You’ll have to excuse me if I’m not my usual bubbly self this week. The truth is that I’ve just had a bit of an eye-opener and what I really want to do is crawl upstairs, bury myself under the covers and cry into my pillow, or at least lie down for a while. The sad fact is that I’ve just discovered something that makes me feel ancient.

Of course, this has been coming on for a while now: at least 16 years. When our daughter Esther first started enjoying Beatles music, I made a quick calculation. This was, let’s say, 1995, which meant that I had first started bopping to the Beatles (all right, of course I didn’t bop! I’m not even sure I know how to bop, but I can remember playing She’s Leaving Home to my mother, in the fond, but ill-considered, hope that she would agree that it was a thing of beauty and a work of genius) which means, as I was saying, that I had first become a Beatles fan about 30 years earlier.

I then thought myself back to when I was aged 12 – the age Esther was in 1995 – which would be 1962. Thirty years before that was 1932, when my parents would have been switching on the radio to give it a chance to warm up before listening to the Mills Brothers, Noel Coward, or Ambrose and his orchestra’s rendition of such popular songs as The Flies Crawled Up The Window, a song that, I must confess, had hitherto slipped under my radar. The realisation that The Beatles were, for Esther, as far distant as Ambrose for me was a chilling moment.

Bernice and I are, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, working through a collection entitled The Nation’s Favourite Poems, chosen in 1995 by listeners to a BBC television poetry programme. At the head of each work, the poet’s dates are given, and I have found it unnerving to discover that such poets as Philip Larkin (1922–1980), Stevie Smith (1903–1971) and Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) are not quite as modern as I think of them as being.

But all of this pales into insignificance in comparison with what I discovered just today.

Our story begins in 1962 (there’s that year again), when Robert Heal, a British furniture designer greatly influenced by the Danish school and its clean, linear shapes, was commissioned by Staples, a London manufacturer of mattresses, to design a range of modular shelving. His design consisted of wooden shelving supported by steel rods that slotted into the underside of the shelves and hooked onto the metal support ladders that gave the range its name – Ladderax. The range proved so successful that Heal soon added a variety of other storage units. By 1972, when Bernice and I married, Ladderax was an immensely popular and affordable storage solution. We bought a modest run of shelving and storage for our salon/lounge in Bridgend, South Wales.

At this point, I hear Bob Dylan: May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung. May you stay forever young. Bitter irony!

Then, a year later, we came to Israel immediately after the Yom Kippur War to volunteer on kibbutz for three months, where we decided that we would return to Wales, sell our house, and come on aliya the following year. In the event, we ‘postponed’ our aliya (for 12 years), but, before that happened, a local Bridgend shop was refurbishing its display units, and selling off its shop-soiled Ladderax shelving. We bought a job lot of bookshelves of two different widths and multiple ladders to add to our existing system of shelving, a drinks cabinet, a writing desk and a three-drawer chest that served us as a sideboard.

For the next 30 years, wherever we went, our Ladderax came with us. Because it is a modular system, it is incredibly flexible, and we were able to find a layout to fit our home in Bridgend, our study in Nantymoel, most of our flat in East Talpiot, and our dining room in Ma’ale Adumim.

In that last sentence, ‘we’ is something of an exaggeration. Bernice has an extraordinarily good eye for colour. She can carry a colour in her mind: on more than one occasion, she has seen earrings in a shop and bought them knowing that they were exactly the same shade as a particular outfit. I, by contrast, have to ask her whether the trousers I am wearing are blue or black.

However, every yin has its yang, and while Bernice does colour, I do layout. When we moved from the Absorption Centre to our first, three-room, flat, in Jerusalem, and took delivery of our lift, which contained most of the furniture from our eight-room house in Nantymoel, the removers refused to believe that all of our ‘stuff’ would fit into our new home. However, I had spent weeks enjoying myself with scale drawings of the flat, and cut-out shapes of the furniture, and I knew that it would. And it did!

So, for me, Ladderax was not only relatively inexpensive and endlessly adaptable. It was also (and sometimes it seemed more importantly) a wonderful construction puzzle – my very own big boy’s Lego and Meccano. Over the years, I must have filled a pack of square-ruled exercise books with trial layouts; in every case, in every home, in every room, I was able to design a layout that fitted the space or spaces we wanted to fill.

Actually, not in every case. In our current home, even I was unable to find a combination that would fill the space that we had, despite the fact that we had more shelving than we could use. We needed one shelf six inches narrower than the one we had.

Not to be outwitted, I sawed six inches off a shelf, lashed two pairs of short metal rods together to make two slightly longer rods, widened the grooves under the shelves into which the rods slipped, to accommodate the double metal and cord lashing, and hey presto, problem solved, with nobody the wiser.

And then, what can I tell you? Even though age cannot wither it, Ladderax, it transpired, was not like Cleopatra in all respects. True, at 30 years of age, it still looked pretty good, but there came a point where we felt that custom had staled its infinite variety. With some reluctance, we decided that we were ready for a change, and we bought new shelving and storage for the dining room. However, we couldn’t bring ourselves to have the Ladderax ‘put down’, like an old, faithful but ailing dog.

At that point we discovered one final benefit of Ladderax. With the exception of the cupboards (which you can stack on top of each other on the floor and use for storing linens), everything else can be dismantled quickly and easily (no screws) and stored flat on top of a wardrobe, for at least five years. At that point, we were delighted to find a new home for it, in the salon of one of our neighbour’s married daughters. She sent us a photo of it a month ago, and, at the age of 49, it’s still looking pretty good.

By chance, I stumbled across Ladderax on the internet today. It is being offered on ebay, for eye-watering prices, and there I see it billed as ‘mid-Century, retro, vintage, with manufacturer’s attribution mark’. I’m very sorry, but I am simply not prepared to be old enough to have furniture we bought new when we first married spoken about as if it were antique. When did that happen?

There’s really only one thing that might just break this mood of gloom and doom!

A story to start this week. A few years ago, my brother and sister-in-law invited Bernice and myself to spend shabbat with them at their flat in Rehavia, in central Jerusalem. On the Friday evening, Martin and I went to his regular synagogue when they are in Jerusalem – Hanasi.

This synagogue holds a service in the main synagogue upstairs and a smaller service in the study hall downstairs, which Martin and I both prefer. However, this particular shabbat marked a birthday or anniversary of Rabbi Berel Wein, the well-respected rabbi of the synagogue, and therefore the downstairs service was cancelled and everyone joined the main service upstairs in his honour.

There I noticed that one of the men saying kaddish (the memorial prayer recited for a deceased parent or other close relative) was a friend who still lived in the same area of Jerusalem that we used to live in. After the service I went over to say hello.

He was also spending shabbat as someone’s guest. He introduced us to his host, and I introduced Martin, and the four of us, for five minutes, shared the same route back from synagogue. In that time, Martin and I between us managed to find three connections with my friend’s host, one of which was that he was a judge in England who sat in the same court as a cousin of Bernice’s then sat in.  

Not much of a story, really, and yet….I have many times, since this incident, thought about how many separate, indeed disparate, factors had to be aligned to make this unexciting event happen.

When Martin and Adèle chose to buy a home in Israel, Jerusalem was, probably, the only serious place they considered, but they could have ended up in any one of a number of areas in the city.

Even having settled in Rehavia, they could have chosen any one of a number of synagogues to pray in.

On a normal shabbat, we would have attended the service downstairs, while my friend was upstairs.

If this friend had not lost a parent less than 11 months before, he would not have been saying kaddish.

If it had not happened, some years earlier, that he and I both lost a parent during the same period, and spent several months saying kaddish together, I would probably not have recognized his voice.

Had I not recognised his voice, I might well not have noticed him at all in the crowded synagogue.

Our two hosts might not have chosen the same week to invite us for shabbat. I would then not have met his host.

If this host did not happen to live in the same direction from the synagogue as we were going, we would not have chatted for five minutes.

There are many London courts at which he could have presided, other than the very one where Bernice’s cousin also sat.

I only knew where Bernice’s cousin presided because Bernice’s mother lived very close to the court, and she and her niece had a warm relationship. As a result, on her weekly session at the court, Bernice’s cousin would usually spend time with Bernice’s mum, a fact which I knew because we always updated with the cousin’s news..

I make that ten facts aligning to produce the result that we discovered this connection. If any one of these links had been missing, the connection would have remained undiscovered.

So, what do I make of this story, and why do I feel that there is a point in sharing it with you?

Let me say first that I do not believe there is a great significance to the connection, nor that this alignment was the conscious working of a prime mover, or the cosmos, or kismet, or karma, or fate. I do believe that it was a coincidence, even though I am aware that, as an orthodox Jew, I am treading a narrow path saying that.

Consequently, I suspect that this kind of alignment has the potential of happening all the time. In the last couple of decades I have experienced at least two other similar chance discoveries. (Don’t worry – I’m not going to inflict them on you; I may presume on your forbearance, but I’m not going to push my luck to that extent.)

