The Container for the Thing Contained

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Last Tuesday, my heart leapt when I read the following 6-word WhatsApp from Micha’el: The container is 90 km from here…!!! My heart actually leapt twice. The first leap was because this represented the beginning of the end of a process that has been going on for almost a year. Anyone who has relocated to another country will know what a milestone moment it is when you are reunited with all the possessions that you have been making do without for far too long.

The second leap was because I have felt increasingly guilty over the last weeks. I was even considering, (be warned: there is a very bad pun coming up….in Latin) of renaming my blog Paenemacorrespondent*, because it seems a very long time since I wrote anything about Portugal or the kids. I just hadn’t been able to think of anything new to say about Portugal. Some of you have been kind enough to comment favourably on my last few musings, but, at the same time, I know there are some readers who would rather learn about life in Portugal than follow my thoughts on aspects of culture. So, I am thrilled to announce that today we have the saga of Micha’el and Tslil’s container, with which they have now been reunited….well, what they’ve really been reunited with is all of their stuff that was in the container. In other words, I am really using the container for the thing contained, which is one of the types of the figure of speech known as synecdoche. For example, you can say We downed a keg to mean We drank all of the beer in a keg. I am particularly proud of the synecdoche: Mich’ael and Tslil are thrilled to be reunited with their container, because it is, I would argue, the very best example imaginable of using the container for the thing contained, using, as it does, the container as the container for the thing contained.

I cannot hear the phrase empty nesters without a wry smile forming on my lips. (It all ties up; trust me.) When fledglings leave a nest, they leave behind them an empty shell, which their parents can easily nudge over the edge of the nest, perhaps one or two downy feathers that the wind carries away, and nothing else. When our fledglings left the nest, they left behind them twelve years of school notebooks (Esther), a library of impenetrable Eastern philosophy and shamanic and hallucinogenic studies (Micha’el), a wardrobe of clothes that no longer suited her (Esther), a wardrobe of perfectly decent clothes that he had no intention of ever wearing again (Micha’el), cuddly toys (Esther), death’s-head ashtrays (Micha’el), assorted mementoes, keepsakes, albums, old tents, useful pots for putting things in, useful things for putting pot in….and that’s just the top layer.

However, Micha’el’s room, at least, didn’t stay that way for long. Last August, Micha’el and Tslil gave up their flat in Jerusalem and moved in with us, bringing with them everything they had not sold or given away (paid forward, as it were). Then, five or six weeks later, they flew to Portugal, having boxed up everything they wanted to ship and left it in Micha’el’s room. Their original plan was to buy space in a commercial shipper’s container. However, they eventually decided that things would be less complicated if they took space in the container that their colleague Shir was planning to ship. Things would be less complicated… There’s another one of those clauses that you just know is going to come back and bite you.

Shir had already found two others to share the container. Splitting the transport costs four ways certainly seemed to make sense. Unfortunately, both of those others fell through, but then they found someone else to come in.

Of course, this meant that the kids’ boxes needed to get to Tuval, in the North of Israel, where Shir’s container was leaving from. However, their arrival needed to be co-ordinated with the arrival of the other contributions (date as yet unknown), and with the shipping date (as yet unknown). So, the kids moved to Portugal, leaving us to hope that we would be given at least an hour’s warning of when the removal men were coming. As you would expect in any plan (and I use the word plan in a sense so loose that its original coiner would not recognise it) involving three separate laid-back thirty-somethings, things remained fairly fluid until half-an-hour before the removal men arrived. Bernice is much better at going with the flow than I am (I’m more of a major-blockage-in-the-pipe man myself), so I allowed her to handle that headache, while I muttered about people who swan off to the other side of the world and expect things to just fall into place.

However, despite my scepticism (I had envisioned Esther having to dispose of the kids’ stuff when she was clearing the house after Bernice and I both die), the day did come, and the boxes did go, and we were able, once again, to enjoy looking at the walls, and opening the wardrobe, in Micha’el’s bedroom. Life is full of small pleasures; we felt as though we had just followed the Rabbi’s instructions and moved the goat out of the house again.

So, everything arrived at Tuval, where the container was packed, driven to the port, and shipped to Europe.

There are two ways to organise shipping a private container to Portugal. The expensive, hassle-free way is to hire a shipper to pick up the container in Israel, drive it to the docks, ship it to Lisbon, release it from the docks and drive it to Penamacor. Hassle-free is undoubtedly good, but expensive is less so; indeed, Shir felt that the good of hassle-free was outweighed by the bad of expensive, and so the kids decided to let him handle the whole process, instead of paying someone,

Unfortunately, because of Corona, the journey took longer than expected, but, eventually, Micha’el was notified that the container was at the docks in Lisbon, and they could start the process of releasing it. Since Shir is currently in Israel, it fell to Micha’el and Tslil to handle that process. This first involved registering with the shipping company as the people picking up the container. Micha’el submitted all the documentation, which was approved. The kids wisely decided that, rather than attempting the round trip in one day (a three-hour drive in each direction with who knew how many hours at the docks in the middle), they would book themselves into an airbnb in Sintra, a beautiful national park adjacent to Lisbon, and have a couple of days’ break.

Those of a nervous disposition should probably stop reading here.

The kids had been having some trouble with their car overheating, which had been fixed by their garage in Penamacor. We’re talking here about a car that has seen a lot of mileage, but that seems to be in pretty good shape for its age. Since our first car cost us £10 (the equivalent of about £130, or US $165, today), we have sympathy with their lifestyle choice. Our first car, incidentally, broke down frequently, but never more than half-a-mile from home, which, considering that we used it to travel 180 miles from South Wales to London several times, was remarkably generous of it.

Micha’el and Tslil decided to drive to Lisbon in the early evening, in the hope that Tao would sleep for most of the journey. However, along the way, the car started overheating, and they had to stop repeatedly and let it cool down before topping up the radiator. Their journey took seven hours, rather than the expected three, so that they arrived in the middle of the night, exhausted and very worried about how they were going to manage.

A search online revealed a garage a 7-minute drive from where they staying, with warm recommendations from several customers, and Micha’el drove the car over in the morning and managed to explain the problem to the mechanic, who agreed to take a look and then contact them so that they could decide on how to proceed. Micha’el then took the 40-minute walk back to their bnb.

Next stop was the port, where he learnt that, although they thought they had paid all the required fees, they had indeed paid the necessary taxes to the shipping company, but not the customs fees. Nobody had mentioned the customs to them because, as Israeli residents importing their personal and used possessions into Portugal, where they now resided, they were entitled to a customs waiver. However, in order to qualify for this waiver, they needed to have received a letter of authorisation from the Portuguese embassy in Tel Aviv that it was, indeed, the case that they were Israeli residents importing their personal and used possessions into Portugal. Nobody had mentioned this authorisation to them. (Speaking personally, this is the point at which I would have regretted not arranging shipment door to door.) Without the authorisation, they could not release the container from the port. Apart from the fact that this meant that their entire journey had been wasted, they were also in danger of incurring prohibitive storage charges while they sorted out the paperwork.

In the middle of all this, the garage mechanic phoned Micha’el to discuss the car. Now, I don’t know about you: I am told there are people who, while not themselves car mechanics, can understand car-mechanic speak. I’m not sure I believe that; in any event, I am not one of this super-breed. I certainly can’t understand a mechanic speaking to me in Hebrew – and that is after 33 years in Israel, and also regardless of the fact that much of Hebrew car-mechanic vocabulary is derived from English. (I believe this is a result of British mandatory army vehicle repair before the state was founded, when the Hebrew language was being dragged into the 20th Century.) I am, therefore, full of admiration for Micha’el, who was able, after less than a year in Portugal, to discuss car repairs with a mechanic, in Portuguese, over the phone.

In the event, the garage was able to carry out repairs, replace a few parts, and make the car roadworthy again, for less than the car had cost the kids originally! Their journey home from Lisbon was smooth and uneventful, and the car has not overheated at all since then. So, that was one good outcome.

Once home, the kids, and, independently, Shir in Israel, applied to the Portuguese Embassy, and, after some delay, Shir obtained the necessary authorisation. We still haven’t received the kids’, but that may be a reflection on the efficiency of the Maale Adumim postal service, rather than the Portuguese Embassy. Shir fedexed the original documents to the authorities in Lisbon, and, a week ago, the container was released. A couple of hours later, Micha’el sent us the message I started with today.

Sure enough, a little while later, the lorry arrived, with the container on its bed. The driver leapt cheerfully down from his cab, and asked: ‘So, where’s the crane?’, just as Micha’el was thinking: ‘So, where’s the crane?’. Micha’el pointed out that he had ordered and paid for a crane together with the lorry, and that the haulage company was supposed to provide it. After some hasty consultation, the hauliers agreed that it was their responsibility, a nearby 12-ton lifting crane rental company was found (no, I wouldn’t know where to look for one, either) and, in almost less time than it takes to tell, the kids had a container sitting on their land.

When Shir is next in Portugal, he will move the container to his own land. Meanwhile, the other family who took space have collected their boxes. Micha’el and Tslil have started taking their stuff, most of which they will transport back to the house, to use straight away (musical instruments, tools, clothes) or to store in the loft (most of the equipment whose purpose I know nothing about). The big furniture (their bed and a chest of drawers) they plan to keep in the container until their tipi is erected.

Incidentally, when I sent my notes to Micha’el, for him to confirm the sequence of these events, he added that there is a new and exciting development this week. Someone else in Castelo Branco apparently signed for the package containing all of the original documents they had been required to submit, and so it has not arrived. Micha’el is ‘trying to sort it out now’, so this horror story may well still have a twist or two left in it.

To learn how Micha’el and Tslil manage to stay sane through all this, view their latest YouTube video.

*If you didn’t have a Classical education, then, just this once, I’ll tell you that paene is Latin for almost. But please try to plug the gaps in your education before the next Latin pun comes along.

