First things first. I never expected to be (mis)quoting Xmas songs – particularly in mid-January, but there you are!

Second things second. I know that, as a True Brit, I should have written Aubergine Roasting on an Open Fire, but it doesn’t scan. I needed a spondee rather than a dactyl. Oh, the benefits of a classical education! (I can still, ludicrous as it may sound, recite from memory the first line of the Horace ode I declaimed in the London schools Latin poetry-speaking competition I was entered for 57 years ago.)

In addition, I used to call the vegetable aubergine when I lived in Britain, when only a deranged Frenchman would consider the abomination fit to eat. Take a beautiful silky-smooth, glossy, deep-purple bulbous object, looking for all the world like a Henry Moore sculpture, then burn it until the skin is only fit to throw away and you are left with amorphous greyish-mushroom gunk, and then eat it? Are you mad? Now, of course, I call it chatzilim (Them chatzilim? It chatzil?), and I know that it is ambrosial. So, the word aubergine carries inappropriately negative associations for me, whereas I am indifferent to the word eggplant.

Third things third. Chestnuts were, when we left Portugal at the end of November, in high season, and to be seen everywhere. I will try to find an opportunity to write more about them sometime soon, but, in the interests of accuracy, you need to know that Tslil roasted chestnuts in our new Electrolux oven, and very tasty they were, too (but, somehow, ‘Chestnuts roasting in an Electrolux oven’ hasn’t quite got the same ring to it), and it was chatzilim that Shir (the kids’ ‘business’ partner) wrapped in aluminium foil and roasted on the open fire, then transformed and blended magically into a baba ganoush to die for.

By the way, we have a coat cupboard in the downstairs hall of our home in Israel, and, although Bernice and I never put anything in there but coats and the occasional hat, nevertheless sometimes, when we are fast asleep upstairs, all sorts of objects make their way to the cupboard and set up home there (in much the same way as street cats do in our garden). So, you will suddenly discover, one morning, that a colony of handbags has moved in, or a small family of empty jam jars, or a close-knit community of useful pieces of string. Why am I telling you this? Because I sometimes open the cupboard door, and am reminded somehow of what the inside of my mind must look like.

(I was going to write here: ‘But I digress’. However, on reflection, it seems a little superfluous to point that out.)

And so to this post’s real subject – open fires. The traditional, and still the main, method of heating homes in Penamacor is the wood fire, and every house boasts a generously-proportioned open fireplace, with a fine chimney breast sweeping up to the ceiling.

Trees in the forestry around the village are regularly felled, sawn into logs and transported away, all by huge combined felling and logging equipment on caterpillar tracks, shattering the peace of the forest and causing the only traffic jam we encountered in Portugal, when they blocked the track to the kids’ land one day.

Now, Bernice and I both grew up with open coal fires. In London, my family made its contribution to the London smog of the 1950s (see Series 1, Episode 4 of The Crown, which is not guilty of exaggeration). In South Wales, Bernice’s family lived in a market town at the foot of a coal-mining valley. So, we both know about going out to the coalshed in the garden on a freezing-cold winter’s day and shovelling coal into the scuttle. We in London had all mod cons, including a mains gas point by the fire and a gas poker we used to light the fire. Bernice’s family, on the other hand, used the traditional twists of paper, on top of which a mound of coal was stacked (leaving plenty of gaps in the structure for air to feed the flames).

Well, it transpires that there are differences between burning coal and burning wood. First of all, consider the volumes required. When Micha’el and Tslil took delivery of mimosa logs at the beginning of the winter, they expected this batch to see them through the winter. Their latest calculation is that they will need three times that quantity. Fortunately, we have a large woodshed, with, so far, nothing nasty in it.

(If you haven’t read the quintessentially English Cold Comfort Farm, from which that last reference is taken, you can read about it here. As a parody of the ‘loam and lovechild’ genre, it is, without a doubt, not to everyone’s taste, and so very un-21^st Century as to be surely due for a revival, but, if you have read any of the doom-laden, dark-family-secret, rural novels that came out of Britain in the 1920s and 30s and that it gently mocks, then you should enjoy it.)

The second difference, which arises directly from the first, is that any given quantity of wood burns much more quickly than the same quantity of coal. In real terms, this means that maintaining a roaring fire requires taking on two extra staff – a porter and a stoker. The alternative is to devote your entire day to tending the fire. This is particularly true because wood burns more idiosyncratically than coal.

In addition, because the units of wood (the technical term is logs) are considerably larger and more unwieldy than the units of coal (the technical term is lumps), building a wood fire requires a much more comprehensive education in civil engineering than building a coal fire does.

Finally, initially lighting a wood fire is a lengthier and more nerve-wracking experience. When, after several failed attempts, with long-handled matches, spills of paper, candles, cardboard and bark, you finally manage to get the bloody thing to light, you need to watch it like a hawk. If it is true that a watched pot never boils, then it is equally true, in my experience, that an unwatched fire never stays alight. I managed to light one fire successfully during our month-long stay, but, on the whole, I preferred to delegate, to Micha’el and Bernice, the wood-fetching duties, the edifice building, and the ignition.

