Of Janus and Yossarian

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We start this week with a little housekeeping. A few people mistakenly believe that it was Churchill who described England and America as ‘two countries separated by a common language’. However, most of us know that it was in fact said by George Bernard Shaw. Except, as I discovered not long ago, it wasn’t…or, rather, it does not appear in any of his writings, and there is no contemporary record of his having said it. Of course, he could easily have said it. It is an astute observation about language, wittily and pithily expressed.

Anyway, whoever shaped this aphorism, I was reminded of it last week, when one of my readers – thank you, Norma – pointed out that the word nonplussed, which I used in my blog, has two possible meanings. The first is, as I intended, surprised and confused and therefore uncertain how to react. The second (informal, North American) is not disconcerted, unperturbed. I therefore apologise to any North American readers who were Britishly nonplussed by my British use of the word.

I was excited to learn about this, because it makes nonplussed a member of a quite exclusive club that I am very fond of, all of whose members are Janus words: words that have two opposite meanings. Among my favourites are cleave – to cut apart or, conversely, to adhere; let – to permit or to forbid (as in let or hindrance); fast – moving quickly or not moving at all. And then there is that group of verbs that can mean add to or remove from: for example, dusting a bookshelf is different from dusting a cake with icing sugar; similarly, can you say definitively whether a shelled nut or a seeded grape is one with or without its shell or seed?

Enough of this! None of it has anything to do with this week’s subject, which came to me in the small hours between Friday night and Saturday morning, If you read last week’s post, you may be able to work out what comes next. Because of the restrictions of the Jewish laws of shabbat, I was unable to reach for my phone and make a note of what had come into my mind….and, sure enough, when I awoke on shabbat morning, I remembered very clearly that I had thought of something to write about, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what it was. So, here we are, waiting for it to come to back to me and, meanwhile, vamping till ready.

While we’re waiting, let me tell you about the adventure Bernice and I had when we went to the bank in Castelo Branco in November to activate the advanced features of our Portuguese debit cards, to enable online purchases. This proved to be a surprisingly complex process, involving a level of security that we weren’t really used to.

To start with, when I first opened the account, and then, on our first trip together, when Bernice became a signatory, the charming bank official, having examined and scanned our passports, explained that we had to wait for a short time, while our details were sent to Police headquarters in Lisbon, to verify our identity. While we were waiting, the official told us that this was just a formality….usually. However, he said, just recently he had submitted details, and received a phone call five minutes later instructing him to keep the customer talking and on no account to allow her to leave the bank; the police would be there in a few minutes. This woman was apparently the prime suspect in a major international fraud investigation, and police had been trying to locate her in order to arrest her. For the rest of our time at the bank, we certainly took great pains to appear as little like international master-criminals as we could, and it apparently worked. 

The next stage in this process was for us to access our account online. To do this, we used the bank official’s computer, since we needed an internet connection, data roaming on our Israeli phones was out of the question, and the bank offers no public internet. This is in contrast to Britain. When we used to stay with my late mother-in-law, who did not have internet in Britain, we would have to wander down to the High Street and stand outside the local branch of Barclays Bank, freeloading on their powerful wifi, in order to access our email. I was always sure that we looked as if we were casing the joint!

Anyway, back in Castelo Branco, to access our account, we had to key in a 6-digit code that we had provided previously. The first time this happened, I had a few moments when I thought dementia had set in. The bank official pivoted his laptop to face me, and I could see a standard 10-key dialpad – an array of three rows of three digits each, with a tenth digit alone in the centre of the fourth row – for me to key in the code. I extended my index finger and tapped the 8 (Row 3, middle key). I was shocked to see that the digit displayed in the box was not 8, but 3. I deleted it, and was about to tap the same key again, when I looked more closely, and realized at the last moment that it was a 3. Feeling slightly giddy, I checked the other keys, and saw that they all contained the wrong digits. Sensing my confusion, the official explained that every time the keypad is displayed, it generates the digits in random order, so that the 6-digit code cannot be deduced from the position of the fingers on the screen. Fiendishly clever, but unbelievably disconcerting.

The final stage was for me to activate the advanced functionalities of the debit card by entering a second code that was sent in an SMS to my phone. As I mentioned earlier, at that time Bernice and I were using our Israeli phones – we did not yet have local (Portuguese) SIMs. The SMS was, of course, generated automatically by the bank’s computer system, and this led to a Catch-22 situation that I would have found amusing if it had been happening to someone else.

Time for another digression, I think. Joseph Heller didn’t intend the title of his book to be Catch 22. Throughout the writing process it had been Catch 18. Then, a few months before the scheduled publication of Catch 22, Leon Uris’s novel Mila 18 was published. Heller’s publisher wished to avoid any confusion between the two war novels, and so the number in the title was changed to the much catchier 22. (Personally, I think that anyone who confuses Mila 18 with Catch 22 has no business reading either of them….and especially not Catch 22!)

Be that as it may, the specific Catch 22 at the bank was as follows. I waited for the SMS to arrive. After a couple of minutes, I requested it to be resent. Nothing arrived. For some reason, while we were in Portugal, neither Bernice nor I could receive, on our Israeli phones, an SMS sent from Portugal. The bank official confirmed that he had encountered this problem with some other of his Israeli customers, but, subsequently, our Israeli mobile provider was unable to offer any explanation, and seemed completely unfamiliar with the problem. We thought, at one point, that it might have something to do with our being physically at the bank. The official explained that we could, in fact, activate the cards’ full functionality at any ATM, using the code sent to us by SMS. Needless to say, even when we were outside the bank, and back in Penamacor, we still didn’t receive the SMS. However, after our return to Israel, we received other SMSs that the bank sent. But, of course, when we are in Israel, and able to receive the code by SMS, we are a five-hour flight from the nearest Portuguese ATM, and the one-time code expires after ten minutes. So we can only use the code where we can’t receive it and we can only receive it where we can’t use it. To make this a perfect impasse, for security reasons the bank’s computer system does not support changing the telephone number that was associated with the account when it was first created.

When we are next in Portugal (how gloriously optimistic When and next sound, at the time of writing), we will need to discuss with the bank whether we can close our bank account and open a new one, and associate our Portuguese mobile numbers to it. Of course, that means that we will not be able to receive in Israel any SMSs sent by the bank. Not for the first time, I hear a weary voice whispering in my ear ‘First world problems’. I know, I know.

Before we close, let me share with you a picture of Tao and Tslil planting his first birthday present, an almond tree.

And finally (you see, we got through this post even without me having anything to write about), let me briefly acknowledge the elephant in all our rooms, and sincerely wish all of you and all of yours a safe and healthy week.

Stockpiling

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Well, there’s a topical….topic, eh? But don’t worry: I’m not going to harangue you about toilet paper or eggs. The stockpiling I am talking about is considerably more metaphorical than that. When I started writing this blog, I very quickly discovered that a) many of my best ideas came to me in the small hours, when I was lying in bed trying unsuccessfully to persuade my bladder that it really didn’t need emptying and b) many of those best ideas would, by the morning, have melted away like the snows of yesteryear (What a clumsy phrase, with its harshly sibilant ‘s’ and ‘z’ in ‘snows’ and its ridiculously excessive indulgence of ‘y’ and ‘e’ in ‘yesteryear’; how much more appropriately evanescent are the softly nasal, liquid, ‘nei…’ and ‘an…’ of ‘neiges d’antan’.)

The solution, I soon discovered, was to jot down a note on my phone. Once I had started to do this, I found myself diligently adding to it, both in real time when we were in Portugal, and while recollecting in tranquility in Israel. In very little time, I had a list of 15 or so topics; armed with this stockpile, which I have occasionally added to even in the last few weeks, I have never been at a loss for what to write about in my next post.

However, this morning, in one of the fits of obsessive-compulsive spring-cleaning that the current unpleasantness has brought out in me, I got out the metaphorical stepladder and climbed up to go through the entire list with a critical eye, stretching to retrieve those packets stuck at the back of the cupboard that were well past their sell-by date, pulling out a couple of cartons that I’d already served up at least once, seizing one or two jars that I decided I couldn’t possibly serve to a mixed audience. All of these I binned, and discovered that my stockpile had dwindled down to the literary equivalent of two tins of baked bins, a packet of stale crackers and the following (I hope slightly more appetizing) snack.

In that spirit of virtual cultural tourism that we are all, I suspect, seized by these days (before we settle down to watch The Lego Movie), let me guide you round Penamacor’s municipal museum. This is something of an anomaly, being funded not by the EU, but rather by the municipality itself. The museum was founded by the local council in 1949, with the sole and very specific initial intention of preserving Penamacor’s charter (explanation later).

After a long period of stagnation, a new director was appointed in 1982 to reform the museum. This reform has included stocktaking (you see how I’m sticking closely to this week’s theme) and dusting off the exhibits, rehousing the museum in the old Military Headquarters and carrying out extensive renovation, and finally mounting an entirely new major exhibition. The result is a museum that is a surprisingly handsome asset for the village, and that does not charge an admission fee.

