed. (No, I’m not proud, since you ask, but it is how it is.)

Meanwhile, Bernice does everything else, which basically means that she has been putting one or two healthy and delicious balanced meals on the table every day for half a century. I think they call it division of labour, but Bernice, I believe, has a different name for it. All I will say on the subject is that she was a good cook as soon as she started, and she continues, unbelievably, to be a better and a more adventurous cook with each passing year. I count my blessings after every meal.

As mentioned above, one of my party pieces is tiramisu, and when Bernice was discussing with Esther what she should make for dessert on Shavuot. (I’m ambivalent about cheesecake in Israel, since you can’t get the really dry curd cheese to make a proper dry, baked Anglo-Jewish cheesecake – the kind that you can’t eat without a cup of tea, because it sucks all the saliva from your mouth.) Esther suggested I make my tiramisu – a dessert based on the principle that anything containing liberal quantities of coffee, chocolate and alcohol cannot possibly fail). Since our guests on Monday were Esther and Ma’ayan, we thought we should fall in line.

As it turned out, we had friends round for dinner last Wednesday night. How exotic and bizarre that sounds…and how wonderful it was just to relax around the table and catch up with everyone’s news. Bernice suggested that I make a small tiramisu for Wednesday, and another small one for Shavuot. I made the first and we finished two-thirds of it on Wednesday. Bernice then pointed out that I didn’t need to make another. She isn’t eating sweet desserts at the moment, and I really didn’t want half a tiramisu staring at me from the fridge while I desperately try and at least not put on more weight before my hip-replacement surgery, scheduled for the end of May.

The problem was that I didn’t really like the first tiramisu all that much, for two reasons: the coffee and the coffee. Let me explain. The recipe that I use calls for soaking ladyfinger biscuits in a mixture of very strong coffee and coffee liqueur. I always used to make a strong mixture of instant coffee, but now, infected with my daughter’s food snobbery, I make the coffee in my Nespresso machine. However, I forgot this time how strong to make it, and I badly underestimated.

In addition, we suddenly remembered that we had no coffee liqueur. We had been unable to find it when we finished the bottle last time I made tiramisu, and then forgot to keep looking! This time I winged it with a blend of brandy and chocolate liqueur, but the end result wasn’t the same, hardly tasting of coffee at all. In addition, I felt the texture was a little drier than I like it.

So, on Thursday we went in search of coffee liqueur, and actually found some. I decided that I would attempt to make a small mixture of very strong coffee and coffee liqueur, pour it alongside the bottom stratum of biscuit on the exposed face of the remaining third of the tiramisu and gently tilt the dish so that the biscuit soaked up the liquid. When the bottom layer of biscuit was well moistened, instead of quitting while I was ahead, I decided to tilt the dish further so that the liquid would reach the top layer of biscuit. I don’t know if you’ve read The Tipping Point. If you have, you will probably guess that I crossed it with the tiramisu, and two blocs from the centre of the strip of dessert separated off and tumbled across the dish.

Question: What do you call leftovers of a traditional English dessert consisting of a mixture of strawberries, meringue, and whipped cream?

Answer: Well, a traditional English dessert consisting of a mixture of strawberries, meringue, and whipped cream is known as an Eton mess, so leftovers might well be called a half-Eton mess.

Which is what I had at that point. I didn’t panic. Listening to some of Esther’s tales from the professional kitchen has taught me that almost any dish can be salvaged from disaster, and what the diners don’t know won’t kill them. I simply eased the two breakaway blocs back into place, and dusted some more cocoa powder over the cracks, where the white cheese layer had been exposed.

The question now is whether my deconstructed/reconstructed tiramisu will be a success. By the time you read this, Esther and Ma’ayan, the family foodies, will have tasted the tiramisu blind. When Esther reads this, I’ll learn whether I got away with it. By the time you read this, the proof of the pudding, as they say, will already have been in the eating.

