Anyone for Tennis?

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Spoiler alert: The title says it all. This started out as a post about sport in general, but I quickly realised that I will need more than one post to do justice to the subject, so this may well be the first of an occasional series. If the mere mention of the word sport induces in you a coma, I apologise. Feel free to leave. I look forward to seeing you next week.

For as long as I can remember, tennis was always one of my family’s favourite sports. My father z”l was a keen all-round sportsman, and introduced my brother Martin and I to tennis at a fairly young age. I knew almost immediately that this was my sport. The activity comes in short, intense bursts, with ample recovery time. Nobody comes crashing into you, barging you out of the way or hacking your legs out from under you. Tennis marries power and finesse, instinct and guile. It uses a ball that, when someone is firing it at you at speed, has the (for you) distinct advantage of not being made of solid cork covered in hard, stitched leather, like a cricket ball. Recreational tennis depends on you, and the player on the other side of the net, trusting each other to play fair, since each of you will usually be better placed to call the other’s shots in or out. The sport requires some equipment, which means that it comes with a body of specialized knowledge, and allows satisfyingly nerdy discussion of the relative merits of different makes of racquet and ball. At the same time, it is surprising how little you can make do with – see below.

By the age of eight or nine, I was hooked. This meant playing once or twice a week, for an hour, or two, or three, at a time, on the municipal courts in our local park. The park boasted about ten hardcourts, so there was usually at least one available. However, the quality of the different courts’ playing surfaces varied: from the recently refurbished (smooth, with crisp, white line markings) to the ridged and pock-marked. The word ‘fault’ is often heard on a tennis court, but seldom referring to something that resembles San Andreas. If I ever played a visitor on one of the worse courts, I enjoyed the advantage of knowing where to attempt to place the ball to maximise the chance of an uneven bounce, much like a slow bowler taking advantage of the fast bowlers’ footmarks.

Another feature of the more unkempt courts was that they had the odd tuft of weed sprouting in the cracks, which helped us imagine that we were playing on the hallowed lawns of our beloved Wimbledon.

Not that our imagination needed much help. In addition to the tennis described above, my friends and I also played hand-tennis every day after school. Using the existing markings (for netball, possibly?), we played with an old tennis ball, which we hit with our open palm. We had to imagine the net; we gave no quarter; but I remember no arguments, no John McEnroe You cannot be serious outbursts. There we would be, rain or shine, until we could no longer see the ball, playing in shirtsleeves, or jumpers (sweaters not having been adopted yet in England) or duffle coats (not many blogs can legitimately introduce duffle coats two weeks running, I bet).

In our minds, my best friend Peter and I were Pietrangeli and Sirola, the Italian doubles pair who won the French Championships in 1959, all grace and elegance. If you can stand in drizzle, wearing a duffle coat that, sodden, weighs twice what it did when it was dry, palming a half-bald tennis ball across a primary school playground, and feel as though you are gliding across the sun-baked clay of Roland Garros in the brightest of whites, then your imagination is at the peak of health.

I did actually get to play once on sun-baked clay. On a family holiday in Italy, Martin and I were woken ridiculously early (on reflection, it was probably 6:30) to play for an hour before breakfast, and before the sun was too high in the sky. Given the very long hours he worked, my father was not able to spend much time with us throughout the year, so this was a wonderful holiday, and that halcyon hour on the clay court was, in itself, enough to fuel another decade of fantasies.

Our tennis year naturally revolved around the Wimbledon fortnight – last week in June, first week in July. There was good BBC television coverage of the tournament as I was growing up. At first, although I enjoyed watching, I far preferred playing. At some point, and I wonder whether this is one measure of my move from childhood to adolescence, I preferred to stay home and watch an absorbing match, however inviting the weather was outside the window.

In our family, watching Wimbledon also meant, with very fortunate frequency, going to Wimbledon and watching live. Wimbledon tickets are allocated by a draw. The public are invited to apply to be included in the draw, and lucky winners are allocated at random a specific court and a specific day. My parents applied every year, and were, as I say, often lucky enough to be drawn. On one memorable occasion, when they had tickets for Centre Court on Finals Day, they generously gave the tickets to Martin and I.

We started early for the long tube journey from East to South London. I was armed with my binoculars, and I suspect Martin had his camera with him. We emerged from the depths of Southfields station to discover a dull and drizzly day. A short cab ride brought us to the ground. We settled in our seats nice and early, and spent the next four hours waiting for the weather to improve. I was able to watch the rain splashing on the covers in close-up, thanks to the binoculars and Martin was, presumably, able to photograph the pools of standing water. Eventually, we heard the dreaded announcement that play was abandoned for the day, and started our long trek back home. The icing on this particular poisoned cake was that the finals were postponed to the following Monday, and we both knew that there was no chance that our parents would agree to us taking a day off school.

However, I do have several happier memories of going to Wimbledon, and actually watching some tennis. The Championships operated a scheme (I’ve just checked, and they still do) whereby any ticketholders leaving the ground early were invited to leave their tickets in special postboxes placed around the grounds. (There were many suburban housewives who came to Wimbledon, but left early enough to be in time to have dinner on the table when their husbands arrived home from work.) These tickets were then collected, and, from mid-late afternoon, resold for a modest fee. All proceeds went, I believe, to the Lawn Tennis Association and were earmarked for affiliated charities. I have a memory of tickets being resold for half-a-crown; I see that the current price is 120 times that amount.

Several times, when the forecast promised good weather, Martin and I travelled to the championships straight from school, arriving around 5PM. On one memorable occasion, we were lucky enough to get Centre Court tickets, sitting high up in one corner of the court, It was men’s doubles semi-finals day, July, 1967.

In the previous round, an unseeded English pair, Peter Curtis and Graham Stiwell, had beaten the Number 1 seeds, John Newcombe and Tony Roche, 8-6 in the fifth set. They were now facing the Number 4 seeds, Roy Emerson and Ken Fletcher, for a place in the final. This was a match that had us on the edge of our seats from start to finish. You need to remember that this was in an era when the best players played all three events, so that the doubles events offered tennis every bit as high quality as the singles, and often at a more spectacular pace.

In the afternoon light, with shadows lengthening across the court, the match unfolded. The Australians won the first two sets 6-4, 8-6. The English then rallied to take two equally tight sets 6-4, 7-5. Would they be able to take the fifth to win a place in the final? Equally nervewracking was the question: Would the light remain good enough to complete the match that day. The prospect of our having to leave after the fourth and miss seeing the conclusion was awful. Of course, the prospect for the players of having to resume the following day must have also been very unattractive for them.

Fortunately, July in England provides some long, lingering evenings, and this was one of them. The fifth set was fought to a darkening but thrilling conclusion at 9-7. The only fly in the ointment was that it was 9-7 to the Australians (doubtless to the delight of at least two of my readers). At least we had the satisfaction of knowing later that they were beaten in the final by the South Africans Bob Hewitt and Frew McMillan.

Of course, tennis was a very different game then. 1967 was the last year before Wimbledon became open to professionals. Racquets were wooden, and, to prevent warping, we kept them in presses. The old-fashioned square press had a wingnut and bolt at each corner, each of which you had to loosen each time to remove the racquet. When this mechanism was replaced by a single metal bar which you pulled up to loosen the press instantly, we were stunned by the cutting-edge technology. The balls were white, not yellow. The racquets did not have the big heads they have now…and nor did the players. It was a gentler, less intense game, with no grunting and generally refined conduct, although, even before John McEnroe’s tantrums, Bob Hewitt was known to take offence at some umpiring decisions, and to plonk himself down, sit cross-legged on the court and refuse to move for a few minutes.

I have spent the last 50 years measuring each rising star – Newcombe, Borg, McEnroe, Connors (I always say that the difference between those two is that McEnroe hated losing and Connors loved winning), Sampras, Agassi, Federer, Nadal, Djokovic – against my gold standard – Rod Laver. Comparisons are, of course, in some sense meaningless. Each player is necessarily a product of his time, and shaped by specific equipment, playing surface, timetable and training parameters. I think each fan is to some extent similarly a product of his formative years.

However, Laver’s performance on the professional circuit in the six years between when he turned professional and when the grand slam tournaments became open to professionals, is sufficiently impressive to suggest that, had he not ‘lost’ those six years of opportunity, he would have won more major titles than any other player so far has. In addition, he changed the way the game was played, turning defensive shots into attacking ones. Before Laver, if you chased down a lob on your backhand, you threw up a lob in return. Laver’s wrist strength allowed him to play a topspin backhand drive cross-court or down the line, while running back. If I had to choose one player who gave me most pleasure to watch, it would definitely be either Laver or Federer, and I’m glad I don’t have to choose between them, but have been privileged to enjoy them both, and so many others.

Sadly, Tao hasn’t started playing tennis yet…but he was, coincidentally, involved in a sporting contest in failing light last week.