The new exhibition is the first that visitors encounter when they enter the museum. It is devoted to the development of man’s measurement of time. This is a more appropriate subject for the museum than you might first think, given that the villagescape of Penamacor is dominated by the castle bell tower, and that the silence of the village is punctuated every quarter hour by the chiming of the bells in the tower’s belfry, and, on the hour, by the striking of the hours from that belfry. However, rather undermining the general thrust of the exhibit, which celebrates the accuracy of human timekeeping, the chiming on the hour of the castle bells is followed an aggravating one-and-a-half minutes later by the striking of the same hours from the main church’s belfry. Mind you, this could be viewed as testament to the message of the exhibit, since the interval between the two chimings is always an undeviating 90 seconds.

When I visited, not knowing anything of the museum’s contents, I was a little nonplussed (now there’s a word I don’t get to use anywhere near often enough) to be confronted as I rounded the first corner by a splendid photo of Big Ben by night (or rather, as the explanatory text explains, ‘the bell tower of the Palace of Westminster, which is popularly known as Big Ben, whereas Big Ben is , in fact, the 14-tonne bell‘). Anyway, this sight made me feel anchored, and I enjoyed the rest of the exhibit, which explained clockwork mechanism and traced the restoration of Penamacor’s clock towers, overseen by a renowned local horologist.

This exhibit led to a second room, a large hall divided in two by a row of potted plants. The first half of the hall houses a number of displays, behind glass. These include the development of the sword and the musket through Portuguese military history, a collection of historical coins, and a range of historical scientific instruments. In the centre of the floor space are two rather splendid 19th-Century carriages. This room served to remind me that Portugal was not always one of the poorer backwaters of Europe, but indeed enjoyed what can be regarded as a glorious, or, conversely, ignominious, history as a naval imperial power. As I walked round, I found myself humming Rule Britannia.

Incidentally, I spent many years lustily singing that anthem without once thinking about the arrogance of the lyric. Listen with me (the emphasis is mine).

When Britain first, at Heav’n’s command
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land
And guardian angels sang this strain:

Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves
Britons never shall be slaves

The nations not so blest as thee
Must, in their turn, to tyrants fall.
……

You get the idea!

The second half of this large, airy room houses a collection of Christian statuary. I must confess that I gave this only a quick glance, because I had postponed my visit to the museum until a couple of days before we were coming back to Israel, and I only had 30 minutes before closing time.

Beyond the hall is a narrow vestibule, on the long walls of which hang what I imagine were the original exhibits: Penamacor’s charter and coat of arms, and a small exhibit devoted to Antonio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, who, as the more attentive of you will remember, is Penamacor’s most famous son. Having devoted an entire post to Ribeiro Sanches, let me talk about the charter. The legality of any city, town or village in Portugal was established, in medieval times, by the granting of a royal charter, or foral. Penamacor’s foral was granted in 1209.

This included the institution of a rather splendid coat of arms for the city (as it was then), featuring the following symbols:

Crescent – marking the Moorish conquest

Scimitar – indicating that it is a military stronghold

Key – alluding to the castle being close to the border

Balled Cord – representing a single will in the defence of the national territory

Leading off this vestibule are two further rooms. One houses a collection of everyday household furniture and tools, including a splendid loom, and the other features examples of the taxidermist’s art, in the form of the most notable of the local fauna, arranged in dioramas. I hope the photograph captures the eerie lifelessness of the exhibits. What it does not capture is the darkess of the room, lit only by the light in the dioramas. I felt as though I had walked into the tunnel of a fairground ghost train, or onto the set of a zombie film. The most prominent creature here is the Iberian lynx, which, having died out in the wild in Portugal, has been bred in captivity and is being reintroduced in many areas of its natural habitat, including the Serra da Malcata, the range of hills east of Penamacor that form a national park and nature reserve.

That concludes our tour of the Penamacor Municipal Museum. Admission is, as I stated, free of charge, but, should you wish to tip your guide, you might care to visit the kids’ latest video on their youtube channel, which features some lovely close-ups of their land and their son (who also happens to be our grandson – did I mention that?)

On the Street Where We Live…Well, Sometimes

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I’m not really keen on using a song title from My Fair Lady. I agree that the film looks ravishing, with its Cecil Beaton costumes; Rex Harrison and Wilfrid Hyde-White are beautifully matched as Higgins and Pickering; Audrey Hepburn as Eliza manages a cockney accent that is considerably better than Dick van Dyke’s in Mary Poppins (mind you, that isn’t setting the bar very high) and Stanley Holloway is magnificent as Doolittle. The music is always worth listening to, and, in addition, the plot, much of the dialogue, and even many of the song lyrics, are extremely faithful to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, on which the musical is closely based. “And yet” (to quote from Accustomed to Her Face), there is, for me, a moment when it all falls apart in an act of outrageous treason to the story it has told. Let me explain.

At the end of the last scene in the play Pygmalion, Eliza, exasperated by Higgins’ imperious treatment of her, tells him that she will never see him again. He then asks Eliza to “order a ham and a Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves, number eights, and a tie to match that new suit of mine, at Eale & Binman’s. You can choose the color.” Eliza disdainfully tells him to buy them himself and sweeps out. In a typically didactic epilogue, Shaw explains that Eliza marries Freddy. He prefaces this explanation with the following comment:

The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories. 

Perhaps it would be kindest to assume that Alan Jay Lerner did not read this sentence, because his book and screenplay display exactly the enfeebled imagination that Shaw writes about. At about 6:30 minutes into this clip from My Fair Lady, Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza comes sheepishly back to Higgins’ home, and, at about 7:15, when Higgins reverts to domineering type, Eliza simperingly gazes at him, in a cinematic moment that never fails to gast my flabber.

Okay. That’s the end of a rant that has been building in me for about 40 years, and I feel much better for it.

Turning to our home in Portugal (not so much a segue; more a tectonic shift), Tao is very much an outdoors kind of guy, which is probably a good thing, considering what his parents have in store for him. If he is upset (which is very rare), he always calms down if he is taken outside, and regularly during the day, when taking the saucepans out of the cupboard and putting them back begins to pall, or when he tires of hiding blocks under the sofa, he will ask to be taken out, either to the backyard or to the street at the front of the house. If he wants the back, then this is usually a two-centre holiday. He will almost certainly want to climb the outside metal staircase to the balcony leading off the kid’s bedroom, a climb which he takes in his stride; nevertheless, even though Tao is remarkably careful in his climbing, the climb leaves me with my heart in my mouth, since this is a fairly open staircase; I have to stay right with him, ready to grab. Bernice refuses to let him climb with her; her heart can’t take it. Tao’s reward for making it safely to the top is that he gets to test the friability of the soil in the pots on the balcony.

The second activity in this excursion is a walking tour of the flower beds that line two sides of the patio. These beds are currently home to, in order, a handsome Portuguese laurel bush, a mature lemon tree, a fairly immature loquat (shesek) tree, an aloe vera, a couple of roses, some more modest ground-cover flowers and a clementina tree.

On his walking tour, Tao, who is a very tactile child, needs to rub the leaves and petals of each of these plants; fortunately, he already understands the need to be gentle with them, and there are very few accidents.

On the other side of the patio, along the ledge of what is, in fact, the outside wall of our neighbours’ covered swimming pool, is an array of sawn-off milk cartons with various vegetables and fruits being grown from seed by Tslil. These also require a proper inspection, ocular and digital, as did the plum sapling that was a gift to Micha’el and Tslil from Esther and Ma’ayan. This tree has now been transferred to the land, and – very exciting – already has a plum showing. After a 15-minute tour, Tao is usually happy to go inside again.

At the other end of the house is the front door, and, beyond that, the street. The sounds of passing traffic aroused Tao’s attention from a young age. This is not entirely surprising: since the street is cobbled and narrow, the tyre noise from passing cars is considerable, and is trapped by the houses. Indeed, when we first arrived last October, I initially wondered whether the house was on the flight path to Lisbon airport!

Once Tao realised that the sound meant a passing car, he did not want to miss any of the action, and would ‘ask’ to be taken out, or at least to the window, to see this traffic. (It has to be said that cars are a relative rarity: we don’t exactly live on a main road.) Every Wednesday, we have the excitement of the gradual approach of what sounds like a Mr Whippy ice cream van. The chimes are, in fact, those a mobile shop, selling meat, fish, fruit, veg, and we can hear them a few streets away, 10 or 15 minutes before they reach our street.

If Tao can persuade someone (usually Bernice) to take him out to the street, then, as in the backyard, he has his set points of interest that he needs to visit. These include ‘the doll’, a life-size but very stylised, almost cubist statue of a young girl that stands on our neighbours’ porch. Next in order, continuing to walk up the street, are some lovely flowering shrubs a few houses along. And finally, the highlight of the tour: seven or eight houses down from us live a family who have a dog. The dog sleeps in a tent-like kennel outside the house-front, dines alfresco in the street, and spends the day sunning himself, often in the middle of the road.