Of course, it isn’t only in the kitchen that I get considerably more than my just desserts. (Apologies!) For example, Bernice goes to the mall, buys clothes for Tao, buys a padded envelope and brings it home. I print an address label, stick it on the envelope, and pack the clothes. Bernice then goes out and posts the package at the post office. This last task alone is an experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone. So, about 98% of the total effort is Bernice’s.

Then, lo and behold, when the package arrives in Portugal, I discover that I have equal billing. I am truly blessed.

I was going to tell you this week about my Nespresso machine, but I’ve decided to put that on hold. Instead, I want to tell you about my thespian adventure last Shabbat.

The occasion was the barmitzvah of one of our multitude of great-nephews. Danny, my brother and sister-in-law’s third grandchild, acquitted himself magnificently, much to nobody’s surprise, despite the considerable challenge of having to read a very long and challenging double portion not in an acoustically-constructed synagogue as would happen in a normal year, but, rather, in the street, for a congregation that included those socially distancing outside their houses some tens of yards away. His reading was tuneful (how wise he was to arrange for his voice to break early enough for him to be already more or less settled into his adult voice), accurate and crystal clear, despite the considerable acoustic challenges.

The only thing to spoil what was a wonderful shabbat was the fact that none of his three surviving grandparents were able to attend, all being held more or less prisoner in England. Which is where I come in.

My brother Martin, showing a flattering level of trust in me, asked me whether I would be prepared to deliver his ‘address to the barmitzvah boy’ on his behalf. No pressure there, then!

I, of course, assured Martin that I would feel privileged. In other circumstances, the following week – waiting for the script to arrive – would have been a little nerve-wracking: What have I let myself in for? I have my reputation as a public speaker to consider! However, I only needed to remind myself that this was Martin to know that, when the text arrived, it would be beautifully written, simultaneously profound and simple, and very moving. As, indeed, it was. What it also was – and this did, to be honest, surprise me – was early, arriving in my inbox six full days before last Shabbat!

Which, of course, gave me plenty of time to practice my Chigwell accent and to get used to wearing a thick, white wig. I sorted out suitable slacks (Martin and I are, so we are told by our wives, the last two people left alive who call slacks ‘slacks’ – and they say that as if it were a bad thing!), and the Martin-est pair of loafers I own. (I remember reading that some great actor or other always starts getting into character by deciding what shoes the character wears, and putting them on. Works for me.)

Eventually, my moment arrived, at 7PM on Saturday afternoon. (As my late father always said: ‘I don’t know why they can’t have before-dinner speeches – then we could all enjoy our meal!’) I was, I admit, extremely nervous. After all, I was carrying a heavy responsibility on my shoulders.

Speaking for myself, I enjoy speaking for myself (although I still get nervous – but a bit of adrenaline never hurt anyone). However, speaking ‘as’ my brother was a whole other ball game. And this wasn’t a 50-second perfunctory Oscar acceptance speech on behalf of a colleague; it was an 11-minute, 30-second full-blooded exegesis and tear-jerker, best appreciated with an IQ of at least 125 and a small pack of Kleenex, on behalf of a close blood relative..

However, I needn’t have worried. If you’re working with good enough material, then that’s more than half the battle. When it was all over, several of the guests said some very kind things; one even suspected me of being not a great-uncle at all, but a hired gun just playing the part. Those who are serial attenders of the family’s smachot said that it was almost as if Martin were delivering it himself, and that I took as a great compliment.

Of course, I dialed a lot of the comments down, since they were made by Americans, and I learnt long ago that there is hardly any limit to how far a reasonable English accent and clear enunciation will get you with Americans. Even so, I found myself wondering about the fact that, if I may be immodest, both Martin and I are able to draft, and deliver, a speech that will hold an audience.

Is this, I mused, an inherited or acquired skill? As it happens, both of our parents were also good public speakers, although my mother came to it quite late. (Now I think of it, all four of our children also speak very well in public.) Nevertheless, I think part of the credit goes to Ilford County High School, which we both attended for seven years.