This leads me to a kind of conclusion. I wonder whether we spend our lives accidentally and randomly doing what Pre-Cog (kind of clairvoyant but not quite the same) Agatha gets Tom Cruise’s character to do intentionally in this memorable scene from Minority Report.

In other words, when we bend down to tie a shoelace, we miss the current cycle of the pedestrian crossing lights and therefore arrive late at the restaurant and just miss seeing….who? And so on and so forth. The forests of our lives are strewn with the dried-up pods of seeds that never germinated, because we were looking the other way.

Even when we act deliberately, we really have no way of knowing what the outcome of that decision will be. Our lives are constructed from the decisions we make at thousands upon thousands of successive splits in the road, each of which leads us down a particular route.

The problem (or perhaps the magic) of this lies in the fact that, whenever we reach a decision point, there is no way that we can make a truly informed decision about how to decide. Doubtless many of you have already been thinking of Robert Frost since before the beginning of this paragraph. For the benefit of those who slept through American Poetry 101, Frost put it much better than I ever could.

The one turning-point that we always speak about at home, and that Bernice is convinced of, is the following. I spent most of my last two years in secondary school being very active in a Zionist youth movement, and to some extent (that’s coded language for almost totally) neglected my studies. (I feel my children have reached the age where I can say this, and my grandson hasn’t yet reached the age where I can’t.)

As my A-level final exams grew closer, I failed to work seriously, and, at a certain point, more or less gave up making an effort. (I did, however, complete some fine jigsaws and played a lot of excellent bridge.) This is largely because my study habits and self-discipline were very poor.

Had I studied for those exams, I might well have won a place at a good university (two good universities thought so), and the likelihood is that Bernice and I would not have married, and I would not have known her wonderful parents, and Esther and Micha’el would not have been born, and Tslil and Ma’ayan would not have come into our lives, and Tao would not have been born, and…and…and my head hurts.

And apparently, it’s never too early to enjoy the chance encounters that life sends your way!

Author’s Note: This is another of those weeks when you need to exercise a little patience if you want to know what the topic is. Take comfort in the knowledge that the ability to cope with delayed gratification is a sign of maturity.

This week we range far and wide, from the Washington DC Metro to the Bridgend Recreation Centre in South Wales, and then to Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. Coupled with the title, that’s just about the most obscure clue for this week’s topic. I’m not even sure Bernice will get it.

It occurred to me on Friday night, as I lay in bed musing over possible topics for this week, that I really needed a strategy that would provide topics for multiple weeks, since the British strain seems likely to set our progress in fighting Corona back several weeks, if not months. (Incidentally, I understand from my brother Martin that the British strain is called the Kent strain in Britain, in what looks to me suspiciously like an attempt on the part of London to absolve itself of all responsibility. One wonders whether South Africans speak of the Jo’burg, or Brazilians of the Belo Horizonte strain.)

After a little thought, I came up with an idea. So, as things stand at the moment, the plan is that, at intervals of a few weeks, I am going to talk about a number of different musical instruments. (I have to tell you: the idea sounded much more exciting late Friday night in bed than it does in the cold light of Sunday morning, sitting on the page and staring at me.)

First big question: which instrument do I start with? I eventually opted for the violin, for a number of reasons, none of which is that it is my favourite instrument. It actually isn’t, although I’m not entirely sure why not. I suspect that the violin can produce a wider range of colours, of textural diversity, than any other instrument; a vast amount of the greatest music ever written was written for solo violin, or for chamber ensembles prominently featuring the violin; very many of classical music’s most striking, engaging, eccentric characters were and are violinists.

It may be because of my personal relationship with the instrument, which was short-lived but traumatic. I was actually praised for my performance of a Paganini violin concerto on stage to a paying audience in one of England’s most distinguished theatres….Well, not the entire concerto: just the slow movement….Then again, not the entire movement: just part of it…three bars, to be exact….And, to be fair, the only person who knew that it was a Paganini violin concerto was me (and that only because I knew that’s what I had been practising, and not because the tune was recognisable).

Let me give you a context. The amateur dramatics group that I was involved in in the 80s in Nantymoel, the South Wales mining village we then lived in, was fortunate enough to win through to the British finals of a one-act drama competition, with a farcical piece entitled Hidden Meanings. Please don’t feel bad that you’ve never heard of it. I played the role of a man obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, and the play opened with me playing the violin.

Much of the humour of the play lay in the character’s total unsuitability to inhabit the persona of Holmes, ranging from his complete lack of powers of logical reasoning to his very poor violin playing. We had a good friend who is a fine amateur violinist, and he foolishly agreed to lend me his violin and give me a quick lesson or two. I practised for hours, determined to put on a convincing performance as a barely competent fiddler, and my performance won praise from the adjudicator at the finals. Unfortunately, what he praised it for was my amazing ability to play so excruciatingly badly.

This experience left me with redoubled admiration for the technical skill of the violinist. To extract a single, pure note from this fiendish instrument seems to me to require great talent: to play Paganini’s Caprice #1 at all I find remarkable; to play it in 1:34, as Itzhak Perlman does here is scarcely credible; to make it sound like music, as he does, wonderfully and effortlessly, is to run the risk of attracting rumours like that which surrounded virtuoso Paganini himself, that he (or his mother) had sold his soul to the devil in order to play so fiendishly well.

Yet neither I, nor even Perlman, was one of the violinists I actually wanted to talk about today. (How about that: a sentence about violinists where I come before Itzhak Perlman; pinch me, somebody.) Three of them are great virtuosi who Bernice and I were lucky enough to see without having to travel very far from home. Indeed, we could have walked to hear Kyung Wha Chung give a recital in the hall of our local recreation centre, in Bridgend. As a young woman, she was an incredibly intense performer, as you can see from the last minute of the first movement of Schumann’s Violin Sonata #2, starting at around 16:20.

On the evening we heard her, she chose to play Bach’s Partita #1. What none of us realised was that the ‘concert’ hall shared a wall with one of the centre’s squash courts. Two or three minutes into the Bach, two players started a game, and the sound of the ball hitting the back wall came clearly though to us. To her credit, the soloist did not walk out, but soldiered on. How she managed to maintain her total concentration, absorption and intensity, I don’t know. Even so, it was an unforgettable experience, but not really for the reason we had hoped.

The strongest contrast to that level of almost painful intensity came around the same time, when we travelled only a little further afield, to hear Isaac Stern play the Beethoven Violin Concerto. This concerto has an unusually long introduction from the orchestra, about three and a half minutes, before the soloist begins playing. For all of that time, my eyes were on Stern, and I could scarcely believe what I was watching. For the entire time, he stood quietly on stage, for all the world like a man casually waiting for a Number 16 bus.

Then, a second before his first entrance, he raised the violin to his chin in one fluid movement, raised his bowing arm in another, and began producing the most tender and beautiful music. He was probably then in his early 60s, and the contrast between his matter-of-fact, ‘just another day at the office’ demeanour on stage, and the exquisite beauty of the music he made that evening has stayed with me for decades.

The last, and youngest, of this trio, is Joshua Bell, who Bernice and I were lucky enough to see in Jerusalem with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra – a very generous 60^th birthday present. He was playing Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, which I must confess is not one of my favourite pieces: I find its whimsy a little wearing after a while. His performance, however, was mesmerising. There certainly seems to be something about the violin, more than other instruments, that attracts the showman and exudes raw, sensual charm. From Paganini to Nigel Kennedy, violinists have generated an electric charge that is palpable. Bell is nowhere near such an outrageous showman, but he is certainly a superstar, and, on the basis of our experience that evening, that stardom is well deserved.

I’ve referenced Joshua Bell mainly to retell, for the benefit of those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the interesting story of the Washington Post experiment. When Bell was in Washington in 2007 to play a single concert, he was persuaded by the Washington Post to busk anonymously in a busy arcade just outside L’Enfant Plaza Metro station during the morning rush hour. This turned out to be a 45-minute recital, on a 3.5-million-dollar Stradivarius violin, by a man who, at the time, played to capacity audiences in major concert halls, commanding an average ticket price of $100.

The busk was filmed, to see how many of the commuters and others passing by recognised him, or even stopped to listen. In the event, of over 1000 people, only seven people stopped to listen: one for nine minutes, one for three minutes, and each of the others for a much shorter time. Only one person recognised him, and spoke to him at the end of the ‘recital’; a few others, when interviewed later, had been struck by the quality of his playing. With this handful of exceptions, Bell was completely ignored. He made about $40 in the 45 minutes.

So, what are we to make of this? Many people use it as an example of the importance of mindfulness, of being aware of what is going on around you, of being in the moment. This is undoubtedly a nice-sounding lesson to draw, but I am not sure how fair it is.

There is another famous experiment, which I will not describe for fear of influencing the result for anyone who doesn’t know it, but which involves counting the passes between basketball players. What that experiment demonstrates is the human ability to concentrate on what is judged to be important at any given moment, rather than to be receptive to all that is going on.

I believe that most of the passers-by were thinking about and preparing for the working day ahead of them, worrying about other family members, or simply concentrating on not colliding with other commuters. Personally, I don’t want the driver of the bus I am on to be smelling the roses, but rather to be watching the road.