We are very fond of him, partly, no doubt, because he looks remarkably like our dog, who died about 12 years ago, and who was a similar long-haired dachshund mix. Those of you who remember our dog must agree the similarity is striking: so much so that we actually call our Portuguese neighbour Chocky. Like our own Chocky, he is very fond of people, and, if you stop to pet him, he will go up on his hind-legs and hook his forepaws around your thigh, desperately clinging on to you and begging you not to leave. Tao loves going to see him, and we are reminded how, in Micha’el’s early years, when he and Chocky were a similar age, they were inseparable.

One day in the middle of our last trip to Portugal, when Tao and I were in the living room, we heard a sound from the street that neither of us could identify. It sounded like a fairly small power tool. When we went out to investigate, we found a municipal maintenance worker mowing the pavement. Our street, like all of the sidestreets in Penamacor, is cobbled; the cobbles cover both the roadway and the pavement; indeed, the only way to tell where the road ends and the pavement begins is to notice the very slight dip at the side of the road and incline at the start of the pavement. Between the cobbles grass grows; apparently, this grass is mown regularly with a strimmer. Tao was interested in this, but I was fascinated. I’ve never lived on a street where they mow the pavement before.

At first sight, Rua Pereira de Macedo seems a rather sleepy sidestreet, but, as you can see, it is in fact bursting with life, if you know where to look, and if there is no other action, you can always sit on your doorstep and watch the grass grow.

Penamacor Perambulations

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I don’t know about you, but, at the moment, what I would really like more than anything else is to go on a good long walk along the wadi paths of Maale Adumim. Somehow, 20 minutes on the treadmill doesn’t quite cut it, and once round the block doesn’t even come near, especially since, for those stretches where I am technically more than 100 metres from home, I’m listening out for the sound of an approaching police car, looking out for a foot patrol, and readying myself to dive into the bushes if necessary.

So, this week, why not join me on a leisurely virtual stroll around Penamacor, while I point out some of the major tourist attractions?

Weather permitting, Bernice and I like to take Tao out for a walk in his buggy every day, and we have a set route that we often take. Our house is towards the north-west corner of the village, high above the centre, but not at the top of the hill. So, we turn left out of the house and walk up to the top of the street (always better to walk uphill at the beginning, we feel, and to have the downhill slope to look forward to when we head back). We can then turn left and walk along the ridge of the hill, with a steep drop to the valley that includes the kids’ land on our right, and, beyond that, the next range of hills with its array of white turbines slowly turning in the wind.

This high point is dominated by a couple of radio towers and masts, but also at the top of the village are several reminders of what membership of the EU has meant for Portugal. We first pass the sports centre, and, shortly after, the indoor swimming pool, both of them built with EU funding. On both occasions that we have visited Portugal, these buildings appear to be closed, and there is another pool on the other side of the village that is apparently the one that people use. I am wondering whether EU funding covered construction but not ongoing expenses, and whether both of these buildings are white elephants. However, an online search suggests that the sports centre at least offers a wide range of activities. I suspect the locals get out a lot more in the summer than the winter.

Can you work out which is the pool and which the sports centre? Pavilho Desportivo and Piscinas Municipais

On the other side of the road, perched on the very edge of the ridge, is a 6-a-side soccer pitch, built with the support of the Portuguese Football Federation, UEFA, The Portuguese Sport Institute and the Secretary of State for Youth and Sport. As you can see from the goalmouth, it offers a very impressive view of the valley. Clearly, the emphasis in training is on passing the ball along the ground rather than in the air, because any ball that clears the metre-high fence on the far side would run downhill for about 2 kilometres before coming to rest.

Beyond the football pitch, the ground to the left falls away; we have now walked beyond the north-west corner of the village. The ridge opens out a little from this point, as we walk towards the pine and oak forest to the west of Penamacor.

This ridge took a severe battering in the storms that hit Portugal a few weeks before our February visit. Extremely strong north-easterly winds blew across the valley, and felled a large number of mature trees along the ridge and in the forest. It is a strange sight to see them all perfectly aligned on the ground.

There are a couple of trails through the forest, fairly wide and with a compacted-dirt surface, which are well-marked by posts with coloured stripes. One of the paths is designated as pedagogical, and includes neat labels giving the Portuguese and Latin names of the various trees and shrubs that line the route. There is even a picnic spot with wooden tables and benches, which, for anyone coming from Israel, is blissfully deserted.

Fortunately, because Tao’s buggy is designed for all terrain, and has better independent suspension than several of the first cars we owned, he is able to enjoy this walk, at a reasonable speed, without risking losing either of his teeth.

If, instead of walking out of the house and turning left, we turn right, and walk downhill to the centre of the village, we can carry on walking and discover that the terrain of the village is saddle-shaped, so that, once through the centre (which takes about one minute to traverse) we have to start climbing again, towards Penamacor castle and the site of the medieval town.

To be honest, not much remains of the medieval streets, but the ruins of the castle and the old city wall are quite evocative, and the views are stunning, both back over the saddle with the village laid out across it, and south over the plain towards Castelo Branco. In the first photo below, you can see, on the opposite ridge, several radio masts and one of the radio towers (which looks more like a water tower) where we started our walk today.

I first took this walk because I had found, on a local tourist map, the location of the house of Antonio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, the 18th Century physician and intellectual I wrote about several weeks ago. The house was, apparently, along the street that leads to the castle. However, when I arrived at the exact spot, I saw, rather than a centuries-old structure, what looked more like an airport warehouse. I walked all the way round it, and found only one door and no windows.

As I was wondering whether I might have mistaken the location, I took a closer look at the door and noticed the unusual design of the very large doorknob. Clearly, there is an interesting story here, which I hope to find out more about on our next visit (whenever that turns out to be).

And now, of course, since this is Penamacor, we have to plunge downhill before the final ascent back to the house for a cup of tea and a well-earned rest. (Not a lot of words today, but, if you add in the pictures at the conventional exchange rate of 1 pict to 1000 wd, it comes to 14,000 words, which is quite enough for one post.)

You know what? Here’s another 1000-words-worth to close on.

To learn more about the latest developments in the kids’ plans, you can watch Micha’el and Tslil talking about them, and Tao stealing the scene, in the latest video on their YouTube account.

Blog in the Time of Corona*

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*With acknowledgement to my nephew Saul, who was, for me at least, the first to compose a variation on a theme by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

By the time you read this, Bernice and I will have come to the end of the two weeks of self-isolation imposed on us when we returned from Portugal. We will then, seamlessly, have moved into an indefinite period of staying at home imposed on us as part of the general population, with a recommendation that I at least (as an over-70 with slight asthma issues) self-isolate completely. Having enjoyed two wonderful weeks exploring and redefining our relationship, we are more than a little reluctant to expose ourselves to the horrors beyond the front door, so we are planning to buy, where possible, online and depend on home delivery. As a consequence, the most dramatic change for us, when our two weeks are up, looks like being the chance to take our own rubbish to the municipal bin at the top of the street, rather than having to ask our wonderful neighbours’ obliging son. We are already arguing about who gets the privilege of first bin bag.

You will, I hope, understand that I am finding it difficult, in the current unpleasantness, to maintain the razor-sharp focus and single-mindedness that have characterised these posts to date, and I crave your forgiveness if I ramble a bit this week.

First, the big news. I know each of you has been on the edge of your seat over the residential status of Tslil and Tao; I can now put your minds at rest with the news that Tslil now has her visa, and so the kids are all set for the next few years, until they are entitled to apply for permanent residency status, and, ultimately, citizenship.

And now I feel a pensée coming on. When we were in Portugal last, I started to be aware that thinking about my blog was providing a ground bass to the unfurling melody of my life. In case ground bass is a term you are not familiar with…*

*Very long parenthetical comment here. As part of its desperate attempt to attract a younger audience, BBC Radio 3 (a station devoted to classical music and the arts) has issued guidelines to its presenters. Among these is a total ban on phrases such as: ‘Of course’ or ‘As everyone knows’, as in ‘As everyone knows, the young Bach walked the 400 miles from Armstadt to Lubeck to hear Buxtehude’s organ-playing’, or:‘Of course, by the time Mozart was my age, he had been dead for 35 years’ (pace Tom Lehrer –although when he first coined this joke, it was ‘dead for 2 years’, as Lehrer was only 37 at the time. 37!!! I’d give 33 years to be 37 again!)  Since I recognise that not all my readers are as fond of baroque music as I am, I have phrased the start of this sentence (I hope) sensitively.

In case ground bass is a term you are not familiar with, it refers to a short theme played on the bass instruments (typically a double bass in jazz or a keyboard instrument in baroque music), which is repeated without variation, and which serves as an anchor for a constantly changing upper-register melody. For a divine example, and as an excuse to hear Alfred Deller’s astonishingly pure voice, listen to Purcell’s Music for a While on YouTube. (Deller was the counter-tenor almost single-handedly responsible for the revival of interest in such music in Britain.)