Among the extra-curricular activities at ICHS were thriving junior and senior debating societies, and we were both enthusiastic members. As well as formal debates, there were other occasional activities.

One of these was the Balloon Debate, in which it was imagined that a hot-air balloon holding four disparate personalities was plummeting to earth, with no further ballast to jettison. In order to save the balloon, one of the passengers needed to be thrown overboard. Each of four pupils was assigned one of the personalities in advance, and each had to argue why they should not be the one to be discarded. After the four speeches, the audience voted on which of, for the sake of argument, Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and William Shakespeare to eject.

More challenging was the Hat Debate, in which a number of motions for debate were placed into a hat and two speakers were selected to draw one motion from the hat. The toss of a coin determined who would speak in favour of the motion, and who against. With no preparation time, the two then spoke, and, again, the audience voted.

This was always a fairly risky entertainment, because sometimes speakers were not up to the challenge of ad libbing on the motion, let us say: ‘This House believes that the world would be a better place had television not been invented’. Fortunately, many, if not most, 15-year-old boys would find watching a classmate dry up completely and stand, frozen, like a deer in the headlights even more enjoyable than listening to a cogent argument on the evils of TV.

However, nothing could compare to the majesty of a full-blown debate, with a motion chosen and publicized two weeks in advance. The order of speaking (with strict time limits for each speaker) would be: proposer, opposer, seconder for the proposition, seconder for the opposition. The debate would then be thrown open to the floor, and the air would grow thick with arguments and counter-arguments, points of information and points of order. Eventually, the opposer and then the proposer would sum up, and the motion would be put to the vote.

I loved every aspect of it! The satisfaction of a speech carefully prepared, rehearsed and delivered, with its focus on the marshalling and construction of the arguments, but equally on the theatricality and the various techniques of persuasion. Balancing all of that was the ability to think on one’s feet, to adjust the prepared text so that it addressed, and undermined, ideally demolished, the points made by the other side.

And, to top it all, it was a competition, with a winner and a loser. I was, even then (perhaps even more then) a cut-throat competitor.

There were two years when Martin and I overlapped in the senior debating society, and, during those years, it was fairly usual for us both to speak at every debate, once the debate was thrown open to the floor. I remember a friend coming up to me after the fourth or fifth such debate and saying: ‘You do realise that, every time, you wait until after your brother has spoken, and then you always argue for whichever side he has not taken?’

I hadn’t actually realized, but, once it was pointed out to me, I had to admit that it was true.

Once a year – the mere memory of it sends a tingle down my spine – we held an inter-school debate, pitting our wits against those of the pupils of St Ursuline’s Convent School. Even at this distance, I find it hard to believe that the powers-that-be in both schools sanctioned this extraordinary co-mingling of 17-year-olds: boys in a single-sex school where the school secretary and the dinner ladies represented our only scholastic exposure to womanhood; Roman Catholic girls schooled by nuns.

It is difficult to exaggerate the degree to which the atmosphere was charged at these debates. A ground note was laid down of school pride and intense competitiveness. Flittering all around this was the frisson of seeing girls of the opposite gender actually on school premises, and in the same hall as us. As the debate wore on, a further layer was added. How many, and how explicit, doubles entendres could speakers from the floor introduce into the debate without being castigated or ejected.

I am not proud of this confession: in mitigation, I can only plead heptadecimality. In other words, we were seventeen. What did anyone expect?

Anyway, happy days! To be free to debate questions of cosmic importance: ‘This house believes it is better to know that one lives in the dark than to believe falsely that one lives in the light’ or of no consequence whatsoever: ‘This house believes in bubble gum’. To revel in our sophistry and intellect. To celebrate our wit and our brilliance. Above all (I see, from the perspective of 60 years ahead): to develop a whole range of abilities: to persuade and to carry an audience; to weave a logical argument and to follow another’s logical argument; to have convictions, and to recognize when they are fundamentally flawed; to listen critically; to be inspired. Looking back at Ilford County, I am not at all sure about the overall quality of the education I received, but the Debating Society was an education for life.