One interesting, but probably not surprising, point is that at least two of the seven who did stop were musicians, albeit amateurs, and recognised immediately the quality of the playing. For some people, music is always important.

This story reminds me of two other busking incidents. In the 1990s, a flood of aliya of Jews from Russia brought with it many fine professional musicians. (A popular joke at the time ran: ‘How can you tell a Russian orchestral conductor? He’s the one walking down the steps from the plane not carrying a violin case.’) The Israeli authorities greatly expanded music education in primary schools, to accommodate some of this influx, and this gave both of our children, among many others, their first steps in music-making.

It also strengthened Israel’s existing orchestras, and gave birth to more than one new one. My violinist friend who I mentioned earlier once told me that a friend of his, who plays in the IPO, said that, had he not auditioned before the 1990s, he would never have got a place in the orchestra.

Ben Yehuda Street is the main pedestrian precinct in central Jerusalem: it has, for over half a century, been a favourite spot for buskers. Walking down the street on an errand from work one weekday morning, I heard a busking cellist performing Bach’s first unaccompanied cello suite. I like to think that I would not have walked past Bell, because that day in Jerusalem I stood mesmerised for 20 minutes. I only heard the cellist that once, under appalling acoustic conditions, but I still remember it as a wonderful performance.

My final busking story suggests that my friend Stuart Nemtin, whom I met on my post-school year’s youth leadership course in Israel, is a finer violinist than Joshua Bell. As an activity one evening, half of us were required to spend the entire evening in Central Jerusalem, in full view, trying not to be detected by the other half, who were looking for us. Stu dressed as a beggar, took his violin, and busked all evening. Not only was he not detected; he made enough money, as he put it ‘to keep him in cookies for the rest of the year’ (which I calculate to be considerably more than $40 in 2007).

Just in case you’re still worried by that misquote in the title this week, my version of Old King Cole (celebrating the violin talents of myself, Perlman, Chang (or should that be Kyung), Stern, Bell and Nemtin) continues:

              He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl
              And he called for his fiddlers six.

Tao may still be a little young to handle violin bowing, but, surrounded by his father’s instruments, he is taking his first musical steps.

I was putting my sweater/jumper/pullover on this morning, and my subject for today suddenly struck me. This was not as random a thought as it might first appear, because I experienced a life-changing event last week.

Throughout our married life, you can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of occasions when Bernice has seen me getting dressed in the morning. Either I have been getting up for work, or shul, before she is awake, or, since my retirement, if I decided to sleep in, she was getting up for work before I was awake. Following her retirement, since I am more of an early morning person than she is, I have still tended to get up before she is fully awake.

However, for the last couple of weeks, we have been experiencing a rainy spell (although, as I am writing this, I can gaze out at a cloudless, gentle-blue sky and a landscape bathed in bright, if not hot, sunshine). (End of nature notes.) This has coincided with me catching a cold (or, rather, my permanent cold coming more to the fore).

I have therefore not been getting up for shul. To stand outside on a damp winter morning for an hour seems ill-considered. Even worse, I seem finally to have shaken off my internal alarm clock, and I now find that I can sleep past (sometimes embarrassingly past) 6:45AM.

One unexpected result of this is that my getting dressed has become an occasional spectator sport. (Nothing kinky, you’ll be relieved to hear.) As a consequence of this, Bernice has, on more than one occasion, called me over to her side of the bed to straighten the sleeves of my sweater. (See glossary above.) I had not previously been aware of it, but I now suspect that, for most of my adult life, I have been walking around with twisted sleeves. Fortunately, since we came on aliya, I don’t wear sweaters that often.

As soon as I discovered this sartorial lapse, I began taking care, if I dressed before Bernice was awake, to adjust my sleeves. And then, last week, for no obvious reason, I suddenly took it into my head to break the habit of a lifetime.

Even if you haven’t read Gulliver’s Travels, you are probably aware that the world is divided into big-enders and little-enders, one’s affiliation being determined by the end that you tap, or cut off, when preparing to eat a boiled egg.

Well, I now discover that the world is divided into neckers and armsers, depending on which part of your anatomy you put first into a sweater when donning it. At this point, I am starting to suspect that I am the only armser in the world. What is certainly true is that, for as long as I can remember, I have always first put my arms into the sleeves of a sweater, and only then put it over my head.

Anyway, as I say, last week, I suddenly decided (impetuous fool that I am) to go in headfirst, as it were. I immediately discovered that, although it was a little more difficult than usual to find the armholes, getting the sweater over my neck, and also ‘unrolling’ the sweater down my torso (I do hope this is not getting too steamy for you), were much easier than usual. However, what made the experiment little less than thrilling was that the arms of the sweater were not twisted!

So, my question is: why did I have to wait until I was a week shy of 71 before discovering this? (Notice the clever way I dropped in a reminder of the impending birthday, there.) Why didn’t they teach me in kindergarten how to put a sweater on?

Once this struck me, this morning, I suddenly found myself thinking of several other vital pieces of advice that I was never given at kindergarten. As I do with almost anything that springs to mind (or even claws its way into my consciousness) on a Sunday, I have labelled them all grist and am just about to put them through the mill.

First of all, pomegranates. Why wasn’t I told that, if you cut a pomegranate in half, hold one half in your hand upside down over a bowl, with the flesh touching your palm, and hit the skin of the pomegranate repeatedly, all over, with a wooden spoon, the seeds will all drop out? Do you know how many hours of my life I have wasted through not knowing that?

Second, why did nobody give me a commonplace book as a sixth birthday present, and train me to use it? I’m referring to a book in which you jot down interesting ideas you come across and memorable short quotes from books you are reading. Full disclosure: my anger here is principally aimed at myself. I have been aware of the concept of a commonplace book since my teens, and convinced of its value almost as long; it’s just that I have lacked the self-discipline to start.

The result is that, over the last half century, every sentence I have been seduced by and reread several times for the sheer pleasure of it, every thought that has perfectly captured a truth about our existence, every witty or beautiful expression that I have felt compelled to read out to Bernice because I just had to share it: all of them have run through my fingers like sand on the beach, and all because I didn’t have a bucket to put them in.

Now that I have gone public with this, I shall immediately take out one of the four bound notebooks I have accumulated over the years for just this purpose, and start today! If that’s not part of a crescendo (see last week’s blog), I don’t know what is.

Not rectifiable, at this stage, is the fact that nobody explained to me that the mortality of my grandparents, and then my parents, of blessed memory all, meant that, if I did not take advantage of the time that I had with them to ask them about their childhood years, all of that history, which is my history, would vanish forever. One of the most important projects undertaken in Israeli schools is a roots project, as part of which children are required to interview their grandparents and learn about their personal history. In this last year, when the last of my parents’ siblings and their spouses has died, almost the last doorway to that past has closed, for me, for ever.

I feel blessed that I have the letters that my father wrote, throughout his five years of army service, most of them in Burma and India, during the Second World War: both letters to his mother and sisters, and letters to my mother. These letters give me a glimpse both of a life he did not speak about a great deal, at least to me, and of a man much younger than the father I remember.

I also wish someone had said to me, in 1968: ‘You are living through a golden age of British theatre. Spend however much you can afford on going to the theatre as often as you can, because an era like this will not pass this way again.’ In the event, I didn’t do badly, between going to theatre with Bernice and leading school theatre visits to London; but there is so much that I missed.

Finally, and perhaps most painfully: I am the owner of a partial memory. There are certain scenes, moments, events of childhood and youth that I remember vividly (some important in a ‘historical’ sense, others important precisely because they have no importance outside themselves). However, there are many, many others, most of them involving discussions with, relationships with, key people in my life, of which my memory is frustratingly hazy.

What I needed was for someone to sit me down at age 7 and explain to me that I should strive to fill my life with faithful, beloved, honest companions; and one of the greatest of these should be a diary. I envy diarists almost more than anyone else, because their past has not slipped through their fingers; they are in possession of who they were, who they are, who they no longer are, who they have always been. What a priceless possession.

I am not saying that the above are the secret to a happy life. However, they are some of the elements of a perfect life that I feel the lack of. What I need to do immediately, of course, is to write another piece, listing the things that I did ‘learn in kindergarten’, to remind myself of how lucky I am. Just be warned: until I see what is on that list, I shan’t make my mind up as to whether to share it with you.

Meanwhile, someone in Penamacor has just learnt the importance of holding on to what you’ve got!

It must have been some time around 1970 that I lost my faith in self-help books. Of course, the world was a very different place then, and the self-help publishing racket industry was in its infancy. Like so many others, I read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which, by the time I came to it, was already 30 years old. I’m not absolutely sure what I was hoping to find in the book, but, whatever it was, I didn’t find it. I think I need to take full responsibility for that, because my expectations were unrealistic. I never really internalized the ‘self’ part of ‘self-help’; the idea that I had to be the change I wished to see sounded too much like hard work.