Welcome back! So, what do I mean when I call my blog the ground bass to the melody of my life? Well, in Portugal, I found that, as each day unfolded, I was increasingly catching myself observing, as if from above, what I was experiencing , and mentally earmarking it for possible inclusion in a blog post. I was also starting to find myself ‘tweaking’ events when I wrote about them in the blog, to highlight a significance or sharpen the humour in an incident. I had even caught myself on one occasion attempting to consciously shape the event in real time so that it would make better copy. This intrigued me, and slightly disturbed me.

As I became conscious of the influence the blog was having on my life, I discussed with Micha’el the phenomenon that I was beginning to become aware of: to my relief, Micha’el recognised what I was describing, and also commented that he feels this is something that we all do all the time as we go through our lives, and we call it memory. The more I think about that, the truer it seems to me.

So, bottom line: don’t take every word here as an accurate account: this is a blog, not a witness statement.

With that last paragraph in mind, I feel emboldened to undertake an activity that seems particularly appropriate to this lockdown age, when increasing numbers of us are experiencing the world virtually. I want now to lecture you on Portuguese cuisine, which is a little like a fish offering to teach you how to ride a bicycle. Bound as I am by the laws of kashrut, I have savoured only three Portuguese ‘dishes’. The first is beer – which is perfectly drinkable, but whose most distinctive feature is that it is inexpensive.

Any serious discussion of food in Portugal has to start with Pastéis de Nata, the little custard tarts that are ubiquitous in Portugal. They even graced the breakfast buffet table of our hotel.

Each region has its own twist on the recipe, but for authenticity, one has to visit Belém, near Lisbon, and specifically the monastery there. Over 300 years ago, the nuns and monks used egg white to starch their clothes; this left them with large quantities of egg yolks on their hands, as it were. They therefore started baking egg tart pastries. (Faced with the same problem at Pesach, when I bake almond macaroons and cinnamon balls, I solve the same problem by making coconut pyramids with the yolks.) When they needed to boost their income, they started selling them.

Then, in 1834, they sold the recipe, and three years later, the Fábrica de Pastéis de Belém opened its doors, and is still selling the pastries 183 years later. I am reliably told that they are to die for, but I have no intention of making them, since they are very labour-intensive, and I would have no way of knowing whether I had captured the authentic flavour. 

Next, we have to talk about chestnuts, which, as I mentioned in an earlier post, are very popular in Portugal. There was once, so they say, a soldier called Martin, who was posted far from home. On a cold winter’s day (bear with me, this does eventually lead to chestnuts), he saw a ragged beggar outside the gates, tore his own cloak in two and gave half of it to the beggar. For this act, he was canonized. His saint’s day is celebrated in Portugal on November 11, and tradition has it (according to the bank employee who was serving us on November 10) that in recognition of the soldier’s act of charity, the weather is always warm and dry on St Martin’s day (as indeed it was last November). In typical Portuguese fashion, the day is celebrated with food and drink. (I suspect that one of the reasons young Israelis like Portugal so much is that they find much that is familiar in the national character of the Portuguese.) In this case, the food is roast chestnuts. The chestnut tree is native to Portugal, and, when we were there in November, the ground was scattered with chestnuts. The supermarkets, on the other hand, were awash with them. On the day itself, marquees were erected in the municipal car-park, and braziers of chestnuts were roasted and eaten. As luck would have it (although my suspicion is that these things are seldom, if ever, determined by luck – many customs and religious traditions naturally arise out of the cycle of the year), November 11 is the first day that the new season’s jeropiga is deemed drinkable. This is a reputedly lethal drink made by adding aguardente (Portuguese brandy) to the residue of grapes from which all the liquid has been crushed to make wine. In English, this pulp is known as grape pomace; in Portuguese, as bagaço de uva, which sounds so much more exotic. Incidentally, the term ‘bagasse’ in English is reserved exclusively for sugar-cane pulp, which is used as a bio-fuel.

Another brief word on chestnuts. Apparently, until the potato took over as the main vegetable in a meal, the go-to accompaniment in Portugal was pureed chestnut.

And, finally, no exploration of Portuguese cuisine would be complete if it failed to talk about salt cod. Of course, no exploration of Portuguese cuisine would be complete if it failed to talk about octopus and pig…but there’s only so much that I’m prepared to write about. You cannot walk into a supermarket in Portugal without being battered about by cod (there’s a joke there, somewhere). Great chunks of salt cod are stacked, shrink-wrapped, in freezer cabinets; slabs of the stuff lie in flat cardboard boxes in the fresh fish department; whole sides hang on butcher’s hooks. The photograph below, taken in our local supermarket, may not look very impressive. While we were shopping one day, I decided to take a couple of photos with my phone, knowing that at some point I wanted to write about this, and no sooner had I started to take shots than a young assistant dashed out of the storeroom and made it very clear that photography was not allowed in the shop. Micha’el told me later that the Portuguese are very sensitive about taking photographs without the subject being aware, but it had, quite honestly, never occurred to me that the cod might object.

Incidentally, my more observant Israeli readers may have spotted, in the background, the origin of the modern Hebrew name for cod, which is bakala.

You may be puzzled as to why a country should abound with salted fish when 70% of its border is coastline, taking in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and nowhere in the country is more than 50 miles from the coast. My curiosity was certainly aroused. Let me save you the trouble of googling, and astound you with the breadth of my erudition. (An erudite person, in case you were wondering, is someone who can google faster than you.) Portugal is replete with recipes for salt cod. Almost any cod recipe will start by telling you to soak the fish, in order to leach out the salt. Some recipes recommend soaking for 6 hours, others for two days, changing the water after 24 hours. Of course, this only begs the question: How on earth did salt cod become such a staple of the Portuguese diet? My research has revealed that Portuguese fishermen, throughout the 16th Century, would fish the cod grounds off Newfoundland, and, naturally, had to salt the fish they caught to prevent it rotting on the voyage back. The attraction of the banks of Newfoundland was that the shoals were so plentiful and so thick that, in the words of one contemporary account, ‘We hardly have been able to row a boat through them’. Portuguese, Spanish, French and English fishermen would cross the Atlantic to catch cod, until the Portuguese first reduced their involvement after the English raided their fishing fleet in 1585, during the war with Spain, and then withdrew completely after the failure of the Spanish Armada.

The only question still begged that I can think of is: Why is it that, even though Portuguese fishermen stopped needing to salt cod over 300 years ago, salt cod is still a central pillar of Portuguese cuisine? However, as someone who spent four years reading, searching, experimenting and tweaking, until I found the recipe that made it possible for me to bake the exact brown bread (rye bread with caraway seeds ) that I had known in my childhood, I think I know the answer to that question. I can hear Topol in the background, with the whole company singing: ‘Tradition!’. (Surely there can’t be anyone who needs a YouTube link for that?!)

After all this talk of food, let me leave you with some pictures of a young man who already enjoys his food, and very definitely knows what he likes.

Our Son, the CEO

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I’ll hazard a guess that few of you have familiarised yourselves with the Byzantine complexities of British citizenship, so this week’s post is a wonderful opportunity to plug that gap in your education.

Both of our children are British citizens, but of two different classes. Esther, born in Wales, and even boasting a bilingual birth certificate, is a British citizen by birth. Incidentally, we had to pay extra for the Welsh-language certificate; had there been a General Election during the period between Esther’s birth and our move to Israel, I would have been sorely tempted to vote Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist) for this reason alone.

Micha’el, on the other hand, born over 3 years later in Jerusalem, is a British citizen by descent (born outside Britain to a parent born in Britain). You know, I still can’t quite believe that we have a son who was born in Jerusalem – and, now, a grandson who is a second-generation Jerusalemite!

This citizenship classification is not just a technical distinction; it has ramifications. Specifically, the children of British citizens by birth inherit their parents’ citizenship; the children of British citizens by descent do not.

In other words, any children Esther had would be British automatically, whereas Micha’el’s son, Tao, is not British. Similarly, Tslil is not eligible for British citizenship on the basis of being married to Micha’el (leaving aside the fact that they have not actually been through a marriage ceremony recognised by any authorities).

And therein lies the rub. As a British citizen, Micha’el is the citizen of what was, when they moved to Portugal, an EU state, and therefore he was eligible for a resident certificate in Portugal, allowing him to stay for five years, after which time he can apply for a permanent residence certificate or, after six years, for citizenship. Tslil, on the other hand, is not eligible. And this despite her descent, on her mother’s side, from the Jewish community of Saloniki (or Thessaloniki, the name to which the city has now officially reverted, after some 900 years of dithering). Saloniki was, from 1492 until 1942, a major Jewish community, founded by refugees following the Spanish expulsion, and by far the largest city in the Diaspora to have a Jewish majority among its population. It seems to me that Tslil’s claim to Portuguese residency is far more solidly grounded than Micha’el’s. One of his great-grandmothers claimed to be of Portuguese descent (as I mentioned in an earlier post); other than that, his tenuous link to Portugal is through Britain, and that only goes back three generations (to his other great-grandparents who all came from Eastern Europe) or, if you prefer, two generations, to when Britain joined the EEC, as it then was.