Year One and Counting

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Those of you who know me really well are probably as astonished as I am to realise that today’s post is my 52nd, and that, according to the Hebrew calendar, I reached my first blog birthday on 20 Marcheshvan, 2 days before the day I am writing this. Both when I started, and this week, we read in synagogue Pareshat (the weekly Torah portion) Chayei Sarah.  I tell you all this to justify this week’s topic, even though the Gregorian anniversary of my first post will actually only be on 12 November, in a couple of days.

Either way, my thoughts have been turning to the, for me, astounding fact that I have stuck at this blog for an entire year. I’m not sure I’ve ever stuck at anything voluntarily for that long, and certainly not anything that required effort (so my marriage doesn’t count…all the effort there has been on Bernice’s part).

In my childhood, I took up trainspotting, which, before it was the title of a novel and film, was a schoolboy hobby. My friend Peter and I would regularly meet up, each armed with a Bic ballpoint pen, a 6-inch wooden ruler and our copy of Ian Allen’s ABC Guide, which provided a list, arranged numerically by serial number, of all railway engines in service in the Eastern Region. We would buy a platform ticket at Ilford station, or, if we could afford it, take the train to Stratford, and sometimes even Liverpool Street, to spend hours on the platform, usually in a light but persistent drizzle.

If I close my eyes, I can still smell the unique cocktail made up of the heady and exotic scent of a steam train engine, all coal dust and steam, mingled with the dank odour of a soggy duffle coat.

We would check every engine we saw against our copies of the ABC Guide, and rule a neat (or, in my case, blotchy and slightly skewed) ballpoint line through the number of each engine that we had never spotted before.

I only bring up the whole topic in order to tell you that, despite the considerable up-front expense of buying the ABC Guide, I only stuck at it for a short while, until the task of filling pages and pages like this seemed just too daunting.

And that pattern seems to have repeated itself many times. The phrase nine-day wonder seems not entirely inappropriate.

And yet, here I am, coming to the end of an entire year, without having missed a week, and feeling that I can maybe contemplate another year. The fact is that, a couple of weeks ago, when I wrestled for two days over a post, I confided to Bernice that I was considering cutting down to a fortnightly post (that’s every two weeks for any Americans who don’t know the word – and it would be invidious of me to point out that we Brits have one word to do the job of 3 of yours). However, reaching this milestone has pumped oxygen back into my muscles, and I’m not ready to compromise just yet.

Seeking inspiration, I turned to a book that I bought second hand for 40p (so it can’t have been more than 49 years ago). My mother z”l, despite being a very intelligent woman, had no intellectual or high-cultural pretensions. She read the Daily Mirror without fail, every morning (the Sunday Mirror once a week). The daily press in Britain at the time was firmly divided into highbrow broadsheet papers and lowbrow tabloid papers, and the Mirror was definitely in the second category. Mum always maintained that, if you only had half an hour to read a paper, you would be better informed reading the Mirror than any other paper.

In the era when she read it, I think she was right. Since then, of course, much of the ‘quality’ press in Britain has been Murdoched down and the old tabloid papers now have little if anything to do with genuine news stories. In the 1950s and 60s, however, the Mirror was vigorous and succinct in its exploration and presentation of the news, and in its comment columns.

The most famous Mirror columnist was William Neil Connor, who contributed 500 words, two or three times a week, every week for over 30 years, from 1935 until shortly before his early death in 1967. I am, frankly, in awe. I know he was being paid for doing this, but even so, I greatly admire his ability to maintain so consistently high a level of writing over all this time, and not to run out of subjects, particularly since he didn’t have a second home in Portugal.

In fairness, this spell was broken by his war service from 1940 to 1945. To give you a tiny taste of his style: he began his first column after returning in 1945:

As I was saying when I was interrupted, it is a powerful hard thing to please all of the people all of the time….

Connor wrote under the pseudonym Cassandra. His columns were a mix of political comment, personal reminiscence, musings and comic entertainments. I remembered reading and enjoying Cassandra’s column very much, in the paper and in book form. When I revisited the book as today’s post was starting to take shape in my mind, I was surprised to discover how fresh his pieces still are. His no-nonsense, down-to-earth style has aged very gracefully.

As he became a well-known and well-respected columnist, Cassandra took on more serious assignments. He attended, and wrote about: the trials of Eichmann, and Jack Ruby (who shot J. F. Kennedy’s assassin); the enthronement of Pope John; Churchill’s funeral; the Korean War. He interviewed, among many others, President Kennedy, Senator McCarthy, Billy Graham, Charlie Chaplin, Adlai Stevenson, David Ben Gurion, Archbishop Makarios, and Marilyn Monroe.

All of these more serious pieces were interspersed with short columns telling appalling jokes based on wordplay. As he himself put it:

Forward into the abyss of unspeakable puns.

For example: there was the miserly theatrical agent who caught his assistant making an expensive international phone call in an attempt to book a pair of Persian acrobats, rather than sending a much cheaper letter. Challenged to explain his action, the assistant explained:

I was only trying to bill two Kurds with one phone.

It is at about this point that I realized this column was heading towards a second newspaper columnist. Once the penny dropped, writing the rest of it was easy.

Exhibit B is a columnist (and television personality) who I always thought I used to look like (when I had hair), and who I certainly would have loved to emulate: Bernard Levin.

He first came to prominence while working a theatre critic. He had a regular slot conducting a serious interview, or leading a discussion, on the ground-breaking satirical BBC TV show That Was The Week That Was. He showed no mercy when savaging the interviewees, and often launched into lengthy diatribes, leaving little time for the ‘victim’ to respond.

When he turned to being a newspaper columnist, he matched or bettered Cassandra’s 32-year run (with a 5-year interruption). Levin wrote five columns a week for the Daily Mail, from 1965 to 1970. Then the paper’s owner attempted to censor Levin’s support for the Labour Party, in breach of Levin’s contract, which guaranteed him political freedom in his column. He almost immediately joined The Times, where he wrote two or three columns a week for the next 27 years.

His topics were as diverse as the death watch beetle, Field Marshal Montgomery, Wagner, homophobia, censorship, Eldridge Cleaver, arachnophobia, theatrical nudity, and the North Thames Gas Board. His editor on The Times commented that ‘he made being opinionated, which he always was, accessible to people’, which seems to me a fine working definition of what an opinion column should be.

In his first published collection of his columns from The Times, Levin acknowledged his readers with a modesty and goodwill that somehow lived with his intellectual arrogance, air of moral superiority, and ruthless destruction of those he saw as evil, whether Peter Rachman the slum landlord or Charles Forte the hotelier and restauranteur. Levin wrote: [My readers’] letters in response to what they read under my name have always astonished me by their quantity and astounded me by their generosity”.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. I’m not sure what I envisaged when I started this blog a year ago. What I certainly didn’t expect was that, wherever my seat-of-the-pants flight of fancy took me, there would always (and I do mean always) be one or two readers out there who enjoyed the trip enough to write and tell me so.

I am immensely grateful to my groupie, who unfailingly thanks me and comments privately on each post; I can never quite decide whether it is genuine gratitude or old-world manners, but I’ll gladly take it, whatever it is, and every week I hold my breath after going live until I receive that email. Because every week I launch my little paper aeroplane, with no real idea whether it will plummet to the ground, land in a puddle, and be revealed as a soggy mess, or catch a fortuitous air current and soar triumphantly. (The truth, as is usual, appears to be more or less equidistant from those two extremes.)

It’s particularly rewarding when my memories chime with those of others, or spark in some of you memories of your own, which you then share with us. We’ve even had one or two rolling discussions in the comments, which is very exciting.

WordPress, the software I use to create my blog, also provides me with some statistical data. For example, I can see how many people view a new post, and how long they spend reading it. (Some of you must have taken that speed-reading course, I think…I hope.) I can also see in which countries my site is being viewed. For the most part, this is as expected: I know that my core readership is largely in Israel, UK, US and Canada. I also know who my readership in Portugal is, and who my one reader in Australia is, and I have a good idea about the one reader in each of France, Spain and Sweden.

However, every so often I get a surprise. I was being read in United Arab Emirates before the Abraham Accords were signed: once only, but nevertheless. I have also been surprised, and intrigued, to see readers in Finland, China and, most perplexingly, Uganda. If any of you reading this can throw light on any of these locations, I would be most grateful. (Of course, I suspect they may simply represent the locations of VPNs.)

I reached an all-time early high of just over 100 distinct readers. This was obviously because I sent out invitations to everyone I thought might conceivably be interested, and most people gave it a try. My readership has now settled down to around 65 or 70. A friend suggested to me that I might want to explore locating the blog on a more high-profile platform. To be honest, I very much like the idea that I am among friends. This way, I avoid unpleasant surprises when moderating the comments, or at least hope to!

One last observation. I regard myself as a pretty private person. I don’t ordinarily feel comfortable baring my soul, or even discussing my shortcomings, with anyone who is not a close blood relative. Curiously, the distance that the blog constructs beween me and you, dear reader, has made it easier for me to open up. Have no fear: I’m not going to go all touchy-feely on you. I have, however, surprised myself more than once in what I am prepared to put out there in the ether.