In the decades since then, I have grown increasingly scornful of self-help literature. The idea that I can turn my entire life around just by reading a 300-page book seems ridiculous. It cannot possibly be that easy, can it? So, when I stumbled across an article in Sunday’s paper entitled The 20 bestselling self-help books of all time — and what I learnt from them, I expected to react with derisory laughter. In fact, I said to myself: ‘Great! I can turn my life around just by reading 2000 words, rather than ploughing through 20 books.’

Of course, my takeaway from this fast-food experience was about as nourishing as such takeaways usually are. However, one instruction, the final message of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, struck me, and I have been chewing it over today. Covey writes: ‘Live life in crescendo’. He coined this lesson to convey the message that ‘the most important work you will ever do is always ahead of you… Retirement is a false concept.’ I’ve been trying to decide, over the last few hours, whether that is the most uplifting, or the most depressing, thing I have read so far this year.

Part of me argues that the reward for decades of climbing the mountain of everyday life has to be the right to enjoy sitting on the summit and admiring the view. At the same time, I find myself feeling some grudging admiration for the concept of perpetual purposefulness.

You must admit that a constant crescendo is relentlessly exhausting, not least because it requires you to constantly find new challenges. If these are to motivate you, they surely have to mean more to you than the ones you are currently facing, or have just successfully met. It seems to me that there must come a point where you have exhausted all the things you care most passionately about. Do you then have to choose to devote your energies to something that is less important to you?

Take brewing beer, for example, or baking bread. Don’t get me wrong: I fully realise that I could study either of these crafts for a complete lifetime and still have things to learn. At the same time, the three or four breads and two beers that I now make are ones that give me a huge amount of pleasure. I could search for the next 20 years and not necessarily find flavours I enjoy as much, and I’d rather spend those two decades eating bread that I absolutely know I enjoy, if it’s all the same to you.

However, when I think about my blog, I realise there may be another way in which I can live my life in crescendo, without constantly seeking out new challenges. As I have mentioned before, when I started writing, I was full of first impressions of Portugal, exhilaration at spending time with Tslil, Micha’el and Tao, and excitement at this new adventure of house purchase in another country.

As the months passed, and especially over the past 9 months, I have had to rely more and more on other topics, but I have, by and large, felt that I had something to say. Some of these posts are the extended verbalizing of ideas that I have been nurturing for a long time; most of them are topics close to my heart.

However, I appear by now to have got off my chest most of what has been bothering me, and, every Saturday night, the next couple of days loom up with an ominous inevitability. Perhaps this blog presents me with the challenge of writing about stuff that doesn’t really mean that much to me, while being as effortlessly witty and thought-provoking as I have been about the topics that are closer to my heart. That’s a kind of constant crescendo I might be able to take on.

Reading back over those 780 words, I see that I haven’t really managed it, so let’s talk about something else. I have been studiously avoiding the elephant in the room, but this coming week promises to be a big one for Bernice and myself. Wednesday week will mark ten days after our second vaccination, and we will then be free as a bird, and able to enjoy going out for a meal….except there are no restaurants open, going to the theatre….which is, of course, locked down, and generally exchanging not being allowed to go almost anywhere for not having anywhere to go.

Add to this the imponderables. Our chances of being infected are (possibly) negligible, but nobody knows whether we can still infect others. How long will our immunity last? Will our Pfizer vaccine prove effective against the next mutations coming down the pipe?

Of course, there are really only two things we want to do, and two places we want to be, and the big questions are whether, when and how we will be able to get to Portugal, or, for that matter, Zichron Yaakov.  Second things first. Our current lockdown is due to end on Thursday, but will almost certainly be extended for two weeks (as the Health Ministry recommends) or one week (as the Health Ministry may have been aiming for when they proposed a two-week extension).

When we do come out of lockdown, Bernice and I should be able to travel to Zichron to see Esther and Maayan, which will be wonderful. Portugal, however, presents a whole new set of question marks. Will travel insurance be prohibitively expensive? Will Portugal accept us? (Currently, the answer appears to be yes.) Are we prepared to fly with a layover, and, if so, which European airports look like being the least risky and best organized? Will we need to go into isolation in Portugal? When we return to Israel, will we need to go into isolation here, and, if so, will that be at home (not a problem) or will Israel have reinstated corona hostels (which, by all accounts, are a fairly unattractive prospect, not least because you are living out of a suitcase}.

Bernice and I are talking about this more seriously all the time. Sometimes we take the line that it’s all a lottery, and nobody can predict what can happen in the month we are away, so we should stop over-thinking it and just go. At other times we question whether our resilience, and ability to roll with the punches, are perhaps just a tad rustier than they were 30 years ago.

And, of course, with every passing month Tao grows and develops and becomes more and more his own person. We know how blessed we are to be able to chat with him, to see him and interact with him, every week; I am constantly thinking back to our parents, who visited us once a year for two weeks when our kids were young, and especially of Bernice’s parents, whose two daughters were raising all six of their grandchildren in Israel. Audio cassettes and air letters were definitely not even Zoom and WhatsApp video calls.

OK, people. Now I’m getting plain maudlin. I know full well that many of you are going through exactly the same as we are – even some of you who live just a short drive from your grandchildren. There is nothing special about the situation we find ourselves in, but I’m afraid this is not one of those occasions when misery loves company.

On the whole I think I’d better stop now, and start trying to find something uplifting, or at least flippant, to chew over next week.

No videos this week, I’m afraid, but I can give you a glimpse of Tao practising his driving skills in the family’s new acquisition, a pickup truck which will doubtless be put to very good use on the land.

If that title turns you off, just before you go, please jump to the end of the blog, where you will find this week’s dose of Tao….and I promise: no literature next week.
For those of you made of sterner stuff:

One of the unanticipated pleasures that corona has brought with it, for Bernice and myself, is that of, respectively, being read to, and reading aloud. I can’t speak for Bernice, but, for me, there are two pleasures in reading aloud. First, it appeals to the aspiring thespian in me. At various stages of my life in Britain, I was involved in amateur dramatics; I may even bore you with my old stories of treading the boards one week. This, together with bridge, is one of the things that fell by the wayside when we came to Israel, despite Israel boasting a thriving (if often less than cutting edge) amateur English-language theatre scene (and a thriving bridge-playing community).

These days, I find myself musing whether ‘I could have been a contender’ (at drama rather than bridge). Twenty years ago, I think I could have made a decent fist of the role of Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist in Peter Schaeffer’s Equus. I would, I am sure, have been more Peter Barkworth (urbane, and in greater control of his suppressed passions, in a magnificent BBC Radio 4 production from 1980) than Richard Burton (rather more impassioned, in a considerably less nuanced, but still worth watching, film from 1977). Sadly, I cannot find the radio production for you online.

I am grateful for the opportunity to perform for an audience of one, especially such an appreciative one, and we have been remarkably fortunate in our choices to date. We have just finished reading Madeline Miller’s Circe. I realise that we came very late to the party for this novel, but, just in case any of you haven’t read it, stop reading this blog now and order it online.

It is feted as a feminist imagining of the story of Circe from Greek mythology…I can hear some of you saying to yourselves: ‘Well, that sounds like a book I certainly don’t have to read!’, Yes, I would have steered clear of it too, if it had not been so warmly recommended by someone whose opinion we value highly.

What we found, as we started reading, is that in turning the spotlight on what is a minor goddess in The Odyssey, Miller has created someone whose self-awareness, passion and strength in adversity all make her a very attractive character. I say ‘created’ although it feels much more as though Miller has faithfully drawn all of her ideas from the source, and ‘simply’ revealed the full roundness of the Circe hinted at by Homer.

The novel also imagines the world of Greek mythology, and describes it in utterly convincing detail: we feel that this is exactly how it must be to develop your magical powers as a witch; these are surely the authentic details of the logistics of a man’s body morphing into a pig’s; this must be just what it feels like to have the sun god for a father.

All of this is expressed in vivid, clear language, rooted in the world it is describing. Circe is nothing less than a joy to read; I cannot remember any book I have so relished reading aloud. We both found the book so thrilling and so delicious that we strictly limited ourselves to one chapter per sitting. This was exquisite torture since every chapter both recounts a self-contained episode and ends on the kind of edge-of-your-seat cliffhanger that I have seldom encountered outside Zorro or Batman. As we approached the end, we did all we could to eke out the last twenty pages.

The only trouble is: what do we follow Circe with? We haven’t finally decided yet, but we will have to work hard not to feel disappointed in whatever we choose.

In tandem with the novel, and as an appetiser before each reading, we have been selecting a volume of poetry and reading a poem a day. For the last couple of weeks we have been reading Carol Ann Duffy’s wry feminist collection The World’s Wife, an amuse-bouche indeed. Duffy served as poet laureate for a decade until 2019, and for those of us who associate poet laureateship with the likes of Robert Southey, William Wordsworth and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, she represents a bit of a departure.

The World’s Wife is woven around the saying that ‘Behind every famous man…’ It is a series of tongue-in-cheek monologues by the wives of great males of history, from Aesop to Quasimodo, from Odysseus to Elvis, and from King Herod to King Kong. The poems are insightful, witty and delightful.