Every Problem is an Opportunity in Disguise

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I’m not a great fan of cracker-barrel philosophy, but…

One of the very few positives to come out of the coronavirus lockdown has been to see the way artists, both amateurs and professionals, have adapted to the completely new constraints imposed. It has been almost impossible to keep up with all the short videos circulating: orchestral instrumentalists, popular singers, members of ballet corps, performing in isolation and being post-edited together; lovers of musicals and Gilbert and Sullivan creating and performing corona-themed parodies; visual and verbal humour; lip-syncing of stand-up comedy routines (when did that become a thing?); and so on and (it sometimes seems) on and on and on.

And then there’s Staged.

For the benefit of those who don’t either live in the UK or have a way to access BBC iPlayer, and for whom this may have slipped under their radar, let me briefly explain. Simon Evans is an English comedian, who was due to start rehearsals for a production at the Chichester Festival this year…until corona. When the director suggested holding the rehearsals over Skype or Zoom, this sounded like a really bad idea to Evans, but, in a eureka moment, he realised it was a brilliant idea for a comedy drama. He and Phin Glynn, desperate to find creative work during lockdown, developed the idea. Evans recruited a couple of pretty big names in British theatre – David Tennant and Michael Sheen (who are apparently good friends in real life) and the result is a 6-part series of 15-minute episodes, following the story of Evans as director trying to guide his two leading actors, Tennant and Sheen, through Zoom rehearsals for a production of Six Characters in Search of an Author. All three play (slightly exaggerated versions of) themselves. It undoubtedly helps that both actors are married to female actors*, who also put in the odd appearance.

This is, quite simply, the laugh-out-loud funniest and sharpest humour I have seen on television for a long time. Tennant and Sheen (or Sheen and Tennant) are completely natural, and have a wonderful rapport. Indeed, Bernice and I argued about whether one scene in the final episode was rehearsed or improvised, because the response of all the cast to the lines is so authentic.**

I mention Staged only because it serves, I think, as a wonderful example of a truth about art. What initially looked like the constrictions of lockdown, preventing artists from breathing, turn out to be, rather, simply parameters. In the hands of a team of artists who are not intimidated by them, and who are prepared to explore the possibilities of this new situation, they can open up unexpected creative opportunities.

For example, with each actor’s face occupying exactly a half (or, when Evans is involved, a third) of the screen in close-up almost all the time, the focus is not on the speaker (with an occasional cutaway to the listener for a reaction), but, rather, all the actors are equal players all the time, whichever one of them is speaking at the moment. This means that the interplay and the relationship between them is always in focus. Again, the medium places tremendous importance on the facial gestures of the actors. Both of these actors, it has to be said, have very interesting faces and several months without a haircut means that their faces are interestingly framed by their hair. Finally, the contrast in the lifestyles of the actors is a constant, captured in the domestic background in front of which each of them appears. This is new, refreshing, exciting drama….and screamingly funny.

Every artist works within the limitations of the medium; the great artist makes a virtue of that necessity, and sees new possibilities within it.

There is, for me at least, a great thrill in admiring the technical skill of the artist. Alan Ayckbourn wrote a trilogy of plays, The Norman Conquests, which tell the story of a couple inviting four of their friends to stay with them at a country home for the weekend. Each of the three plays is set in a single area of the house – the dining room, the living room, the garden – at various times during the weekend, and to some extent the times overlap, so that if a scene in Table Manners starts at 6:00PM, and 45 minutes into the scene a character leaves the stage by walking through the door that leads to the living room, then in the play Living Together, in a scene which starts at 6:30PM, the same character will enter the stage by walking through the door from the dining room 15 minutes after the scene starts. Each play is written to stand independently, and each play does; however, the trilogy is ideally viewed as a unit, and can be viewed in any order, with no loss of impact.

Bernice and I watched it in the 1970s in Cardiff over a single weekend: Friday night; Saturday matinee; Saturday night. The production starred David Jason – then unknown but already a brilliant comic actor, and the weekend was a unique theatrical experience. As with many of Ayckbourn’s works, the technical constraints (in this case entirely self-imposed), far from holding the work back, send it soaring, and give it a very effective claustrophobic intensity. As the weekend unravels the audience revisits the scenes of disastrous events we have previously only heard about or seen the fallout from. These accumulating revisits create a sense of the intensity of the emotions closing in ever more stiflingly. (Like all the best Ayckbourn, the plays have no difficulty being simultaneously achingly funny and painfully sad.)

I have read that Ayckbourn wrote the trilogy in two weeks. While that seems to me to be a display of almost supernatural creative powers to rival Mozart’s, I can only assume that the rigid frame he had locked himself into allowed him to find relatively quickly the only way out.

And finally, m’lud, Exhibit C is a sad case of a square peg in a round hole: a stage production that was, I would argue, completely insensitive to the play it was presenting. Cast your mind back to the London theatre world of 1597. This is actually very easy, now that you can visit Shakespeare’s Globe on the south bank of the Thames in London. The first thing that struck me when we visited is that wherever you are in the audience, you are very close to the stage. This is a very different theatrical experience from the one in most of London’s theatres, especially older theatres where climbing to the upper balcony requires a Sherpa and an oxygen mask, and the view that awaits you is largely of the tops of the actors’ heads. Bernice and I once went up to London for the day and saw Frank Finlay in Ben Jonson’s Volpone and Anthony Sher in Singer (a powerful play inspired by the story of the slum landlord Peter Rachman). In both cases we stood behind the last row of seats in the upper balcony. I mention this only because the force of Sher’s performance hit us, even that far back, so powerfully that it was all we could do to remain standing.

However, that kind of acting, while brilliant in context, doesn’t work in the Globe, which calls for a more delicate touch. Shakespeare knew this, and he took full advantage of it in his writing. For example, when Iago moves to the front of the stage, so that you, in the audience, are closer to him than Othello is, at the back of the stage, you can easily accept that, while you can hear Iago’s aside, Othello cannot,

Another feature of the Globe is that it does not allow elaborate scenery. There are no wings to roll scene changes out of; no flies to drop sets from the space above the stage; no possibilities of lighting changes. This means that everything must be done through the poetry, as Shakespeare was well aware: indeed, in the Prologue to Henry V, he appealed to the audience’s imagination to supply scenery, accommodate changes of location, infer the passage of time:

Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass.

Nowhere does Shakespeare create magic from the technical limitations and intimacy of his stage more effectively than in Antony and Cleopatra, with its short scenes jumping repeatedly between the hedonism of Egypt and the harshness of Rome, and with its multiple scenes of intimate exchanges between just two characters. The National Theatre recently chose to broadcast, as part of its At Home series, the 2018 production directed by Simon Godwin and starring Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo. It may be that, on a traditional stage, in front of a large audience stretching a long way back, this production was as great as the critics indicated. However, the filming of a production, using close-up and sensitive microphones, unavoidably emphasises anything that is ‘big’ in the acting or speaking. As a result, on the screen, there was no sense of intimacy between Antony and Cleopatra: she in particular came across as raucous. This was a bad choice of production for NT to make. They do much better sticking with productions whose very character is large and unsubtle: One Man, Two Guvnors, for example.

A more fundamental criticism, and this is a criticism of the stage production itself, is that it used the full panoply of modern staging effects: a revolving stage alternated clunkily between the sunken pools of Egypt and the satellite-fed hi tech war room of Rome. There are no fewer than 42 scenes in Antony and Cleopatra, and a production that does not recognise that this calls for minimal sets and instantaneous, seamless transition between scenes is bound to be a leaden failure.

It turns out that, while Staged proves that every problem is, indeed, an opportunity in disguise, this particular Antony and Cleopatra showed that, equally, every opportunity can be a problem in disguise.

Judge for yourselves whether Micha’el and Tslil are unmasking the opportunities in their problems, by watching their latest YouTube video, with a guest appearance by their very own toddler.

*Sorry: there’s a cultural time lag between Britain and Israel. I know I’m no longer allowed to say ‘actresses’, but I haven’t yet absorbed the fact that I’m no longer allowed to say ‘female’.

**Having just watched an interview with T&S (S&T), I can confirm that there were improvised scenes; Bernice was, of course, right.

And for Those of You Watching in Black and White

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Bernice and I are currently enjoying watching Seven Worlds, One Planet – one of David Attenborough’s prestigious blockbuster series that highlights “the incredible rich and wonderful diversity of life found on our planet’s seven unique continents”. The series is certainly visually stunning, exploiting all of the technology available these days to a film crew. If much of television is ‘food porn’ and ‘real estate porn’ this is undoubtedly ‘fauna porn’.

However, I am cantankerous enough to have certain issues with the series. I’m not suggesting that, in light of the fact that Attenborough spent much of his early TV years presenting Zoo Quest,in which he traversed the globe in search of rare animals to hunt down, rip from their natural habitat and put behind bars, he should be ‘cancelled’ by environmentalists everywhere. My objections are, I hope, less totalitarian.

For starters, a series celebrating the diversity of life does itself no service by resorting to a rigid format, for all the world as if it were The Great British Bake-off or one of those makeover programmes – for clothes, cosmetics, interior design, garden design, it doesn’t really matter. We know that we are going to get, at some point, an amusing small animal going about its domestic business (courting and nest-building rituals are favourites), a large animal, sometimes basking, but always looking awesomely powerful, and a central, longer, set-piece of a lone animal or a pack hunting for prey, at first unsuccessfully, but eventually making a kill.

All of this will have often intrusive musical accompaniment, which, together with a somewhat arch commentary, will miss no opportunity to anthropomorphise and thereby, I would argue, demean the animals thus patronised. In addition, every episode will lead up to a conclusion that illustrates and bemoans the loss of natural habitat resulting from Man’s failure to steward his activity responsibly. In fairness, the series shows powerfully the inter-connectedness and delicate balance of the elements of an eco-system, and the often surprising and far-reaching effects of what may seem at first to be a trivial change. However, the message is not made more powerful by being hammered home in the exact same way in every episode.

As I watched Attenborough in his orange oilskin, with the drone-mounted camera slowly rising ever higher as it pulled back from close-up to reveal the puniness of this single human on a wide beach in front of a storm-tossed sea, my mind went back 47 years, to another man, perched this time on a hilltop, talking about the development of the human species. Let me explain how he got there.