And that is quite enough navel-gazing for this week. Let’s cut to what is, for some of you, and for me, the chase: Tao. This week we find him chasing off to the shops. Rest assured: off-camera, he is being accompanied by a responsible adult, although by the looks of it that may only be necessary for the next week or two.

Momentous Moments

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My Uncle Bobby, z”l, was a jazz enthusiast, and always contended, in discussions with lovers of classical music, that anyone who claimed to enjoy listening to a 40-minute symphony was deluding himself: what he actually enjoyed were a few key moments, and he was prepared to wait through the other passages for the pleasure of these ‘highs’. Jazz recordings, Uncle Bobby believed, were a distillation of the ‘highs’, without any of the boring in-between bits.

I didn’t subscribe to his theory then, still less now…and yet there are some works that contain, for me, undeniable ‘high’ moments. I would, nevertheless, argue that the impact of those moments owes much to the surrounding music within which they sit.

For instance (I recall that my father z”l once told me that he was 14 years old before he realised that for instance was two words; until then, he visualised it as frinstance). Anyway, for instance, one such moment for me is the last three notes of the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4. If you can spare 5’ 35”, please listen to the whole movement, as interpreted by Christian Zimmerman and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Leonard Bernstein. (The movement runs from 19’25” to 25”00.) Of course, if you have a full 35 minutes to spare, I recommend listening to the whole thing.

I am no musicologist, but, for me, what is going on here is one long build towards resolution. At the beginning of the movement, the orchestra speaks in short, abrupt, hesitant, stuttering, broken phrases, in a minor key; the music is indecisive and troubled. The piano part, in contrast, is serene, measured, in long, sweeping passages. As the movement progresses, the piano passages became shorter, as if influenced by the orchestra. At the same time, the piano ‘calms’ the orchestra. By the end, soloist and orchestra are as one.

The movement closes with the orchestra playing a sustained chord, quietly, while the soloist plays a sequence of single notes moving up the scale, that start by echoing notes of the chord being played by the orchestra, in perfect harmony, but then turn back from the top of the scale, with the two final notes making us suspect that this is not the resolution of the piece, but a transition to what is to be a joyous final movement. As the piano crests that run, my heart always skips a beat. (Hope yours does, too.) Of course, I suffer from atrial fibrillation, so my heart often skips a beat. (Hope yours doesn’t!)

This happens, for me, not just in music, but also in theatre.

London’s Barbican Centre boasts a vary large apron stage; the distance from downstage right to upstage left, when the apron is in place, is about 16 metres.

If I close my eyes, I can still see Lady Percy, in a 1983 production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I, entering at the back of the stage, very agitated, having just learnt that Hotspur, her husband, is about to leave for war. She spots him at the very front of the stage, and runs the entire diagonal from back to front at full pelt. Hearing her approach, he turns; a few metres away from him, she leaps into his arms, and wraps her arms and legs around him.

From the dialogue between the couple in their few scenes together in the play, we can easily feel that they are uncomfortable with each other. Percy is a man of action, not talk, and he certainly does not feel any need to make a woman privy to his battle plans. Lady Percy seems unsure of Hotspur’s love, and feels shut out by him from the things that matter to him.

However, in this one moment on stage, we learn of a whole other side to their relationship that the words cannot convey. We see tremendous passion, impetuosity and physicality. We see that Lady Percy trusts Hotspur completely, and is absolutely confident that he will catch her.

When he does catch her, without staggering back, it is a thrilling moment for the audience: Hotspur is standing perilously close to the front edge of the apron, and Lady Percy, though slight, has launched herself at him like a bullet. We feel some of the relief we feel watching a successful acrobatic or trapeze performance, and we admire Hotspur’s strength and solidity. The leap, and the catch, are an expression of their love for each other, an expression that is missing from their dialogue. The texture of their relationship, and of the play, is enriched by this wonderful moment of theatre.

One more moment, this time of both theatre and music. Bernice and I were privileged to see Amadeus, in Bristol, in its pre-London 1982 run, with Frank Finlay playing Salieri. At the time, the round trip from Nantymoel, where we then lived, to Bristol was well over three hours; I can honestly say it would have been worth walking to Bristol to see this particular production. Although the play had premiered with Paul Scofield in London a year earlier, we knew very little about it before seeing it.

There is a scene, near the beginning of the play, when Salieri, in a single revelatory moment, realises Mozart’s genius. He hears, from a side-room, a wind serenade, which you can hear here. Instead of attempting to describe the music, I will give you the words the playwright Peter Schaeffer gave to Salieri:

The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse. Bassoons and basset horns, like a rusty squeezebox. And then suddenly, high above it, an oboe. A single note, hanging there, unwavering. Until a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I’d never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.

I can only add that, in Bristol, that evening, that music soared over the theatre and we all felt the same awe as Salieri, knowing that we were in the presence of a divine talent.

It is these moments that drive me to continue going to live theatre and live music concerts. At a certain level, this makes no sense. You pay a not insignificant sum of money for tickets, drive an inordinate distance, spend ages looking for a parking space, and then have to half-jog to reach the auditorium in time. No sooner do you sit down than you have to stand again so that even-later-comers can squeeze past, and now you’re settling yourself for an evening of trying to filter out the rustling, coughing and whispering of those around you.

Why do I do it? I wouldn’t bet on my ears being able to distinguish a live recital in the concert hall from the reproduction through my mid-priced CD player and speakers in the comfort of my own home. At home I can listen to Daniel Barenboim, Pinhas Zukerman and Jacqueline du Pre performing Beethoven’s Archduke Trio, in a recording from 1970 that has perhaps never been bettered for unabashed youthful enthusiasm.

We’ve already established that I’m not a musicologist; if I were, I could do even better, perhaps, and read the score, hearing the music in my head exactly as I feel it should sound. So why do we still go to concert halls…or, indeed, theatres, to see live plays, when we can download films and enjoy a more comfortable seat with unimpeded sightlines.

Not everyone does go, of course. Our son, Micha’el, himself a multi-talented amateur musician, hates going to live arts performances of any kind, because he finds himself on the edge of his seat, imagining all of the things that might go dreadfully wrong.

This is, paradoxically, almost exactly the same reason that drives me to go to live arts performances; I find myself on the edge of my seat, imagining all of the things that might go wonderfully right. The fact is that, every time I go to the theatre, as the lights go down, I have a strong feeling that this may just be the night when the cast, or the musicians, all give the performance of their lives. This, I guess, makes me an incurable optimist, but the moments I have described here, and more than a few others over the decades, give me good grounds for my optimism.

All I have to hope now is that, at some point in the future before we all become immobile or gaga, we. and you, will be able again to enjoy live arts performances (and grandchildren, of course).

Until that moment, Bernice and I will just have to make do with our video of A Man for All Seasonings.

Quercus Suber and the Screwtop

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All this time we’ve been together and we haven’t once talked about cork. Can you believe it? No, I can’t either. The truth is, I planned to write about cork 11 months ago, and then something else popped into my head and drove it out. I really must buy a larger-capacity memory stick.

I’ve been pulling corks out of wine bottles for the last half-century, without giving a moment’s thought to the interesting questions: Why do they use cork to seal wine bottles? Where does the cork come from?

I’m guessing you erudite lot don’t think cork is off-topic; just in case you do, let me tell you that Portugal is the world’s largest producer of cork, being responsible for 49.5% of annual production worldwide. Another 30.5% comes from Spain, and the remaining 20% comes from other European and North African countries in the western half of the Mediterranean basin, whose temperate climate is ideal for these trees.

You don’t have to be in Portugal long to discover the cork trees, or cork oaks, as they are properly known, or quercus suber (which is ‘cork oak’ in Latin and therefore posher), or, in Portuguese, sobreiro. Although the main concentration is in the South, the trees are cultivated as far north as Penamacor, where they can easily be spotted in the mixed-tree forest. 25% of Portugal’s total forest area consists of cork trees.

In the south, over a million hectares are covered by the montado system, an ecologically balanced multi-functional agro-silvo-pastoral system, which has existed for over 1300 years; during all that time, the oak trees have been protected by law, and a Government permit is needed to fell any cork oak.

This three-function ecology, supporting agricultural crops, fruit-bearing trees (the oaks’ acorns) and also grazing land, ensures the continued viability of the soil, acts as a barrier to the desertification encroaching from the south, and produces over a billion dollars in export value of natural and agglomerated cork, making cork Portugal’s sixth most valuable export.

Being an evergreen, the cork oak also photosynthesises throughout the year, and captures an estimated 73 tonnes of carbon dioxide for every tonne of cork harvested. As if that were not enough, the cork forests provide a habitat for more than 130 different species of vertebrates and about 95% of all land mammals in Portugal, including the Iberian lynx that I encountered, stuffed, in Penamacor’s museum.  

As a result of all this, the montados are recognized as one of the 36 biodiversity hotspots in the world and have UNESCO-protected status. In addition, the cork oak was officially designated Portugal’s national tree in 2011.

There are two final environmental boxes that cork ticks.