Anyway, bottom line: Tslil, and Tao, are most of the way through a process of acquiring the much-sought-after residency permit. One reason why it is so desirable is that, without it, their status is that of tourists, and they are required, every six months, to spend time outside Portugal. The latest we hear from the kids is that Tslil had a very productive meeting with the authorities in Castelo Branco, except that one document she submitted had not been correctly completed by the authorities in Penamacor. So, another trip to Castelo is scheduled, and we hope that might be the last step.

Perhaps I can tell you a little more about their plans, to explain why permanent residency in Portugal is so important to them. I apologise if I am covering some old ground here, but their plans have evolved considerably since their arrival in Portugal, and it is not easy to keep up with some developments.

Their long-term plan is to form a community of like-minded individuals and families, a permaculture village. Unlike some communities of this kind in Portugal, this is not planned to be a touchy-feely closed community (as Micha’el described it to me: ‘a bunch of hippies sitting round a fire singing Kumbaya‘). Instead, they want to engage in research, exploring the potential of new/old techniques in construction, agriculture, living in harmony with their environment; and also to carry out a lot of outreach, not only to the world community of the ecologically aware and interested, but also to the local rural community in the middle of which they are putting down their roots.

I was planning to go on to describe one such piece of research and potential outreach, in the field of fire prevention and containment. They have developed a novel approach to this very real threat, and their hope is that not only will they be able to persuade the authorities to approve this plan for their land, but also that this will encourage other landowners to adapt and adopt it for themselves. As I say, I planned to explain this to you as best I could. However, Micha’el has just posted an excellent video, which not only does a far better job of explaining than I could, but also gives you an opportunity to see something of the land they have bought. The most helpful thing I can do is invite you to follow the link (and, as ever, urge you to subscribe to, like and help disseminate the kids’ YouTube channel).

Every time we walk on the land, or even see a video of it, I am struck by the scale of the task that lies ahead of the kids. This is clearly a project that will span decades, which seems to me very daunting, but, for the kids themselves, is not the least exciting aspect of it.

Even the first steps in building this community are small and gradual. However, after five months, the kids have made a lot of progress. They now have a clearer picture of the bureaucratic process of getting planning permission to build a home on the land. Together with their partner, Shir, they have registered themselves as a company, which made bureaucratic and administrative sense, focusing on research and consultancy in the broad field of permaculture. Immediately after we left Portugal, a week ago, two other potential partners arrived, to stay with the kids for a few days, explore common ground and discuss plans. Going forward, Micha’el and Tslil will be receiving a monthly salary for the development work they are doing, and they have already been approached by potential clients for their consultancy services. In the light of these developments, Micha’el allowed his mother to buy him a couple of button shirts and a pair of respectable trousers, for official meetings. All the rest of the time, he prefers to dress casually. But don’t think Val Doonican or Andy Williams; this casuality has a much stronger Eastern influence below the waist and a much more sleeveless t-shirt one above. The key concept is ‘comfortable’, which translates to ‘baggy’. Bernice is reminded of her late father, who could not stand feeling constricted by clothes, and who therefore always wore shirts whose collar, and trousers whose waistband, were at least two sizes bigger than he was.

Those of you who know Micha’el well will, doubtless, share the astonishment Bernice and I feel every time we see our son, in his capacity as a landowner and joint CEO of a registered company, driving off in his smart clothes to a meeting with his lawyer or accountant. But then, Micha’el’s mission in life since childhood, it sometimes seems, has been to astonish us, in a huge variety of ways.

By the time of our planned return to Portugal in June, there should have been several developments on the ground. Novel coronavirus willing, we are eagerly anticipating seeing how the community, and our grandson (but not necessarily in that order), have grown and developed in the intervening three months.

Speaking of Tao (nice segue, eh!), he is one year old today, and just about ready to graduate to his new car seat. He’s not a great fan of sitting in the car seat, but he loved the box it came in. (Excuse the appalling out-of-focus shot, into the dark, facing the light. The B after the David clearly stands for Brownstein rather than Bailey.)

Ganging Agley

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It’s a fair assumption that any wise old saying that I can recognise in three different languages is likely to have more than a grain of truth in it. If you caught the reference in the title of this week’s post, you will be way ahead of me. Just in case you didn’t, here’s what I’m referring to.

The best laid schemes of mice and men gang oft agley.

Man proposes, God disposes.

Der mentsh tracht un Got lacht.

(I understand, incidentally, that the origin of the English version is in Latin, from a work by Thomas a Kempis, the 15th Century German cleric.)

Anyway, I planned to be writing this week’s post at an altitude of 30,000 feet, somewhere between Lisbon and Tel Aviv, rather than in a Lisbon airport hotel. However, Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit, as Tom so snappily put it. Let me explain.

Bernice and I were booked to return to Israel on an overnight El Al flight, landing at 2:30AM on Monday. This was a smarter move than it sounds, because Taanit Esther, the dawn-to-nightfall fast that precedes the holiday of Purim, would start about two hours after we were due to land, giving me an opportunity to eat and drink just before the fast started. It also meant that we would be able to leave Penamacor in the middle of the day and have a civilised drive to Lisbon, rather than slipping away during the night as we did in November. We felt that Tao might more readily accept our absence if we drove off during the day, rather than disappearing overnight. It is, for us, upsetting that we cannot explain to him at this age that we will be back and have not deserted him.

So that was the plan. We had, of course, been following closely the spread of the Corona virus, and were relieved that the number of cases in Portugal was small, and that the kids had chosen to move there, rather than to Spain or Italy, particularly after the Israeli authorities ruled that anyone returning from the worst affected countries had to self-isolate for 14 days.

I was woken on Sunday morning at 6:00 by Tao’s crying. (He is cutting, or rather not quite cutting, a tooth.) I was secretly a little pleased, because the pain does not seem to last very long, and Tao is then wide awake, while his parents are usually still exhausted. My selfless offer to keep him entertained downstairs while they go back to bed is gratefully accepted, and I get to look like a hero, while enjoying an hour or more of Tao to myself. Lying in bed, waiting to see whether Micha’el managed to coax Tao back to sleep or gave up and took him downstairs, I checked my phone, and read an SMS from El Al inviting me to check in online (which I had already done) for our 7:00PM flight the same evening. This SMS had been sent at 5:37AM. A second SMS, sent by El Al at 5:38 (a minute later) informed me that our flight had been cancelled! While I was struggling to absorb this information, I heard Micha’el go downstairs with Tao. I followed them, and asked Micha’el to stay with Tao for a few minutes while I phoned El Al.

‘A few minutes.’ I only had to wait on the line for 35 minutes before a clerk answered. I explained our situation, and learnt that, as I suspected, the airline was ‘condensing’ flights. I imagine this is because passengers are cancelling, and also because flight crews returning from some European destinations are having to self-isolate. When I confirmed that I wanted an alternative flight as soon as possible, I was transferred to reservations. This involved me holding for another 90 minutes, quite convinced that at any moment the line would go dead and I would have to start the whole process again, but eventually another clerk answered, and, after I had explained the situation, he offered me a TAP (Air Portugal) flight the following afternoon. When I confirmed that would be fine, he asked me to hold while he made the booking. A mere 7 minutes later he was back, and I soon received email confirmation of the booking. It was now 8:30AM, and Bernice and I started thinking of the other changes we had to make. She whatsapped our insurance agent, to check whether we needed to extend our travel insurance by a day. In fact, since we had been due to land at 2:30AM on Monday, we were already covered for the entire day. Meanwhile, I called the car hire office at Lisbon airport to explain that we would be returning the car a day later than arranged.

Which is where Got really started lachting. The conversation went something like this:

‘Our flight has been cancelled, and I would like to extend our rental period by one day.’

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible, sir.’

‘Im sorry. Could you repeat that? I thought I heard you say that isn’t possible.’

Note: In my experience, car hire companies are only too happy to extend the rental period, and often don’t even require you to notify them. You can return the car a week later than agreed, and they will be delighted.

‘That’ s correct, sir. Your contract is for 28 days and that is the maximum contract period that we allow. You will have to make a new contract.’

OK. I’d like to make a new contract for one day.’

‘No problem, sir. Just come in to the office and we will do that.’

‘So you are telling me that I need to drive a 90-minute round trip to Castelo Branco to make a new contract for one day? I can’t believe you are suggesting that.’

‘No, sir, you misunderstood. We don’t have an office in Casto Branco. You will have to come to Lisbon.’

‘So, in order to extend my contract by a day, I….’

‘No, sir, you cannot extend your contract.’

‘Of course. Silly me. So, in order to take out a new contract for 24 hours, I have to drive three hours to Lisbon and three hours back.’

‘Yes, sir. Exactly, sir.’

‘And I cannot do this over the phone.’

‘No, sir. You have to bring back the car in person, and we will issue you with a new car.’

‘You do realise that this is complete madness!’

‘I’m afraid there is no other way, sir.’