On the positive side, a wood fire leaves much less ash than a coal fire. Riddling, shovelling and disposing of ash are not the time-consuming tasks that they are with a coal fire.

A word about fire-lighting materials. We could have bought, in the supermarket, firelighters – those cubes that feel like polystyrene foam, look like giant sugar lumps, and smell disgusting. However, since Micha’el and Tslil want to save the (very little) ash that the wood fire leaves, to do something mysterious with it on their land, we did not want to pollute it with chemical firelighters.

So, instead, we used the materials we had at hand. You may remember from an earlier post that we ordered a lot of goods from Amazon, and this meant that, by the time it grew cold enough for a fire, we had an impressive store of cardboard from the various boxes that the goods were transported in. Even better as a firelighting material is wood bark, and so Bernice and I were always on the lookout for bark debris, every time we took Tao for a walk in his buggy. I must say that the wood bark burned strong and long, and was really good for starting the fire. Bark-gathering soon became second nature, so much so that, after our return to Israel, when a particularly windy night had left the pavement strewn with debris from the palm tree at the corner of our street, I had to resist the temptation to pick it all up to take home.

Sadly, our wood hearth is not the most efficient method for heating the house. A lot of the heat escapes up the chimney, and, since the open staircase leads directly from the salon/living room/lounge, more heat escapes upstairs. We will need to think about long-term solutions to this, probably starting by installing a significantly more efficient wood-burning stove in the existing fireplace.

Meanwhile, we have all been reminded of just how spellbinding are the dancing flames of an open fire…. even if there are no chestnuts roasting on it.

If you would like to see more of our home in Portugal, and our adorable grandson (though not necessarily in that order), Micha’el and Tslil have posted a new video devoted to Tao on their youtube channel this week. Who knows? You might even want to subscribe, like and spread the word.

One of the beneficial, but disturbing, effects of moving to another country is the discovery that a huge number of things that you always assumed were true all over the world…aren’t. Growing up in England (Have I mentioned before that I grew up in England?), I always thought I had a fairly good general knowledge. Good grief, I was even selected as one of the four members of my school team to compete on TV’s Top of the Form. And then we came on aliya, and I discovered that what I had always assumed was general knowledge was not only Bourgeoisie-centric, and mid-20^th-Century-centric, but also Occidento-centric, and even Anglo-centric. Very humbling, let me tell you.

But, of course, this phenomenon is not confined to general knowledge. The shock of my discovering that there are countries in the world where they drive on the right was immense. OK, I exaggerate, but you get the idea. In rather the same way as young children tend to regard their family, however dysfunctional, as normal, so we – or at least I – tended to think of the way things were done in England as not only the way they should be done (obviously), but also as the way they are done around the world.

Well, let me tell you: it ain’t necessarily so. We have now lived in Israel for over 33 years, and I long ago reached the point where not only do I fail to understand any of the British cultural references I read and see in the media, but I am also no longer certain which of my ways of doing things come from England and which from Israel.

So, I was prepared for the culture shock of Portugal, and I thought that, in this post, I would share with you just three of the surprising, and sometimes impressive, ways they do things in Portugal.

Let me start with the first one I discovered, on my initial drive from Lisbon to Penamacor. The last leg of the journey is along a country road with a 90 kph speed limit. The road passes through several villages, and the speed limit comes down to 70 kph on approaching a village, and then 50 kph within the village. As I drove through the first village I came to, the traffic light ahead of me turned red. When I stopped at the light, I wondered why the authorities had bothered to put a light there at all, because there was no cross street or pedestrian crossing. After half a minute, the light turned green and I carried on.

When the same thing happened at the next village, I was even more puzzled. Once again, the light turned red as I approached, and I cursed my bad luck.

At the third village, the penny dropped. A speed camera had detected that I was driving at slightly over the 50kph limit, and automatically triggered the traffic light to turn red. The traffic light had been erected solely to penalise speeding drivers, and to deter them from speeding.

What a wonderful system! I suspect I am not alone in feeling that if I travel at 52 kph in a 50 kph zone, I am only 4% guilty, whereas if I drive through a red light, I am 100% guilty. The effect on me was exactly what the authorities intended. Knowing that if I tried to gain a few extra seconds, I would pay for them in waiting time further down the road, I kept dutifully to the speed limit throughout my time in Portugal.

We discovered another creative solution to a widespread problem when we went to Castelo Branco, the provincial capital, to transfer the electricity contract from the old owners of the house we had bought. The offices of EDP (Energias de Portugal, formerly Electricidade de Portugal – Who said Portuguese is a difficult language?). are very plush, and the staff are dressed in smart uniforms that make them look like flight attendants. In Penamacor, and even in Castelo Branco, while all the office staff and bank officials dress very smartly, the customers are in jeans and casual shirts. Perhaps the man in the street dresses more smartly in Lisbon, and the contrast is less striking.