In 1964, a third TV channel was launched in Britain, with the brilliantly inventive name of BBC2 (to distinguish it from the existing BBC channel, which was, in a similar stroke of genius, renamed BBC1). I hope you’re keeping up so far. BBC2 boasted a new technology, broadcasting not on 405 lines but on 625. This made it the obvious choice for introducing colour broadcasts, which were launched to coincide with Wimbledon 1967. The lush green of the grass, contrasting with the pastel summer shades of the spectators’ clothes and the pristine white of the players’ kit, made colour an instant success.

Another sport that looked better in colour, incidentally, was snooker, with its 8 different colours of balls against the green baize table. Of course, there was a considerable period when many viewers had not traded up to a colour set, and continued viewing in black-and-white, which led to the famous observation by an unfortunate commentator I alluded to in the title: ‘And, for those of you watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green.’ I have always felt sorry for Ted Lowe, the commentator in question, because his comment was actually helpful. In black and white, the yellow and pink balls were very similar greys, whereas the green had its own distinct shade of grey. In addition, the green was, at the time, on its spot, and therefore very easily identified. But I digress – no surprises there!

The Controller of BBC2 at the time was a young fellow called David Attenborough; he was charged with devising programmes that would show to the greatest advantage this new technology, which was, for the moment, a unique selling point for BBC2. Unsurprisingly, the first choice of programme was a series celebrating the greatest works of Western art. I suspect that this series initially virtually wrote itself. Fly the team to the great European storehouses of art (the Vatican, Amsterdam, and so on), point the camera at the ceiling (Michelangelo’s The Creation of Man), or the wall (Vermeer, Girl with a Letter), and have a figure of appropriate gravitas and eloquence stand in front of the works and present them to the viewer. Kenneth Clark, art historian, museum director and broadcaster was an obvious choice. In the event, Clark opened up the series to be more wide-reaching, and visually more interesting, even, than originally planned. The 13-part series of 50-minute programmes, Civilisation, which traced the history of Western civilisation chronologically, was an instant and huge success, and the format was well and truly established.

With the American bicentennial looming up on the horizon, and with an eye on possible American sales, BBC2’s next blockbuster was America, a look at the history of that interesting nation, fronted by Alistair Cooke, a wonderful radio broadcaster, and an established figure on both sides of the pond. Making this 13-parter bought time to think about how to realise the next project. Everyone agreed that it should be the counterpart of Civilisation, but focussing on science, rather than the arts. This presented challenges: science is less obviously visually ravishing than the arts; it is abstract and theoretical rather than concrete; it is perceived as less accessible to the man in the street; its humanity is less obvious. In short, how do you tell the story of science in 13 bite-size full-colour chunks.

Enter Jacob Bronowski, a little, bespectacled, Polish Jew, with a receding hairline and windswept eyebrows. Well, that’s one way of describing him; here’s another. Having arrived in England as a child, he won a scholarship to study maths at Cambridge. He taught maths at university, then led the field of operations research during the Second World War, increasing the effectiveness of Allied bombing. After the war he headed the projects division of UNESCO. He worked for the National Coal Board in England, before becoming a resident fellow of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. When he wasn’t at his day job, he indulged his passions: for chess and for poetry. He was the author of several studies of the poetry of William Blake, as well as being a published poet himself. If it’s any consolation, I’m told he was a very bad cook.

And here’s another description: he was a brilliant, mesmerising, natural explicator and television broadcaster. With Bronowski at the helm, the 13-part series, with the evocative title The Ascent of Man, was screened in 1973 and immediately soared. I was absolutely hooked from the opening moments, and my wonderful wife, as my graduation gift in 1976, bought me the book of the TV series – first-hand – hardback, no less. (That was when I really knew she loved me.) We didn’t eat for a week, in order to pay for it, but it was well worth it. As I reread it now, I hear his distinctive voice, with its not-quite-native English accent, his soft but throaty r’s, his dramatic (sometimes almost flamboyant, but never less than gripping) pauses, his total grasp of narrative, of how to tell a story.

I remember the series for many, many things, but, above all, for a moment that genuinely shocked me in 1973. At the end of Episode 11, an episode entitled Knowledge and Certainty, Bronowski took us to Auschwitz, stood in front of a pool into which were flushed the ashes of countless Jews, and spoke about the Shoah. I cannot remember an earlier occasion in mainstream British culture when the Shoah was presented, and certainly not presented so starkly and so unsensationally. It is difficult now to remember a time before the Shoah was part of the general discourse: in Britain now, the Shoah has a place in the school syllabus; Valentines Park in Ilford, where I grew up, is now home to a Holocaust memorial. But 50 years ago, that was far from the case. The sequence at Auschwitz lasts less than four minutes, and I urge you to watch it here. David Attenborough, recalling the making of The Ascent of Man, described how Bronowski filmed the entire scene in one take, with no script.

That one scene gives you a taste of Bronowski’s manner, but it obviously fails to capture how the series grew, organically, to offer a coherent and cogent presentation of the development of civilisation from the perspective of science, rather than the arts. It certainly offered this layman viewer, and many, many others, some insight into the big questions of our existence, and even some possible answers.

You can find some, if not all, of the episodes of The Ascent of Man on YouTube. I have rewatched some extracts over the last couple of weeks, and, for once, I have been reassured to find that my memory has not been playing tricks on me. I did indeed live through a golden age of intelligent television, and Jacob Bronowski represents the pinnacle of that age.

And finally, our grandson may not yet hold the key to life, the universe, or even everything, but he does have the keys to the car!

Could Be Worse. Not Sure How, but it Could Be

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I shouldn’t be writing this post. I should be writing a completely different post. Oh, how I wish I were writing a completely different one! When we first came back from Portugal, in early March, we already had our next trip booked, flying out on 7 June and returning on 5 July. This would then have been, should have been, a light-hearted post, full of amusing accounts of how we flew to Tel Aviv, but our luggage preferred to take a short holiday in Buenos Aires, of how our seats were double-booked and we were bumped up to business class, of how bittersweet it is to leave our family in Penamacor and come back to our home, our family and our friends in Israel.

However, it will come as no surprise to anyone to learn that, once again, we might be pretty strong in the proposal department, but when it comes to disposal, there’s only one firm in town, and it certainly isn’t us.

So, I’m writing these words, just as I was last week, and the week before, and the week before that, and every week about as far back as I can remember, gazing out of our back window at the late afternoon skyline of Mount Scopus, and coming to the conclusion that this is the right time to address what appears to be a burning question.

We have started to venture out gingerly into society – here a conversation over the fence, there an hour or so with friends in the garden, each of us sitting in a separate corner, like prison guards overlooking the exercise yard. At some point in these encounters, the question is always asked: ‘So, any idea when you’ll be going off to Portugal again?’

It’s a fair question. It’s a very good question. It’s a question you might want to phone a friend about…and then ask the audience…and then go 50-50. I just wish I had a good answer.

For the first few weeks of lockdown, one of us thought there was still a chance that we would be able to use our booked tickets. The other one of us tried to cool that ardour, and to inject a shot of realism, a carefully regulated dose designed to take the edge off the optimism, without sending both of us into deep depression. To help you identify exactly which of us was which, let me just say this: If the Brownsteins decide to record a dramatised reading of The House at Pooh Corner, the casting director might well invite Bernice to play the part of Pooh or Piglet…but I will undoubtedly be typecast as Eeyore.

By mid-May, even Piglet had to admit that Eeyore was right, and so I went online to clarify what TAP Air Portugal’s refund policy was in our Corona world. The first thing I discovered was that TAP is a rarity in Portuguese cyberspace: their site’s home page sports a discreet Union Jack in the top right corner, with the magic two-letter combination EN alongside it. More remarkably, the English displayed is easily understandable, with not a single postilion in sight.

Even more remarkably, TAP has a very fair refund scheme in operation. Not, of course, a full cash refund: Eeyore certainly wasn’t expecting that ; even Piglet wasn’t expecting that. However, they did offer a voucher, valid for two years, redeemable against any flight to any destination, transferrable to a third party, and worth the full value of the sum originally paid, plus a supplement of up to 20% extra, if used to purchase a ticket that cost more than the original ticket. In other words, if I originally bought a ticket for $500, and then redeemed the voucher for a flight costing $600, the voucher would cover the entire cost of the new flight. Eeyore needed to sit down when he read that!

So, I filled in a ridiculously straightforward 6-question form and clicked Submit. I then had to repeat the process for Bernice’s ticket, since a separate voucher is issued for each ticket. Within minutes, a confirmation email, in English(!) arrived in my Inbox, with a reassuringly complex 15-character identifying code, assuring me that I would soon be receiving the voucher by email. Within minutes, a second confirmation email, with an equally reassuringly complex, but subtly different, 15-character identifying code arrived, assuring Bernice that….

My inner Eeyore remained sceptical, but, sure enough, three days later, two emails arrived, one for myself, the other for Bernice, enclosing our vouchers, with even more reassuringly complex 20-character identifying codes.

And then, later the same day, two more emails arrived, one for myself, the other for Bernice, enclosing a second pair of vouchers with equally reassuring but completely different 20-character codes.

I waited, and waited, but no further vouchers arrived. Nevertheless, the vouchers we had already received represented a 140% return on our investment in just 6 months; I was sorely tempted to reinvest immediately in TAP tickets, and then request a refund, until I realised that, of course, the refund offer did not apply to tickets booked later than mid-March.

Four weeks later, a further pair of emails arrived. (TAP write to me more often than any of my other friends.) These emails pointed out, politely but firmly, that Por lapso, foram emitidos dois vouchers (Through a lapse, there have been emitted two vouchers), informed me which of the vouchers had been cancelled and which were still valid, and apologised for any inconvenience caused.

I haven’t heard from them since then…I do hope it wasn’t something I said.

