I Whip Up a Happy Tuna

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But first, some housekeeping. In an uncharacteristic moment of immodesty, I ventured last week that I had been the cutest page boy at my aunt and uncle’s wedding. Well, if I did! My brother, not by nature much of a taker of umbrage, in this case took a healthy dose.

As luck would have it, my cousin sent me photographic evidence (which I had unsuccessfully looked for in our dining-room cabinet cupboard, a cupboard crammed with photos that keep screaming at me: Corona is the perfect opportunity to put us into a semblance of order!). So, here it is; I leave you to decide whether my brother is the cuter one, or I am. Actually, looking at the photo again, he may have a point, but I would never admit as much to him.

And so to this week’s actual topic. I have mentioned previously that, in my 18 years as a technical writer, I travelled quite a lot on business. My role was to capture the minutes at meetings with our customers, meetings designed to discover the gaps between what the customer required and what our off-the-shelf software solution provided, in order to identify precisely what customisations were required. My work consisted of sitting in on meetings throughout the business day, sometimes working through lunch, and then polishing the minutes, often late into the night, for approval the following morning. The work was very demanding, in terms of both the length of the working day and the level of concentration required throughout. This was especially true for me, since I had no technical background and typically understood between ten and twenty per cent of what I was capturing. The relevance here is that I had few opportunities for fine dining.

I learnt a lot spending a week or two in a wide range of major cities in Europe and North America, and a couple in Asia. Perhaps the most important thing that I learnt was that eating tuna and sardines for two weeks straight sitting in a hotel room does not make you a stronger swimmer.

Every one who keeps kosher and travels has stories to tell. I’ll tell you mine…and then you might want to share yours. Those of you who don’t keep kosher may never even have thought about the challenges. Why on earth would you?

My food travelling kit consisted of a tin of fish* and a sachet of cup-a-soup for each day away, crackers to accompany the fish, my favourite teabags, a plastic plate and bowl, a china cup, and cheap metal cutlery. (On one occasion, my knife was confiscated at the airport, despite the fact that, as I explained to the security staff, I would find an identical knife on my in-flight dinner tray in a couple of hours.)

In addition, I carried ‘portable and discreet’ food that I could take to the office to eat for lunch, or nibble discreetly if we were working through lunch and I was falling asleep from hunger. In my case, this comprised raw peanuts, almonds, sultanas, Nature Valley bars and plain chocolate.

On arriving at my destination, I would check in and then go in search of the nearest supermarket, where I would buy fresh fruit and salad and milk. In America, this represented one kind of challenge. By the time I arrived at the strip mall, it would be something like 20 hours since I had left home. I would park my hire car and walk into the supermarket. I would then spend ten minutes selecting food and 30 minutes walking up and down the half-mile milk section, trying to find a normal carton of milk, with no additives or subtractives, in a size that would fit into my hotel minibar.

I would then walk out of the supermarket, look around the vast open-air car park, and realise that I had no recollection of where I had parked, and, in addition, no idea of what make, model or colour of car I had just picked up at the airport. I can highly recommend, as a way of recovering from a long transatlantic flight, a healthy 30-minute walk up and down a strip-mall car park, carrying weights in each hand (two supermarket bags are ideal), pressing a remote unlock button every ten seconds while desperately looking for blinking sidelights.

In Bangkok, my problem was rather different. My hotel led directly onto an indoor mall, at one end of which was a Tesco’s. This was tremendously comforting, until I walked in, and realized two colossal challenges. Everything was labelled in Thai. Please don’t think I am complaining about that. Of course that is a perfectly reasonable thing to find in Thailand, and the problem is all mine, not theirs. (Incidentally, I have seen it claimed that Thai uses an alphabet, but written Thai looks more like the cardiogram of someone with arrythmia). The second challenge was that I was completely unable to determine, having found fresh produce, what was a salad vegetable and what was an unspeakable and boneless something dredged out of the depths of the sea.

There are some episodes of Star Trek in which the intrepid crew land on a planet that supports a civilization whose homes are furnished with fruit bowls and flower vases. The set dressers always come up with some laughably weird fruits and flowers to place in the bowls and vases. Bangkok kept reminding me of that.

