Call That a Bonfire?!

Posted on by

In any normal year, Monday night this week would have been a time in Israel for staying indoors and closing all the windows, because, as many of you know, Lag b’Omer started on Monday night. As with many Jewish traditions, just exactly what we are marking on Lag b’Omer is open to argument discussion: the ceasing of the plague that killed thousands of Rabbi Akiva’s students; the beginning, almost 1900 years ago, of the rebellion against Roman rule that was led by Bar Kochba, and supported by Rabbi Akiva; the death of one of the very few of Rabbi Akiva’s disciples to survive the revolt, Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, the putative author of Judaism’s major mystical work, the Zohar (which could be translated as Incandescence). Or, possibly, all of the above.

Hundreds of thousands, mostly ultra-orthodox, Israelis flock on Lag b’Omer to Mount Meron, to the grave of Rabbi Shimon, to celebrate the mystical secrets that he allegedly shared on his death-day, by singing, dancing, and, principally, by lighting large bonfires, evoking the spiritual light that the Rabbi brought to the world.

This ritual is replicated thousands of times, in every community in Israel, as teens and pre-teens indulge their pyromaniac tendencies. Indeed, from the day after Pesach, from Metulla in the north to Eilat in the south, no piece of wood that is not firmly nailed or glued in place is safe, and the streets are full of purloined supermarket carts laden with planks, offcuts, branches, all pushed by young boys, some not old enough to see over the handlebar.

Then, on the night itself, I don’t recommend driving down Road 1, the main artery in Jerusalem leading from the North and East. At one point, this road skirts the Old City walls on one side, and ultra-religious neighbourhoods on the other side; on Lag b’Omer, ranged along that side of the pavement, a series of huge bonfires blaze away between the traffic and the apartment buildings, and threaten both. If you’ve ever wondered what the height of stupidity is, look no further: it’s about 2 metres.

Or so I thought, until last year. Take a trip with me, now, through space, from the Eastern end of the Mediterranean to the Western end, and through time, from mid-May to late December, and join me at the madeiros of Portugal. Another religion, another tenuous tradition, and another set of bonfires.

In very many towns and villages throughout Portugal, in the days leading up to 25 December, piles of firewood are brought from the forest to the town square, where a huge bonfire is built, and lit, on 24 December, symbolically to warm the newborn infant child. Historically, the gathering of the wood was undertaken by young men about to be enlisted in the army. These days, the collection is non-gender-specific. Historically, there were two methods of collection. Generous landowners would have their contribution of wood paraded into the town centre, with festivities and glasses of the traditional wine-based spirit, jeropiga, all at the landowner’s expense. Less generous landowners would have wood stolen from their lands by the peasants, and these ‘offerings’ would be deposited in the town square at dead of night, with no ceremony. These days, the felling, sawing and transportation of the wood is a highly controlled process, coordinated with the Forestry Commission.

Ideally, the fire, once lit on the night of 24 December, should burn constantly for the next 12 nights. Over the years, quite naturally, rivalries grew up between neighbouring towns, as to which could produce the biggest and best madeiro, and it was not unheard of for the young bloods of one town to steal the firewood from the pile of a neighbouring town, again under cover of darkness.

A brief etymological aside. When I first encountered the word madeiro, which I assumed meant bonfire, my excitement was intense. The word for bonfire in Hebrew is medura, and the two seemed like cognates, words (often in two different languages) that have a common etymological origin and, in this case, an identical meaning. I suspected that the Portuguese Sephardic Jews had adopted the Portuguese word. However, my research revealed that medura is a word used by the prophet Ezekiel, and is from the root DOR (דו”ר) with the meaning circular. From the same root come the words dor meaning a generation, and davar meaning a postman, who delivers letters on his round. A medura, as any good boy or girl scout knows, is made by placing logs in a circle and then lighting them.

Now I was excited in the other direction: perhaps the Portuguese had borrowed the word from the Sephardi Jews. Alas, it seems not: madeiro actually means a log or beam, and is from the Latin materia, meaning wood, or material/matter, and ultimately deriving from the Proto-Indo-European for mother, presumably in the belief that all matter is born from the Mother.

So, I now have a philosophical question. If two words in different languages look very similar, and have the same meaning, but are not etymologically related, should we regard them as true cognates, or false cognates? At this point, I’m guessing that some of you don’t find this quite as urgent a question as I do, so let’s get back to the main theme of today’s meander.