Having completed this thought-provoking confection (if that’s not an oxymoron), we turned to a book Bernice received as a 50^th birthday present, The Nation’s Favourite Poems. In 1995, a BBC TV book programme conducted a poll to discover Britain’s best-loved poems. Nobody would suggest that this was a scientific survey: the responders were self-selecting, both in choosing to watch the programme and in choosing to submit their choices. However, the final league table of the top 100 poems makes interesting reading (not necessarily the poems themselves, you understand, but the list).

The first point to make (not, I suspect, predicted by the devisers of the poll) is that the most popular poets were less likely to do well if they had written a large body of popular work. So, for example, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats and W H Auden did less well than you might expect, because votes for them were split between several poems.

The other thing that strikes me, as we start to work our way through the 100 winners, is how respectable and dusty the collection is. Only one of the top 12 poems, and only 23 of the 100, were written by poets born in the 20^th Century. 22 of the top 36 poems are ones I was taught in school, and a further 8 of those 36 are ones I taught 10 years later in school.

What to make of this? Well, I should point out at this stage that, in 1995, most of the viewers of The Bookworm were probably retired. The programme was screened at 4:20 in the afternoon (with view on demand still decades away).

It also appears that most of the poetry that most of the population (even the reading population) read and enjoyed, they first read in school. Indeed, I wonder how many readers, then or now, read poetry regularly or, indeed, at all, in their adult life.

In addition, much of the poetry that we read in school, and that we were required to learn by heart and recite, has an incantatory quality that stays with us. This is perhaps best reflected in the two most popular poems in the poll. If I tell you that they both rely heavily on recurring structures and language, that one is overtly character-building, and the second is steeped in English mythology, you might possibly be able to guess that topping the poll was Rudyard Kipling’s If, with twice as many votes as the runner-up The Lady of Shalott.

If that second choice elicits from you the reaction: ‘The Who of What?’ there is no need to feel embarrassed. Tennyson’s poem has, with considerable justification, slipped out of the public eye in the last half-century. I haven’t even bothered to give you a link to the poem online. If you don’t know it already, I see little need to inflict it on you at this stage. Bernice, who did not remember ever hearing or seeing it before, was singularly underwhelmed by it, despite a magnificently sensitive and evocative reading by yours truly.

Number 3, however, was a different story. This was, again, one Bernice didn’t recognize, although I remembered it very clearly. I thought I knew it from primary school, but I may be over-estimating the sophistication of myself and my peers. Whenever I met it, its mysterious quality, and its sense of an underlying and undisclosed narrative, have stayed with me over the years. It is Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners, and, if you do not already know it, I feel it is worth a visit.

As I looked through the entire list, I noticed that none of the poems that I grew up with (1958–1968) were anti-establishment. Many were apolitical – dealing with nature, recounting historical events without commentary, or capturing and analysing human emotion – and those that were political were jingoistic, pro-establishment and conservative.

When I fast forward to the poems I taught in Britain (1976–1986), I find that almost all of them inhabit the contemporary world of the poet, and many of them are political with a small ‘p’, exposing and addressing social problems of the age. Far too often, the tone is bleak, the mood one of the world’s failure.

This starts with the First World War, whether in the wistful sadness of Wilfrid Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth or the dark cynicism of Siegried Sassoon’s The General. It continues through the Second World War, as condemned in Louis MacNeice’s Prayer before Birth. It goes into the post-War Britain of the Welfare State, and its failed promise, with Charles Causley’s Timothy Winters. It bemoans the nuclear family, with Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse (Warning! Contains strong language). All in all, it’s a pretty bleak read.

So there is this very strong contrast between the two ages of poetry in the first half of my life. This is not poetry written then, but poetry promoted in the public sphere then. I can think of no better way of conveying this shift, this contrast, than by putting alongside each other two poems by two contemporaries. Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) and Wilfred Owen (1893–1918). In 1914, before he had seen any action, and a year before he was killed in action, Brooke wrote the stirringly patriotic The Soldier, calmly facing the possibility of the ultimate sacrifice, and the recognition that, if it is a sacrifice for one’s country, it is to be embraced with grace.

The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
      That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
      In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
      Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
      Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
      A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
            Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
      And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
            In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

By the time Wilfred Owen wrote Dulce et Decorum Est (It is Sweet and Fitting… [to Die for One’s Country]), he had seen horrific action on the Western front, spent a long convalescence In England, during which he recovered from shell-shock, and was preparing to return to the front, where he was to meet his death just one week before the armistice was declared.

Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. –
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Your reward, gentle reader, for staying the course, is to learn the exciting news that, after a one-month hiatus, Micha’el and Tslil have just released the latest video on their YouTube channel. You may want to watch it because of the clarity with which Micha’el explains how things are going, and sheds light on their approach to life in general and the challenges they are facing. You may, on the other hand, just want to watch it because of the opportunity it gives you to see Tao throwing himself into work on the land. Either way, from where I’m sitting, it’s a worthwhile watch. Liking, subscribing and commenting are also warmly encouraged. Here it is:

Welcome to a topic that has, in the last decade or so, very much captured my interest: the art (some would say the dark art) of translation. An art, because translation is not just a matter of ingesting the original text at one end and excreting a translation at the other. Oh no! There’s a lot more to it than that.

You do not have to get very far into a text for translation before you encounter a lexical gap – a word or phrase in the source language for which no equivalent exists in the target language. Take, for example, the words for the different stages in the life of….well, how far do you have to read in the following list before you know what we are talking about?

Egg, alevin, fry, fingerling/parr, smolt, adult.

What is being described here is my old favourite, the salmon. English has a single word for each of the six stages in the life cycle of this magnificent silver leaper. However, I am prepared to guess that the Sango language of the Central African Republic lacks some, if not all, of these words; indeed, I would not be surprised if it has no word for salmon at all. So, the distance from ‘fingerling’ in English into Sango represents a lexical gap.

Of course, there are ways around the problem. You can use the Sango for ‘silver river fish when it starts to move downriver towards the sea’. However, you will agree that this loses something in the translation.

Let us, for a moment, assume that there is a word for ‘fingerling’ in Sango. Although the denotation (the dictionary definition) of the Sango word matches exactly that of ‘fingerling’, unfortunately it (my assumed Sango word) fails completely to reproduce the connotation (the associational and emotional weight that a word carries). ‘Fingerling’ carries within it the following connotations (for me at least):

• An indication of the size and delicacy of the salmon at this stage (finger);
• An affectionate suggestion of diminutiveness (ling);
• A feeling of folk, rather than scientific, classification (both ‘finger’ and ‘-ling’ originate in Old English, and have none of the scientific or official flavour that words from Norman French and Latin roots tend to have in English).

I am sure that, despite being (I wager) no more fluent in Sango than I am, you will concede the fact that the likelihood of finding a connotative match for ‘fingerling’ is approximately nil.

Of course, nobody consciously considers these connotations when using a word in everyday conversation, although when we choose to say ‘hearty’ rather than ‘cordial’ or ‘home’ rather than ‘domicile’ or ‘friendship’ rather than ‘amity’, we are probably aware, at some level, that we are making, in each case, the ‘warmer’ choice.

A quick task for you (an interactive blog, no less). Rank the following words in order from positive to negative connotation: THIN, SLIM, SKINNY.

I expect that you, like me, ranked SLIM as positive, SKINNY as negative and THIN as neutral. I just fed these words into Google Translate, and received the following translations into Spanish: DELGADO, DELGADO, DELGADO; Russian: Тонкий, тонкий, тонкий; Arabic: نحيف ، نحيف ، نحيف; Hebrew: רזה, רזה, רזה. I am a great fan of Google Translate, but this little experiment demonstrates that the app is a lot better at capturing denotation than it is at conveying connotation.

Douglas Hofstadter, in his book The Mind’s Eye, made the very good point that the most accurate ‘translation’ from America to Britain of Nancy Reagan was probably Denis Thatcher, because the fact that he was a man whereas she was a woman was not, for either of them, their significant characteristic; it was, rather, that they were the spirited (if over-shadowed) spouses of the two strong leaders of the Western world.

Even if the translator manages somehow to bridge the lexical gap, there are other challenges. Imagine, for example, translating traditional poetry. As well as translating the meaning (denotation and connotation) of the source word, the translator will want to retain the rhythm and rhyme of the original, and, ideally, the weight and effect of the vowel and consonant clusters. Let me give you two quick examples.

I don’t, for the most part, ‘get’ Emily Dickinson; I fail to understand what the admirers of her poetry see in it. Yet every so often I catch a glimpse of her power. Perhaps her best-known poem, A Bird Came Down the Walk, ends with a description of how…

Butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap plashless as they swim.

Any translator must strive to find a combination of consonants that forces the reader to hang in mid-air for a moment, like a butterfly, between the closing ‘p’ of ‘leap’ and the opening ‘p’ of ‘plashless’.