I stated earlier that on business trips abroad I had few opportunities for fine dining. Occasionally, the opportunity did arise. I was once covering a two-day board-level customer meeting in Vienna, and, as part of the package to entice our most important customers’ CTOs and CIOs to give up two days of their time, these specific meetings included luxury boutique hotel accommodation and fine wining and dining. On this occasion, we were entertaining the customers at Vienna’s finest restaurant. Two of us had requested kosher food, which was provided from a local kosher caterer.

This was during the period when cuisine minceur was all the rage. The restaurant’s first course was, if I remember rightly, a cube of turtle meat about the size of a sugar cube, with two lengths of grass laid tastefully beside it. Next was an espresso cup of consommé. By this point, we had ploughed our way through gefilte fish balls the size of your fist and a deep bowl of chicken soup with lockshen and kneidlach. When the party’s main course of a diaphanous slice of roast beef, a new potato, a fan of six string beans and a teaspoon of mustard sauce arrived, our fellow diners were bidding against each other for a share of the kosher chicken dinner that filled our generous dinner plates.

On another occasion, I was in Montreal for the fast of Asara b’Tevet, in early January. The basement of our hotel led directly into the subterranean pedestrian precinct. We would walk the half mile every morning to the customer’s downtown office. I had not actually been outside for almost a week. When the fast ended at sunset, I was still working, but at 7:30 I decided that I could not face sitting at the desk of my hotel room to break my fast on yet another tuna and salad meal . I knew that there was a kosher restaurant serving the Jewish student community. I always feel that there are few sadder sights than a middle-aged man eating by himself in a restaurant, but I really needed a hot meal of comfort food. I checked on the map; the restaurant was only a ten-minute walk away. So I put on a second pair of socks, donned my thick sweater, winter coat, cap, gloves and scarf, and set off.

If you have never tried to walk in Montreal in midwinter without snowboots you will have to use your imagination. A ten-minute walk in summer becomes a thirty-minute trek, during which, every time you need to cross a road, you have to scale a mound of snow that makes you wish you had brought your crampons. I was almost, but not quite, completely wrapped up against the cold. I never realized that your eyebrows can ache from the cold.

When I eventually arrived at the restaurant, they were about to close, but took pity on me, and I enjoyed chopped liver, salt beef and chips that took me back to the Blooms of my childhood. The meal was so good that I did not even mind the walk back to the hotel.

One final memory. The first time I returned from the Far East, having been away for almost three weeks, I was very much looking forward to the kosher airline meal. Not because I expected it to be fine dining, you understand; simply because I had lived out of a fish can and a cracker packet for too long. When I opened the promising black box, I discovered…tuna and crackers, which I soon learned is the standard fare on long-haul trips from Singapore or Bangkok. Never mind: it made finally arriving back home all the sweeter.

What I haven’t yet spoken about is shabbat away from home. Unless I was on a weeklong trip to Europe, I was unable to return home in time for shabbat, and so I always had to spend shabbat abroad. Watching my non-religious colleagues leave for home on Thursday night or Friday morning was rather depressing, but I usually comforted myself with the knowledge that my employer was footing my hotel bill, and I would have a chance to see something of the city I was in, before my Sunday flight took off. However, I think that shabbat abroad is a large enough subject to warrant a post to itself, at some point in the future when I am casting about for something to write about.

Meanwhile, to prove that you don’t need to travel far from home to see things of interest…

*The fish I packed was principally tuna, with a couple of tins of sardines. This explains this week’s title, which is supposed to be an amusing reference to a song from The King and Me (as some of you would probably prefer me to say).

Today I am not a Fountain Pen

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Note to self: No politics, no religion, no fake news, no grammar.

This, of course, means that I have had to scrap my planned opening sentence:
‘In my opinion, Trump weren’t the antichrist.’
 (Incidentally, whether I judge that sentence disqualified on three or four counts is for you to guess and me to know.)

So, instead, let’s start by considering whether Dickens is the greatest second-tier English novelist. Or, rather, let’s start somewhere else entirely (apparently) and see if we can get to Dickens.