So, to return to the burning question. When we do decide to fly, it will make sense to fly TAP, so that we can redeem our vouchers. Of course, if we want to fly direct, we only have two options: TAP and El Al. You may remember that we (and especially Piglet) definitely do want to fly direct – indeed, interestingly, when we flew with a layover in Vienna, I briefly became Piglet and Bernice was Eeyore. (Rather like Gielgud and Olivier in Romeo and Juliet, or Cumberbatch and Miller in Frankenstein.) Of course, in Vienna, Piglet’s optimism proved well-founded, just as, in the current situation, Eeyore’s pessimism is, sadly, proving equally well-founded.

TAP and El Al. Currently, El Al is in dispute with its pilots, and has recalled all of its fleet to Tel Aviv and grounded all flights – passenger and cargo. The greatest likelihood is that El Al will need a substantial Government bailout to continue operating. Meanwhile, in mid-April, TAP requested a Government bailout, cut its weekly flights by 98% and put 90% of its employees on furlough. If we want to fly direct from Tel Aviv, our best plan at the moment looks like going to the Mursi in Ethiopia for some serious ear-lobe stretching and then finding a magic feather.

There may be other options. A week or so ago, it looked as though Israel would be signing an open skies agreement with its East Mediterranean partners – Greece and Cyprus. That would have meant Aegean Air flights from Tel Aviv to Athens, with the possibility of a second leg from Athens to Lisbon. However, a moment’s thought led to the realisation that the flight from Tel Aviv would be full of Israeli 18–25s, enjoying their first real taste of freedom in four months, and heading for a drink- drug- and ‘social-activity’-packed two weeks on the Greek islands. If I’m going to die, I can think of dozens of methods preferable to contracting Covid-19 while I’m locked in a tube hurtling 35,000 feet above the Mediterranean at 900 mph, surrounded by people who, even pre-pandemic, I tried to avoid eating in the same restaurant as. (Winston Churchill and I are happy with that ‘as’ just where it is, thank you very much!)

Now, of course, as Israel’s numbers of new infections soar onwards and upwards, and as even Portugal is acquiring a spike, a trip seems further away than ever. Fortunately, WhatsApp offers us a substitute: a very poor second, but infinitely better than what we could offer our parents, in 1986, when we took our almost-three-year-old Esther away. Those were the days of queuing at the Jerusalem Central Post Office to book an international phone call to London, of airmail letters and aerogrammes, and of an annual two-week visit by grandparents. In contrast, we have a long WhatsApp video call with the kids every week, and now that Tao is walking, understanding, and interacting more every time we speak, the call is sheer joy. At the same time, of course, it is very frustrating, as we watch how far he has progressed since we last saw him in March, and realise how much we are missing. Still, we are learning to be very grateful for what we have: with a happy, healthy, bright, inquisitive 15-month-old grandson in one pan of the scales, we know we really have no cause for complaint.

You can see what I’m talking about in the kids’ youtube video from last week, co-presented by Micha’el and Tao.

And finally, this week, I apologise for the bleakness of this week’s title: Could be worse. Not sure how, but it could be. It honestly doesn’t reflect how I feel: I am, remember, one of those lucky ones whose natural tendency towards social distancing has suddenly become public-spirited. It’s just that I wanted to begin with a quote from Eeyore, and I think that is the Eeyoriest. If you want something a tad more upbeat, he also said: The nicest thing about the rain is that it always stops. Eventually.

So: stay dry, stay safe, stay well, stay sane….and stay reading!

Perry Mason and the Woman of Rome

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Bernice and I recently ventured into Jerusalem. We had to go for a routine medical test, and decided to live dangerously, and combine the visit with a couple of other errands. One of these was to go to the excellent specialist music store on the main pedestrian precinct, to try to get for Esther’s wife Ma’ayan a book of sheet music for jazz piano. We had seen the book on Book Depository, but we agreed that we should support the privately-owned, specialist shop, particularly as it had only just reopened after lockdown. It is a shop that I love going into – although ever since Michael left home we hardly ever have an excuse to go in. The shop window always boasts a delightfully eclectic assortment of instruments, and the array of acoustic guitars, ouds, with the occasional cello or violin along the walls inside the shop, all softly illuminated from above, always leaves me wondering whether man has ever put wood to more beautiful use than when carving musical instruments.

When I went in, I saw that there were no books or sheet-music on display. I assumed they had all been moved to the upper floor. When I asked the owner about the book, he smiled ruefully, and explained that they no longer stock any books: that entire side of their business has been killed by the internet. He also agreed with me that, if he did not stock it, nowhere else in Jerusalem would. And so, regretfully, we had to order the book online.

Don’t get me wrong. Bernice and I are huge fans of Book Depository, with its frequent discount campaigns, its bargain offers, its no-argument replacement policy for goods that arrive damaged or do not arrive, its charming bookmarks. I even enjoy the fact that books are dispatched separately, as the order is filled: I place one order of a dozen books, I forget what I ordered, and then I get the frisson of opening 12 separate surprise presents, over the space of a couple of weeks.

But (and it is a huge but) Book Depository is not the second-hand bookshop on the corner of the Lower Cranbrook Road and Ilford Hill, where I browsed many miles of bookshelves from my early teens onwards. It was there that I fed my first ‘literary’ addiction, buying, reading and then selling back probably 25 or 30 of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason stories. Google Maps street view shows me that the site is now a children’s clothing store, cramped uninvitingly between Chicken Hut and Dixy Chicken. In the early 1960s, however, it was between a cobbler’s, if I remember rightly, and a haberdasher’s. (For those below a certain age, ‘cobbler’ was originally a pejorative term indicating someone who had no skill. This meaning survives – in stage portrayals of Cockneys, at least – in such phrases as ‘cobbled together’ and ‘a right load of old cobblers’. Later ‘cobbler’ came to be used specifically in the shoemaking trade for someone who could repair shoes but lacked the skill to make them from scratch. Haberdashery is what I believe the ex-colonials call ‘notions’: buttons and sewing thread, sequins and trim, and all of the other paraphenalia of needlework and dressmaking.)

‘My’ bookshop was a place of mystery and hidden treasure. As I opened the door, the bell that hung above it would tinkle lightly, and the owner would emerge, badger-like, from the gloom of the back office. The lighting and ventilation helped to create an atmosphere that suggested the shop had been burrowed out of a hillside.

I think for me the greatest mystery of the place – and of second-hand bookshops in general – has always been the ubiquitousness of Alberto Moravia’s Italian masterpiece, translated into English in the Penguin edition – The Woman of Rome. From 1963 until 1986 (when we came on aliya), whenever I went into a second-hand bookshop, I looked for a copy of The Woman of Rome, and I never failed to find one. I am still unsure what to make of this. Did it indicate that it was an extremely popular book, since clearly everyone owned a copy; or, since everyone was getting rid of it, was it an extremely unpopular one? I can’t offer any answers, I’m afraid. I never actually bought, or read, it.

There are at least four ways in which second-hand bookshops are far superior to Book Depository. First, and most obviously, every book is a potential bargain. Books are among that special group of artifacts whose infinite variety age cannot wither, nor custom stale. (Note to self: There’s a good turn of phrase in there somewhere; must play around with it and see if I can use it again.) As long as all the pages are there, and all of the text is legible, a dog-eared, eighth-hand Penguin paperback copy of Women in Love offers exactly the same glorious literary experience as a signed, hardback first edition.

An added benefit, for the obsessive reader, is that, whereas you might be tempted, having discovered John Steinbeck at age 15, to order online everything he wrote, a second-hand bookshop compels you to space out your acquisitions, buying a new title now and again, whenever one surfaces on the shelves, and thereby avoiding binge-reading. (Incidentally, this also makes it much easier to control your spending!) In this way, I enjoyed The Red Pony, for example, on its own terms, rather than comparing it unfavourably with Grapes of Wrath, as I probably would have done if I had read them back-to-back.

In addition, second-hand bookshops usually strike the perfect balance between order and chaos. So, for example, non-fiction is usually divided into science, history, travel, biography, and so forth, and fiction is arranged alphabetically by author. However, the arranging is done not by computer according to Dewey number, or by banks of data inputters, but rather, typically, by one day-dreaming bibliophile, whose efforts, furthermore, are often thwarted by customers returning books to the wrong place.

What this meant for me was that looking for another John le Carré was not a completely hopeless task, (although I could never decide whether he would be found between D H Lawrence and Harper Lee, or between Truman Capote and Lewis Carroll). At the same time, I always had to cast my net a little wider, in case something I was looking for had been bumped a little from its correct position.

However, on balance, I would say that the greatest advantage of the second-hand bookshop over Book Depository is serendipity*. I cannot easily ‘browse the shelves’ of Book Depository, and, if I do, I am very unlikely to stumble across something that has been misfiled.

In my second-hand bookshops, on the other hand, I have found a few absolute treasures that I had no idea I should be looking for. Almost always, it was the titles that attracted me. One day in the mid-1970s, for example, living in the cultural backwater of Bridgend, South Wales, I came across a title that simply begged to be bought, just to find out what on earth it was. And so I came to discover the utterly absorbing experience of reading Robert M Pirsig’s (the author’s name alone might have tempted me to buy the book) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I have seen this variously described as ‘The best-selling philosophy text of all time’ and as an attempt to unify ’holistic, subjective perspective with analytical, objective perspective’. It is part road trip, part philosophical musing. If you had asked me in my twenties whether it was readable, and whether it was worth reading, I would have answered ‘Yes and yes!’ enthusiastically. I recently rediscovered it on my shelves and reread it. Let’s just say that it, or I, or perhaps the world, or perhaps two or more of us, have changed since the 1970s.

It was again the title that seduced me into buying Harlan Ellison’s subversive and notorious overview of American television in the late 1960s, The Glass Teat. Not only was the subject-matter stimulating and thought-provoking, but the direct, vernacular prose was both articulate and immediate. We didn’t talk or write like that in Bridgend in the 1970s, and we certainly hadn’t talked or written like that in Ilford in the 1960s, but it was thrilling and vivid and intoxicating. (Almost all of you know me well enough to be aware that the effect wore off pretty quickly….but for a brief moment there I was of my time.) Unlike ZAMM, which is how we cognoscenti refer to Zen and the…, Ellison’s work is, for me, as fresh as ever. It still leapt off the page and hit me between the eyes with full force.