Anyway, after a fairly short wait, we were seen by a very helpful lady, and the bureaucracy was handled swiftly and painlessly. At one point, she asked me whether we wanted to increase the electrical capacity in the house from 3.45 kW to 6.90 kW. Now, I don’t know about you, but I have no idea what these figures represent in terms of average domestic consumption. I’m sure there are people who can recite their peak consumption over each of the last three years, but I don’t believe I know any of them. Anyway, Micha’el told me that he had encountered no problems with fuses being tripped, and I suspected that any increase would require rewiring, possibly installing triple-phase, and, doubtless, considerable expense. In my head I could hear Flanders and Swann singing The Gasman Cometh (If you know them, you don’t need me to tell you that it doesn’t get more English than Flanders and Swann; if you don’t know them, follow the link above to complete your education.) In short, we both agreed that we really didn’t need to increase the capacity. There is, I find, tremendous, if short-lived, satisfaction in coming swiftly and confidently to a decision on a matter about which you know nothing. In retrospect, I wish we had flipped a coin, and had a 50% chance of being right.

Incidentally, if you’re wondering why Bernice wasn’t involved in this decision, it’s because she was three doors down, looking in a shoe shop. No surprises there, as some of you may already know. (I thought about adding here that I have always suspected her middle name might be Imelda, but I have grown too fond of living with her to risk writing that.)

Only a few days later, when we had bought a couple of heaters for the house, did we discover that there were combinations of appliances that did indeed trip the fuse, and we spent a couple of days discovering just what our possible simultaneous combinations of washing machine, oven, kettle, heater and so on were. It started to feel a little like the puzzle about the farmer/merchant with a small rowing boat/raft, a cabbage, a rabbit/goat and a fox/wolf. (How interesting that the cabbage seems to be the only constant in this ménage à cinq!)

We then discovered, by means too tortuous to go into here, that, if we chose to increase our capacity, this would simply involve a clerk in the electricity company changing one value in their central computer system. No rewiring, not even a technician call-out to the house; just a couple of keystrokes at a terminal. However, our monthly fixed charge would be increased as a result, though not by very much. Needless to say, we chose this option.

My understanding of this system is that it makes it possible for EDP to avoid the peak-consumption-period power cuts that Israel, for example, occasionally suffers. During a spell of particularly hot weather in Israel, the surge of demand (principally to run air conditioners) may be more than the electricity company can meet, resulting in a power cut, sometimes over a significant area. In Portugal, EDP knows what the maximum possible demand is (the sum of each customer’s capacity) and can ensure that the infrastructure can meet this demand. The higher charge paid by customers who want greater capacity can contribute toward the cost of providing the infrastructure that will satisfy that demand. This seems to me a very equitable system.

Which brings me to this week’s third contestant – the humble front-door key. I grew up with Yale locks, the standard in England, with a spring mechanism that locks the door automatically when you close it. This is intended to be remarkably convenient – you don’t need to remember to lock the door when you leave the house, and, if your hands are full, you don’t need to fumble with the key on your way out. It can seems less convenient at 6 AM, when you are shinning halfway up the drainpipe in your pyjamas and slippers, hoping you can still fit through that bathroom quarterlight, because you just stepped onto the porch to pick up the delivered milk bottles, and heard that suddenly less than reassuring clunk of the Yale slipping solidly back into place.

In Israel, the standard is more like a bank safe door, with sliding cylindrical bolts that do not lock until you turn the key.

In Penamacor, the mechanism is mounted on the inside of the door, the house side rather than the street side. This means that the key has to reach through the entire width of the door and then some, to engage with the locking mechanism. This means that front-door keys need to be very long: indeed, inconveniently long, if you carry the key in a trouser pocket. And so, in a fit of Iberian ingenuity, the Portuguese have devised the telescopic doorkey. You slide the key closed to fit it into a trouser pocket, then expand it to insert into the lock.

However, it is advisable to explain to foreigners how the key works, rather than just handing them a shortened key. The mechanism is discreet enough to be unnoticeable, and there is much fun to be had watching a newcomer struggling to open the door with a key that does not reach far enough to engage the lock.

Believe me, it only takes a couple of weeks to transition from ‘How on earth are we supposed to work that out?!’ to ‘Of course; everybody knows that!’ It’s just another small step in our adjustment to life in Portugal.

If you want to follow Micha’el, Tslil and Tao’s journey of adjustment to life in Portugal, you can take a look at their youtube channel, where they seem to be posting a new video every week. (You might even get the urge to subscribe, like, and spread the word.)

Okay. I think you’ve waited long enough. Today we get serious, as I attempt to explain to you what brought Micha’el and Tslil and the most fabulous grandson in the world (so far) to Portugal, and, what’s more, to one of the more remote parts of Portugal, 270 kilometres from Lisbon, almost as far from Porto, and further still from the Algarve. And all of this, let me point out, in a country that is only 218 km wide and 561 km long.

Given the nature of the subject-matter, there’s just a chance you won’t find this as scintillating as my usual writing. Apologies if that’s the case, but rest assured: even this week’s post won’t be in the test, so feel free to skip if you couldn’t care less.