One effective device in public speaking is, of course, the use of repetition for emphasis.

Two weeks ago, I mentioned an unwritten rule among the circle of friends that I was in Israel with on a programme 53 years ago: whenever we meet, each of us is allowed to show just one photo of their grandchildren, and to talk about just one of their medical conditions. The group has another unwritten rule, one which I reinforced fiercely at our 50-year reunion: no religion, no politics.

In 1968, we were all united by our love for Israel, and by the common ground in our separate visions of what the country could become (would become, we were convinced). In the intervening half-century, it’s a sad but unavoidable fact that some of us have moved some distance away from that common centre, and many of us have found it increasingly difficult to focus on that centre, rather than on the issues that divide us.

‘No religion, no politics’ was, therefore, undoubtedly a sensible policy for our reunion, and it ensured that we all enjoyed three days of unadulterated nostalgia and warm, fuzzy feelings. (We did, however, veto the singing of Kumbaya. There is, after all, a limit to how much warm fuzziness a grown adult can take.)

In my blog, I have attempted to follow a similar path. I do not seek to court controversy, nor do I want to antagonize any of my readers.

This week, however, is not, in any sense, a normal week. I am writing this on Monday, and I find myself looking back to yesterday and forward to tomorrow.

Sunday (my yesterday) was declared a national day of mourning in Israel, to mark the terrible tragedy on Mount Meron last Thursday night, when 45 lost their lives, trampled underfoot. In a uniquely Israeli way, Israel radio marked this day with sad, reflective, wistful songs. There is a whole body of such songs that everyone here associates with the aftermath of terrorist attacks or other disasters. On this occasion, the selection of songs appropriately, and uncharacteristically, reflected the sensibilities, the idioms, the musical style and the tropes of the haredi (ultra-orthodox) community.

After a corona year in which tensions between the haredim and the rest of the population have often been strained, it felt as if the nation came together, if only fleetingly.

On the other hand, Sunday was a reminder that, despite two damning warnings by the State Comptroller in recent years, and despite warnings from various authorities, governments have repeatedly shirked the extraordinarily challenging task of compelling the ultra-orthodox authorities to recognize the urgent need to address the problem of severe over-crowding at Meron.

Tuesday (my tomorrow) is the day by which Binyamin Netanyahu must either form a government or return the mandate to President Rivlin. While there are still many possible permutations that could result in the formation of a (more stable or less stable) government, the dreadful prospect still looms of a fifth general election in 28 months.

The whole period since the last election has been marked by wheeling and dealing, horse-trading, brinkmanship, false-kite-flying, jinking and feinting. To watch the multitude of political parties manoeuvering around each other is to despair of ever seeing anything approaching consensus in Israel.

I feel that, this week, it would make no sense for me to write about anything other than the state of the nation.

From my window, I can see the line of bunting suspended across our garden; the string of small Israeli flags flutter blue and white in the early evening breeze. Not so many years ago, most houses in our street, and almost all cars, flew the national flag at least for the two days of Yom Hazikaron (the memorial day for fallen soldiers and other forces and also for victims of terror attacks) and Yom Haatzma’ut (Independence Day), and often from Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) a week earlier until Yom Yerushalayim (marking the liberation of Jerusalem in 1967) some three weeks later.

This year, continuing the trend of recent years, flags seem to be much fewer and farther between. I sometimes feel this reflects a deeper malaise in Israeli society. The Israel Democracy Institute found, between June and October 2020, a very significant decline in public trust in most State institutions, including the Supreme Court (trust down from 52% in June to 42% in October), Israel Police (down to 41%), the media (32%), the Government (25%) the Knesset (from 32% in June to 21% in October) and political parties (from 17% to 14%).