When I last visited a second-hand bookshop, I did it in style. We took the kids on a roots trip to Britain, in 2013, and spent a few days in Swansea staying with very good friends. Micha’el was, at the time, very interested in shamanism, and had tried, with no real success, to find some books in Charing Cross Road. He had been very impressed by Foyles, but not so much by the limited helpfulness of the staff, and so I decided that I would take him to the shrine of books. From Swansea, we drove one day to Hay-on-Wye, which has become the second-hand book centre of the United Kingdom (and possibly the world).

This small riverside town that lies on the Welsh-English border has a population of about 1500, and boasts over 30 bookshops, some specialist, some general. Micha’el and I split up to visit a few, and then met up again in the largest shop, housed in a converted barn, two floors high, with a soaring ceiling, inspiring a sense of awe similar to what one experiences in the great medieval cathedrals. It was a three-hour round-trip drive, but it was very much worth it just to see the expression on Micha’el’s face when he walked into the emporium, and to hear his enthusiasm when he found an assistant who could discuss with him intelligently the various branches of shamanism on which they had books in stock.

I wonder when I will again get to a second-hand bookshop. There are such shops in Jerusalem; Micha’el even worked in one several years ago. However, unsurprisingly, the bookshops I love are the ones whose stock reflects the tastes of people like me: usually more widely read, and almost invariably more adventurous than me, but close enough to me to be able to stretch out a hand and allow me, by stretching out my hand beyond my comfort zone, to grasp the book that they are offering. Now, if Book Depository could only develop an algorithm that did that, our library would be doubled in size….and our bank balance would be halved. Just as well they can’t, probably.

Of course, a well-rounded life is one that combines sedentary reading with healthy exercise.

*Serendipity: now there’s a word with a fascinating etymology. King Barham V, you hardly need me to remind you, was a Persian king who ruled the Sassanid Empire about 1600 years ago. Around his reign there was woven a fantastical tale, which passed into Persian folklore and was published in Venice in 1557. The book was eventually translated into English as The Three Princes of Serendip (which is the Persian name for Sri Lanka). It tells the story of the journeys of the three princes, who ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’. Enter, around 1750, Horace Walpole, a Prime Minster’s son, the architect of Strawberry Hill House (which was really the forerunner of all the grand Victorian public buildings in England) and the author of the world’s first Gothic novel – The Castle of Otranto. In his spare time, Walpole, enchanted by the tale of the three princes, borrowed the name of the princes’ birthplace to coin the term serendipity, meaning ‘the fact of finding interesting or valuable things by chance’. (Incidentally, Walpole is also responsible for the first recorded written use in English of over 200 other words, among them: souvenir, malaria, beefy and nuance.)

Enter a Messenger

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As is becoming traditional, I must start with some housekeeping (a blogger’s work is never done, and all that). You may be one of those who smirked at my pitiful attempt at Psychology 101 last week, when I pretended I thought I could get into the mind of the confidence trickster. If so, you might be interested in hearing, from the horse’s mouth, a first-person account of the motivations of the con man. This is a keynote address given by Frank Abagnale in 2013 to, I believe, a conference for senior executives in Federal government in the US, and it not only alerts you to the liberties that Spielberg took with Abagnale’s biography in his film Catch Me If You Can, but also gives you insight into the man himself. Of course, as you listen, a little voice inside your head keeps asking whether you can actually believe anything he says, but both Bernice and I found this a very entertaining way to pass 30 minutes. You can watch it on YouTube here.

And now to today’s main course. I feel like an actor with a walk-on, one-line part in one of Shakespeare’s histories. Picture, if you will, a stage peopled by men all named after counties, with the most powerful, who is either the most handsome and manly or, more interestingly, the most shrivelled and ugly, enthroned, downstage left. (If this is one of those trendy modern-dress versions, the nobles may also have been updated, and be named after some of the newer counties: My Lord Tyne and Wear, what news of Merseyside? He is at odds with Greater Manchester. On reflection, I think we’ll stick to tradition.) I enter, upstage right, decked out in doublet and hose and a suitably flattering codpiece, and holding a rolled and sealed parchment, bound with a bright scarlet ribbon. I stride purposefully across the stage’s diagonal, extend the parchment towards the nobleman, bow with a flourish, and deliver my one line: News from Portugal, my liege.

Yes, my friends. I know that you have been waiting anxiously for the next instalment of the property tax story. Well, here it is.

You will remember that Micha’el paid the outstanding semi-annual property tax by bank transfer to the Portuguese Tax Authority, but, unfortunately, because of an unsympathetic bank-teller, the payment was not accompanied by the requisite document reference number or my NIF (the equivalent of a social security number). Consequently, the payment was not credited to my account with the Tax Authority. As 31 May, the final date for payment, drew nearer, I decided that it would be politic first to make a second payment correctly, and only then, at leisure, to try to locate the first payment in the system and get it credited to cover the second instalment due in November. Micha’el, bless him, transferred the money (this time effortlessly and accurately, through an ATM) and, last week, I made my way, again, into the labyrinth of the Tax Authority website, following the trail of thread that I had carefully paid out behind me on my last expedition. I remembered Citizen Kane (it suddenly strikes me that it is probably unwise to publicise one’s answer to a security question on one’s blog, but it’s too late now), and meandered almost effortlessly to my personal page. There, in my message inbox, was a long and very official-looking message from the Tax Authority, which looked like, and, as Google Translate confirmed, actually was, a statement of payment received. My disproportionate sense of achievement can perhaps be ascribed to my relief at no longer facing the prospect of a kangaroo trial, and an indeterminate period inside a Portuguese jail.

And then (Why, oh why, does there always have to be an and then?), when I woke up on Sunday morning, I found, in my inbox, an email from the Tax Authority which refused to yield its secrets to my cursory glance; all I could make of it was 25 June and 50,000 euros. Ever the optimist, I immediately assumed that I was being given until 25 June to pay a 50,000-euro fine for non-payment of the 50-euro tax. However, I decided to run the email through Google Translate before waking Bernice and telling her that we needed to pack immediately and make our way to some third-world country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Portugal. What a surprise when I did indeed translate it. This is what I read:

On June 25, the first 2020 special drawing of the “Lucky Invoice” will take place. Three prizes worth 50,000 euro each will be drawn. To qualify for the draw, simply request the insertion of your tax number (NIF) on all invoices.

As I contemplate the convoluted, and, doubtless, multiple navigations through the website that I will need to go through in order to be sure that I have, actually, requested the insertion of my tax number on all invoices, I just know that that word ‘simply’ is going to haunt me.

Equally intriguing is the fact that the prize money is not to be awarded, as you might have thought, in crisp 500-euro notes in a delightful pastel lavender shade. Nor even, since the 500-euro note is no longer being printed, in crisp yellow 200-euro notes. (Apparently, in common with Canada and Singapore, Europe is phasing out its highest-denomination bill in an attempt to make things more difficult for international terrorists, who will now need two large suitcases to carry a million euros in cash, rather than managing with one medium one, as in the past. As if the life of an international terrorist were not difficult enough already!)

But, no. Scrap that image of Bernice and I falling back onto a water bed with huge quantities of banknotes fluttering to the floor around us. Apparently, the award will be given in Certificados do Tesouro Poupança Crescimento, which I must admit sounds very impressive. It turns out that these are Treasury Savings Growth Certificates (which sounds almost as impressive). So that’s today’s addition to my Portuguese vocabulary. Certificados do Tesouro is obviously Treasury Certificates; Crescimento is clearly Growth, as in crescendo and a crescent moon. In that case, by a process of illumination, Poupança must be Savings, although I can’t find any etymological hook to hang this word on, so it will just be floating around inside my head for a day or two until it swims out of reach and is lost to me for ever.

Speaking of crescimento, the kids’ vegetable nursery is coming along nicely – obviously benefitting from some tender loving care.

Catch Me if You Can…and You Could…and You Did

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(Quick piece of housekeeping. For the last two months, a technical glitch has prevented anyone leaving a comment. Being me, I naturally, assumed nobody was interested enough. Last week, the problem was rectified. I look forward to a flood of feedback this week.)

I don’t know about you, but I find true-life accounts of confidence tricksters fascinating. I thoroughly enjoyed Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can, the fairly accurate film account of the extraordinary exploits of Frank Abagnale, who, posing as, among others, an airline pilot and a hospital doctor, forged payroll and other cheques worth millions of dollars. Leonardo diCaprio is immensely attractive as the con man, and Tom Hanks, as the stolidly determined FBI agent who tracked Abagnale for years, turns in a convincing and wonderfully observed performance. (When does he ever not?)

If you want to see whether Abagnale would have fooled you, watch the episode of television game show To Tell the Truth from 1977 that featured the real Abagnale and two other contestants, both posing as Abagnale, in an attempt to fool the panel. The relevant section is from 1:58 to 13:40.

On my morning walks a couple of weeks ago, I listened to a podcast from the BBC: a radio docudrama chronicling, over six 30-minute episodes, the story of Anna Sorokin, Russian-born, whose middle-class family moved to Germany, from where, after finishing high school, she escaped to Paris, and then, in 2013, New York, where she reinvented herself as Anna Delvey, an heiress about to inherit a multi-million dollar trust fund and looking to launch an arts centre complex in Manhattan. Over the next few years (and, for most of the time, by the seat of her pants and the skin of her teeth), she managed both to fool enough of the people enough of the time, and to talk her way out of enough tough corners, to enable her to live a millionaire lifestyle ($100 tips to busboys, champagne dinners in boutique hotels, taking three friends on an all-in two-week holiday in Morocco, staying at a $7000 per person per night villa). It is a fascinating story, as much about those she fooled and used as about Anna herself, and the blend of documentary and dramatization is very well-handled. It was directed by the masterly Sasha Yevtushenko (probably the only BBC Radio drama producer whose father featured on the cover of Time magazine for his achievements as a poet). You can hear it here.