However, I know some of you are interested. I have identified three groups of you so far. First, there are the handful of people who assure me (with just a soupçon of what I detect as relish) that the kids are bound to fail, and who catalogue all the things that can go wrong  (you know who you are). Then, there are those who regard not only the kids’ adventure, but even the one Bernice and I are on, as wildly exciting, totally crazy and absolutely fascinating. This is very flattering, although I assure you that, in the modern world and the internet age, the journey Bernice and I are on seems fairly routine most of the time, except for those moments when we suddenly turn to each other and ask ourselves how the hell we got here. And finally, there are those who get it, who understand what has motivated Micha’el and Tslil to embark on this new life.

So, for all of you out there, a little background.

Like much of the rest of Europe, Portugal is experiencing negative population growth, largely because of a falling birthrate. In addition, in the last few decades there has been a transmigration of young adults from rural Portugal to the big cities, mainly on the coast, so that now, only 2% of the settlements (cities, towns, villages) in Portugal have a population greater than 2000, and about 60% of the population live in that 2%.

Most of the underpopulated interior is agricultural (including forestry), and those agricultural lands are increasingly underfarmed or abandoned. The average age of Portuguese farmers is now about 65; it is not difficult to envisage what the situation might be by 2050.

In addition, in very many of these rural communities, the ageing index (the relation between the percentage of the population who are 65 or older, and those who are 15 or younger) makes demographic regeneration very difficult. Since the 1960s, the population in Portugal has aged at a higher rate than that in the remaining European countries and their fertility rate is one of the lowest in Europe.

Apart from the direct economic and demographic dangers of this situation, the weather in recent summers has highlighted another, more immediate, danger. In 2018, Portugal experienced a summer drought and temperatures that reached 46^o C.

This resulted in devastating forest fires, particularly in many unharvested and untended forest areas, where undergrowth had not been controlled. With no prospect of this land being kept under control, and with a dwindling and aging population that will become increasingly unable to prevent or fight the forest fires, the prospect is frightening.

The Portuguese government’s most creative response to these challenges has been to encourage resettlement of these rural areas and the regeneration of agriculture, by making it relatively easy for foreigners to buy land in the rural areas, build homes on the land and farm it. The bureaucracy has been simplified (although, as everywhere, it is still relatively slow, unwieldy and tortuous) and efforts have been made to offer foreigners a more attractive legal status in Portugal.

The hope is that this foreign influx will cut back the overgrown brush, steward the land by farming it, and thereby provide a free fire prevention, early reporting and control service. This all sounds to me suspiciously like a win-win situation.

As a result, Portugal in general, and several rural provinces in particular (including Castelo Branco – the province where the kids have bought land) have been attracting a motley crew of: youngish idealists, seeking a simpler, more fundamental life; would-be escapees from the rat race; aging retiree veterans of Woodstock; and so on, all flocking to a new Jerusalem from many corners of Europe and America, as well as from Israel.

Portugal is proving a popular choice with many Israelis. With a climate that offers summer sunshine to make Israelis feel at home, a relaxed lifestyle among a friendly local population, a fairly relaxed attitude* to recreational marijuana (a part of me hopes that I sound like I know what I’m talking about there….and another part hopes that I don’t), and an attractive food and drink culture (at least for the non-kosher-keeping meat- and seafood-eater), Portugal has a lot going for it.

In addition, Portugal, like Spain, has, in recent years, introduced naturalization laws, which have been described as aimed to atone for the state-led campaigns of persecution against the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions from the 16th Century on. Under these laws, Jews who can provide evidence that they are the descendants of Portuguese Jews can apply for citizenship. Naturally, many Israelis find the prospect of an EU passport attractive, and, although few of them contemplate moving to Portugal, these laws have brought Portugal into the consciousness of more Israelis. (Post-Brexit, there will undoubtedly be an upsurge in the number of British Jews applying, as well.)

The fact is that Micha’el and Tslil spent almost two years exploring possible ways of living their dream in Israel. However, the authorities make this virtually impossible. To give just one example: all rainwater in Israel is classified as government property, and collecting rainwater for private use is illegal. (You may feel the need to read that sentence again.) There are many stories of official harassment of communities trying to live off the grid (literally and figuratively). In addition, a population density of around 400 people per km² makes Israel the 30^th most crowded country on Earth, and, as a result, land prices, even in less populated areas, are prohibitively high. (Portugal, incidentally, is the 100^th most crowded country in the world, with a density three and a half times lower than Israel’s.)

In the end, the kids gave up, and started looking elsewhere. Imagine our delight when they chose Portugal rather than their other short-listed destination, which was much further away, and seemed considerably less safe, in South America.

So, that’s why Portugal. As for why Penamacor, the kids, on their first pilot trip, and Micha’el, when he flew over alone (Tslil being, at the time, too close to her due date for Tao) looked at various possible plots in various areas of Portugal. The reason they chose the land they finally bought was because the size and topography of the plot matched what they were looking for, rather than because of the specific area of Portugal it is located in. They had a limited budget, and their money certainly went further just outside Penamacor than it would have done in the flatter, lower-lying, lusher lands of the Portuguese heartland.