I was interested to learn that Beira (the province in which Penamacor is situated) is the area of Portugal most ‘into’ madeiros, and that the string of villages and towns north of Castelo Branco are the most fanatical, and that the jewel in that crown, the biggest, tallest, longest-burning madeiro in all Portugal is the one gathered, erected, and ignited every year in Penamacor. On 6 December, the logs are brought into town, the bonfire is erected, and the Penamacor fire is actually lit on the night of 23 December, a day earlier than everywhere else.

The biggest, tallest, longest-burning madeiro. But what, exactly, does tall mean? Or, to repeat my question, what is the height of lunacy? Well, early last December, the kids took Tao down to the village square, when the bonfire had been erected.

I am informed that in Penamacor – in, you may remember, the heart of forest-fire country – the madeiro, which, as you can see, is erected less than two metres from buildings on either side of the village square, has sometimes been built over 10 metres high.

Incidentally, you can see a sign near the top of the woodpile. I originally assumed the sign, with its legend Malta 1999, was commemorating Penamacor’s gold medal in the Mediterranean Madeiro Games of 1999, held that year in Malta. However, it actually means Cohort of 1999, referring to the 20-year-olds who in 2019 took the lead in wood collection, and who were, of course, born in 1999. The background of the sign actually shows a pile of logs, each of which bears the name of one of the cohort.

If you’re interested, you can see how these logs arrive in town in the ceremony of the bringing of the firewood here (the actual parade starts around 2 minutes into the video).

Despite the fact that, once it is alight, firemen play hoses on the edges of the bonfire continuously, the kids decided it would not be responsible parenting to bring Tao down once the fire was lit, so I can only offer you some footage from the provincial news station. You can see the madeiro in all its glory here.

I mentioned responsible parenting earlier. In this context, let me share a couple of recent pictures of Tao with you.

Another birthday present?  You really shouldn’t have!
You mean it’s not for me?

Misfortunes

Posted on by

François de La Rochefoucauld was a 17th Century French nobleman, best known for his published collection of over 500 maxims, mostly reflections on human behaviour and character. He did not pull his punches, and, in the introduction to his Maximes, he shrewdly wrote:

…the best approach for the reader to take would be to put in his mind right from the start that none of these maxims apply to himself in particular, and that he is the sole exception, even though they appear to be generalities. After that I guarantee that he will be the first to endorse them and he will believe that they do credit to the human spirit.

I mention him only because I want to cite one of his maxims, by way of introducing this week’s ramblings:

In the misfortunes of our best friends, we find something that is not unpleasing.

It is in this generous spirit that I offer you the following story.

Let’s start at the very beginning. You basically don’t exist in Portugal until you get a NIF (Número de Identificação Fiscal, or Tax Identification Number). Without a NIF, you can’t open a bank account or buy property. So, of course, when I first visited Portugal for 4 days, principally to acquire the services of a lawyer, open a bank account and start the process of finding and buying a property, the first thing the lawyer had me do was acquire a NIF. To expedite this process, I had to furnish an EU address through which I could be contacted, which I did. All went smoothly, as you know, until…

A couple of weeks ago, tiring of reorganizing our  book collection (I can recommend by spine colour, for its aesthetic effect, and by original publication date, to remind yourself that Cervantes and Shakespeare were contemporaries), I went into the Portuguese Tax Authority website, in the hope of changing our EU contact address to our address in Portugal. Navigation was actually fairly straightforward, since bureaucratic language in Portuguese is not that different from the English equivalent.

I started by providing my NIF, and then was asked for my password, of course. At that point, I realized that I had tried to sign in, rather than registering, so I started again. All went smoothly until I came to a page that I did not understand at all. A quick copy and paste into google translate established that I was being asked to choose a security question and provide an answer. Now, I am used to objective security questions that yield an unequivocal answer, such as my mother’s maiden name or the name of my primary (elementary) school. The questions I was invited to choose from, however, were all subjective.

What is your favourite film?
 Oh, I don’t know! Citizen Kane? Or is that a bit obvious? Les Enfants du Paradis? Just a tad prententious? (Not really pretentious François Truffaut once said that he would give up all of his films to have directed Les Enfants du Paradis. I can’t find the film online, but you can watch a charming 4-minute excerpt on youtube here.) It’s a Wonderful Life? Is that really the corny image I want to project?