Some of you may have recognised the title of this week’s post as hinting at the apocryphal opening of a barmitzvah boy’s speech in the 1950’s, whimsically referencing the cliché barmitzvah gift in England at the time. By the time of my barmitzvah, in 1963, the joke had more or less driven the gift out, and I received not a single writing implement. This should not have been a problem, because, when I was an adorable two-and-a-half-year-old, Auntie Mimi had married Uncle Sam.

I was one of Mimi’s five nephews (and no nieces), and so, in the absence of bridesmaids, all 5 boys (aged 6 to 2) were decked out in bow ties, waistcoats and berets (Mimi and Sam were both francophiles) and stole the show as the cutest set of page boys you can imagine (none cuter, or chubbier, than the baby, yours truly).

As a gift to mark the occasion, we were each given a classic Conway Stewart lever-fill fountain pen, marbled pattern, gold nib, in a magnificent padded and satin-lined box that snapped shut with a reassuringly solid thud. Over the next eight-and-a-half years, I opened and closed the box, caressing the satin, removing the pen from its bracket and feeling its heft in my hand, many times.

However, I was not actually allowed to use it until grammar (high) school, at the age of 11. In primary (elementary) school, we had wooden desks with an insert enamel inkwell at the top right corner, an ink monitor (a dizzyingly high rank, only slightly lower than milk monitor) who ensured that the inkwells were full each day, and wooden-handled pens. May I draw your attention to the authentically ink-stained forefinger in Exhibit A. Rest assured: this was as nothing compared with the state of my fingers at the end of the average schoolday.

At school, I vied with Elizabeth Jones for top marks in all subjects….except for penmanship, at which she excelled and I…didn’t. For one thing, her page of writing displayed a perfect flow and evenness of letters, where mine looked like a sampler for 50 different sizes and styles of lettering, none of them one you would want to select. For another, the rest of her page was a pristine cream, while mine looked like an aerial view of wetlands. In addition, by the end of the day all the digits of my right hand were stained blue, whereas Elizabeth could have modelled Nivea hand cream.

My greatest achievement of penmanship (or, more correctly pen-and-pencilmanship), however, was in grammar school, where we were required for homework to trace an outline map of Australia, and shade the outside of the outline in blue pencil, to indicate the sea. My homework was returned with a mark of 3/10 and the comment: This is the most spineless work I have ever seen. 58 years later, I still have no idea what a spineful map of Australia would look like.

To return to the Conway Stewart, lever-fill, marbled effect, gold-nibbed pen, you can imagine my excitement when, at age 11, I was finally allowed to take the pen from its box, unscrew the cap, gently lower the nib into a bottle of Parker Quink ink, ease the lever from its recess on the side of the pen to compress the ink sac, slowly replace the lever, lift out the now full pen, dab the nib with a piece of blotting paper to remove any excess ink, and securely replace the threaded cap. Thus armed, I set off for Day 1 at grammar school. With such a magnificent pen in my inside breast pocket accompanying me through seven years of school, I would surely triumph.

On Day 3, I lost the pen. I naturally contemplated running away from home, but reckoned they would find me wherever I hid, and so I eventually decided to face the music, and a succession of cheap, plain pens without gold nibs accompanied me through the rest of my school career; these pens, aggravatingly but predictably, were never lost.

All of this explains why, while not receiving a fountain pen as a barmitzvah gift should not have been a problem, I would actually have welcomed one. But it was not to be. Instead, I received no fewer than three briefcases – all with the exotic and tangy aroma of real leather – which actually just about saw me through my entire seven years of grammar school, despite being: thrown in advance over railings before I scaled the railings myself; landed on by numerous goalies making extravagant saves during pick-up football games; used as assault weapons in impromptu scraps; and generally given the full range of Which! Briefcase reasonable usage tests.