The harvested cork retains the ability to absorb carbon dioxide, so your unvarnished cork noticeboard is actually helping the planet.

Because of its cell structure, cork does not burn easily. In addition, it produces no flame. It is, therefore, a very good fire retardant, which, in Portugal, is a significant advantage. You may remember I wrote many months ago about Portugal’s recent spate of forest fires.

Now, I’m the kind of person who can recognize a Christmas tree, even without fairy lights (although I can’t tell my spruce from my pine), a horse-chestnut (after a youth heavily invested in conkers), an olive (you can’t walk 50 yards in Maale Adumim without tripping over the roots of an olive tree), a loquat (we have one in our garden) and a cypress (we used to have one in our garden till it started encroaching on the flight-path of passing planes)….and…and…and that’s about it. However, I quickly learnt to recognize the cork trees around Penamacor, at least the mature ones, because of the extraordinary nature of the tree and the way the cork is harvested.

Cork is basically an outer bark of the tree. It can be stripped away, leaving the inner bark, without damaging the tree, and the tree then produces new cork, growing a new outer skin. The stripping of the cork is strictly regulated by law; only a mature tree (at least 25 years old) can be stripped; the width of the band stripped from around the tree cannot be more than three times the diameter of the tree; a tree cannot be stripped more often than once every nine years.

Since the trees have a lifespan of under 200 years, on average a tree will be stripped 17 times in its lifetime. The first and second strippings of virgin cork do not have a sufficiently regular structure, and are too hard, to be used for bottle corks. They instead are used for tiling and decorative items.

Let me illustrate how you can (at least, how I) identify a cork oak tree; it’s the one showing a lot of leg. The number that you can see on the tree in the foreground records the year in which the cork was stripped. Every year, one ninth of the trees are stripped, and this tree is from the last year of the nine-year cycle. (If you stand close, you can almost hear it shouting: ‘ I am not a number; I am a free tree’.)

So that’s the ‘Where from’; what about the ‘Why’?

Cork has a honeycomb cell structure which gives it remarkable insulating properties.  It’s flexible, compressible and elastic as well as lightweight, impermeable, durable and hypoallergenic. All of this makes it an ideal material for sealing a bottle of wine. And yet….

For white wines, and other wines designed to be drunk young, a completely airtight seal is ideal. This can be provided by an aluminium cap (screwtop). To the best of my understanding, if you keep your white wine for any length of time before opening, a screwtop might be the most reliable way of retaining the full flavour of the wine.

However, many reds are bottled in the expectation that they will mature in the bottle, and they are only ready to drink some time later, and may indeed reach their prime several years later. For this maturation in the bottle to occur, the wine needs to be exposed to some air…but not too much. If the right cork (and I believe this is a function of the exact degree of elasticity and compressibility of the cork, the tightness of the honeycomb ‘weave’) is married to the right wine, then natural cork does a better job than any other material of helping the wine achieve its full flavour.

The big disadvantage of cork is that it can (in a small percentage of cases) taint the wine, so that the wine becomes ‘corked’. How it does that is interesting. Cork, like any wood material, attracts fungal micro-organisms. If the cork has been exposed to certain chlorinated compounds (sometimes used in pesticides), these compounds can combine with the fungal micro-organisms to create TCA, which can be retained in the cork and later dissolved into the wine. While completely harmless and odourless in itself, this TCA can then distort the way our brain perceives smell, and make the wine taste, to us, like mouldy newspaper or wet dog. ‘I’m picking up notes of underripe strawberry and previously flooded basement.’ Remarkably, some people can detect TCA at one part per trillion, which is the equivalent of one thousandth of a teaspoon in an Olympic swimming pool.

However, just as chemistry created this problem, chemistry can resolve it. If you open a bottle at home and find it corked, pour the wine into a bowl lined with cling film. Leave for a few minutes while the non-polar TCA molecules are drawn to the chemically-similar plastic. Decant the wine from the bowl and you will find the essence of soggy doggy gone. (In a restaurant, of course, you simply summon the sommelier and inform him that the wine is corked. If the restaurant does not have a sommelier, you call over the waiter and tell him it stinks.)

Synthetic ‘corks’ avoid this problem, but do not have the same subtly imperfect hermeticity, and therefore cannot be matched as well with great reds.

So, that’s more than you may have wanted to know about cork.

There’s just one more piece of business today. A couple of weeks ago, some of you were impressed by Tao’s skills at breaking into kitchen cabinets. You will be interested to know that he has, since then, upped his game considerably.

To forestall any comments:

  1. Tao is entirely self-taught; he learnt this skill purely through observation.
  2. There are no caustic products in that cupboard. The washing powder and other products are home-made and not hazardous.

Nevertheless, I think we’ll be returning those child-proof locks and asking for our money back.

There’s Old….and Then There’s O-o-o-ld

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You find me in a dilemma. In recent months, I have, I hope, served well those of my readers who are happy to follow me along any whimsical byway. However, those who demand that I give at least a passing nod to my ostensible subject – Portugal (as is more than suggested by the blog’s witty title of Penamacorrespondent) – are, by this stage, probably feeling cheated. What am I to do?

My fund of anecdotes about personal encounters with Portugal is exhausted; until Bernice and I manage to get there again, I have only two choices. I can make stuff up (tempting, but rather risky, having already learnt the hard way what an erudite lot you are), or I can Google. So, this week’s post comes to you freshly but shamelessly milked from the internet; it will, of course, be filtered through the distorting lens of my particular and peculiar perspective.

Today’s basic fact, then, is that Portugal is old. I realise that this bald statement needs a little elaboration and context, so let’s talk about Montreal. When I started working as a technical writer, my first business trip abroad was to Montreal. When I mentioned this to friends and work colleagues, all the North Americans assured me that I would love Montreal because it was so old.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, and I certainly hadn’t thought this through, but, when I had a chance to look around the city a little, it wasn’t quite what I had been led to expect. There were a couple of charming corners, but it was mostly just a modern city. It was only when I had made several further trips across the Atlantic, and seen St Louis, Dallas, Seattle, Atlanta, and other cities, that I understood. For a North American city, Montreal is indeed unusually old. However, for a European who knows London, Paris or Budapest, Venice, Florence or Rome, Montreal is nothing very special. There’s old, and then there’s o-o-o-ld.

Since I count some ex-Montrealers (by birth or adoption) among my regular readers, I should hastily add that, over a number of later trips, I grew very fond of the city, resenting only the fact that on my winter trips (and, let’s face it, most trips to Montreal are winter trips, whenever you go), my eyebrows tended to freeze up.

It strikes me that different countries, different cities, wear their age differently. Almost all of my travel has been on business, to major cities, and my opportunities to explore have usually been restricted to one Sunday, or sometimes just one evening. This means that I have a snapshot of each city. Let me share some of those subjective, undoubtedly extremely incomplete, snapshots with you, and see how many other readers I can antagonize.

First, the difference between Athens and Rome. Athens was, for me, an unexceptional, shabby city, with rundown neighbourhoods apparently inhabited by men in vests and stray dogs. The Acropolis feels completely divorced from the city. However, I must say that, even though when I climbed it I discovered the Parthenon clad, mid-renovation, in scaffolding, I still found it to be a magical place that transported me back two and a half millenia, and allowed me to completely forget the city beneath.

On the other hand, the thread of Rome’s history is woven into the very fabric of the modern city. If you walk the city at night, every time you turn a corner you discover another church, or fountain, or ruin, stunningly but tastefully lit; you have a sense of a beautiful city that had a continuous and long-running historical importance.

Then there is Dublin, where you find isolated pockets of Georgian architectural splendour, single magnificent buildings or entire elegant streets: all memorials to the brief period at the end of the 18th Century when Ireland enjoyed prosperity. Of the centuries of poverty and obscurity on either side of that brief period, nothing much remains. From 1800, the city appears to have leapt to the 1990s, and a brief period of EU prosperity and expansion.

Of course, there is also London, where there are a mere handful of national treasures from before the Great Fire of 1666 – including the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Hall, and Guildhall – but a wealth of glorious architecture from every period since 1666, starting with Wren’s churches. There are streets in Central London that you can walk down and view fine examples of architecture from every century from the 17th to the 21st. Whether you regard that as a ghastly mishmash or a glorious riotous celebration is a matter of taste.

Which brings me to Jerusalem, and Israel in general. London’s divider, 1666, is a very thin line; Israel’s is a great swathe. In Israel, if you find anything more than 120 years old, it will almost certainly be more than 2000 years old. The presence of the distant past is inescapable. Scarcely can a road be laid or an underground carpark built without some archaeological find being uncovered. Just in the last few weeks, a prehistoric copperworks has been unearthed, which may contain the earliest known example of a smelting furnace in the world. So far as distinctive city architecture is concerned, Israel’s World Heritage masterpiece is the Bauhaus architecture of Tel Aviv, Israel’s first modern city.

Ah! I was supposed to be writing about Portugal, wasn’t I?