Listening to it, I was struck by what I suspect may be a dilemma that many con artists face. Both Abagnale and Anna seem to have been seduced not only by the prospect of wealth and a glamorous lifestyle, but also by the attention and admiration that they would attract as a result of that lifestyle. Particularly with Anna, I feel that she wanted to be admired more than anything. This, I suspect, is also part of the reason why Abagnale chose such ‘sexy’ professions as airline pilot and hospital doctor. Unfortunately, the con artist is the one person who knows that what he is being admired for is a sham. Even sadder is the fact that the con artist knows that there is one genuine achievement for which he might be worthy of admiration: the extraordinary combination of social and other skills, and the dedication and energy, that he displays in maintaining the charade. The irony, of course, is that the only way the con artist can achieve recognition for that is to be exposed as a fraud. In Anna’s case, I wonder whether the one blatantly foolhardy decision she made at the end of her ‘career’ was deliberate, because she wanted the world to know what she had managed to achieve.

It was only after listening to the serial that I realized that I, in a very modest way, was involved in my own little scam, or, at least, deception, in posing as an expert on a range of subjects, including Portuguese history. And then, last week, my scam collapsed.

When Netflix come to film the story of my rise and fall, the screenplay I write (I’ve never seen the point in fantasising modestly, have you?) will contain three key moments, scenes whose significance is not immediately obvious.

The first is an apparently casual comment I made in my blog post of 24 March. After discussing the nature of my narrative construct, I wrote: So, bottom line: don’t take every word here as an accurate account: this is a blog, not a witness statement. This looks, in retrospect, like the kind of throwaway line, toying with the audience, that Orson Welles used so deliciously in his dazzling 1973 film essay about, among other things, art forgery and literary hoax – F for Fake.

Now we move back to December, and a conversation I had with my friend Seth, an amateur historian who wondered if I might be interested in seeing the PowerPoint presentation that he had put together after a Jewish heritage trip to Portugal.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, when my nephew Saul WhatsApped me with the news that he has discovered that a work colleague of his is originally from Lisbon, can trace his family back through several centuries of continuous residence in Portugal, knows about both Belmonte and Penamacor, and is something of a history buff, even editing Wikipedia entries on the Jews of Portugal.

And yet, ignoring all these warning bells, I calmly put my head in the lion’s mouth by choosing, the very next week, to write about 1497 and the Belmonte community. My post was published at 9AM on 9 June, and, at 9:48, I received another WhatAapp from Saul, drawing my attention to what he called ‘one (perhaps) corrigendum’. (‘Corrigendum’! There’s a 400 shekels an hour lawyer’s word, if ever I heard one.)

Saul pointed out that his work colleague stated that the Jews were not expelled from Portugal, but, rather, the practice of Judaism was prohibited.

When my phone rang 30 minutes later, and I saw that it was Seth, I knew what he was phoning to tell me, even though he would have me believe he was phoning to enquire about the general well-being of Bernice and myself.

So, I checked back on my sources and quickly realized that I had leapt to a mistaken conclusion. So (and here we come to this week’s real subject), I believe that some of you may have been under a misapprehension after reading last week’s blog.’ Some of you may have been under a misapprehension.’ So much more civilized than ‘I made a false statement’, don’t you think? I’m considering applying for a job as a Government spokesman.

Oh, the hell with it. I was wrong! Satisfied?

Let me at least try to put the record straight. The story of the Portuguese monarchy’s treatment of its Jewish subjects at the end of the 15th Century is a little more complicated that I suggested last week.

In the wake of the expulsion from Spain in 1492, tens of thousands of Spanish Jews fled to Portugal, where King John II granted them asylum in return for payment. However, only eight months later, the government decreed the enslavement of all Jews who had not yet left Portugal. In 1493, King John deported thousands of Jewish children to the recently established colony of São Tomé in Central Africa, where many of them soon died.

King Manuel I, who succeeded John after his death in 1494, was a pragmatic man, who well understood the contribution of Jews to the Portuguese economy, tax-collecting, and professions, and was loth to lose that contribution. However, in 1497, Manuel married the widow of John’s oldest son, Alfonso. Isabella, his bride, was the eldest daughter of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. (Do try to keep up at the back, there!) She had spent part of her childhood in Portugal, and subsequently had been very popular in Portugal during the years of her first marriage. When Alonso was killed in a riding accident, Isabella became convinced that his death was a punishment from God for Portugal sheltering Spain’s Jews rather than expelling their own. She became very religious, and followed an ascetic lifestyle of mourning. Although she had vowed never to marry, she was eventually persuaded to marry Manuel, on condition that he expel all Jews from Portugal who would not convert to Christianity. He agreed to her ultimatum, and they married.

However, Manuel still wanted to keep as many Jews as possible in Portugal, and so he devised a plan. He ordered that Lisbon was to be the only port of embarkation Jews could use. On March 19, 1497 (the first day of Pesach), Jewish parents were ordered to take their children, between the ages of four and fourteen, to Lisbon. Upon arrival, the parents were informed that their children were going to be taken away from them to be raised as good Catholics. Some children were literally torn from their parents, while other parents chose to kill themselves and their children rather than be separated. Eventually, many of the parents agreed to be baptized, along with their children, while others succumbed and handed over their babies.

Later that year, another 20,000 Jews came to Lisbon from all over Portugal, to prepare for departure to other lands. They were herded into the courtyard of the palace of Os estaos, and were approached by priests trying to convert them. Some capitulated, while the rest waited around until the time of departure had passed. Those who did not convert were told they would forfeit their freedom and would become slaves. More succumbed. Finally, the rest were sprinkled with baptismal waters and were declared New Christians.

This explains why there were so many anusim, or crypto-Jews, in Portugal in the following centuries, in contrast to Spain. Of course, the Portuguese Inquisition, which flared up intermittently until its eventual abolition in the first part of the 19th Century, ensured that those New Christians who were not prepared to give up their Jewish identity had to be very circumspect in their practices.

There! I feel much better for having confessed my sin. However, you should now be even more aware that what I write is not necessarily to be trusted. Sadly, the more we bend the truth, the more pliable it becomes.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s someone at the door. I suspect it may be Tom Hanks, wearing glasses with thick, black rims, so I’m just going to nip out the back to climb the garden wall and make my escape.

Before I go, here’s a young man who is still in the blissful state of being unaware that such a thing as human deceit even exists.

A Later Post

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You won’t recognise that title, but it is in fact a quote from my post of 10 December last year, which, by the time you read this, will be 6 months ago! At that time, I discussed the expulsion of Jews from Portugal, and ended a very brief account with:

The movement of Jewish populations triggered by the expulsions and persecution dramatically impacted what are now the districts of Castelo Branco and Guarda, including the town of Penamacor. However, I am going to leave writing about that until a later post.

My plan was to wait until Bernice and I had visited the town of Belmonte, before writing about it in detail. However, since we failed to make it there in our first two trips, and since we now have no idea when our third trip will be possible, and since I feel that, for the last couple of weeks, I have been treading water, and infuriating those of you who are only here for the Iberia (Double Diamond nostalgists click here) and couldn’t care less about my reading habits or my pseudo-intellectual pretentious pontifications about Art, and since I cannot think of anything else to write about Portugal, this seems like the perfect time to tell you about Belmonte. I apologise to those of you who are familiar with the subject, and even more to those of you who, unlike me, have actually visited the town, but I think it is a tale that bears repeating.

Our story begins in1497, with the expulsion of Jews from Portugal, after probably at least 13 centuries of Jewish life there. Following the expulsion, those Jews who remained faced either conversion to Christianity or imprisonment and execution. Of those who converted, some were not prepared to surrender their Jewish identity; their conversion was purely expedient, and they became crypto-Jews, or anusim. Over the years and the centuries, their identification with and knowledge of Jewish life understandably faded, until the 20th Century, by which time, at least as far as the rest of the Jewish world was aware, none of the anusim remained in Portugal.

By then, Jews had started to return to Portugal, the Inquisition having formally ended after 330 years, in 1821. Some affluent families of Sephardi Jewish Portuguese origin returned to Portugal from Morocco and Gibraltar, and, in 1904, the first synagogue to be built in Portugal since the 15th century was inaugurated in Lisbon.

20 years later, the most unlikely player came on the scene: Samuel Schwartz, a Polish Jewish mining engineer, who had studied in Paris and worked throughout Europe, settled with his wife and child in Lisbon in 1917, in order to put some distance between his family and the World War. While he was conducting surveys for potential tin-mining sites in North-East Portugal, he stayed in Belmonte, a town of about 7,500 people, less than 30 miles from the border (and about the same distance from Penamacor).

There had been a Jewish community in Belmonte at least since 1295, and possibly a century or more earlier. As was the case with other towns close to the Spanish border (including Penamacor), this community had been augmented in the wake of the Spanish expulsion in 1492 by Spanish Jews hoping that, after a brief spell in Portugal, they would be allowed to return across the border, or, failing that, when this specific wave of antisemitism passed, they would be able to steal back across the border into Spain. In fact, of course, the Portuguese expulsion of the Jews followed five years later, in 1497, and the Jewish community of Belmonte, together with all the others in Portugal, disappeared.

While Schwartz was staying in Belmonte in 1917, a chance remark from a shopkeeper led him to believe that there might still be Jews among the local population. He made enquiries, and eventually met a group of crypto-Jews.When he first encountered them, they were diffident and evasive. As he gradually won their confidence, they eventually shared their traditions with him, but refused to accept that he was Jewish. They had believed that they were the only Jewish community in the world. When he saw them lighting an oil lamp on Shabbat eve, and told them that Jews in other countries usually light candles, they were scornfully sceptical, declaring that candles were so fundamentally associated with Catholic ritual that it was inconceivable Jews would adopt them. 420 years of living a secret Jewish life, with no formal education, and with rituals being passed down within the family, had eroded the vast majority of their Jewish knowledge.