I also received, and this struck me as a little excessive, three travelling alarm clocks. For those who can barely remember a pre-cellphone age, these were in the form of a case, three inches square and an inch deep, which unclasped to become three hinged panels. One of the end panels consisted of an alarm clock face and mechanism. The hinges opened to 60o, to allow the three panels to form a stable triangular block that could sit on a bedside table. Luminous hands, and a satisfyingly chunky key-shaped winder at the back of the clock were impressive features. However, the button for switching off the alarm was usually less accessible and aggravatingly fiddly. Needless to say, none of these clocks has survived the intervening 57 years…or, indeed, needed to.

The only presents that have survived are books…and not even all of those. A few years ago, in our last major clear-out, I forced myself to part with the Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia, finally admitting that not only is information more easily retrieved from the internet, but also that huge swathes of the 12-volume set – science, political geography, arts…almost everything, really, except for Greek and Roman mythology – were no longer relevant or accurate or politically correct. I kept the 13th volume, an index and overview, for sentimental reasons, and, as is their wont, books soon arrived to fill the gap left on the bookshelves.

However, I still have the religious books I received: a Tanach (full Old Testament) with a rather leaden translation, a Haggadah, which I still use every seder night on Pesach, and which is almost-living proof that matza crumbs do not degrade over half a century, and my set of Routledge machzorim (festival prayer books), whose publication can be dated, of course, by the wording listing the names in the prayer for the Royal Family. In my case, it is:
Our Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth (so 1952 at the earliest)
Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (so 2002 at the latest)
Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (no help – 1947 at the earliest)
Charles, Duke of Cornwall (so 1957 at the latest)

The other books that have stayed with me are a complete set of Dickens, bound in red mock-leather with my monogram on the covers. Very handsome they look in the bookcase, too.

Although I read and enjoyed many of the novels over the years, I often felt that Dickens was, as I mentioned at the start of this meander, perhaps the finest of the second rank of novelists. Of course, I recognised that technically his books were splendid: his plotting and control of the narrative were immensely skilful, and he was able to conjure up a host of memorable characters. And yet….and yet…for many years I felt that there was a depth missing. I suspect that there were three dimensions to that perceived depth that , as I then thought, marked out ‘great literature’: a tragic ending, ambiguous characters and complex emotions. I believed that all great literature must be tragic, and also that there was something intrinsically second-rate about characters that could be easily understood and situations and events that evoked a clear and simple emotional response in the reader.

I was forced to reconsider when, over 20 years ago, I took a job which required me to commute daily, for three months, from southern Jerusalem to central Tel Aviv. This meant that I was taking three buses each way daily for a total of about 18 hours a week. I decided to use this time to plug some of my Dickens gaps. Over the three months, I managed to read six or seven of the novels I had not read previously. At the end of that period, I was a convert to what, I believe, was Dickens portrayal of the world as he saw it. The clarity in the books that can sometimes seem childlike reflects the clarity with which Dickens saw the world, and the overwhelming affection he felt for his created characters. I now feel that my earlier assessment was the result of prejudice: Dickens proves that great literature can be different from what I expected.

30 years ago, Peter Ackroyd wrote a fascinating and very idiosyncratic biography of Dickens, which is now out of print. An abridged version was published in 2002, which I believe omitted Ackroyd’s imaginative reconstruction of Dickens’ thoughts. If you can find the original version, it’s a sometimes bizarre and always fascinating read.

If, on the other hand, you have only 90 minutes to spare, you might prefer to listen to Simon Callow ‘performing’ Peter Ackroyd’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens. Callow is not only a passionate Dickens fan, but also is, I always feel, quintessentially Dickensian himself – larger than life and relishing all he tastes of life.

Meanwhile, back in Penamacor, Tao has graduated to Escapology 201. He has fully grasped that one needs to understand how a buckle works if one is to learn how to release it. Note, also, the triumphant Yes at the end: one of his few words at the moment, and one he clearly relishes.

A Cat, Several Pigeons, and I/Me (Delete as necessary)

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I don’t know about your dentist, but mine has the habit of settling you in the chair, tilting you back to a virtually horizontal position, clamping your top jaw and packing your bottom jaw with cotton wool, and then starting a conversation, which is, perforce, rather one-sided. It so happens that I was at the dentist last week, about four hours after publishing my last blog post.