While Portugal cannot compete with Rome, or Jerusalem, it is old. As you explore its towns and cities, you can see buildings, intact or in ruins, that reflect the centuries of its history. As I have written earlier, Penamacor itself shows evidence of the last 900 years of occupation. Indeed, there is an important archaeological dig going on there at the moment.

Portugal is the oldest nation-state in Europe, in the sense that it has had the same borders since 1139, when Alfonso Henriques was proclaimed the first King of Portugal. England could have been a contender for this title; sadly it has been, in contrast to Portugal, unable to sit still over the last 400 years; instead it has been fiddling around, adding Wales and Scotland here, Ireland there, and then losing most of Ireland again. Throughout all of these upheavals, Portugal has remained constant and unchanging.

When you’ve been around that long, you acquire some other age records along the way. The English first gave military aid to Portugal in 1147, during the Siege of Lisbon, which ended with Portugal taking Lisbon from the Moors. After thinking about it for over 200 years, the two countries eventually signed the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance in 1373. Since then, they have been coming to each other’s aid against such common enemies as Spain, France and Germany. Even in the Second World War, when Portugal carefully maintained neutrality, it offered significant humanitarian assistance to Allied civilians and some logistic assistance to Allied military forces. The Alliance still stands, and is the oldest extant diplomatic alliance in the world.

Livraria Bertrand in Lisbon is the oldest bookstore in the world. It has been trading since 1732 (beating the Moravian Bookshop in Pennsylvania by 13 years). Of course, Bertrand has not been in the same premises all that time: It was forced to move in the aftermath of a massive earthquake, and has only been in its current premises since 1755.

And, finally, Portugal was the world’s first genuinely global empire. In 1494, the Treaty of Tordesillas gave Portugal the eastern half of the New World, including Brazil and parts of Africa and Asia. Portugal’s empire actually lasted from 1415, when Cueta, a port on the Northern coast of Morocco, was captured, until 1999, when Macau was handed over to China.

The more I read about Portugal, the more it seems to have in common with Britain. There’s even the explanation of how Portuguese Jewish exiles brought fried fish to England (via Holland). The breadcrumb batter served to make palatable the fish that was fried on Friday to be eaten cold on shabbat.

The Doting Grandfather

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You can’t say I’m not giving you fair warning this week, with that heading.

One of the things on which Bernice and I agree to differ is competitiveness. She used to remonstrate: ‘It’s only a game!’, until she realized that I had no understanding of what the word ‘only’ meant in that sentence. In the early years of our marriage, when we had no children and boundless energy (and I had two working hips), we used to play badminton regularly. However, it was never an entirely satisfying experience for either of us, because I couldn’t ‘enjoy’ the game in the way she wanted, and she couldn’t take the game as seriously as I wanted.

Those of you who don’t hail from Britain may be unfamiliar with the observation of Bill Shankly, a very successful football (soccer) managers of the 1960s, who said (or, my research suggests, didn’t exactly say, but it’s a great quote, genuine or not): ‘Some people say that football’s a matter of life and death, but it’s much more important than that.’ Well, I don’t actually agree about football, which has always left me cold, but I applaud the sentiment as applied to competitive sport in general, and, indeed, competition of any kind.

One measure of the magnitude of Bernice’s devotion to family is the fact that, after both of our kids had inherited my competitive gene (‘I’m more competitive than you!’ ‘No, you’re not! I’m much more competitive than you!’), she participated with scarcely a word of complaint in years and years of board games, charades and trivia quizzes. Indeed, even through those stormy teenage years (mine lasted until well into my forties), we were always the family that would play together to stay together.

I’ve always had a fairly good general knowledge, or at least I did have until I put it down somewhere, and now for the life of me I can’t remember where. I’ve also always been interested in finding out the answers to things I didn’t know, or couldn’t remember. These days, to do that all you need is an internet connection and a nose for distinguishing between fake news and fact; where (and when) I come from, you needed a good reference library.

Of course, I realise now that distortion, misrepresentation, and pure invention did not start with the internet. I was for several years the proud owner of a handsome volume entitled The Commonwealth Annual 1963, full of informative articles about the far-flung islands of civilization that Britain had established among the barabarians. When, a few years ago, I revisited this book for the first time in 40 years, I turned into the deeply ashamed owner of it, with its colonial condescension and cancelling of indigenous culture…and then I binned it.

Fortunately, for us the importance of a good reference library has not been completely eclipsed by Google. If you are Shabbat-observant, then none of those thorny questions that arise over the Shabbat dinner table can be resolved on the spot online. Your only options are to wait until after Shabbat (and you probably don’t need me to tell you that the challenge then is to remember what the hell it was that you didn’t know six hours previously) or to refer to your reference library in real time. Among my favourite volumes in our particular library is Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, whose every entry is a miniature enlightenment. Here’s the entry on tawdry, for example:

A corruption of St Audrey. At the annual fair of St Audrey, in the Isle of Ely, cheap jewellery and showy lace called St Audrey’s lace was sold; hence tawdry, which is applied to anything gaudy, in bad taste, and of little value.

Many’s the time that I’ve been able to satisfy our curiosity as to the origin of, say, raining cats and dogs, which, by the way, has nothing to do with household pets being washed out of their beds in the thatched eaves of a medieval dwelling.

Let me attempt to steer this ramshackle carriage back towards my intended subject. I remember Micha’el telling me a few years ago that he still remembered the shock he felt when he first discovered that I didn’t know everything. Knowing me, I would have expected that to be a humiliating moment for me. And yet, it was a moment that gave me immense pleasure: recognizing that your parents don’t know everything is an important step on a child’s journey to autonomy.

In a similar vein, I fought as hard as I could to win any game I played with the children; nobody could ever accuse me of throwing a match in order to let my kids feel good. What that meant, and what I wanted it to mean, was that when they did beat me for the first time, at tennis, or chess, or snakes and ladders, or uno, they knew that they had beaten me on equal terms. These are the only contests where I have accepted defeat with equanimity, and even delight. To be outstripped by your children, it seems to me, is one of the great pleasures of parenthood.

These days, of course, I have long since ceased to be a worthy opponent: here I am, a physical wreck, whose knowledge of popular culture ended in the early 1980s, and whose grasp of academic subjects ended much earlier. Good grief: the school I went to didn’t even teach biology; the only ‘respectable’ sciences were physics and chemistry. These days, I know that Micha’el’s grasp of quantum mechanics far outstrips mine. (To be honest, I don’t actually have a grasp of quantum mechanics.) We knew Esther had left us behind when she started her master’s in Glocal Development, and we gently told her there was no such word as glocal.

However (and here we reach today’s subject), I had thought I would have a bit of time before I needed to be worried about being outsmarted by Tao. Our grandson is, after all, not quite 19 months old. And yet…

For Bernice and I, the highlight of our week is a video chat via WhatsApp with the kids every Thursday. As well as catching up with any news, it also gives us a chance to spend time with Tao. In the last few months, his engagement has grown, and he is now a very active, and pro-active, participant in the conversation, even though he is not at all verbal: vocal, yes, with a variety of animal sounds and a few sounds of letters, but, for the moment, he substitutes grunts for words.

He also has a limited repertoire of songs of which he is excessively fond. On Thursday, almost as soon as we started our chat, he ‘said’: ‘I wonder if you would mind singing for me: The wheels on the bus.’ Rather than me trying to describe just how he conveyed that message, Tao kindly agreed to demonstrate for you.

Just in case this is a song that has slipped under your radar, its primary thrust is: The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round. The wheels on the bus go round…’You get the idea!

Of course, like the doting grandparents we are, we obliged. This was doubly satisfying. Not only did Tao reward us with a generous round of applause when we finished, but we also earned Micha’el’s gratitude, since every time we sing it is one less time that he has to sing it that day.

We carried on our conversation and, a couple of minutes later, Tao rolled his arms again to indicate that he would like a reprise. How could we say no?

When he asked for a fourth time, I decided to apply some of that clever child psychology that I have learnt from my wife, who has a T-shirt with the totally accurate slogan: I’m a kindergarten teacher. What’s your superpower? I ignored his hand signals, and asked him whether he would like to show us a book or a toy. As he instantly turned and trotted off to his book cupboard, I allowed myself a moment of self-satisfaction. I have spent the last 25 or so years behaving like a matchbox – Keep away from small children – and here I was managing Tao like a pro.

When Tao came back and placed himself in front of the screen again, he had one of his favourite books, a Hebrew word and picture book. Without hesitation, he turned to the page with a picture of a lorry (truck), and pointed, pointedly, to the wheels. There I was, sucker-punched by a child just over a year and a half old; paradoxically, I couldn’t have felt prouder. Needless to say, Bernice and I treated him to a 5-star rendition, with 4 verses and harmonies, which, in fairness to Tao, earned us a big smile and another generous round of applause.

Grandparenthood: the dote to which there is no known antidote.

Temporarily Permanent or Permanently Temporary?

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I had intended to try to dredge up online something illuminating to say about Portugal, to satisfy those of you who claim to find an outsider’s view of Portugal more interesting than an insider’s view of my mind. However….