Well, I hope you now feel not only older but also wiser. If you are interested in learning more about Micha’el and Tslil’s journey, as it unfolds, please consider following their YouTube channel. It would be wonderful if you subscribed to it, because they are hoping to monetise the channel. (I can almost talk the talk, but I assure you I can’t even limp the walk.) Apparently, to qualify for monetisation, they have to reach a minimum threshold of hours of viewing time, and also (to forestall Bernice, who runs each video on an endless loop) a minimum threshold of subscribers. So, please, if you are at all interested, watch, subscribe, and spread the word to anyone else you know who might enjoy it.

Similarly, feel free to recommend my blog to any of your friends. I have found the warmth of your feedback surprising, and immensely flattering, and I seem to be starting to get a taste for this.

* In case you’re interested, Portugal has decriminalised all personal drug use – including cocaine. However, personal use is still illegal, being now an administrative rather than a criminal offence. Offenders are defined as patients rather than criminals. If you are caught in possession of an amount of cannabis commensurate with personal use, you will not be prosecuted for a first offence. However, second and subsequent offences may lead to compulsory attendance at a support group or payment of a fee.

I left you last time with us having just arrived home from the supermarket, laden with a comprehensive range of food items. Since it felt pretty much like winter (even in the house…but that’s another story, for a later post), we were able to leave most of the fruit and some of the vegetables out of the fridge, and we found that we had enough cupboard space to pack away all the dry goods, though not necessarily enough brain space to remember where we had put everything. There was certainly an awkward transition period of a couple of days during which Bernice and I kept looking for items in the equivalent cupboard to the one where we keep them in Israel, but by the end of our four weeks we felt so much at home that, when we returned to Maale Adumim, we kept looking for items in the equivalent cupboard to the one where we keep them in Portugal. Thank goodness they drive on the right in Portugal and at least we don’t have that adjustment to look forward to six times a year.

We were now completely up to speed, and ready to cook for shabbat. The oven had no timer, which meant that we (let’s be honest, it meant that Bernice) would not be able to use it on shabbat. Fortunately, among the recipes she had photocopied and brought from Israel were several that could be cooked in advance and then kept hot on the shabbat hot plate (which was the one really useful item we had ordered and bought in the kosher shop in Lisbon). So, she rolled up her sleeves and started peeling and chopping vegetables.

A little background. About 7 years ago, Bernice decided to stop eating meat (but not, I hasten to add, fish). We now do not eat meat at home – which, in a kosher kitchen, makes life so much easier. I still occasionally eat meat when we are out, but less and less. I have long argued that if I had to give up meat or fish I would give up meat. Incidentally, if I were cast away on a desert island and could only take one fish with me (as it were), the lucky (or perhaps that should be unlucky) winner would be herring; partly, no doubt, this is because my late father z”l owned a delicatessen shop. Herring is a magnificent and incredibly versatile fish, to be relished pickled, shmaltz (or should that be shmaltzed), which is preserved packed in salt and oil, chopped (a mixture of shmaltz and pickled, blended with onion, apple, hard-boiled egg, white pepper, and a little stale bread), fried, soused, smoked as a kipper or a bloater…but I digress).

Not eating meat at home is no kind of hardship. However, not preparing meat at home comes with a price tag. There is no getting away from the fact that getting a chicken ready for the oven is far less labour-intensive than preparing vegetables, tofu and mushrooms for a meatless stew or curry. Fortunately, among the items we had bought on Amazon was a good set of kitchen knives.

(Yet another aside: The company I used to work for gave its employees gifts at Pesach and Rosh Hashana, as is usual in large companies in Israel. One year, the choice of gifts included one or two that we had chosen previously, another couple that we had no use for, and a set of Arcosteel kitchen knives and block, endorsed by Israeli celebrity chef Meir Adoni. Both Bernice and I felt that such expensive branded knives were almost certainly an affectation, but there was nothing else we wanted and, after all, we weren’t paying, so we chose the knives…and our lives changed overnight. A set of perfectly balanced, hollow-handled, lightweight knives, each formed from a single piece of metal, that sit beautifully in the hand, stay sharp longer, and sharpen wonderfully well. Among the things they cut in half with ease is prep time in the kitchen!)

We were delighted to see that the reasonably-priced knives we bought online for Portugal seem to be cut from the same cloth – or, rather, tempered from the same steel. Nevertheless, Bernice had to spend many hours on Thursday and Friday preparing wonderful meals for shabbat, including soup that everyone really enjoyed, including Tao.

Meanwhile, I was baking challah. This has been my job since Bernice decided, several years ago, that kneading the dough was too exhausting. Having come to the same conclusion some time later, I now use the electric mixer to knead the dough, and, although purists will be horrified, I believe I get a better result. From challah, I have gradually moved (with subtle but effective nudging from various members of the family) to baking all of our bread. The full story of what that means will have to wait for another post; for the moment, what matters is that the smell of challah wafting from the oven and filling the house made us all realise shabbat was almost here. Rather too much of the smell wafted, by the way, because the oven, we discovered, had a very poor seal at the top, and copious clouds of steam escaped into the kitchen. In addition, the oven had only one tray, which presented quite a challenge.