After a brief discussion, Bernice and I decided that the only solution was to leave Penamacor as planned on Sunday afternoon, book into a hotel near Lisbon airport, leave our luggage there, drive to the airport and return the car, then spend the night in the hotel and return to the airport the following morning. At least this would all be at El Al’s expense.

Growing increasingly frustrated, I googled and found an airport hotel, booked a room online, printed out the reservation, and asked Bernice to put it with the rest of our travel papers. She spotted immediately that I had booked a room for Monday night, instead of Sunday night. I tried to alter the reservation, but that was not an option online, so I had to cancel the reservation and start again.

By the time I had done that, the clock on my laptop showed that we had barely enough time to pack and make some sandwiches to tide us over the next 24 hours, before we had to leave, if we were to drop off the luggage at the hotel and then return the car within the contracted time. (I was using the clock on my laptop because my watch battery had died a few days before; it transpires that God, like his opposite number, is in the details – we had not found anywhere in Penamacor that replaced watch batteries.)

I was far from quietly growing increasingly hysterical as the clock ticked, and I had no idea why the rest of the family were staying so calm and looking at me as if they did not understand my concern. It was only after we were ready to go that I realised that, since my laptop was still on Israel time, we in fact had more than an hour before we needed to leave.

This meant that Bernice and I had time to make and eat some breakfast (at around noon) before saying our goodbyes. Never easy, but our next trip in June is already booked. We had an uneventful drive to Lisbon, found the hotel and checked in without incident, and returned the car on time. We then walked back from the airport to the hotel (a 40-minute walk, which was a good opportunity to stretch our legs after the drive), went straight to our room, showered, ate some of our sandwiches and spent a pointless 20 minutes looking for something worthwhile to watch on TV. My goodness, wasn’t The Ten Commandments a dreadful film? And why did the Egyptians and Hebrews all speak with a British accent (Chuck Heston, Yul Brynner, even Edward G Robinson,), while the Midianites all spoke with American accents? We soon opted for an early night, after an exhausting day.

I am now writing this post at 30,000 feet, as originally planned, so I suppose that all’s well that ends well. Of course, when we land, we may discover that Portugal has been added to the Israel Ministry of Health list, and we will be facing two weeks of self-isolation at home. Mind you, after the last day and a half, two weeks of doing nothing at home sounds pretty attractive.

PS: …. two weeks of doing nothing at home sounds pretty attractive. This is just as well, because, in a move that proved beyond doubt that we are no better off than mice in the planning business, we landed in Tel Aviv exactly 75 minutes after Israel extended the self-isolation requirement to Israelis returning from any foreign country. (Word on the street is that Israel wanted to extend the requirement only to a number of countries where the situation had worsened, including a number of states in the US, but Mike Pence ‘explained’ that America would view with dissatisfaction being labelled unclean, but would be prepared to accept being part of a blanket restriction.)

So, I am completing this blog in the comfort of our own home, where Bernice and I will be enjoying a second honeymoon, desperately trying to remember what we did on the first one almost 48 years ago.

We are comforted by the fact that, having returned, from an isolated and so far virus-free area of a country that is (again, so far) much less affected than Israel, and having arrived back at our home town of Maale Adumim, whose first case of Covid-19 was diagnosed today, we actually feel much safer at home, isolated from all those potential carriers on the streets. The only drawback is that our internet is not working at home, and, as of the time of writing, I do not know when I will be able to upload this post. So, please accept an advance apology for prospective tardiness.

And next time, having spent a week locked up at home, I will have no news from here, and should be able to bring you up to speed on the kids.

Bring Me the Head of…Hudson Hawk

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At my grammar school (high school for my trans-pond readers), one of the Classics masters was a mildly eccentric character who could easily be deflected from the topic of the lesson by an ostensibly innocent question from a pupil. There was a running competition in the school to see which class could manage, using this method, to get this teacher to speak on the largest number of subjects in one 40-minute lesson. I believe the record was 47. (Incidentally, this was one of the more gentle examples of ways in which we tormented our teachers. The more I look back on my own childhood, the more convinced I am that William Golding, in his dystopian novel Lord of the Flies, painted far too rosy a picture of pre-pubescent boyhood in post-War middle-class England.) Anyway, I invite you to count the number of topics in this week’s rambling and entirely trivial post.

I have only walked out of the cinema in the middle of a film twice. Once I gave up on Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Devils, from Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun via John Whiting’s stage play. In a family blog like this, I can’t go into the intricacies of the plot but two of the film’s publicity taglines were ‘There have never been exorcisms like this’ and ‘Hell will hold no surprises for them’; so you can imagine! The film starred Oliver Reed in one of his more understated performances (which was almost the only understated thing in the film), and I can, having now put 49 years between it and me, remember little else, thankfully.

The second film I walked out of was Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). You may know this film first hand, or you may know it from regular references to it (largely by Graeme Garden), in BBC Radio 4’s self-styled ‘antidote to panel games’ I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue (ISIHAC). While the programme has fallen off a little since the demise of Humphrey Lyttelton, the jazz trumpeter and bandleader who chaired the show from 1972 until his death in 2007 at the age of 85, it still has me listening, not least to marvel at the continued speed of wit of Barry Cryer, who wrote material for many of Britain’s comedy greats in the 1950s-80s, and who,at 84, has lost little of his comic creativity. Please don’t write and tell me that the panel get a week’s warning of the topics in the upcoming edition of ISIHAC. I prefer to live with my illusions (particularly as 84 seems to me less distant than ever). You can hear a typical archive edition of the programme here, but be warned: the humour is very British and very schoolboy.

Or (to return to the second sentence of the last paragraph), you may never have heard of Bring Me the Head… If so, let me explain that the title is a quote from an American Mafia boss on discovering that his daughter is pregnant by said Alfredo. The remainder of the film, which I have always thought of as Peckinpah’s blood-soaked parody of 1963’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (but which he apparently regarded as the only one of his films on which he did not have to compromise with studio executives, and which appeared on the screen exactly as he envisioned it), documents various people’s efforts to retrieve and hold onto the eponymous head, in order to bring it to the mafia boss and collect the one-million-dollar reward.

The only other thing you really need to know, for the purpose of this post, is that the central character, who initially retrieves the severed head from the grave, keeps it in a drawstring canvas bag on the passenger seat of his convertible as he drives across the Nevada desert, so that, as the film progresses, the bag attracts more and more flies.

And so to the topic of this week’s post, which is my adventures last Friday at the hotel where we are staying. Because we sleep over at the house on Friday nights, we have to check out of the hotel every Friday morning, and check in again every Saturday night. Seeing how under-occupied the hotel is, we requested to keep our belongings in the room over shabbat, to avoid having to physically pack, vacate the room, and then unpack the following night. The hotel readily agreed.

Last Friday morning, Micha’el whatsapped me at about 6:30 to ask if I was/we were awake, and, if so, whether I/we could come over early, to relieve them after a not-so-good night with the baby. I was awake, but Bernice wasn’t, so I got up, dressed, grabbed a quick breakfast, then went back to our room to collect our drawstring laundry bag, since we were planning to do a wash and tumble dry before shabbat.

As I was walking across the (fairly large) lobby area on my way to the car, it suddenly struck me that: a) the hotel staff at the desk had only ever seen Bernice and myself leave the hotel together; b) we usually left around 9 to 9:30, whereas it was now 7:15; c) I was carrying a drawstring canvas bag of about the right size and shape to contain a severed head. To my relief, the desk was unstaffed, and I managed to reach the hotel doors unspotted by any of the staff.

At about 2 the same afternoon, while waiting for the hallot to rise prior to giving them a wash of egg and putting them in the oven, I suddenly realized that I had left my chumash (the book containing the Torah reading that I needed for shabbat) in the hotel. So I set my phone countdown timer for 25 minutes (after which time the challa would need my attention), asked Bernice to turn the oven on in 20 minutes, and set off for the hotel (a 5-minute drive away).

Which is where Hudson Hawk comes in. This 1991 comedy crime caper is, for me (or, rather, was, in 1991 – whether my tastes have changed I couldn’t say) a delightful piece of fluff, with Bruce Willis proving as entertaining as he was playing opposite Cybill Shepherd in the TV series Moonlighting. In Hudson Hawk, he plays an art thief who works with a partner. On the job, they calculate how long they have to carry out the job, and Hudson, from his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Great American Songbook, and of the standard versions of those songs, selects a song that is exactly the right length. The two thieves then sing said song concurrently but separately, to time and synchronize their exploits. (Among their choices, for example, is Bing Crosby’s rendition of Swinging on a Star.)