I am sitting writing this in my sukkah. If I’ve lost you already (my readership being to some extent heterogeneous), then you can get a quick background on the sukkah by reading the first four paragraphs here.

It’s noon on Sunday, so I’m feeling much less pressured than last week, and anyway sitting out under my schach and decorations feels very relaxing. Mind you, since many of my weeks at the moment consist of sitting outside doing very little it’s not easy to understand why this feels different. To explain why, let me tell you the history of our sukkot.

For our first year in Israel, we used the wood of our shipping crate to construct a sukkah on the balcony of our apartment on the absorption centre.

When we moved to a ground-floor apartment in Jerusalem, we bought a metal-frame, material-wall sukkah, three metres by two, which we erected on the grassed area outside our salon window. Until we put in French windows, accessing the sukkah involved negotiating kitchen steps placed on each side of the salon window, but it was all good fun…and we were much younger then.

Mind you, climbing through a modest salon window while holding a pot of hot soup or a tray of stuffed vegetables was a skill you had to start practising around four weeks before in order to be able to carry it off with aplomb on the night itself, all the while with a white linen serviette draped over your left forearm.

Now, in Maale Adumim, we are blessed with a backyard that is about five metres by four, walled on all four sides; it is therefore fairly well protected from the wind and outside noise. We are further blessed with a climate that allows us to eat outside for most of the year: in summer, breakfast and dinner; for some of the rest of the year, lunch.

Not long after we moved to Maale Adumim, we acquired a second sukkah, identical to the first. I then bought a couple of T-junction uprights, which enabled us to combine the two into a single four-metre-by-three sukkah, which fitted our backyard very nicely. In the years after the kids left home, erecting the sukkah became more of a challenge with each passing year, involving as it did bringing heavy rolls of bamboo schach down from Micha’el’s bedroom, and also taking the sukkah and schach-retaining planks down from their chest-high cradle in the backyard, then, after Sukkot, performing a weightlifting clean and aborted jerk to get them back into the cradle.

And so, two summers ago, when we were having the backyard turned into more of a garden, we decided to install a pergola. Not only would this give us much needed shade that would significantly extend the hours we could spend outside, but it could also double as a sukkah, solving the problem of what we were going to do when, at some point in the next fifty years, erecting a frame sukkah became too much for me.

The pergola extends over all but a metre-wide strip of the far end of the backyward; the existing walls act as the minimum three walls required for a kosher sukkah, and the wooden slats of the pergola act as schach. As an added bonus, there are no material walls blocking the light from the garden, so I now no longer need to rig up cables for lighting inside the sukkah.

These days, ‘building a sukkah’ means, for me, going up a ladder, lifting and replacing one slat from each row of slats across the entire width of the sukkah. This year, that took me 4 minutes, not counting decorating the sukkah.

Except, of course, that you have to count the decorating. Let me tell you about our decorations. Most of our friends decorate their sukkah modestly, showing impeccable taste. We have always favoured a style of decoration that I like to think of as Rococo-Gaudi. This is largely attributable to two of Bernice’s trademark characteristics. She is a sentimentalist hoarder when it comes to the children’s artwork, and she adores anything like the Blackpool illuminations. As a result, when the kids were young and came home from kindergarten every year with another one or more artwork decorations for the sukkah, these had to be added to our existing stock. Every year we would also buy another paper ball, or pomegranate, or other bauble.

I was once on business in Atlanta in early December, and found, in a Walmart, coloured, flashing Christmas lights. As I took them to the cash desk, an assistant manager came over to me, leant in, and said quietly: ‘Perfect for the sukkah.’ When I presented them to Bernice on my return home, her eyes lit up more brightly than the strings of bulbs.

One Sukkot in Jerusalem, a freak storm on the first night completely soaked our sukkah, and quite a lot of the kids’ artwork was lost. (It’s fair to say that this upset some of us less than others.) Since then, our decorations have been a little more sparse, but the untrained eye would probably not detect the difference.

A few years ago, Bernice finally allowed some further rationalization, and we put aside a lot of the decorations. However, we still have more than enough, and, to be honest, I am glad that we do. Now that we have a pergola, the only thing that distinguishes Sukkot – that makes our sukkah different from our pergola – is the decorations. We come into Sukkot having eaten under the pergola all summer; we need the decorations to make this week special.

Putting the decorations up under the pergola has presented a new challenge. We like to have paper chains and rows of small flags spanning the sukkah. I have drilled hooks into the walls at just over two metres above the ground, so that I can easily hook on the decoration strings while standing on a kitchen stool. However, with that long a span, the decorations sag in the middle. Since our pergola roof is unusually high, at 3.2 metres, I cannot attach decorations directly to the roof.

This year, I came up with a typically Heath Robinson (Rube Goldberg) solution. I tied two equal lengths of nylon fishing line onto a metal washer, which I then ‘cast’ out of an upstairs window so that it landed on the roof of the pergola close to the centre. I then climbed a ladder, screwed an eye into the central roof strut in the centre, retrieved the nylon lines, untied them from the washer, threaded them through the eye and reattached them to the washer. With the line fully extended, it dangled at an accessible height above the ground. As I put up each span of decorations, I threaded it through this loop. When all was finished, I went back upstairs and reeled in the line, until the washer reached the eye, through which it was unable to pass.

At the end of sukkot, I will let down the line, unthread the decorations, and reel the line in again, so that, for all of the rest of the year, there will be a small eye and washer on the underside of the pergola roof, which would be unnoticed by anyone if I could only resist the temptation to point them out in order to demonstrate how clever I am. The photo gives you an idea of the final effect, and also gives you a view of Micha’el’s 28-year-old, rain-damaged, hand-drawn Israeli flags.

All of which explains, I hope, why I am unsure whether to regard our pergola-sukkah as permanently temporary or temporarily permanent.

Speaking of temporary permanence, Micha’el and Tslil have posted a new video on their YouTube channel documenting the erection of their tipi (which, when I was at school, was called a teepee). You may want to view, like, comment, share, subscribe, or all of the above.

Time for a meanwhile, I think. Looks like by this time next year Tao will be ready to go up the ladder for me, although I may suggest to him that he try it without holding a corn cracker.

Days of Awe…and Reflection

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What more appropriate way to start my first blog after Yom Kippur than by asking for your forgiveness! Or, perhaps, ‘What less appropriate…’, since I was required to ask forgiveness for all of my sins against my fellow man before the Gates of Heaven closed at sunset last night.

Be that as it may, my apologies to those of my faithful readers who, always to my astonishment, open my blog within 15 minutes of my posting it, ideally every Tuesday at 09:00 Israel, or 06:00 UTC.

Incidentally, what does UTC stand for? Universal Time Coordinated, or, if you prefer Universel Temps Coordonné. And just what is that supposed to be? Universal Time Coordinated is bad English; it should be Coordinated Univeral Time, or CUT. Equally, Universel Temps Coordonné is bad French; it should be Temps Universel Coordonné, or TUC. The explanation for ‘UTC’ lies in that word equally. When the International Communications Union decided to adopt UTC as the time standard to be used throughout the world, they wanted to avoid confusion by having one single set of initials adopted globally. They could not adopt CUT, or the Francophones would have been furious; they rejected TUC, because the Anglophones would have sent a gunboat. So they decided on a compromise which made equally little sense in French and English, and UTC it is. (Things were much easier when Britannia ruled the waves and we called it GMT.)

I can offer you an explanation for the delay in this post, although you may feel it is the equivalent of ‘The dog ate my homework’ or, as schoolchildren probably say in this corona world, ‘Our internet was down’.

Before Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year) 11 days ago, when severe restrictions were imposed on maximum numbers allowed in synagogues, a neighbouring family volunteered their spacious backyard for a small minyan (prayer quorum). Bernice and I had previously decided that we were not going to shul; despite the extremely hard work done in preparation by the shul officials, it would, we felt, be very difficult to impose the restrictions on a congregation that, at this time of year, usually includes many who have no affiliation to the shul, and we anticipated some unpleasant arguments. (I’m delighted to say that, from what I have heard, everything passed peacefully.)

We had been planning to daven (pray) at home, which seemed, in prospect, to offer both swings – being able to daven at a pace that suited you individually, rather than being driven by the pace of the leader of prayers – and roundabouts – the New Year services include very many wonderful tunes, and being part of a 200-strong congregation all singing enthusiastically certainly enhances the atmosphere of the day.

In the event, we were able to attend a ‘shul’ just down the road. I have never lived less than a 15-minute walk from the shul I daven in – and always an uphill walk – so to leave the house four minutes before the service begins and still arrive a minute early is wonderful. (Mind you, I have never wanted to live round the corner from shul, since that usually means that you are the person the rabbi calls at 6 AM when they are one short of a minyan of 10 men for the morning service.)

Services over Rosh Hashana, Shabbat and Yom Kippur have been very special. On Yom Kippur morning, we began at 6:00, in the cool of early morning and cut many of the optional piyyutim (liturgical poems) that are usually sung. This enabled us to finish the morning and additional services at 9:40, and be back home before the real heat of the day. For comparison, our shul usually starts at 7:00 and finishes around 3:00. There has been considerable talk of whether, post-corona, when things get back to normal(!), we should aim to keep this streamlined davening. I suspect there will be advocates on both sides of the argument.