Similarly, in the middle of Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters, the drug-induced languor is described as follows:

There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,

What sonic challenges does the translator face here? First, the need to reproduce the phenomenon of almost every word being separated from its predecessor by a combination of closing and opening consonants that requires the reader to pause. Read it aloud carefully and you will experience the impossibility:
There is|sweet|music|here that|softer falls|Than|petals|from|blown|roses on|the grass

There are also eleven breathy, drawn-out, ‘th’, ‘s’ and ‘z’ sounds, and seven long vowels. The translator must aim to reproduce this soft, slow language.

Finally (although this is not an exhaustive list), even if the target language has an adjective to describe flowers that have shed their leaves, it should ideally be a monosyllable with the same long vowel sound as the word for roses.

During the Renaissance, Italians were very disappointed with inadequate translations of Dante into French, some that failed to capture the beauty of the original, and others that failed to capture accurately its meaning. The Italians coined the phrase Traduttore, traditore, which literally means Translator, traitor. In other words: All translation is unavoidably a betrayal of the original.

I hope that you relish the irony that the phrase is a meta-phrase, in that it is an excellent example of itself. No translation of it into English can preserve the parallel of the two words in Italian, identical in sound and stress except for one vowel-sound in the middle of each word.

So, clearly translation is an art, but why do I call it a dark art? Well, faithful reader, that is because, against all the odds, and in wonderful ways, translators actually manage to translate successfully, which seems to me to suggest some diabolical power. I thought I would share some of those that I have come across in Israel.

First, I want to single out Ehud Manor, a much-loved Israeli songwriter, who was awarded an MA in English Literature from Cambridge University and spent considerable time in New York. He became the leading translator into Hebrew of musicals, including Hair, Sweeney Todd, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Les Misérables, The Threepenny Opera, Cabaret, Blood Brothers, Chicago, West Side Story and Porgy and Bess. Bernice and I saw Cabaret and West Side Story in Tel Aviv, and in both cases we had to keep reminding ourselves that these were translated and not original lyrics.

As an example, here are aome of his lyrics to the title song from Cabaret. This is not an easy song to translate, not least because each syllable has a different note, so that the metre of the Hebrew has to match that of the English.

My non-Hebrew-reading followers will have to take my word for it that the metre and rhyme are faithful, and the translation ‘back’ from the Hebrew shows you how Manor kept the spirit and concepts of the original, even when he was not able to translate with literal accuracy.

Next, let me offer you the cleverest translation I know of a film title into Hebrew: The 1959 film Never on Sunday. This is a classic case of denotation and connotation. In Greece, where the film was made, and in the English-speaking world, where it was very successful, Sunday is (as the title song states) [the] ‘day of rest’. However, if you translate the title into Hebrew literally, you lose the entire connotation, since Sunday is, in Israel, the first day of the working week.

However, you cannot simply map the title to its equivalent connotation in Israel, because then it becomes Never on Saturday, thereby changing its denotation, and thoroughly confusing the Israeli audience watching the film. The solution found was an excellent example of lateral thinking: Only on Weekdays (רק בימי חול). Elegant, no?

And now for the pièce de resistance. (That’s another way to avoid the pitfalls of translation, of course: simply import the phrase wholesale from the source language.)

One challenge for the translator that I haven’t yet touched on is wordplay such as puns. These can hardly ever be translated literally while still retaining the humour. In Israeli film subtitling, the translator often gives up, translating the sentence literally and adding in parentheses: a play on words in English.

Not long after we came on aliya, Israel TV screened Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. (Potter is worth a post to himself; indeed, The Singing Detective is worth a post to itself!) Fortunately, being a words man rather than a pictures man, I was reading (or, more accurately, was unable to stop myself reading) the Hebrew subtitles. At one point, the leading character, speaking about himself and a prostitute with whom he had a complex relationship, says:

It was a case of tit for tat. She was all tit and I was all tat.

This is, let me point out, a double pun:

‘Tit for tat’ meaning reciprocally;
‘Tit’ being an informal term for breast;
‘Tat’ meaning a worthless scrap (of material).

So, how on earth do you translate that? Here’s what they came up with:
עין תחת עין, היא כולה תחת, ואני כולי אַיין.
Literally: An eye for an eye. She was all arse and I was entirely a non-entity
where the word ‘for’ is a homonym of the word ‘arse’ and the word ‘eye’ is a homophone of the word ‘non-entity’.

I do realise that the above pedestrian explanation has murdered the joke, but I hope that, for my non-Hebrew-speaking readers, it has indicated the brilliance of the elegance with which both puns were captured while the denotation was accurately conveyed. If that’s not evidence of dark arts, I don’t know what is. You can’t come up with something like that (and certainly not on the salary of a subtitle-creator in Israel TV at the time), unless you have previously sold your soul to the devil.

Meanwhile, in Portugal, someone is honing other skills. Less strict parents might have started their son on something a little more yielding, like a potato or carrot. But Tslil and Mucha’el run a tough boot camp!

Consider the following text:

If I were to wake at 6AM on Thursday, the sourdough I had prepared the previous evening would, by then, have been rising for nine hours. I would need to punch it down, and the dough would be ready an hour later for shaping into loaves, which would mean that I would not have had enough time to shower, dress and eat breakfast.

The above text is an illustration of one of two theories that I have developed over the years, to explain extraordinary phenomena. I thought today would be a particularly appropriate time for me to share these with you, principally because, after three days of musing, I still cannot think of anything to write about this week, but also because of two experiences I have had recently.

Let me leave that tantalizing text hanging for a moment, and consider instead Brownstein’s First Law – the Law of Sport. I long felt the need to develop such a law, because I have for decades been troubled by my relationship to sport.

A couple of months ago, to properly prepare myself for my weekly Zoom call with my brother, I checked the fortunes of Spurs (that’s not the San Antonio Spurs of basketball’s Western Conference, whatever that is, but rather Tottenham (no less exotic, in its own way, than San Antonio) Hotspur of English football’s Premier League.)

I dutifully noted their 2-0 defeat of Arsenal, and dropped a casual reference into my next call, knowing that, as an ex-Arsenal fan and now a Spurs supporter, Martin would be feeling good about this result. Sadly, I couldn’t keep the feigned interest up, and, when Martin made a reference to Spurs’ subsequently dismal fortunes a couple of weeks later, I had no idea what he was talking about. I simply don’t ‘get’ football.

The same is true of American football. However, at work, when I found myself at a lunch table surrounded by Americans, I found that ‘What about those Packers, eh!’ was usually all I needed to establish my street creds.

When I used to travel on business, my first act on leaving the airport in Sofia, or Copenhagen, or Vienna, or wherever, would be to find a taxi to take me to my hotel. Inevitably, the taxi driver would feel obliged to make cheerful taxi-driver conversation.

In Warsaw, the taxi-driver’s ice-breaker was ‘You want me to fix you up with a nice girl to come to your hotel?’, which is more or less where the conversation ended. In almost every other city outside the United States, the driver’s opening gambit would be: ‘Where do you come from?’

This was, in many ways, a more difficult question to answer. During the period when I was travelling, Israel was often not Europe’s pin-up country, and I had to try to avoid getting into an argument, when all I wanted to do was get to my hotel, shower, change and get to work.

So, I would usually say: ‘England’, not really a complete answer to the question, but technically not actually a lie. Unfortunately, my escape from the frying pan of the Middle East only landed me in the fire of England’s most important cultural export. The taxi-driver’s face would, without fail, break into an enthusiastic grin, as he intoned the sacred words: ‘Manchester United!’.

I was then required to spend ten minutes simulating enthusiasm for, and trying to conceal my ignorance of, and total lack of interest in, football. More than once I found myself musing what exactly there was in the nature of football that fed that lack of interest – or, perhaps, what it was that there wasn’t in football, whose absence meant the sport left me cold.

At one point, I started compiling two lists: of those sports I enjoy watching, and of those I don’t. So, here’s your starter for 10: In what ways are tennis, cricket and golf different from football? The answer I eventually came up with is that I enjoy watching sports where a match stretches over a considerable period of time, and where the play is in short intense bursts, separated by lots of thinking time.

It is the taut, psychological battle that appeals to me, and that is more intense in an individual sport than a team sport. Cricket is, of course, a team sport, but it very often plays out as a clash between two individuals. It is that clash that I relish, whether between bowler and batsman, tennis players facing each other across the net, or a golfer wrestling with nothing more or less than his own demons.

I realise that I need to define my terms a little more closely. In cricket, ODIs and even T-20 can be fun, but they’re not really cricket; there’s red ball and then there’s everything else. To be honest, there’s a five-day Test and then there’s everything else.

Similarly, a five-set tennis match is a great deal more than one-and-two-thirds of a three-set match. Four days of the Open Golf contain more than four times the drama of a single round. The longer formats elevate these contests to an epic stature.

This must be why I even enjoy snooker – not the first choice of most intellectual and cultural snobs such as myself.

So, here’s a tentative formulation of Brownstein’s First Law: The degree of interest inherent in a sport is in inverse proportion to the ratio of actual playing time to total duration.

I have never actually timed a golf tournament, but a rule introduced in 2019 set a limit of 40 seconds to play a stroke. This means that a golfer taking the maximum permitted time, and playing 4 rounds for a total of 270, should spend three hours actually playing through his four rounds, while he will have been on the course for a total of about fifteen hours. The same is more or less true for tennis.