What is your favourite book? Bernice suggested The Bible, on the grounds that I was more likely to remember that. I also felt that it was a good choice for the Tax Authority of a staunchly Catholic country.

What is your favourite colour? I don’t think I’ve got one.

I was beginning to feel completely characterless.

Next, I was asked to provide my password, again. Of course, I still didn’t have one, so I selected the option to set a new password. A popup informed me that a temporary password would be sent to my contact address. At this point I gave the whole thing up as a bad job.

Then, a week ago, my UK contact informed me that a letter had arrived. I asked him to open it, and send me a photo of the contents. Of course, the disadvantage of this method is that I didn’t have a soft copy that I could paste into google translate, and the quality of the photo I was sent wasn’t good enough for my Translator app camera to identify the text accurately. All of this meant that I had no easy way of finding out what the letter was about. However, 20 minutes of deciphering, typing short phrases into google translate, comparing the letter with other documents in my possession and, alright, blind guesswork, led me to the conclusion that the letter was a demand from the Portuguese tax authorities for the first of two payments of the property tax due on our purchase of the house in Penamacor. Impressive, no? Either that, or it was an eviction notice…or possibly a two-for-one offer on Portuguese wine.  

Having established the nature of the letter, and understanding that the bill had to be paid before the end of May, I then turned my attention to the section of the letter that outlined Instruções sobre as formas de pagamento. Payment, I learnt, can be made at a Smart Multibank ATM. This is, by the way, an ATM at which you can pay bills, order theatre tickets, and perform other advanced transactions. Of course, you need to be in Portugal to do that, so this was not such a smart method for me. Payment can also be made by cheque, but we don’t have a chequebook, so that was out as well.

Fortunately – if that’s the word I’m looking for – the letter also gave the address of the Tax Authority portal, which I then visited again, in the hope that I could pay the tax online. After hardly any time at all, I navigated my way to a section that gave the Tax Authority details for bank transfer, and stressed the two items of information that had to be included as a comment in any bank transfer – my NIF and the document reference of the demand for payment.

Now we were cooking! Or at least in the advanced stages of food prep. I grabbed my phone and went into our bank account app, entered all the details of the transfer and advanced to the approval screen, where, of course, I was confronted by the message: Bank transfer requires enabling the Matrix functionality, which you have not done. Those of you take copious notes each week will remember that enabling the Matrix functionality requires receiving an SMS with a one-time code and keying it in at an ATM, and that we are unable to receive, when in Portugal, SMS messages on our registered phone, unable to reach an ATM when in Israel, and unable to change our registered phone. I am thinking that, on our next visit to Portugal, I might leave my debit card with Micha’el, request my bank to send me the SMS immediately after our return to Israel, and forward the SMS to Micha’el, for him to enable the functionality at an ATM. (Rereading this, I wonder whether I actually want to leave Micha’el my debit card and have him be the only person who knows the password for advanced functionality.)

Meanwhile, I had to find another way of paying the tax. It seemed to me that I had no choice but to bother Micha’el to pay it for us. So, I phoned him to explain the situation. He, of course, readily agreed, and I sent him the bank details and the two vital pieces of information (NIF and document reference number). Soon afterwards, Micha’el sent me a photo of the bank transfer confirmation. I immediately spotted that there was no mention of the vital information; when I asked Micha’el, he explained that he had tried to make the transfer from an ATM, but at some point had not understood how to proceed; he had then gone into the bank, and asked a teller to carry out the transfer. She was not very sympathetic, because she felt he should have used the ATM, and, as a consequence, although he had stressed to her the importance of the vital information, she had been fairly brusque, and had apparently omitted it. Micha’el suggested I email the Tax Authority with the vitals, and I thought to myself: ‘Well, that sounds straightforward’. (This is, as you probably realise, one of those dramatic irony lines that make you smile wryly when you watch the film for a second time.)

So, back I went onto the Tax Authority website, and looked for an email address. I couldn’t find one anywhere, but I did eventually come across, and was able to download, a file with contact details for all the offices, branches, departments and officials of the Tax Authority – addresses, office reception hours, phone numbers and email addresses. Fortunately, this was an Excel file, so I was able to filter the hundreds of rows and search for the department I needed. Less fortunately, the department I needed was not listed.