So there I was, entering the hotel, with 20 minutes still on the clock. I knew deep down that, if I was seen by the desk clerk, I could easily explain that I had forgotten something in the room, but I nevertheless hoped to get in and out without being seen. Again, the desk was unmanned at the time. I reached our room, to discover that it hadn’t yet been made up. I assumed that they were leaving that until the next day, and it occurred to me that I had just enough time to take the shower I had skipped in the morning, in the walk-in shower, in a warm, spacious bathroom, rather than facing a colder, over-the-bath-hand-held-showerhead shower in the house, made all the more exciting by the chance that someone would, at the same time, use the kitchen sink (which is upstream from the bathroom), thereby giving me the dubious pleasure of being frozen or scalded almost to death. I brought my phone into the bathroom, and calculated I had just enough time. Indeed, I managed to complete my shower, dry myself off and get dressed except for my socks and shoes, before I heard a tap at the door. I toyed for a moment with the idea of tiptoeing across the room, silently opening the balcony French window, slipping outside, swinging over the railing and hanging by my fingertips until whoever was at the door had let themselves in, finished and left the room. (I blame this fantasy on the fact that one of the hotel TV channels had just run a season of the Bourne films.) However, I soon saw sense, and opened the room door, to see two chambermaids. It only took a moment or two of pointing to my watch then holding up two fingers (in the nicest possible way), while muttering ‘Dos minutos’ (with no idea whether this was the Portuguese equivalent of Dog Latin), for them to understand, express what I assumed from their body language was agreement, and start to walk away. A glance at my watch told me I still had 7 minutes, so I hastily completed my dressing, picked up my chumash (remember that?) and left the room. I caught up with the chambermaids and proudly used almost half of my Portuguese: ‘Desculpe. Obrigado. Boa tarde!’ (‘So sorry! Thank you! Good afternoon!’) I found myself wishing that their cleaning trolley had included a bag of spelt flour, so that I could deploy over 50% of my entire stock of vocabulary: ‘Desculpe. Obrigado. O! Farinha de espelta! Boa tarde!’.

I walked swiftly to the hotel door, where I stopped to check how much time I had left on my phone. My phone! Where was it? Aaargh! I had left it in the bathroom. Hastily, I retraced my steps, retrieved my phone from the smiling chambermaids and raced back to the door. Unfortunately, there was a clerk at the desk as I crossed the lobby. Without breaking step, I smiled in my most winning way, waved my chumash and called out: ‘Would you believe it? I forgot this book this morning’, and went out the door.

Four minutes later, exactly as my phone’s timer started beeping, I pulled up outside the house.

And that was my Hollywood Friday!

I’ll do my best to provide more serious content next week.

Meanwhile, here’s Tao helping me to make challa. Note that he appreciates this is a serious business.

Remember: If you want less of the meanderings of my stream of consciousness, and more of the kids’ progress, you can follow, subscribe to, and like their youtube channel.

Life Is with People

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The title of this week’s post is borrowed from a book I first read over 50 years ago. In the 1940s and 50s, a number of books were published evoking life in the shtetls (the Jewish rural communities of Eastern Europe), a life that was utterly destroyed in the Shoah. The most famous and the most warmly received of these books was Life Is with People, which grew out of a broad academic study at Columbia University led by Margaret Mead. There were two things I did not know at the time I read it. The first was that its idealized and romanticized picture of shtetl life was largely rejected and scorned by academics: it is a very warm and fuzzy read, but there are apparently many places where it sacrifices accuracy on the altar of sentimentality. The second was that the co-author, anthropologist Mark Zborovski, was, when he wasn’t at his day job, an influential Russian spy. I kid you not. You can read more about the book and about Zborovski’s extraordinary story, in this article from Jewish Review of Books.

The reason why I have borrowed this title is because Micha’el and Tslil’s experiences since they first arrived in the village of Penamacor five months ago have demonstrated very clearly what it means to be welcomed into a small, close-knit community. I had been thinking for some time about writing about this aspect of village life, and events this past week helped me decide that now is the time. Even before the kids moved in, in the few days I spent house-hunting last June, I already felt some of this sense of community. The estate agent (realtor) who showed me the house we eventually bought (Eventually? From first viewing to transfer of ownership was only 55 days!) is Anabella Gaspar. a very friendly woman in her 30s with whom I quickly developed a warm relationship, even though her English was marginally less good than my Portuguese. We did a lot of gormless smiling at each other.

We had corresponded for a few weeks before my trip: she in English (courtesy of Google Translate), and I in Portuguese (likewise). In one afternoon, accompanied by an English-speaking colleague, she showed me three properties. The first remarkable fact was that all three properties met the criteria I had given her. (My experience in Israel is that estate agents always believe they know better than you what you are looking for…or, rather, they believe that their powers of persuasion are so remarkable that they will be able to sell you whatever property they most want to move, regardless of your needs.)

At the end of the viewings, she gave me a three-page questionnaire, inviting me to comment in detail on what I had liked and disliked about the properties I had seen. This is something I’ve never encountered before, but it really makes sense. In our case, we bought one of the three houses I viewed; in the event, however, that we had rejected all three, the agency already had a clearly-documented and detailed analysis of what we were looking for.

In the following weeks, we continued to correspond, while Bernice and I waited for the results of a ‘check-up’ we ordered for the house, for confirmation that the renovations we wanted were feasible, and for a detailed estimate. During this time, Anabella was anxiously pressing us for a decision, but always in slightly formal and very polite language, her emails always beginning: ‘Dear Mr David…’

When the sale was completed, Anabella sent me an extravagantly grateful email. When, a couple of months later, the kids moved in, she came round with a bottle of wine as a token of her gratitude. She was not to know that we couldn’t drink it because of kashrut, and the kids wouldn’t drink it because they don’t drink alcohol; it was a lovely thought.

Over the following weeks, she proceeded to take the kids under her wing. She accompanied them on their first trip to the health clinic, and introduced them to all the key people. She became their go-to person for advice on all matters Penamacorean. During our first stay in November, when Tslil needed to go to A&E one Sunday morning (Don’t worry: all was OK), the kids phoned Anabella to ask her which hospital she advised them to go to. (There are two fairly equidistant, about 35 minutes’ drive away.) She immediately came round to the house, with her husband, who happens to be an ambulance driver. They advised on which hospital to use, and we were only just able to persuade the husband that he didn’t need to drive in front of Micha’el all the way to hospital, because google maps would get him there.

And then there are the neighbours. Going up the hill, our immediate neighbours are a couple perhaps a little younger than us. The husband, Joce, was born in Paris, but moved to Penamacor in his childhood and was raised here. He spent his working life in Paris, and then retired to Penamacor. We reckon they bought a row of four houses (which I never even managed while playing Monopoly) and converted them into a single home, including putting a covered swimming pool in the back garden. Every detail of that description should indicate to you how little they have in common with Micha’el and Tslil, and yet… They have proven to be wonderful neighbours, starting with inviting the kids in for tea. This led to a bizarre conversation. They introduced themselves in Portuguese: “We are Joce and Lucrecia – Portugal”, and so the kids introduced themselves as: “Micha’el and Tslil – Israel…and what is your family name?” “Portugal,” was the puzzled and rather puzzling reply. Yes, their family name is indeed Portugal, and the sign bearing that name on the wall of their home is not, as we originally thought, evidence of extreme patriotism, but rather a routine name plaque. On reflection, ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ are both surnames.

When a friend brought the kids a sack of citrus fruit last week, Tslil took a bag of oranges in to Lucrecia, who immediately asked: “Would you like me to make some marmalade and give it to you?”

The kids’ car was due for its annual roadworthiness test last week. This is a 1991 Opel Astra that they bought from a couple they are friendly with, who are in the middle of a period of spending a couple of months in one country then moving to another. In each country they visit, they buy an old car and use it to get around. Micha’el broke off a wing mirror last week on the dirt track to the land, when he was negotiating a particularly treacherous pothole after torrential storms a couple of weeks before we arrived. Obviously they needed to replace the wing mirror before the test, and we suggested that, before the test, it would be wisest to get the car checked, and have any necessary work done in advance. The testing centre is in Castelo Branco, and Micha’el would not want to have the car fail, be forced to leave it in a garage (repair shop) he didn’t know, and have to travel back to Penamacor without the car, then back again to Castelo Branco. Much better to find a local mechanic. Bernice sensibly suggested asking the neighbours, which Micha’el did. Joce was indeed able to recommend a reliable garage, and insisted on leading Micha’el there (10 minutes outside the village) and introducing him to the mechanic, waiting while the car was checked in, and driving Micha’el back. After a couple of days, when Micha’el had not heard from the mechanic, he went next door to ask for a phone number. Joce tried phoning, but was unable to reach the mechanic. Joce then launched a village-wide search to locate him. I believe he had gone to his brother’s smallholding. Anyway, when he was finally reached, he assured Micha’el that everything was progressing well. There were a number of replacement parts needed, and he had ordered them all. Micha’el made it clear to him that he would have expected the mechanic to submit a quote and get Micha’el’s authorisation before starting work and ordering parts, but, naturally, Micha’el agreed to the work, all of which was essential to pass the test. Joce had heard Micha’el’s end of the conversation, and immediately offered to lend Micha’el the money to pay the mechanic. Micha’el assured him that the money was not a problem, but it was important to establish the principle of getting prior approval for work. When the work was finally done, Joce offered to take Micha’el back to the mechanic, but Micha’el explained that I was able to take him.