By this token, I suppose I should also enjoy watching chess….but it turns out that I’m the one person who didn’t even enjoy The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix.

Right! That’s sport sorted! Now let’s tackle the secret of Israel’s success.

I had promised myself not to talk about corona in my blog, but I must just mention that Bernice and I went for our first vaccination on Sunday. Despite the Government having twice brought forward the launch date for the vaccination campaign, all of the health funds, after some initial hiccoughs – websites temporarily down because of the amount of traffic; helplines not answering for an hour – had a system that was working effectively within a few days. We were processed efficiently and fairly quickly. All of this (the changing plans and the quick recovery) was typically Israeli.

You will often hear it suggested that at least one of the secrets of Israeli success is the extraordinary ability of Israelis to think on their feet and to improvise. From the boardroom to the battlefield, there are no end of thrilling and inspiring stories of Israelis instantly assessing an unforeseen situation, and exploiting it to their advantage.

Of course, there is another way of looking at this. If, surprisingly often, you find yourself confronting unforeseen situations and unanticipated developments, perhaps what you should consider is whether you need to brush up your skills in the areas of foresight and anticipation. Unfortunately, investing months in careful planning is much less of an adrenalin rush than brilliantly seizing a sudden opportunity.

The highest compliment that could be paid to an outstanding manager in the company I worked for was not to call her a splendidly methodical planner with an uncanny eye for detail, but, rather, a totach, which translates literally as ‘cannon’. In other words, sudden, explosive, and obliterating her target by being pointed vaguely in the right direction. In contrast, I never heard anyone praised for being a sniper.

Received wisdom in Israel is that this talent for improvisation is first discovered, and nurtured, in the army, where, so we are told, very little is predictable, and the ability to think on your feet is perhaps the most important survival skill. I do not agree with this theory. I believe that the fundamental reason why Israelis improvise so well, is precisely because they do not plan well. And they do not plan well because of…..Hebrew grammar.

Let me explain. The text with which I began this week’s post is a fine example of the multiplicity of verb tenses in English. There are no fewer than 17 tenses in English. Excluding the imperative, they are as follows:

Present tense
Present simple tense — I do
Present continuous tense — I am doing
Present perfect tense — I have done
Present perfect continuous tense — I have been doing

Past tense
Past simple tense — I did
Past continuous tense — I was doing
Past perfect tense — I had done
Past perfect continuous tense — I had been doing

Future tense
Future simple tense — I will do
Future continuous tense — I will be doing
Future perfect tense — I will have done
Future perfect continuous tense — I will have been doing

Past future tense
Past future simple tense — I would do
Past future continuous tense — I would be doing
Past future perfect tense — I would have done
Past future perfect continuous tense — I would have been doing

You should care about this, even though it isn’t in the test, because, as the sample text about baking bread demonstrated, you may need all of these tenses in order to be able to express complex temporal relations between different events.

Hebrew, on the other hand, has only four tenses – past, present, future and imperative. This makes any kind of forward planning much more difficult to conceptualise, and even more difficult to discuss.

Now that we have Gantt charts, this probably matters less. A Gantt chart is, put simply, a colored-bar visual presentation of the breakdown of a series of scheduled tasks over a certain period.

It is used in business to recognize how the dependencies between different tasks in a process (you can’t tile the roof until you have erected the walls) influence the possible timeline. In my experience, the primary purpose of a Gantt chart is to tell you that, in order to meet your deadline, you need to have started your project six months ago!

Gantt charts are all well and good in business. (And, for me, in synagogue mishloach manot projects – a reference I have neither the time nor the patience to explain, I’m afraid. As we say in Hebrew: ‘He who understands will understand.’ – It sounds snappier in Hebrew.) However, in everyday life, we still need the ability to talk clearly and concisely about these temporal relations. We can do that in English, but not in Hebrew.

So, Brownstein’s Second Law states: The ability of a nation to improvise effectively is inversely proportional to the number of verb tenses in its language.

Of course, if you want to develop an analytical mind that can visualize future developments, it’s never too early to start playing the ultimate game of strategy – Go.

By the way: at the time of the video, Tao had a filthy cold, but that was two months ago and he is now completely recovered.

My second’s in muesli, but not in mince
My third is in roti, and also in bries
My fourth’s in zucchini but isn’t in cheese
My whole is a myst’ry; of that there’s no doubt.
But I’m perfectly sure you can all work it out.

I want to go back to when I was fifteen years old, and at school; specifically, to the moment when I was sitting in the hall until my name was called and I went in to see the careers master.

Careers advice was a relatively new concept, and it’s fair to say that my school did little more than pay lip service to the idea that teenage pupils should be given some guidance in mapping out their future path through the educational minefield and into the world of work.

I remember envying (let’s be honest, I still envy) those focused folk who knew from the age of 7 that they were going to be gastro-enterologists, or criminal lawyers, or ministers of religion. As I mentioned in a previous post, I had briefly, a year earlier, entertained the notion of a life in journalism, until I discovered that it involved not only talent but also application and self-discipline. By the time I was 15, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up.

This may be just as well, since any idea I might have had would almost certainly have involved a university education, and I was at the age of 15 heading for very disappointing results in my A levels at age 18. Thinking back to my last two years at school, with the perspective of life experience, I begin to suspect that two years of concentrating only on those aspects of my studies that really interested me, and spending the last months before the exams pretending to revise but actually doing jigsaws, may have played some part in my failure.

So there I was, sitting in front of the careers master, being asked what career ambitions I had. I can no longer remember what I answered, but I am sure my vagueness accurately reflected my lack of direction. I basically had no idea. So, on reflection, the career master’s recommendation that I aim to read English at university was sound advice: a university degree in English can be leveraged as an intro to a wide variety of occupations, or, put another way, a university degree in English qualifies you for nothing….except teaching English, which is what I eventually ending up doing. But that’s another story.

Allow me to indulge myself, and to spirit myself back 65 years. If I had again my five minutes with the careers master, I believe I now know what I would have answered when asked about my career ambitions. “Well, sir,” I would have said, “what I really want to be is a bespoke quiz designer.” Try as I might, I am unable to imagine what his response might have been, other than to send me to the headmaster for insolence.

When I look back on my working life and wonder how it might have panned out differently, I find myself coming to the conclusion that compiling quizzes to order might well have given me more satisfaction that anything I actually did, except, probably, English teaching, which was a rough and uneven ride, but whose satisfactions, when earned, as they occasionally were, were very deep and rich.

I count myself very lucky because I have been able, over the years, to indulge my passion. Unfortunately, nobody has ever seen fit to pay me for a quiz, but you can’t have everything. Anyway, I thought I would tell you about some of the quizzes that have given me the greatest satisfaction.

When we first moved to Maale Adumim, 24 years ago, our synagogue ran an annual supper quiz, and, after we had been here for a year or two, I took a stint as question master. Since the participants included immigrants from half a dozen different countries, and even a couple of native Israelis, one challenge here was devising questions that were not culture-specific, and, where possible, not verbal. Picture and music rounds were safer than arcane references to minor characters in Coronation Street.

For the most part, I have concentrated on quizzes as part of birthday or anniversary celebrations. Rather than being faced with a blank canvas, it is easy here to concentrate on the number of years. I remember a very nice 29^th birthday quiz for Micha’el which dealt exclusively with questions based on the number 29. In the past, this would have been challenging, since 29 is not an obvious number, but these days all you need to do is google ‘29’, and then sift through the mountains of material to find the nuggets of question material.

For my late mother-in-law’s 70th birthday, I devised a very elaborate quiz and board game. We were spending the shabbat away together, so I thought there would be plenty of time to play. An array of 10×7 squares represented the 70 years of her life, with a separate question relating to each year.

In addition, there were questions built around 7’s, with all the usual suspects: dwarves, Magnificent, deadly sins, sisters and so forth. (Incidentally, the actor that you can never remember in the original, 1960, The Magnificent Seven is Brad Dexter.) I was very pleased with the end-result, and on the Friday I eagerly packed my box of index cards, coloured tokens and stoutly laminated board.

We never actually played the quiz game; the moment never seemed right. But I have hung on to the questions, and Bernice should be warned that if she isn’t nice to me I shall inflict it on her for her 70^th birthday!

Fortunately, Sue and David, Bernice’s sister and her husband, are keen quizzers, and have often been kind enough to ask me to provide questions. This is well within my comfort zone, since we are all of the same era (although they are considerably older than Bernice and myself!) and have similar backgrounds, as do most of the friends they invite to their celebrations.

What I regard as my masterpiece was a musical quiz I devised for David’s 70^th birthday. Sue had asked me to incorporate questions on The Barber of Seville, The Shadow of Your Smile and Scherezade. I managed to construct a round of questions built around barbers (ranging from Samuel’s Adagio to Chris’s When the Saints Go Marching In), and a further round in which I spliced together recordings of six different artists singing The Shadow of Your Smile, demonstrating, on the way, that Andy Williams and Johnny Mathis sing in the same key, and with very similar guitar accompaniment.