However, on another tab of the Excel file I did find the right department. Scrolling across to the column headed Email Address, I found that on this tab there was no such column. There was a phone number, and I could, I hear you suggesting, have just phoned the office.

If you live in Israel, you are very used to phoning a Government office and hearing, in Hebrew, ‘For Hebrew, press 1’, then, in English, ‘For English, press 2’, and so on, for Arabic, Russian and Amharic. In Britain, if I remember the last time I visited a hospital, interpreters are available for six or seven languages, and explanatory pamphlets are available in 20 others. Well, let me tell you, in my experience, Portugal is, by comparison, insular; indeed, I find Iberia as a whole is peninsular. When I was working as a technical writer for a large software company serving the telecommunications industry, I captured minutes for meetings working with clients in 20 or so different countries. I can only remember three instances when the meetings were not conducted in English. In Russia, following the mass immigration to Israel of Jews from Russia, our company always assembled a complete team of native Russian speakers: managers, software engineers and technical writer, and all meetings, emails, documentation were in Russian. The company touted it as our competitive edge over our rivals in America and elsewhere. In Austria, the client insisted on conducting meetings in German, although I am quite sure that the client participants all spoke reasonable English. In this case, the client wanted to ensure that it had the upper hand in meetings. In Spain, the client insisted on meetings and documentation being in Spanish, because the participants’ English was simply not good enough, and because insisting on using the Spanish language was a matter of national pride.

So, I knew that there was almost certainly no point in phoning the Tax Authority, not with my command of Portuguese and my collocutor’s likely command of English.

In the end, I found a page dedicated to non-residents and foreign nationals, which included an option to submit a question in writing. This seemed like my best shot. So, I composed a message in English, explaining the situation, giving details of the transfer and all the vitals, and asking for the payment to be credited to me. For good measure, I asked whether, at the same time, the Tax Authority could update my contact address to our Portuguese address, and also, in any reply, could use my email address rather than my postal address. Feeling rather pleased with myself, I pasted that message into google translate, pasted the translation into the message box on the website, and Hey Presto! I got the popup message: You have exceeded the maximum of 500 characters. There then followed 15 minutes of chiseling away the superfluous material, like Michelangelo, to reveal the essential message perfectly formed within, then google translating it and pasting the result. After four or five attempts, I finally got the Portuguese down to 520 characters, while still preserving an almost coherent narrative. I then discovered that the heading of the message did not count towards the 500-character limit, so I added my email address to the heading of the message and reached the magic 500.

Tolstoy can scarcely have felt a greater sense of achievement on completing the final sentence of War and Peace than I did when I hit Send.

Not 15 minutes later, my contact phoned me to say that a letter had arrived. It transpired that this contained the code for registering with the Tax Authority. He relayed the code to me, using our typical fumbling approximation of the NATO alphabet. (Michael McIntyre, who I know I have referenced before, has an amusing 2 minutes on this at the beginning of this clip.)

My pulse racing, I went back to the Tax Authority website, entered my NIF, was asked to choose a security question, selected What is your favourite book? and typed in The Bible. I then got a popup message: This is incorrect. Try again. This time I selected What is your favourite film? and typed in Citizen Kane. Success! I felt as though my each-way bet on the Grand National had come in second. Unfortunately, I forgot that this was an accumulator bet. I was next asked for my password, and entered the password my contact had given me. Incorrect password. You have two more attempts. It was only at this point that I realized that my second visit to the Tax Authority website had generated a new password to be posted to my contact address, whereas the password I had used was the first one generated, which I had subsequently rendered obsolete.

So now, I am waiting to receive my second password, and waiting to hear whether the Tax Authority is able to locate and assign my payment. A lot of waiting. Fortunately, I have several weighty books to read….and I’m not going anywhere, not even Portugal to see our grandson, who seems to be getting very grown up.

A Postilion Post

Posted on by

If I’m at home by myself in Israel, and there is a knock at the door, my heart sinks. ‘Oh no!’ I think. ‘Now I’m going to have to answer the door and talk to someone.’ (For those of you who don’t know, I am, much of the time, one of those people for whom lockdown has legitimised the habits developed over decades.) On the other hand, if I am at home by myself in Portugal, and there is a knock at the door, it is a completely different experience. ‘Oh no!’ I think. ‘Now I’m going to have to answer the door and be completely unable to talk to someone.’