These accumulated woes led to us deciding that we would buy a new oven. In addition, by this time Tao’s nappies had been hanging on the clothes horse for 3 days, and still weren’t dry. This was largely because the washing machine seemed to feel that the essence of spinning lay in the noise and the shaking, rather than the rotation of the drum, so that the clothes came out of the machine at the end of the cycle fairly wet. So, we decided we needed a new washing machine as well, and, given how cold and wet the Penamacor winter is (you can see where this is going), a tumble dryer as well. At this point, Tslil pointed out that the controls for the gas hob were on the oven, so, of course, we needed to replace the hob as well.

Fortunately, we had noticed, on our trip to the supermarket, a large electrical goods store in the same mall, that seemed to be offering some substantial discounts. I went online, and found that the store was part of a large Portuguese chain that had good customer reviews and sold a lot of own-brand appliances that scored very well in review, as well as many from better-known companies. The icing on the cake was that their excellent website used one Portuguese phrase that we understood – Black Friday. A couple of hours of online research later, we had chosen and ordered all four items. How did we ever manage in a pre-Internet world? (The story of the delivery of these white goods is so good it will have to wait for a post all to itself.)

Having showered and dressed for shabbat, we all gathered in the salon for candle-lighting, in front of the window in full view of the street. (I remember reading about one Sephardi family who had retained some traditions while losing their awareness that they were Jewish. The grandmother, apparently, would go down to the basement to light candles on Friday evening. She did not realise why; she only knew that was what her mother had done.)

Later, around the kitchen table, I was able to give our son, daughter-in-law and grandson the traditional Friday night blessing. Those of you who know me well will appreciate Bernice’s stunned admiration that I got through the whole thing without once crying. Then came kiddush, the sanctification over wine that marks the beginning of the shabbat meal. This rather confused Tao. He already seems to be aware of the difference between English and Hebrew, and to know that his Daddy speaks to him in English, while his Ima (Mummy) speaks to him in Hebrew. Daddy, he realises, speaks to Ima in Hebrew – and even speaks to strangers in another language that Tao doesn’t yet recognise very well. Ima speaks to many visitors in English. However, until that first Friday night, Tao thought he was on safe ground with Nana and Grandpa. He had only heard us speak English. And now, suddenly, here I was, speaking, and here we both were, singing(!) in, Hebrew. Tao certainly looked a little disconcerted, although he seemed to have adjusted to it by the time we left to come back to Israel.

That first shabbat evening, as Bernice and I reflected on the past week, we felt very pleased with what we had managed to achieve; that the five of us were enjoying shabbat together made us feel that all of our hard work had been well worth it.

Clarification: All of these posts are being written in retrospect. Bernice and I arrived back in Israel from our first stay in our house in Portugal in late November. I reckon that I have at least enough material to support a weekly post until our next trip, scheduled for early February, again for a month. So, at the moment, this is less of a blog, and more of a memoir. Not that there’s much difference, I think….but that’s a subject for another post.

One of my favourite jazz pianists is Erroll Garner, not least because of his playfulness, which showed itself best in the elaborate solo intros he loved to weave, especially when playing a live concert with his trio. These intros were often very free-flowing, modulating through unexpected sequences of keys, often featuring such frequent and bewildering changes of rhythm and melodic line that they sometimes barely sounded like music. At a certain point, after he felt that he had teased both his bassist and drummer, and also the audience, enough, he would slide effortlessly into a classic melody from the Great American Songbook, and a ripple of applause of recognition would glide through the audience. Of course, repeated listening to these intros – knowing in advance what the song is – unlocks, for me, at least some of the mysteries of the initially impenetrable intro, so that I can enjoy the joke with him.

As I write these words, I am listening to Erroll Garner playing The Way You Look Tonight. You can hear what I’m talking about here, but please then hit the back button to return to this page, and to find out where my own elaborate intro is leading.

I owe my late mother-in-law an apology. (I actually owe her several, but there’s one I’m prepared to share with you.) Betty Joseph z”l left her home in England at the age of 87, and came on aliya (to live in Israel). After staying with us for a year, she moved into her own flat a couple of miles from us, and lived very happily until a few months into her 91^st year. She was in many ways very independent, and made several new friends and led an active social life on top of the time she spent with her daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. However, we could never persuade her to go to the corner shop if she ran out of milk or bread. We used to nag her about this: “You know what a carton of milk looks like….The shopkeeper is very friendly….It’s only two minutes down the road.” Well, Mum (and here’s where we segue smoothly into the actual song), now I get it. I understand your hesitation. I shouldn’t have criticized you until I was standing in your shoes.