They knew no Hebrew, praying in Portuguese, and using a liturgy that bore only faint traces of the standard Jewish liturgy. They marked Shabbat and some holidays, not only by lighting oil lamps (in a place where neighbours could not see them), but also by refraining from eating pork, instead cooking beef and rabbit sausages, highly seasoned with salt to disguise the origin of the meat. They marked three holidays: Pesach, on which they ate matza, Yom Kippur, when they fasted, and Purim, which they marked principally by fasting. The Fast of Esther, in Jewish tradition, falls on the day before Purim; Purim itself is a very joyous holiday. They observed these holidays a day or two before or after the correct date in the Hebrew calendar – a tradition which probably arose so as not to arouse the suspicions of the Church authorities. At least one member of the community feigned an allergy to leavened bread, and ate matza throughout the year, so that his eating it on Pesach would not arouse suspicion. For the same reason, they would meet to play cards on Yom Kippur, specifically so as not to appear to be worshipping.

Eventually, Schwartz convinced them of his Jewishness by reciting the Shema, which is arguably the cornerstone prayer of Jewish faith. His audience did not recognize the Hebrew, except for the repeated word Adonai (the Lord), which was the only Hebrew word that had survived in their community. This one word persuaded them of his good faith. Incidentally, Schwartz noted that, every time he uttered the word, the older women in the community covered their eyes, as Jews do when reciting the first lines of the Shema.

Even after the Belmonte anusim had accepted that there were Jews outside their town, practicing their religion openly, they were initially reluctant to change their ways. Eventually, however, they sought to rejoin their fellow-Jews, and wished to affiliate with the rest of the Portuguese Jewish community. There were those in the wider Jewish world who were keen to return them to the mainstream Jewish fold. In Portugal, these included Schwartz himself, and also Artur Carlos de Barros Basto, a descendant of New Christians who had achieved importance in Portuguese national life and also espoused Judaism. Some British Jews also showed considerable interest in educating these Portuguese descendants of anusim and returning them to standard orthodox Judaism. Unfortunately, Schwarz and Barros Basto did not get along well and mutual antagonism and suspicion characterized their relations. At the same time, the British efforts did not bear fruit.

The Belmonte Jewish community is in many ways unique. It has very unusual practices, some of which I described earlier. Also unusual is the arcane selection of festivals that have survived in the community. It has been suggested that the fact that the Fast of Esther is one of the few holiday observances that survived in the community may be due to a readiness to adopt Queen Esther as a counterpart to the Virgin Mary, so venerated in Catholicism. Their celebration of Pesach venerates Moses in a similar way.

A more disturbing example of the community’s uniqueness is that, as a result of centuries of inbreeding, many of its members have endemic health problems, suffering from night blindness, among other afflictions. One family has a gravely ill daughter as a result of genetic complications. This endogamy has led to the community sometimes not being welcomed by the Jewish communities of Lisbon and Porto.

In the religio-political complex that is characteristic of official Jewish life in Israel (that shouldn’t have offended more than half my readership, should it?), the status of the Belmonte community members is not clear-cut. Some officially returned to Judaism in the 1970s, and opened a synagogue, Bet Eliahu, in 1996. There is a community rabbi from Israel, under the auspices of Shavei Israel (Returnees to Israel), an organization which seeks out and supports fringe Jewish communities. The members of the Belmonte community as a whole, however, have not yet been granted recognition as Jews. In a very real sense, it seems to me impossible to deny their Jewishness. Indeed, their achievement in sustaining their faith against incredible odds over 400 years is surely something essentially Jewish.

One astonishing prayer in the community’s liturgy is a 13-line rendition (in Portuguese, of course) of Maimonides’ 13 articles of faith. The hymn is very close in structure and content to Yigdal, which is the standard Jewish liturgy’s poetic rendering of the same 13 articles. In the words of a report about the community in the Israeli daily paper Haaretz:

One cannot help but wonder how this hymn survived. The mind boggles to think that Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith, composed in the 12th century and chanted toward the end of the morning service on weekdays, became part of a Portuguese prayer recited by crypto-Jews who did not even know the Hebrew language existed and refused to talk to Schwarz because they believed that secrecy was integral to their religion. Incredibly, Maimonides’ “Thirteen Principles,” or the hymn based on it, has survived in Portuguese for 500 years; and they never even heard of Maimonides. Which shows how cultural values can live in dark and unknown corners for hundreds of years until one day they burst forth into the light, virtually unchanged, despite a change of language.

If you want to read or watch something more about this unique community, there are two resources I would recommend.

After serving as Israel’s fifth president, and then as Minister of Education and Culture, Yitzchak Navon left political life to pursue other interests. Navon was always a champion of Sephardi culture, and promoter of Ladino, the Judaeo-Spanish language derived from Old Spanish and spoken by Iberian Jews. He travelled to Spain and Portugal in 1992, to mark the 500th anniversary of the expulsion from Spain. He was accompanied by a TV film crew, and produced a 6-part documentary series. This included a visit to Belmonte, which you can watch
either with Navon narrating in Hebrew (no subtitles) here, (the visit to Belmonte starts around 45:07 minutes into the clip)
or with a narrator speaking Navon’s words in English, here (the visit to Belmonte starts around 53 seconds into the clip)

An interesting account of a visit to Belmonte, with a wealth of detail about the community’s customs and liturgy, appeared in Commentary in 1967. You can read it here.

And finally, here’s a Jew in Portugal pictured hiding from the authorities just a few months ago.

Art’s Art and Others’ (and Others)

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Confined to barracks for the last 13 weeks, Bernice and I have been devoting significant time to watching some of the offerings online of plays, (principally from the National Theatre), operas and programs on the visual arts. When we feel our eyes going square, we switch to reading. And when my eyes demand a complete rest, I turn to music. This artsfest has led me to muse about the nature of each of these arts, and, in particular, the relation of each to interpretation.

The art that lends itself most easily to interpretation may well be music. If you want to go along with me (it will take less than ten minutes, and hardly hurt at all), then please listen to this very straightforward (and fairly parve – neither meat nor milk) rendition of Dvořák’s best-known Humoresque. Now, hear what Art Tatum (for my money the greatest jazz pianist) does with the same delightful little jewel. You certainly don’t have to agree, but at least listen to his interpretation.

So, I hear you wearily ask, what’s the point? The point, I think – and bear with me here because, as always, I am making this up as I go along – is that as a performance art, music is, by definition, interpretational, and, given the nature and limitations of musical notation, music is arguably the art form most open to interpretation. This is true even if the performers are not rearranging the music or improvising on it, or playing a set of variations (as Tatum arguably is).

To illustrate this last point, listen to two mainstream classical performances of the Allemande from Bach’s English Suite No 1. The first is from Gustav Leonhardt, playing on a harpsichord from the period of Bach. The second is from Glenn Gould, idiosyncratic Canadian pianist. They are both playing all (and only) the right notes, and, unlike Eric Morecambe, in the right order. (If you don’t get that reference, click here, but only after you have read the rest of the blog.) Two questions: Do you feel that you have just listened to two versions of the same piece of music, or two different pieces of music? And how much of the effect that the music had on you is Bach and how much Gould or Leonhardt?

Another quick question: Is it possible that if Bach heard Gould or Leonhardt (or Dvořák heard Tatum), they would say: ‘A-a-ah-h-h! So that’s what I meant by that!’?

If I wanted to risk losing half my readers (if I haven’t already), I would now offer you Klemperer’s and Bernstein’s conducting of Mahler’s 5th symphony, and then, as the ultimate in how the same thing can sound different, Glenn Gould’s 1955 and 1981 recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations: the same piece of music played on the same instrument by the same performer, but two completely different interpretations.

I am no musician, and not even very knowledgeable about music, but I can understand why some musicologists prefer to read a musical score rather than going to a concert or even listening to recorded music, with the coughs and chair squeaks mercifully absent. Only in their head can they hear what the composer wrote (or, I suspect, their own interpretation of what the composer wrote). They want the unmediated experience.

At the other end of the interpretative scale from music are, it seems to me, painting and sculpture. Here, the creator presents a finished work and the consumer’s interaction with it is almost completely unmediated. No performer presents the work to me. And yet, of course, the museum or art gallery chooses to display the painting or statue in a specific position in a specific room, next to specific other works, lit in a specific way. We can surely view all of these decisions as mediations or interpretations of the work, quite apart from any explicit notes displayed next to the piece or in an accompanying catalogue.

The question of background notes leads me to my next set of questions. To what extent, and in what ways, does knowledge of the artist’s biography contribute to (or perhaps influence) our appreciation and understanding of the work? For example, do we need to know about van Gogh the man in order to view, be moved by, appreciate, understand his work? And here come a few more troubling questions that follow on the heels of that one. I have long ‘known’ that Carl Orff was a Nazi sympathizer in the Berlin of the 1930s and 40s. Does this ‘fact’ influence the quality of his music? In background reading for this post, I have just discovered that the ‘fact’ of that sympathy is far less certain than I have always believed. Does my discovery of this alter the music qualitatively? If we were to learn tomorrow that Picasso poisoned and dismembered red-headed men in his spare time, would that change the nature and quality of his art, objectively? Or subjectively? Does the word ‘objectively’ have any relevance in matters of art, or is art appreciation all subjective, and the high esteem in which Rembrandt is held ‘proves’ his objective standing as an artist no more than the results of one general election (or even several general elections) prove the objective superiority of the majority party? No answers, people, just questions.

Perhaps halfway between music and painting comes theatre. I am sometimes tempted to think that theatre is as freely open to interpretation as music, but, on reflection, for me at least that is not the case. If I hear an interpretation of a piece of music, however far removed from the original, I feel the power of the original in it. Barry Manilow’s Could It Be Magic, for example, is still invested with Chopin’s Prelude in C minor, on whose melodic and harmonic frame Manilow hung his song. However, I have seen some theatrical interpretations that seem to me to have no connection to the essence of the work they are interpreting. I wonder whether that is because theatre operates at a more explicit, intellectual, verbal, literal level than music.