Incidentally, the car passed the test with flying colours, the tester assuring Micha’el that he had “a very good car there.”

I know that the Portugals have a daughter and grandchildren in Paris, and I imagine they hope that neighbours are looking out for their family in the same way as they are looking out for our family.

These are two extreme examples, but, walking around the village with the kids, and listening to the stories they have to tell, it is clear that they have been made to feel very welcome, by neighbours and nodding acquaintances, bureaucrats and shopkeepers. It is very good to know that our children are living, and our grandson is growing up, in a genuine community.

Speaking of our grandson, he went down to the land yesterday with his father and us, and, while he seemed a little concerned about the condition of the soil, he was very pleased with the new growth.

If you are interested in learning more about Tao’s plans for the land, you can follow, subscribe to, and like his family’s youtube channel.

Feeding the Stomach and the Brain

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The challenge in writing my blog from Portugal is that much of our day is spent with Tao; so, when I sit down to write, my mind is filled with thoughts of him. I am acutely aware that banging on about one’s amazing grandchild can be very boring for the reader, so, instead, let me dedicate this week’s post to……my amazing children.

When Bernice and I first started talking about my then upcoming big birthday, I really didn’t want to make an event of it. I was eventually persuaded that changing your prefix is not insignificant. (That extraordinarily clumsy phrase ‘changing your prefix’ is a leaden attempt to capture the essence of the phrase in Hebrew. Area dialing codes in the Israeli landline phone system consist of zero plus a single digit – 02 for Jerusalem, 03 for Tel Aviv and so on. These codes are known as ‘prefixes’. The big transitional birthdays, from one decade to another – in my case, from 69 to 70 – are referred to as ‘changing prefix’.)

A large part of the reason why I was initially reluctant was that I didn’t want to celebrate without the family all being together. Our solution was to have a modest evening at home with our local friends, and then for Esther and Maayan to fly out to Portugal for a week, overlapping with our visit, so that we could celebrate as a family.

So the seven of us enjoyed the whole of last week together…and it was wonderful. The kids all went out into the country, to walk and do a little sightseeing, and also went to Micha’el and Tslil’s land a couple of times, leaving us to babysit. Apart from that, for most of the time, we didn’t do anything much, but just sitting around of an evening with the family was very special. Tao shared himself out between us very fairly, so that we scarcely ever came to blows, and I got to indulge in one of my favourite spectator sports, which is watching Esther and Micha’el – in recent years, Maayan and Tslil as well – simply enjoying each other’s company. To have two children who are, in many ways, so very different from each other, yet who are so close to each other, is a source of pure joy to me.

During the week, we all went to a vegan restaurant in Castelo Branco for what I imagined was to be a celebratory meal. (Good grief – I’ve turned into someone who blogs about what he’s eating!) I only mention this because we actually were photographed together, and I have been asked, offline, to provide some photos of the kids. Not the least enjoyable part of the meal for me was the bill: a mere 52 euro (under 200 shekels) for six adults.

Happy Families

The meal was initially made even more special for me by the fact that I was anticipating my birthday surprise. I didn’t know quite what to expect, although I was praying I wouldn’t get waiters bringing to the table a ‘shaving foam’ dessert replete with sparklers, while singing Happy Birthday, in Portuguese, off key. As the meal progressed, it gradually dawned on me that nobody was going to make a big thing – or indeed even a small thing – of my birthday. I can only hope that I managed to conceal my disappointment from the others.

However, I needn’t have worried, because the actual celebrations took place at home on shabbat. (Yes, our house in Penamacor does already feel like home, which is a lovely feeling, and a great relief, since when we bought it Bernice hadn’t seen it yet.) The kids took total charge, with the exception of Bernice’s signature curry and rice on Friday night and lasagna for shabbat lunch. We were also allowed to provide the wine.

Every Pesach during my childhood, my father, of blessed memory, would order some bottles of Israeli Carmel hock to serve at the festive meals. At that time, Carmel winery produced kiddush (sacramental) wine – syrupy-sweet red – and one or two dry wines. Buying the hock represented the triumph of optimism over experience: every year, Dad would open and pour the wine in eager anticipation, take an initial sip, and swear that he was not going to buy any next year…but he always did.

Since then, of course, Israeli wine has undergone several transformations, and is now at the point where many of its wineries have won international awards. Bernice and I always open a bottle for shabbat. I am guided in my purchases by a comment from Adam Montefiore – the English-speaking voice of Israeli wine – who advises that if you pay less than 25 shekels for a bottle of wine, you are paying principally for the glass bottle, and if you pay more than 150 shekels, you are paying principally for the label. Fortunately, there are many really enjoyable wines in the 35-65 shekel range, which is our particular sweet spot (although I can hear one or two of my readers tutting about our cheap taste).

When we first came to Portugal, in October, we picked up a few bottles of Portuguese wine at the kosher food shop in Lisbon. On our first two shabbatot, we tried two different wines: the first was execrable, the second barely drinkable. Some hasty online research revealed a European Kosher wine supplier based in Brussels, who ships throughout Europe, with free delivery if you buy a case (which can be mixed). So, I sat down one evening and looked through their list. I decided to give up on Portuguese wine but to stay with Iberia, so I ordered 12 assorted bottles of Spanish wines. I also followed my usual policy, of starting with the cheaper bottles, and only moving up-market if we didn’t enjoy them. A very sturdy and well-protected case arrived 3 days later, and, so far, we have enjoyed the bottles we have tried. To be honest, nothing has been as good as the Israeli wine we drink at home, but I regard this as an ongoing long-term research project, and it seems a little ridiculous to pay more here to drink Israeli wine than we do in Israel.

Anyway, back to our celebratory Friday night meal. After we had eaten in Castelo Branco, Esther (on the right in the photo), Maayan (on the left) and Micha’el went off to do their own thing, while Bernice and I drove home with Tslil and Tao. It transpired that ‘their own thing’ was buying the ingredients for the shabbat meals. Esther rose to the challenge of cooking in a strange kitchen magnificently, serving a chestnut and mushroom soup that both nodded at Portuguese cuisine’s love of the chestnut and was deliciously warming and comforting.

She then excelled herself with a dessert that, if you have a sweet tooth, was to die for (and, if you have several sweet teeth and no self-control, to die of) – a chocolate and caramel tart, served with whipped cream lifted by a hefty slug of amaretto.

This delicious meal was accompanied by an original creation from Micha’el, which I will come to in a minute. But just before I do, I have to give you a little background.

After our first decade in Israel, when people asked me what I missed of Britain, I could honestly reply that there was very little, apart from BBC Radio 4. In those days, we would listen to BBC World Service on longwave radio. Fortunately, there was a powerful signal relay from Jordan, which meant tolerable reception in Jerusalem. There were a couple of programmes broadcast on the World Service that I loved: One of these was Round Britain Quiz – a cryptic general knowledge quiz between teams of celebrity experts. In its heyday, the programme boasted several competitors whose erudition and powers of deduction were worthy of the questions set: Irene Thomas and John Julius Norwich being the most worthy. Over the years, the teams have become much less impressive, but the questions have pretty much maintained their high standard. There are only eight questions in each half-hour episode, but each question is multi-part, and answering it usually involves a fair amount of discussion among the team – and often hints from the question-master. If that sounds like your thing, you can sample the programme here.

As well as trying to answer quiz questions, I am, as some of you will know, very fond of setting quizzes. Over the years, I have carved for myself a niche, creating bespoke quizzes for family celebrations. When I started, 50+ years ago, this involved spending days in the reference library. These days, the research can be carried out online, which is much faster and more efficient (but less satisfying, to be honest). The art of a good bespoke quiz is to make it difficult enough to be challenging, but not so difficult as to make people give up, and also to tailor it sufficiently to the interests and strengths of the celebrant (the birthday boy or girl, or anniversary couple), so that they can do better than anyone else, while not making everyone else feel excluded. Apart from the frustration of occasionally having to reject a question as being too challenging for the audience, I really enjoy the craft of themed quiz construction.

Micha’el (in the middle in the photo, flanked by Tao and Tslil) presented us on Friday night with an exquisite quiz, just sufficiently challenging to keep us fully occupied between courses, but ultimately solvable. Everyone pitched in – except Tao, but I’m prepared to cut him some slack at this stage – and, between us, we cracked all of the questions.

Micha’el had brilliantly devised questions that played to some of my strengths; he had also included some questions that required a knowledge of Hebrew, and some that were focussed on Jewish tradition, while others were genuinely general knowledge. It was tremendous fun to solve the riddles, and immensely gratifying to see Micha’el sharing some of my passion for the genre, and matching, if not exceeding, my talent.

Let me leave you with a taste of the quiz. All of the questions were to do with 7 or 70. Here is one – general knowledge – question. If you can find the letters for the spaces under the pictures, you may then be able to fill in the answers 1–7. Please feel free to comment.

If you want to see what Micha’el does when he isn’t setting fiendish quizzes, you can follow his,Tslil’s and Tao’s youtube channel.