Which I was, on the Wednesday morning of our first week in our new home in Portugal. Having koshered, cleaned and equipped the kitchen, we set off with Micha’el to a large supermarket 40 minutes’ drive away in Fundao, to buy food. (This took Bernice and I back 45 years, to when the French-owned Carrefour opened several hypermarkets in Britain, one of them in Caerphilly, a largish South Wales town about 40 minutes’ drive from Bridgend, where we were then living. The Carrefour hypermarket was the only construction of importance to be built in Caerphilly since the castle was completed in the 1270s, and we would drive over excitedly every two weeks or so to do our major shop.)

We were armed with a download of the Lisbon Jewish community’s list of kosher products and guidelines, which we hoped would make our task easier. Of course we didn’t expect provincial Fundao to have the range of products that can be found in Lisbon…and we were right.

You all know what it is to walk into a large supermarket you have never been in before; you have no idea where anything is, and it takes you a considerable time to get your bearings. Because of the layout (high-sided, narrow, parallel aisles), you have to walk through every single aisle to know what is there; you cannot find any high ground from which you can survey the entire shop and spot the frozen food cabinets or jam and marmalade section.

Add to that the fact that we barely had any vocabulary in Portuguese, and even Micha’el, who was very convincing in most situations, found that food was not one of his areas of linguistic strength.

Add to that the fact that we had no idea what products looked like. If you are from Israel, and therefore looking for flat packets of 50 individual sheets of baking paper, you will never notice the rolls of baking paper on the shelf, and will assume they are just more aluminium foil or cling film. If you are looking for whole chickpeas in a can, you can easily miss the array of glass-bottled chickpeas.

Finally, add to that the fact that we had no knowledge of Portuguese culinary preferences. For example, we triumphantly came home with flour for bread-baking, only to be gently told by Tslil that almost all flour in Portugal is self-raising – even bread flour – and that we needed to look for packets labelled SEM (without) FERMENTAÇÃO (…I leave the translation to you). Another example: when I got home, I discovered that the 6-pack of beer that I had bought was non-alcoholic!!! What a strange country.

Let me just say that this was a very stressful and frustrating shopping expedition, not helped by the fact that we were by this time only 52 hours from the start of our first shabbat. We eventually reached the point where we decided that the items we had so far failed to find meant less to us than the time it was taking us to fail to find them, and so we made our way to the checkout, where, thankfully, I paid by debit card.

Why do I say “thankfully”? Well, before my retirement, I travelled quite a lot in my job, and, over the course of 18 years, visited about 15 different countries for one or two weeks at a time. Because I keep kosher, I would regularly visit food shops and supermarkets, to hunt for Philadelphia cream cheese (kosher throughout the world and divine when spread into the trough of a stick of celery),as well as to buy fresh fruit and salad vegetables to eat with the tuna and crackers I always brought with me. After one big initial shop, I would, over the course of my stay, pop back for individual items. When I first started travelling, I used to pay for these small items in cash. It’s difficult to put into words how humiliating an experience this is. First of all, you reach the checkout and return the cashier’s cheery greeting with the two words that constitute about 40% of your total vocabulary in the local language. However, the cashier takes your confident “Bom dias” or “Dobré ráno” as evidence of your fluency, and then tells you the total cost of your purchases; you, of course, fail to understand. You attempt desperately to locate where on the cashier’s screen you can read the total, and it comes to, let us say, 25 lek and 47 qindarka. Until now, you have taken the coward’s way out, offering the cashier a 20 and a 10 – after all, it’s easy to familiarize yourself with the notes. However, over the last few days, this strategy has meant that you have accumulated several pocketfuls of small change, and you feel you want to get rid of some of it. And this is where your problems begin. You have not studied the coinage; the value embossed on each coin is usually placed in an unexpected position, and is often almost too small to read; you cannot trust your intuition, because, aggravatingly, the 5-qindarka coin is bigger than the 10. So, in desperation, you hold out a fistful of change, and the cashier gently picks out the coins they need. What is most unnerving about this whole experience is that they smile sympathetically while doing so, clearly questioning your mental competence.

This is bad enough in Bangkok or Brno, but when they issued new coins a few years ago in Britain without telling us, it happened to me at a cash desk where I had been happily chatting like a native to the cashier (I was a native, dammit!); this was true humiliation. For the rest of our stay, I affected a Peter Ustinovian, vaguely Slavic accent with cashiers.

The technique I eventually developed at work was always to pay by credit card, even for the most trivial purchase.

In Penamacor, however, there are several shops that do not accept credit cards at all, so I had to spend some time one day studying the coinage, before I could summon the courage to go to the corner shop to buy a carton of milk. And then, when I got to the shop, I could not find any milk in the refrigerated section. I asked the shopkeeper: “Leite?”, and was directed (again, with that considerate gentleness reserved for dealing with the infirm) to an array of 15 different kinds of milk, right opposite me, on non-refrigerated shelving.

I spent what felt like an unreasonable length of time trying to decipher the text on the various cartons, and then opted for one that seemed, if I remembered right, to be a similar shade of blue to the carton we had just finished. I negotiated the cashier with considerable success, smugly offering the exact coinage, and made my triumphant way back to the house, only to discover that I had bought long-life, lactose-free milk. I now know that our corner shop sells only long-life milk, which is very popular in our part of Portugal, apparently.