I must say that davening outside is a different and refreshing experience. Davening the closing service of Yom Kipper as the light dwindled and the air cooled certainly reinforced the sense of squeezing everything out of the last moments of the day, the last opportunity to make our voice heard on High.

The make-up of the minyan is also very interesting. The core, from our shul, is five or six men strong, and our numbers have been augmented by another five or six locals who are not only not members of our shul, but are Sephardi rather than Ashkenazi Jews. The differences in the liturgy are significant: on Shabbat, less so, but on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, more so. For most modern orthodox Israelis, this is not daunting: many Ashkenazi communities daven in a Sephardi-lite style, and the average person, through school, army, and workplace minyanim will have been exposed fairly often to both liturgies.

On the other hand, growing up in Britain, I scarcely knew what a Sephardi was. I had an aunt who had married a Sephardi, and I seem to remember that we attended my cousin’s barmitzvah at Bevis Marks Sephardi shul in London. This was, I should point out, in the Spanish-Portuguese tradition, as brought to England largely from Holland, whereas in Israel most Sephardi families are Mizrachi, coming from Arab countries in the early years of the State. So there are differences within the Sephardi world. I mean no offence in suggesting that the Spanish-Portuguese tradition is more High Church, and the Mizrachi tradition is Low Church.

Of that one service in Bevis Marks I remember nothing – although, in my defence, let me say that my cousin Ian is seven years older than me, which seemed a much greater difference on his thirteenth birthday, when I was not yet six, than it does now.

Apart from that, the extent of my first-hand experience of Sephardi liturgy before we came on aliya was hearing two Sephardi cousins in my brother’s community recite the longer, Sephardi, text of the mourner’s kaddish.

I still vividly remember our first shabbat on the absorption centre where we lived for the first 18 months after coming on aliya. I had heard that there was a minyan in a shelter on the absorption centre, so I looked no further. I walked in on Friday late afternoon, with my Ashkenazi prayer book, and found myself a seat just as the service was about to start. I didn’t recognize what was being recited, so I waited for the first words of Ashrei, with which I was expecting the service to begin. By the time Ashrei came, I had almost given up hope, and was wondering whether these people were Jewish at all. I had not known that, in the Mizrachi Sephardi tradition, Song of Songs is recited in full before the afternoon service.

To return to our neighbourhood minyan. While many men can capably lead the daily and shabbat services, leading the services on festivals, and especially on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, is more of a specialist role. Luckily, the host of our minyan is a wonderful leader of prayer, and I was anticipating very enjoyable services. A couple of days before, he approached me, pointing out that, of the congregants, only he and I had any experience of leading these services. He is a regular leader in our shul, and, at various times since we came to Maale Adumim, I have led services: the shorter evening and afternoon services on Rosh Hashana, and, when we were short of real experts, I have even tackled the longer and more demanding morning services.

However, I was younger then, arguably less riddled with self-doubt, and felt that I was among friends. Nevertheless, when our host asked if I would share the load with him, how could I refuse? So on Rosh Hashana I led the evening service both days (the one service I am most comfortable leading), and also the afternoon service, which required more homework, but not too much. All went well, so I’m told.

However, I had made it clear to him that on Yom Kippur, I was prepared to lead the afternoon service, but not the evening. This evening service includes the famous Kol Nidrei and is, in addition, a longer and far more complex service than any other evening service. At the end of Shabbat, he took me aside and said, quite reasonably, that he felt the burden of leading the evening and morning prayers would be too much for him, especially since we would be continuing into the heat of the day. I felt that I could not say no, much as I wanted to. Bernice assures me that I have once led this service in shul, but I’m not sure whether she just wanted me to feel less sick.

Having agreed on Saturday evening, I then had to devote all of Sunday to locating demonstration videos on YouTube, to refresh my memory of the liturgy and the tunes. As Sunday went on, I felt less and less sure of myself, and more and more queasy. To my relief, it was, so I’m told, ‘alright on the night’.

All of which explains why I was unable to write my blog on Sunday, as I had planned, and instead I am writing it on Tuesday morning/noon, with Yom Kippur behind us for another year.

While we have all been breaking out and exiting, to pray outdoors, our outdoors grandson seems more intent on breaking and entering. It’s never too early to learn a good trade!

Crossing the Border

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Over the last two days we have been celebrating the Jewish New Year – Rosh Hashana – which naturally invites what is called in Hebrew a cheshbon nefesh, a spiritual accounting. This can take many forms, partly depending on whether you are religious, and partly depending, it seems to me, on how far you are along life’s road.

This was, for Bernice and myself, a rather sobering Rosh Hashana, because of some very sad news that we heard on Friday, as we were preparing for the festival: a very good friend of many, many years, after a year of fighting cancer, had died. I have been wondering over the last couple of days just why this death, more than some others, has moved me so deeply. I think I have identified a few reasons, which I would like to share with you today.

Andy Golstein, of blessed memory, was one of that fairly small circle of friends whom we have known forever (55 years for me, 60 for Bernice) and whom we have stayed in contact with, more or less unbrokenly, for all of that time. She and Steve, her husband, were already an ‘item’ at Hanoar Hatzioni winter camp when I first knew them. We were very close until they came on aliya in the late 60’s. In the immediate aftermath of the Yom Kippur war in ‘73, Bernice and I volunteered for three months on the kibbutz where they then lived. When we holidayed in Israel in 1983, we met up with them. In the 34 years since our own aliya, we have seen them fairly regularly at parties, barmitzva celebrations, weddings, milestone birthday celebrations. Andy was one of a small group of people that, for us, had always been part of our personal landscape.

Andy was extraordinary, without being in the least exceptional. She was, quite simply, a lovely person: always smiling, always completely engaged with whoever she was speaking with, generous of her time and her hospitality, gentle and cheerful; I counted her as a very close and special friend, and I suspect that many, many others did as well, because that was how she made you feel. The world without Andy is a poorer, greyer, duller place.

She was also, in the deepest sense, a life partner of her husband. I never knew either of them without the other, and how Steve will cope with the loss I cannot imagine. Our sadness at our loss is compounded by our sadness at his loss.

There is, I think, another reason, more to do with myself than with Andy, and it was this that I really wanted to explore today. This is not the first time a close friend of mine has died. In 1968–69, I spent a year in Israel on a Zionist leadership programme, and became friends with another extraordinary person, a Canadian, Lyle Isaacs of blessed memory. This was a very intense year, and we spent a great deal of time together and became incredibly close.

As I reread my description of Andy above, I see that every element of that description fits Lyle as well. In addition, to quote from the Canadian Young Judea website, “To many of us, Lyle had the most to offer of all the human beings we knew in this world”. Those of you who did not have the privilege of knowing him will have to take my word for it that this is no exaggeration. The summer a year after we all returned from Israel, he died in a traffic accident. The news reached me at Summer Camp, where I was Camp Director, and the gaping hole I felt in my life was all the more painful because there was no one with whom I could share this loss: nobody else at camp had met Lyle. I felt utterly alone, and was devastated and not really able to function for the rest of that day.

And yet, Lyle’s untimely and senseless death did not cause me to reflect on my own mortality.

Twenty years later, a film, TV and stage actor called David Rappaport took his own life in California. You may well remember him from his starring role as the leader of the dwarves in Terry Gilliam’s film Time Bandits or in regular guest appearances as a criminal lawyer in LA Law. I had grown up with David, of blessed memory, and for a couple of years we were fairly constant companions at Hebrew classes in Ilford three times a week.

David was born with a form of dwarfism, and by age 10 or 11 was already markedly shorter than his contemporaries. However, I can honestly say that, in his company, I was never aware that he was different, and that is overwhelmingly because David himself seemed completely unconcerned by his dwarfism. I remember a very funny, very creative, very energetic boy, and, the last time I saw him, a very powerful Mosca playing opposite Paul Scofield’s Volpone on the London stage.

When I heard the news of David’s death, I was shocked, because of my memories of him being apparently at peace with himself, and because of his very successful subsequent career. However, again, possibly because of my age at the time (40), and possibly because of the circumstances of his death, I did not consider how his death reflected on my life.

Andy’s death has affected me in a completely different way. I suddenly realised that Bernice and I are now at a stage in our lives when we are much less likely to be making new friends, and much more likely to be losing old ones. This is a very sobering thought. Fortunately, we have several close friends who are younger than we are, and we can therefore expect (once we get to the other side of corona) to be celebrating with them, God willing, several more weddings.

However, the realistic expectation is that we will increasingly meet at funerals and shiva houses. I remember a friend of my late mother, of blessed memory, a woman who was blessed with a wicked sense of humour, remarking that she now knew more people in the Waltham Abbey Jewish cemetery than outside it.