Last November, when Bernice and I were in Portugal, one afternoon, when the kids were both out, having taken Tao (and Shir, their business partner) with them, there was a knock at the door. I contemplated hiding under the table, but the salon window is right next to the front door, and I might have already been spotted, in which case my embarrassment would have been even harder to endure than my humiliation at being unable to speak a word of Portuguese beyond ‘Hola!’ and ‘Bom dia’. (It strikes me that it is less than efficient, if you are able to express only two ideas in a language, that they should turn out to be by and large the same idea!) So, I opened the door, gave an inviting smile and a welcoming ‘Hola!’, which in my anxiety was possibly just a tad louder than necessary, and waited to be plunged into total incomprehension.

The youngish man on the other side of the doorstep was not wearing any uniform or other clothing that might give a clue as to the nature of his visit; he was not standing next to a horse pulling a milkcart, or a van with a helpful picture of a household appliance or farm produce on it. He was not dressed in an over-bright rustic shirt and carrying a wicker basket of clothes pegs. He didn’t even have a wart on his nose and a large, shiny, red and green apple in his hand. In short, he was carrying no clues beyond a glossy, multi-coloured cardboard folder. I politely waited for him to finish his first sentence, then inquired ‘English?’, with what I planned to be an apologetic wry smile, but probably looked more like a simpering grimace. Wonder of wonders! Our visitor spoke enough English for me to understand that his visit was not unconnected to electricity supply. However, he seemed to be denying that he was a representative of EDP, our electricity supplier, and, when I invited him in to read the meter, he made it clear that that was not the purpose of his visit. (This was, of course, before I knew that, in Portugal, meters are not read by the supplier at the point of consumption.) He seemed to want to offer us a deal, but I could understand no more than that.

At this point, thankfully, Shir returned. Having spent some time in South America, Shir’s Spanish is not at all bad. When he suggested ‘Espagnol?’, our visitor happily graduated to a language he was more comfortable with. Over the next few minutes, Shir was able to understand that our polyglot friend was a representative of a rival supplier, and was indeed offering us a special deal, the details of which failed to leap across the linguistic gap between his and Shir’s Spanish.

At this point, doubly thankfully, Micha’el returned, and, with his Portuguese, was able to get almost the full story, which need not concern us here. My takeaways from this experience were three.

First: Micha’el’s knowledge of Spanish (from a few months in Ecuador), combined with the Portuguese he had by then acquired (2 months after arriving in Portugal), and enhanced by his ease and confidence and complete lack of concern over the possibility of making a fool of himself, all added up to him punching way above his weight in the spoken Portuguese ring.

Second: How many door-to-door electricity salesmen in Britain, I wonder, can make themselves even partially understood in two languages other than English? Perhaps things have changed in the 33 years since we left Britain, but I bet they are still pretty thin on the ground.

Third: Unless I am happy to continue to be humiliated over my inability to hold even a fragment of a conversation in Portuguese, I really must do something about learning the language.

And did I? Well, yes and no….but on the whole: Did I heck as like! (which translates roughly as ‘No’).

I did actually start (both Bernice and I did) an online Portuguese ‘course’. However, it soon became apparent that this was little more than sets of vocabulary lists, and was not what we needed. Bernice, of course, saw this more quickly than I did, and she dropped out a week or two before I finally saw the wisdom of her ways. My only gain from this experience was that I now know the names of the days of the week, which are actually very easy for a Hebrew-speaker to grasp, but, I imagine, as confusing for others as the Hebrew days were for us when we first came on aliya. Saturday and Sunday are Sábado (from shabbat) and Domingo (the Lord’s day). However, uncharacteristically for Christian countries, Domingo, Sunday, is regarded as the first day of week, and Monday to Friday are known by the ordinal numbers 2nd to 6th. (These ordinals refer to market fairs throughout the week, and, formally, the weekdays are Segunda-feira (2nd fair) through to Sexta-feira.) So, Monday is Segunda or 2a and Friday is Sexta or 6 a, just as in Hebrew. Depressingly, I have so far found this the only easy aspect of learning Portuguese.

