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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider the following text:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).