“My wife,” began the dentist (who is also a co-congregant and friend), “is pretty upset by what you wrote”. I knew immediately what he was referring to. I realized I was going to have to live with my earlier hasty decision, and that I knew what my topic for this week would be. I’ll explain all presently (if this week’s title hasn’t already made it obvious).

But first, to continue my story. After the dentist had worked his alchemy on a recalcitrant tooth, I returned home to discover, in my inbox, a shocked email from a friend of over 30 years’ standing, a Classical scholar, who took issue with my English both in itself and as reflecting Danish grammar, which (if I understood him correctly) he claimed is the real arbiter of how English grammar should be. (My friend is Danish; his English is, like that of all the Danes I know, excellent – as I always say, if it weren’t, there would be precious few people he could talk to.)

So, what evoked these shocked and outraged responses? It was that, once again, I had used a nominative noun as part of an accusative compound noun phrase. Don’t panic! To be specific, I had written:

My father z”l was a keen all-round sportsman, and introduced my brother – Martin – and I to tennis at a fairly young age.

My two erudite friends argued that I should have written:

My father z”l was a keen all-round sportsman, and introduced my brother – Martin – and me to tennis at a fairly young age.

Their reasoning was that, since it would be incorrect to write:

My father…introduced I to tennis

it is similarly incorrect to write

My father…introduced my brother and I to tennis

Now, I don’t want to suggest that their position is eccentric. My blog is read by at least two others who take the same position strongly enough to have written to me on the first occasion I used this construction (and probably many others who didn’t feel strongly enough about it to actually write to me).

I want to first consider the underlying premise behind the argument that what I wrote was incorrect. This is a premise that was originally implicit, but that one of my correspondents made explicit later, writing:

I know that language evolves, and it certainly needs to. But I suspect there’s a vast difference between changes of growth and changes of … neglect (?), where a society – its speakers and its teachers/students–can’t be bothered to care about or learn their language.

That is exactly the fundamental point where I differ from my critics. Their view of English is the one I, and they, grew up with:

I was educated in a school system that taught and practised parsing – breaking down a sentence into its parts and describing the syntactic role of each part in the sentence. Parsing was presented and treated as an exact science, and, for each exercise, there was a single right answer. English grammar, I was raised to believe, was a closed, complete, perfect and unchanging system.

Not coincidentally, this ‘English grammar’ that I was taught was modelled very closely on Latin grammar. Where it didn’t fit, grammarians took a mallet to hammer various round pegs of English into square holes of Latin. The two facts they failed to take sufficient account of were that English is not Latin and that all native Latin speakers are dead! As a result, Latin is a dead language and, therefore, does not develop. On the other hand, a surprisingly large number of English speakers are alive. Trying to impose a closed, complete, perfect and unchanging system of grammar on a living language is a little like trying to fit a jellyfish into a small box: bits will forever be spilling over the edges.

Living languages are changing languages, and the changes are made not by grammarians but by users of the language. There may be some who wish this was not so, but they are not free to decree that it shall not be so. King Cnut (or Canute, as know him) of Denmark (there’s that pesky Denmark again), Norway and England demonstrated that eloquently when he sat enthroned on the beach and commanded the tide not to come in (knowing full well that it would not obey).

To illustrate this process of change, I have cunningly sprinkled through the first 150 words of this post a number of examples of ways in which English has changed in the last 30 years (or, in one case, 400 years). How many of them did you spot as being ‘wrong’, and how many slipped under your radar?

I knew immediately what he was referring to.

I grew up ‘knowing’ that a preposition was a word you must not end a sentence with. You probably know the (possibly apocryphal) chestnut attributed to Churchill. He received either a ‘corrected’ draft of a speech of his, or a very stuffy letter, with an awkward sentence including a preposition moved from its natural position at the end. He scrawled on the manuscript: ‘This is the kind of language up with which I will not put.’ There is no logical reason for this ‘rule’; it serves no purpose, and usually results in a sentence that is harder to understand, since we have to ‘remember’ the preposition until the end of the sentence, when we can reunite it with the verb that it naturally follows. Compare these two examples:

Where is the hat from which he pulled the rabbit?
Where is the hat he pulled the rabbit from?