Having tried the online course with little success, I found myself thinking about phrasebooks, and, in particular, the Portuguese phrasebook I remembered reading about in my youth, the one that opened with the sentence My postilion has been struck by lightning. Incidentally, if, like me, you have never been quite sure how a postilion differs from a coachman, a postilion ‘drives’ the carriage by sitting on the horse, or, if there is a team of horses, the front nearside horse. The post part of his title is a reference to the fact that he drives a post horse, so-called because it is one of the horses kept at the staging posts on post-roads, to be used by stage-coaches, which exchange their horses at these staging-posts, so as to always have a fresh team. (Incidentally, did you know that the Finnish have a word – poronkusema – for the distance that a reindeer can travel before requiring a bathroom break. What I do not know is whether this is a term used generically to indicate a rough distance, in the same way as a day’s ride from here is based on an estimated average, or it is a term used in comparative tests carried out by the monthly magazine What Reindeer: Dasher achieved a 40-km poronkusema on the open road, but Rudolf could only average 32.)

My postilion has been struck by lightning. Oh, how we laughed at the absurdity of this appearing as the very first example in an English-Portuguese phrase-book! Googling this book, in the last couple of days, I have discovered that our laughter may have been hasty.

First of all, what I always understood to be a Portuguese phrase-book is, variously, cited as Hungarian, Russian, French and Dutch, an indication, at the very least, that social media have always half-borrowed, adapted and distorted, whether wilfully or carelessly. The references to this phrase begin around 1916, and appear in the magazines Punch and New Yorker (the latter example penned by James Thurber). In addition, James Michener refers to it, Dirk Bogarde adapted it for the title of his autobiography, and the poet Patricia Beer wrote a two-stanza poem inspired by it, which you can read at the bottom of this post.

The reason for all of this interest, I am sure, is that the phrase sounds to our ears completely removed from real life. Under what circumstances, we ask ourselves, would anyone ever need to use this phrase? Indeed, Linguistics Professor David Crystal coined the term postilion sentence for language which, although grammatically correct, has little or no chance of ever being useful in real life. it conveys a structural meaning, and a lexical content, but that is all.

Just a little more research, however, reveals that our amusement may well be misplaced. First of all, for the English lady or gentleman undertaking a 19th Century European grand tour, the post-coach would have been the usual means of travel, and the postilion would have been a common element of the journey. Indeed, the post-coach and its positilion might have been among the first elements of foreign life that the traveller encountered abroad.

‘All very well’, I hear you protest, ‘but how likely is it that the poor postilion would be struck by lightning?’ Well, remember that, on his horse, the postilion would have been the highest point of the party – a perfect lightning rod. Indeed, travelling across open, flat country, he might have been the highest point for miles around.

My only question is: Who are we to imagine the traveller addressing the sentence to? A coach with a postilion does not normally have a coachman as well. The postilion himself is, if not dead, then at least unlikely to be in a mood for conversation. Perhaps our traveller is sharing a coach with strangers.

Before I finish, here are two other postilion sentences, both from genuine phrasebooks:
Czech: Who is this man/woman in my bed? (Who do you imagine you would address this to?)
Spanish: My tailor is rich. (I defy you to construct a conversation where this is the next sentence you want to say.)

And finally, as promised, here is Patricia Beer’s poem:

The Postilion Has Been Struck by Lightning

He was the best postilion
I ever had. That summer in Europe
Came and went
In striding thunder-rain.
His tasselled shoulders bore up
More bad days than he could count
Till he entered his last storm in the mountains.

You to whom a postilion
Means only a cocked hat in a museum
Or a light
Anecdote, pity this one
Burnt at milord’s expense far from home
Having seen every sight
But never anyone struck by lightning.

Of Janus and Yossarian

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stockpiling

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You get the idea!

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

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

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

Crescent – marking the Moorish conquest

Scimitar – indicating that it is a military stronghold

Key – alluding to the castle being close to the border

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

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

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

On the Street Where We Live…Well, Sometimes

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Penamacor Perambulations

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blog in the Time of Corona*

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Son, the CEO

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ganging Agley

Posted on by

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

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

Man proposes, God disposes.

Der mentsh tracht un Got lacht.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, sir. Exactly, sir.’

‘And I cannot do this over the phone.’

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

‘You do realise that this is complete madness!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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