A synagogue is a good place to see this natural development in action. The children of shul members who played outside when we moved to Maale Adumim 24 years ago are now married with children of their own, and when we reach the point in the service where mourners say kaddish, whereas 24 years ago there might be nobody to recite it, today there is usually a chorus.

So, I understand that this is part of the natural rhythm of life; however, that is a less uncomfortable fact to be aware of when you are at the beginning of the cycle than as you approach the end. I expect that I will, in time, adjust to this new (or, at least, newly realised) reality, but, for the moment, I can take comfort only from my mother’s mantra when people commiserated with her ill health: “Beats the alternative!”

The penultimate word, today, I leave to Ogden Nash. I couldn’t remember the title or exact wording of this piece of verse, so I looked through the 508 pages of his Collected Verse to find it, only to discover that it is, appropriately, the very last poem in the collection.

Crossing the Border

Senescence begins
And middle age ends
When your descendants
Outnumber your friends.

I take comfort from the fact that I still have more than three friends (assuming that those four people would agree that we are friends), while I only have three descendants. Fortunately, you can count descendants in quality as well as quantity, using which method Bernice and I have a whole world of descendants.

My Love Affair with the Fourth Estate

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That deep sigh of relief that you may be able to hear is me celebrating the fact that the latest edition of our synagogue magazine, has been edited, set, proofread and printed. As I write these words, it is being distributed in time for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, next weekend. I was ‘volunteered’ to edit this edition, and, while it was a stimulating and ultimately very satisfying experience, I can’t say I’m sorry that it’s over.

The bar had been set very high by the previous editor, and I was concerned about letting the side down (PC-speak for I was damned if I was going to have anyone say that I didn’t do a better job). We had some anxious moments, as, I’m sure, is always the case when people who want to ‘just buff up that aphorism a little, and maybe add another curlicue in the corner there’ bump up against a non-negotiable deadline like The Day of Judgement.

However, in the end, everything fell into place, and I’m actually very pleased with the result. Of course, when your synagogue membership includes several talented writers with something interesting to say, as well as a professional graphic designer, the editor’s job is made much simpler.

I find myself thinking back to my other three roles as editor, all over 50 years ago. In my youth, I thought about becoming a journalist. My mother arranged for me to meet a friend of hers who worked for (if I remember rightly) one of the London evening newspapers. I remember he said: ‘Well, the best thing you can do if you really want to be a journalist is sit down every day, start writing, and don’t stand up until you have written 2000 words. It doesn’t matter what you write about, but 2000 words, at one sitting, every day.’ Those of you who knew me aged 14 or 15 will realise that that was the day my journalistic ambitions died. It sounded way too much like hard work and iron discipline.

The irony, of course, is that, for the last 44 weeks (well, someone has to keep count, and I bet you haven’t been) I have sat down at the keyboard every Sunday morning and produced 1500 words, give or take. Perhaps it’s not too late for me to start a new career. I could buy a notepad, and learn Pitman’s during the second lockdown we are threatened with starting on Friday. I already have a fawn trenchcoat and a trilby.

My career as co-editor, co-writer, co-everything began when I was ten years old, when Peter, my very bestest friend in the world, and I decided to write a magazine to give out to our classmates. I can no longer remember the details of production, although I am guessing we might have drafted in my mother to type the copy up on Gestetner skins (if you’re under 50, you can google it), then beg to use the school’s duplicator to ‘run them off’. What I do remember is that the content of our magazine was (not even very loosely) modelled on the comics our parents allowed us to read.

So, not the Dandy or Beano, whose pages were populated by very naughty boys with catapults and grubby knees who either went around in gangs – The Bash Street Kids – or operated as loners – Denis the Menace.

Oh no; we were raised on the saintly trinity of The Swift, The Robin and The Eagle, in which chisel-featured Dan Dare, the Pilot of the Future, flew to Venus, and football captains rallied their team to an against-all-odds 11th-hour victory, while, at the turn of a page, plucky Cockney privates helped pipe-smoking RAF officers devise plans for escaping from a Nazi stalag. I particularly remember that we fashioned just such a hero, with his trusty companion. (We never discussed it, but I’m sure Peter and I each saw ourselves as the tall, handsome leader, and each saw the other as the slightly overweight sidekick.)

The details of the storyline are lost in the mists of antiquity, but I know that the intrepid duo were behind enemy lines, on a saboteur mission that would, if successful, change the course of the war overnight. Each week, we wrote our heroes into a tight corner from which there appeared to be no escape, and we went to press with no idea how we would extricate them; each following week, we managed to find a way. It was a real adrenaline rush, I can tell you.

If I make it sound as though this magazine ran for years, I apologise. I have a horrible feeling it folded after two issues. I do know that I would love to see a copy again, and, if Peter is reading this, I hope he has proved to be a better hoarder than I am.

My next venture into the world of Hearst, Beaverbrook and Murdoch was as the editor of the Hanoar Hatzioni newsletter, Batnua (Hebrew for ‘In the Movement’). Since we tried to produce this every month (with a national circulation that included groups as widespread as Liverpool, Swansea, Bournemouth, Middlesbrough), editorship involved a considerable amount of article-writing as well. I very much enjoyed both roles, except for the moment at which my hubris led to my downfall. Eager to flaunt what I thought of as my extraordinarily rich vocabulary, I wrote about ‘a plethora of opportunities’. Unfortunately, I thought ‘plethora’ meant, not an abundance, but a scarcity. I still blush at the memory, but at least I learnt early on to double-check in the dictionary before committing myself to print.

My last role as editor in my youth was of the school magazine, Chronicles. Let me assure you, this was a magazine that did what it said on the tin. (Incidentally, ‘It does what it says on the tin’ is an idiom that I assumed was fairly old, but I discovered a couple of weeks ago that it dates from 1995 only, when it was devised as an advertising slogan for Ronseal waterproof sealant.) Chronicles. Could there be a more leaden, self-important, stodgy title than that? (Incidentally, I just checked, and, 53 years on, my old school magazine is still published under the same magical name – if it’s always been broke, why fix it?) Faced with that title on the front cover, who would want even to glance inside? With its reports of school sporting achievements, comings and goings of staff, acquisition of equipment or new buildings, it said precious little that was not already known  by its readers, and even less that most of its readers would want to know.

However, the position of editor was quite a prestigious one, and would certainly look good on my final school report, and so I gladly accepted the position, which meant working, with a co-editor, under the close supervision of the Head of English, a teacher whom I respected and liked. The technical process of editing, and particularly the proof-reading of the galleys, I thoroughly enjoyed. I was at last working with a professional printer, who produced galley proofs on paper with wide margins for corrections and emendations, and with several pages printed beneath each other on long sheets of uncut paper.

However, what makes this experience really stick in my memory is what happened with my co-editor, John Fleming, a tall, soft-spoken and undemonstrative youth with whom I studied English and who I was friendly enough with, if only as a classmate. He wrote for the magazine a poem that was certainly of its time (the time being 1967), reflecting the then-current dalliance with Eastern cultures. The poem, of which I am sure I did not understand all the allusions, included a line that referred to ‘Buddha contemplating his navel’. On first reading this, our overseer, the Head of English, stepped in and stated categorically that the school magazine could not possible include as racy a word as ‘navel’, and he invited John to rewrite the line. (I swear to you that I am not making a word of this up, although I appreciate it may be hard to believe in 2020, when not an edition of the Times of London can appear, it seems, without one or other columnist writing ‘f***’ – albeit with the asterisks, but nevertheless.)

What makes this story even more worth retelling is that John, who had, up to this point, seemed to me the least swinging sixties of our entire cohort (even including myself), refused to accept the editorial decision. When he saw that the powers that be’d were unbudgeable, he withdrew the poem from the magazine, resigned his position as co-editor, walked out of school, never to return, left home and, as far as we were concerned, disappeared off the face of the earth. Over the next year or so rumours circulated that he had found a job writing for Private Eye, the scurrilously satirical magazine that was just about as cutting-edge as one could get in 1967, but we couldn’t quite manage to believe that.

Over the next 45 years, I occasionally found myself wondering where he had actually ended up, until, eventually, the internet developed to the point where even I could locate him. A single email ‘I saw your name and wondered if you could possibly be…’ sufficed to confirm that he was, in fact, a leading writer, producer, sponsor, promoter and chronicler and analyst of alternative comedy. His website gives a brief bio, which I only point you to so that you can appreciate that, while Renaissance European giant Antonio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches (you may remember him from my post of Feb 4 this year) makes me feel like an under-achiever, at least he wasn’t in my class at school, and getting no higher marks than me for English. However, I certainly don’t begrudge John his achievement; it couldn’t have happened to a nicer, or more unexpected, guy.

Which leaves me, editing a synagogue magazine, and imagining myself as Clark Gable getting to share a room with Claudette Colbert, or possibly Robert Redford (listen, if I’m going to fantasize, then I’m hardly going to choose to be Dustin Hoffman, am I!) meeting Deep Throat in a dimly-lit underground car park.

Meanwhile (and you know what that means) here’s ‘Hold the Front Page’ Tao, rushing his copy to the editor. Dirty business, journalism, evidently.