Of course, you could argue that in the second sentence, from is separated from the hat’, which also makes the sentence harder to understand. In this case, a more drastic rewrite might be best: perhaps something like:

He pulled the rabbit from a hat: where is the hat?

I’ll explain all presently.

Originally, and unsurprisingly, presently meant at the present time, immediately. For example: I’ll do it presently meant I’ll do it now.

From the 17the Century, this gradually weakened, until today it probably means something more like at some indeterminate time in the not-too-distant future.

I bring this example to demonstrate that the meaning of words is fluid, and the changes in meaning are determined not by some official body (What an absurdity the Académie Francaise is, banning words: clearly, Cnut was not king of France.) The meaning of words is shaped by the way they are used. Some people think that the compilers of dictionaries invent what words mean; in fact, they discover the meanings that are already current. A dictionary is a snapshot of a language’s vocabulary as it is used at one moment in time in the real world.

The same, incidentally, is true for spelling. In the mid-1300s, there were heated discussions, and ladies having fainting fits, over the ‘incorrect’ writing of cupboard, when everyone knew it was two words: cup board. Changes like this are a process, and if you happen to be living in the period when this process takes place, you may find yourself arguing about which form is correct, instead of asking (of the journey from two words to one) Are we there yet?

But first, to continue my story.

I’m particularly pleased with this example, since it ‘breaks’ two ‘rules’: Never begin a sentence with a conjunction, and: Every sentence must have a finite verb. Thirty years ago, I would have ‘corrected’ this sentence to something like:

However, first let me continue my story

and ended up with a sentence that seems to me a weaker piece of communication.

So, language is constantly changing, and we should recognise that sometimes we are upset by changes in language in the same way as we are upset by changes in musical styles. Just because I happen to think Western music reached its peak with Bach, and it’s been steadily downhill since 1750, doesn’t mean that Beethoven’s musical style is incorrect. I can rue the change, without condemning it as wrong.

Let’s return now to my correspondent’s suspicion that there’s a vast difference between changes of growth and changes of … neglect (?), where a society….can’t be bothered to care about or learn their language.

I am reminded of two rather different characters: M. Jourdain and Bubba Watson. Jourdain is the foolish bourgeois who aspires to be a gentleman in Molière’s comedy. At one point, he is amazed to discover that: ‘For more than forty years I have been speaking prose while knowing nothing of it!’ We don’t need to study our own language in the abstract; it is sufficient to experience it in our daily lives. It is also unreasonable to expect the majority of language users to undertake serious academic study of their native language; just because I find this stuff exciting, I don’t need to inflict it on others (so feel free to leave).

Bubba Watson is an American golfer who rose to World No 2 in his prime, and who has earned at least $30 million from golf. What brings him here is that he has never had a single golf lesson in his life. He is a purely instinctual player. It’s not that he can’t be bothered to care about or learn golf; it is, rather, that he has a natural gift. Native speakers, I would argue, also have a natural gift.

Language is a functioning democracy. If a sufficiently large number of people decide to adopt a new word, meaning, spelling, grammatical or syntactical structure, it will be adopted generally. Once it is adopted, it is part of English. We might personally think it less elegant or useful than what it replaced (although that is often merely subjective), but we cannot argue that it is wrong.

The point at which a language finds itself at any given moment is a set of conventions, not immutable laws. These conventions have no moral value, and they can be changed with impunity. That’s how living languages function.

Let’s return now to the example that sparked this blog.

My father…introduced my brother and I to tennis.

The fact is, if I’m being completely honest, that this doesn’t sound right to me. Unfortunately, neither does:

My father…introduced my brother and me to tennis.

On this particular journey, from the grammatically conventional ‘me’ to the colloquially increasingly popular ‘I’, I feel more or less equidistant from the starting point and the finishing post, and I can’t really see either. I am confident that, when I write my blog in another 30 years, I will be completely comfortable with ‘I’….and so will you.

Meanwhile, here’s someone who started not just speaking, but also reading, his own language, faultlessly, 9 months ago.

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.