For a democracy, these figures are little short of frightening. (I originally wrote ‘functioning democracy’; however, I find myself wondering to what extent a democracy can be described as functioning if 79% of the population do not trust their elected representatives.) You can view the full report here.

W B Yeats wrote, in other circumstances: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’ and I feel, and sense that others feel, that this may reflect the situation we are facing in Israel. Someone made the point to me last week that part of the reason for this is that, over the last decade, the perceived shared centre, the sense of a commonality of purpose, the social contract, respect for the other, have all but disappeared in many quarters. Historically, while the various factions in Israeli society had very different ideologies, they all respected the rule of law and the decisions of the electorate.

It is, perhaps, only natural that, in the early years of the State, that mutual trust and sense of shared purpose was stronger. After all, the very establishment of the State represented an immense achievement for the Jewish people, and a total contrast to what was happening to Jews in Europe a mere four years previously. There was so much clear common ground to stand together on, waving the flag and singing the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah, in unison.  

The euphoria of the establishment of the State, and the thrill, 19 years later, of the miracle of victory in the Six-Day War, have moved from being current affairs to being historical events. In their wake they have brought other existential challenges that cannot be so easily met, and moral dilemmas that offer no easy solutions. Uniting around a common cause is no longer so clear-cut.

However, there are still occasions when the country comes together, and this is the season of the year when this is most noticeable. It starts with Pesach’s seder night, observed in one form or another by a staggeringly high percentage (perhaps as high as 96%) of the Jewish population. It moves on to Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron, climaxes on Yom Ha’atzma’ut, and fades away with Yom Yerushalayim.

Every year, the central and defining element in the official opening ceremony for Yom Ha’atzma’ut is the lighting of 12 beacons, by 12 invited honorees. Every year, a theme is chosen for the selection of honorees. This year’s theme was Israeli Brotherhood. (In the name of political correctness, that should probably be Israeli Siblingitude, but I can’t quite bring myself to write that.) Bernice and I found this year’s selection of the honorees, and their brief speeches/declarations, very moving. Celebrating both the diversity and the inter-dependence of Israeli society, the ceremony provided the starkest possible contrast to the Prime Minister’s self-congratulatory pre-recorded presentation that was screened during the ceremony, which was little more than a personal political promo.

The most depressing aspect of this entire political season is the total absence of any discussion of ideas or ideologies, policies or manifestoes. What should be, for a political party, the means to an end – gaining enough political influence to be able to enact policy – has become an end in itself. The entire ‘debate’ over the last weeks has been about how a government can be formed, and not a word has been spoken about what that government will plan to do, once it is formed.

This is not for lack of problems that need to be addressed. While the challenges from outside attract attention – Iran, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Turkey, Russia, America (feel free to choose your favourites, and, indeed, to add to the list) – the internal challenges pass virtually unnoticed. In the fields of social welfare, equality of opportunity in the workplace, affordable housing, development of natural resources, educational and medical infrastructure, there are so many areas that need urgent attention. The tremendous quantity and quality of the contribution made by voluntary organisations in Israel and in the Jewish world partially masks the neglect shown by the State in all of these areas.

So, do I focus on the honorees’ selflessness or the Prime Minister’s self-regard on Yom Ha’atzma’ut? On the way the country came together on Sunday to mourn those who died at Meron, or the way the country failed to come together in the last years to address the problem of the disaster that was waiting to happen? On the sense of public duty that attracts young women and men to enter politics, or the cynicism of political leaders sacrificing principles to expediency in order to hold on to political power, then doing nothing with that power?

Perhaps it is wrong to think that the world is made up of those who see the glass half-empty, and those who see the glass half-full. Perhaps what we need is to be able to draw strength and encouragement from the half that is full, so that we can strive to combat the half that is empty.

And here’s someone who seems already to be aware of both halves.

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!

*