Despite that, clearly theatre is very much an interpretative art. Indeed, I expect practitioners of the art – directors and actors – would argue that there is no point in staging a play if the production does not have something new to say about the work. I also suspect that this is more true for theatre than for music. If we go to a concert specifically because a certain artist is performing a certain work, we may well be hoping to hear the songs or music we love played in the interpretation we are familiar with. However, we would probably not want to see Judi Dench reprising her performance as Lady Macbeth in an identical revival of the Scottish play. Most vivid in my mind, because I have seen it most recently, is the National Theatre production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in which Tamsin Greig played Malvolia (rather than Malvolio, as written by Shakespeare): turning this character (and also Feste) from a man into a woman not only seemed appropriate in a play that is so much concerned with gender identity and confusion, but also, for me, seemed to help the production to actualise its decision to expose the full force of the cruelty of the trick played on Malvolio/a and his/her subsequent incarceration.

Which brings us back, inevitably, to literature. Where does fiction, for example, lie on this spectrum of interpretability? At first sight, it would seem to be, like painting, complete in itself and not open to interpretation. Even more so than in a gallery, nothing mediates between the work and the consumer. For the reader, one page of black type on white paper looks almost indistinguishable from another.

I am tempted to think (and this may simply because I am a words person rather than a pictures person, but I don’t think so) that a great novel contains within it the possibility for a wider range of understanding and interpretation than a great painting does, or, at least, that more of this range is accessible to the general reader. This is partly because of the amount of space and time it covers – there are more words in a novel than brushstrokes in a painting, and very few people spend an hour a day for a month looking at a single painting, but such a parcelling of time is quite normal for reading a novel. I feel that it may also be because words are more equivocal, ambiguous, nuanced, than paint. It may, of course, also be because I, like most modern non-specialist consumers of art, am better educated and more experienced in interpreting novels than painting.

Certainly, the experience of reading aloud to Bernice over the last couple of months has made me far more aware of the way in which we, as readers, are constantly interpreting the books we read, in an effort to understand and possess them.

So, music, painting, theatre, literature – which is the greatest art? Fortunately, the pantheon of arts is not an Olympic Games. Each of the arts is a gold medallist and our lives are enriched by both the depth and the breadth of the art we consume. Of all the things we have binged on over the last couple of months, the arts may well be the least unhealthy.

And finally, for those who don’t read the blog but scroll straight to the bottom, here’s a couple of portraits of the artist as a very young man (taken three months ago). As you can see, I had the temerity to disturb him in mid-flow.

Mondries

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Let’s start by not explaining that title just yet, which will at least give you some incentive to read on until we do.

As I write these words, it is 12 noon on Sunday. It should be 10 o’clock in the morning, but it’s taken me much longer than usual to get myself going on this week’s post. Indeed, I think I am only here in front of the laptop today because a few people were kind enough to tell Bernice and myself that they particularly enjoyed last week’s offering, and because a friend whom I regard as a serious writer (as opposed to a dispenser of half-a-yard of assorted ramblings like myself) mentioned this week that my unfailing ability to deliver the goods week in, week out, inspires her to take up her own pen. This is an awesome responsibility, for which, at this moment, I don’t think I thank her. Still, I’ve started so I’ll finish.

This whole getting myself motivated thing is not helped by the reading matter currently on my bedside table. This is because, as luck would have it, none of the books I am reading is of the: ‘Good grief! Even I could do better than that!’ variety. Each one of them is the work of an author exhibiting complete mastery of his art or craft, and therefore, paradoxically, the worst thing to read if you are trying to write while being plagued by impostor syndrome in the first place. (For anyone unfamiliar with the phrase, impostor syndrome is a psychological pattern in which one doubts one’s accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. For some of us, it’s not so much a syndrome as a way of life.)

Anyway, let me share my current reading matter with you: all highly recommended (provided, of course, that you, yourself, are not at the moment trying, and failing, to write).

The first author, and perhaps the most daunting for me, is Bill Bryson, whose The Body – A Guide for Occupants I am thoroughly enjoying. I must apologise for coming so late to what is such a well-publicised book, but I don’t generally stay on top of the literary news; it was my clever daughter who read up about this attempt ‘to understand the extraordinary contraption that is us’, and, thinking, quite rightly, that it had my name written all over it, Esther and Maayan bought it for me for my birthday. It is endlessly fascinating, with an average of three or four scarcely credible facts on every page, and it is written with the easy charm, sense of wonder and delightful humour that characterise all of Bryson’s work. Why is it for me the most daunting read? Because, if I ever think that I might possibly be a writer when I grow up, then this is the kind of writer I might least unrealistically kid myself I could aspire to being, and reading the genuine article can lead to despair.

My only other criticism of it is that it places me, at least twice a day, on the horns of a dilemma: I can’t wait for Bernice to read it after me, and I really don’t want to spoil it for her, but at the same time so much of it is so astonishing or hilarious – or sometimes both simultaneously – that I want to read great chunks of it to her, even though I know I am in danger of spoiling her enjoyment of it when she does read it herself.

Next is James Joyce’s Ulysses, reading which was one of the items on my Retirement To Do list. I started off tackling this task with full seriousness, reading Homer’s Odyssey for necessary context, studying Jeri Johnson’s 50-page introduction to the 1922 text edition of Ulysses, and buying Harry Blamires’ The New Bloomsday Book as a guide to supplement the 250 pages of notes at the back of the Oxford edition. I am enjoying the read; indeed, I think I am enjoying it more as I gradually ease myself free of the perceived need to research every note, and just surrender myself to the sound of the text itself, and let it wash over me. By this means, I am starting to feel that, by the time I get to the end, I will begin to appreciate why so many regard it as such a great novel. I have also discovered that I enjoy it more if I read it aloud, very fast, in an appalling Dublin accent, although, of course, I can only do that when Bernice isn’t around, and, if I ever ride the buses again, I’ll have to refrain from declaiming there as well.

Which brings me to a practice Bernice and I have recently revived: one that we indulged in a lot in the early years of our marriage, usually lying in bed. I am referring, as you have probably guessed, to reading fiction aloud. I read Bernice the entire Jane Austen canon way back in the day; I firmly believe that reading aloud sets a measured pace that allows you to fully savour Austen’s sense of irony. Dickens, of course, begs to be performed as well – he set the unattainable standard for that himself, in his hugely popular reading tours. Ideally, Dickens demands a week’s pause between chapters. That is how many of his original ‘readership’ experienced each of his books: serialised, with one member of the family reading aloud to the household that week’s instalment from a literary magazine.

We revived this fine practice with Bernice’s surprise birthday present to me this year: Clive James’ epic poem Rivers In the Sky. I am sitting here wondering which is the more daunting task: describing this poem to someone who hasn’t read it, or describing Clive James to someone who does not know of him. Let’s start with the man. Over a period of 80 years, from the late 1780s, England sent her convicts to Australia. Then, in the 1960s, Australia sent England a string of larger-than-life characters, such as Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and Clive James. This has to be one of the better deals England has ever made. If you need reminding who the first two are, or just want to bathe in nostalgia, you will find Humphries in the persona of Dame Edna here, and Greer in the persona of Germaine Greer here. (Be warned: the Greer documentary is X-rated.)

As for Clive James, he first rose to fame as the man whose weekly newspaper column of TV criticism was read by everyone, not only for its intelligent analysis, but also (and, to be honest, principally) for its often blistering humour. He once described the young body-builder Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking “like a brown condom full of walnuts”. After 10 years at the top of his game as a TV critic, during which James also published several collections of more serious literary criticism, he then, for some of us inexplicably, created and hosted a programme that celebrated the lunacy of the Japanese TV genre of human endurance reality shows, where contestants underwent such challenges as having their torsos smeared with fish food, before being lowered into a river stocked with hungry catfish. James presented this programme with a rather uniform mocking bemusement, and I never understood why he devoted so much of his time to (wasted so much of his time on?) something so insignificant. The answer, I now think, was that he found television, all television, fascinating, because he saw it as an honest reflection of life. He once wrote: “Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”

Those of us who were upset that James was wasting his time and talents on this trivia need not have worried. At the same time as researching and presenting this series, and later a very successful series of travel programs, focussing on a different major world city each week, he was also teaching himself Russian, because he “could no longer bear not to know something about how Pushkin sounded”. He spoke several other languages, and published an English translation of Dante’s Inferno. He could talk intelligently for hours, and apparently frequently did, about his various passions, which included both Formula One motor racing and the tango. TV chat show host, presenter of documentaries, publisher of five volumes of memoirs and several novels, poet and songwriter, he was told, 11 years ago, to expect that he would die very shortly of leukaemia, and was then given ten more years through a miracle drug, ten years in which he produced a number of fine books, and many of his finest poems.

River in the Sky is an epic poem, mostly written in free verse, with some blank and some rhymed sections, In it, James, contemplating his imminent death, looks back to key events, people and places in his life, while also examining a range of cultural references broad and deep enough to make even James Joyce look only half-educated. It is 120 pages of the most dazzling, moving, witty, searingly honest brilliance, less a river than a rollercoaster.

It’s now 6 o’clock on Monday evening, and time to explain the title of this week’s post. Last week, I had little idea what to write about, so I tidied up some loose ends, fed off my readership, and called the resulting pot pourri Sundries. This week, I had even less idea what to write about: the problem continues, so we now have Mondries. I’m just praying this dire situation doesn’t continue for more than seven weeks.

Which reminds me of a piece of verse from the Look pages of The Sunday Times (dedicated readers will know that that is the London-based newspaper of that name). This piece lodged itself between the teeth of my mind in the 1970s, and no amount of probing with tongue and toothpicks has succeeded in budging it since then.

Three Times a Week
Monday:
Choosy
Wendy.
Thursday:
Heidi.
Saturday:
Cindy

And penultimately, some audience participation. I have three other books to tell you about. Shall I do that next week, or are you all booked out? Please let me know – below or by email.

And finally, here’s another reader in the making: over 8 months ago.