A round of matching Leroy Anderson pieces to their titles (I knew that David rightly admires Anderson’s ability to write and orchestrate melodies) followed, and we also had a formal, recorded, public version of the game David and I often played privately, each of us in turn singing the eight bars of intro to American standards and inviting the other to identify the song. It is interesting how some songs have remained very well known, while their intros have slipped into relative obscurity. Consider, for example, this lyric:

At words poetic, I’m so pathetic
That I always have found it best
Instead of getting ’em off my chest
To let ’em rest unexpressed

I hate parading my serenading
As I’ll probably miss a bar
But if this ditty is not so pretty
At least it’ll tell you how great you are

The ease of the flow of the language, the effortless but sophisticated internal rhyme, are unmistakably Cole Porter. But I never heard them until I was preparing the quiz. They are the intro to You’re the Top which Porter himself sings inimitably here.

What made me so pleased with this quiz was that David beat everyone else (as the birthday boy should), but even he had to dig deep for one or two answers, and, at the same time, the others were not just bystanders, but were (or at least seemed) eager participants.

Of course, participants are sometimes just a little too eager. I regard myself as being as competitive as the next man, unless of course the next man is a guest at a party I quizzed many years ago.

As well as the usual rounds of questions, the teams had a crossword that they could work on throughout the evening. Eventually, having allowed everyone a final five minutes, the time came to collect the crosswords in, and I had to physically wrestle one guest to the ground to separate him from his crossword.

In recent years I have also started preparing a Purim quiz as part of our price of admission to friends’ seuda (festive meal). This is always a flippant and brief affair, but the family in question are knowledgeable, great lovers of language, for the most part, native Hebrew speakers, and inveterate quizzers. I have taken it upon myself to devise what is almost always a language-based quiz in Hebrew, with wordplay and anagrams. It stretches my command of Hebrew well beyond its normal limits. Nevertheless, so far I have received no complaints.

Last year, when we returned from Portugal the day before Purim, we had to go into isolation immediately, and therefore missed the seuda, Our friends were horrified, and demanded the quiz anyway. Our internet was down (long story), so they had to collect the question sheets from our house, and I had to run the quiz by phone.

Now that I’m retired, of course, I have to prepare quizzes on my own time, rather than my employer’s, but, even so, it is a labour of love…and I do still take bookings.

Meanwhile, back in Portugal, someone is learning that all that food preparation and cooking generates washing up, but nobody has yet told him that this is a chore rather than a privilege, and his parents would appreciate it if you don’t burst the bubble.

Have you ever considered murdering your spouse, only to be deterred by the fact that you’re not sure how to dispose of the body, since you don’t have access to, or room for, a woodchipper (à la Fargo. [Those of a nervous disposition might want to look away from 40 seconds onwards]). If this resonates with you, then you might like to consider the merits of a Vitamix blender. I don’t normally indulge in product endorsement, but the Vitamix is such a powerhouse that I have to mention it.

If you can stand the sound of a Hell’s Angels convention in your kitchen, then this compact weapon of destruction can convert a kilo of raw root vegetables and half a cup of cold water to a perfectly smooth soup in sixty seconds, and, if you are prepared to risk long-term hearing damage, you can keep it running for another minute, in which time the force of the blades will heat the soup to a serving temperature that would satisfy all but the most demanding customer (which, in our family, is my sister-in-law Adèle). I’m sure it could handle a reasonable-sized spouse without the motor burning out.

I mention the Vitamix for two reasons. I hope that naming it three times in a single post might lead to the manufacturers showing their gratitude by sending me a blender. More realistically, I am reminded that a friend once told me that her friend (I know this is starting to sound like an urban legend, but…) said that if her kitchen were on fire (note the subjunctive in a too-little, too-late attempt to mend some grammatical fences), she would run back into the kitchen to rescue her Vitamix.

I have often thought about this, as one does. I must confess that the comment seems ridiculous to me, since, with internet access, you can replace a Vitamix in days without having to leave the relative comfort of your (admittedly now reeking-of-smoke) home.

If I were (two subjunctives in three paragraphs – this is a genuine attempt at reconciliation) to brave the flames, it would be to rescue something irreplaceable…or, rather, several irreplaceable somethings. I thought you might be interested to hear about them. (As I typed that last sentence, even I was wondering why on earth anyone else should be interested, but, intrepid readers, you have surprised me before, and perhaps you will again this week.)

Exhibit A is a pastry brush. I actually use it as a brush for egg-glazing challot, and it replaced a silicon brush, which was really not gentle enough to coat the challa with egg without driving some of the air out of the risen dough and pulling it slightly out of shape. So, I looked for a brush with natural bristles.

All I could find in the shops in Israel, wherever I looked, were unyielding silicone brushes. Online, I could find just what I was looking for, costing a trifling amount. However, to that cost I had to add shipping. I don’t know what Micha’el and Tslil paid to ship their lift from Israel to Portungal, but it can’t have been much more than the cost of shipping a pastry brush from China to Israel. Of course, if you buy 20,000 pastry brushes, it becomes an economic proposition; but that seems a little excessive.

Then, the last time we were in Portugal, in the China shop (which, you may remember, sells everything), I found one, ridiculously cheap. Needless to say, I bought one to leave there and one to bring home. Glazing the challa is now a pleasure. Happiness, I increasingly find, is most easily achieved through the steady accumulation of such small felicities.

Exhibit B is a short, narrow-bladed, plastic-handled knife, which I use, together with a wooden board, for cleaning and slicing pickled and shmaltz herring, and sometimes for filleting raw fish. The light weight and the narrow blade are all that is needed for slicing through tender fish, and they make the knife very easy to control, allowing me to work in comfort and at speed.

The wooden board is possibly an indulgence, and probably more difficult to clean than a plastic board, but when I scrape the herring skin and other waste to the side of the board, and tap the knife against the board to release the last scraps that have stuck to the knife, I hear the rasps and raps of my childhood, the sounds of my late father z”l standing cutting herring in the shop for hours on end.

Next up is perhaps the most unexpected item. Before we were married (and probably for a decade before we were married), Bernice’s grandmother z”l accumulated, item by item, a trousseau for Bernice (although she called it a bottom drawer). She was far from a wealthy woman, but she knew how to save a little here and a little there, and she was a very canny shopper.

One of the many items she gave us – bought, in all probability, in Well Street market in Hackney – was a bone-handled grapefruit knife. It has seen good service over the years, but, since Bernice doesn’t much like grapefruit, and a health fund dietician recommended recently that I stop eating it because of my osteo-arthritic hip, we don’t really have a need for a grapefruit knife these days. Nevertheless, I couldn’t imagine parting with it.

Having used a number of different grapefruit knives (at Pesach and in other people’s houses), I have come to realise that ours is a miracle of engineering. The teeth are perfectly sized and spaced for cutting through grapefruit flesh cleanly and easily, without tearing. The blade is flexible enough to accommodate the variations of curvature in the fruit. The curve of the blade itself is perfect for scooping out the flesh in two quick circuits of the halved grapefruit – one a series of downward sawing plunges, the second more of a gouging action.

In addition, if, like us, you often cut melon in rings to dice it, rather than cutting ‘boats’, the grapefruit knife is perfect for separating the flesh from the rind at those awkward ends of the melon. On reading my first draft, Bernice also pointed out that what we should clearly be calling an all-purpose scoop knife, rather than a grapefruit knife, is perfect for hollowing out eggplant/aubergine for stuffing.

In my experience, it is only when we are lucky enough to find a perfectly designed implement that we realise just how much craftsmanship goes into it, and just how inadequate most such implements are. Each of these items possesses an integrity and grace that elevates it.

My final choice is the odd man out. Its irreplaceability rests not in its perfect design, although I am sure it is perfectly designed, but rather in its sentimental value. I inherited one of my late father’s smoked-salmon knives. I have never actually used it, so I cannot absolutely vouch for its quality. However, judging by the wafer-thin slices that Dad conjured from a side of salmon, I am sure it is as fine an instrument as the others I have described.

I keep it also because I hope, one day, to try it out. However, I do not understand how anyone gets to practise cutting smoked salmon. Surely, nobody in their right mind would consider entrusting a side of salmon to a novice, to be butchered. (In the same way, I often wonder how a mohel, a ritual circumciser, acquires his skill…or, indeed, a brain surgeon. I seem to remember once hearing something about practising on grapes, but it’s not really something I want to think about too deeply.)

I actually have a recipe for ‘smoked’ salmon that involves wrapping it in aluminium foil, puncturing the foil with airholes, and cooking the salmon in a closed pot on the hob. I hope to try this some time. (Genuinely smoking salmon, in our gas barbecue, using a box of woodchips, seems unnecessarily carcinogenic at this stage.) So, perhaps I may still have a chance to take the salmon knife for a test run.

Meanwhile, I have a clear mental map of the location of these five items, so that, if the dreaded fire does break out, I will be able to save my irreplaceables.

Of course, it’s equally important to have a rolling pin that is just the right size. (This video is from about a month and half ago.)