So, yes, I am really sorry, Mum, that I persistently nagged you to do a little food shopping, and failed to understand how daunting and challenging that can be in a new country, with a language, currency and culture that you know hardly anything about.

I daresay we all know at least the second line of this verse: Columbus sailed the ocean blue. However, for Jews, 1492 has an additional significance: it is the year in which the Jews were expelled from Spain. The Jewish communities of both Spain and Portugal had been founded over a thousand years before, and there had been long periods of stability, and even prosperity, in both countries, with monarchs appointing Jews to influential court positions, diplomatic, mercantile and financial, and with many Jews engaging in the free professions or working as skilled artisans.

I must confess that, until it became clear to me that Portugal was now going to play a significant role in my life, I knew little more than the above. If asked, I would have said that Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492; that the vast majority left, and, that, of those that remained, most converted to Catholicism (and were known as neo-Christians – cristãos-novos or conversos), and a few remained crypto-Jews (known also as anusim, or – in a term which is now viewed as offensive – as marranos).

It transpires that I was almost completely wrong. To focus on my major errors:

• Portugal was initially much more sympathetic to its Jewish population than Spain, and it did not expel its Jews until 1497, and then almost entirely for political reasons connected to an alliance by marriage of two royal families. It remained periodically more sympathetic in the following centuries. (It has to be said that being more sympathetic than Spain during that period is not setting the bar impossibly high.)
• However, over the next 300 or so years, there were a number of ‘spontaneous’ pogroms (often condemned by the monarch, with the perpetrators being punished), in addition to periodic programmes of systematic persecution (from forced conversion to auto-da-fe) within the framework of the Portuguese Inquisition.

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. If you want a full-length history of the Jews of Portugal, you will find a scholarly but very human account in the early chapters of Howard Sachar’s excellent Farewell Espana: The World of the Sephardim Remembered, which you can read about here.

The whole purpose of this long introduction is to explain that for us, indeed for any aware Jew, the whole question of moving (back) to Portugal has resonance. It is in some ways parallel to Jews moving to Berlin (although of course 500 years is a lot longer than 75, but then nobody ever accused Jews of having short memories). As it happens, Bernice’s maternal grandmother z”l (of blessed memory), a larger-than-life character and a wonderful woman, always claimed that her family had fled Portugal and come to England as part of the first group allowed back by Oliver Cromwell in the mid-17^th Century. Research by a relative of Bernice seems to corroborate the story, in part if not in its entirety, and those of us who always secretly thought it apocryphal owe her an apology. In addition, Tslil’s mother’s family came to Israel a couple of generations ago from Saloniki in Greece, an almost certain indicator that they were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula some time earlier.

All of this meant that, for me, the act of attaching a mezuza to our front door in Penamacor acquired a significance above and beyond its regular importance. (If you missed my earlier post and are unsure what a mezuza is, you can find out more about it here.) Not just to be walking around a provincial town in Catholic Portugal, openly wearing a kipa, but to be standing in the street in broad daylight, reciting the bracha (blessing) aloud, and attaching a mezuza to our front door in a clear declaration of our Jewish faith, felt immensely satisfying. As Tslil said at the time: We’re back!

At the end of my last but one post, Bernice and I were standing on the doorstep of our new second home in Penamacor. Before we could knock on the door, our son Micha’el had opened it wide, and we stepped inside to a welcoming log fire, an even warmer welcome from Micha’el and his wife Tslil, and a more cautious appraisal from our 8-month-old grandson, Tao. We had been very anxious as to whether Tao would remember us from the five weeks the kids had stayed with us immediately before they left Israel for Portugal, five weeks earlier. Seeing him now, very quietly looking us over, we were not at all sure. However, within a few minutes, he came to us for a cuddle without any fuss, if still a little cautiously, and was soon all smiles, which is his default mood. Micha’el assured us that he clearly remembered us, because he was normally very shy with strangers. We thought Micha’el was humouring us, until later we saw how subdued Tao was with genuine strangers, and realized that he must remember us.

Content warning: Bernice assures me that I am allowed one grandfatherly dote, and, since Tao is the real reason we have embarked on this adventure (sorry, Tslil and Micha’el), I thought I would indulge in it sooner rather than later. Feel free to skip.

Tao is the happiest, most naturally curious, most intelligent child imaginable. He has inherited his father’s physicality, balancing happily on two feet and one hand while totally absorbed in exploring a toy with the other hand, and scaling the fifteen stairs in the house for the first time a few days after our arrival, with care and caution but complete confidence. Bernice reminded us that, when she took Micha’el to Tipat Halav (mother and child clinic) for his 10-month check-up, he started by climbing the filing cabinet, at which point the nurse decided they could probably skip the test for gross motor skills and balance.

Tao also has amazing focus and perseverance, and can spend five minutes trying, and failing, to take the large bowl out of his toybox, without giving up but without becoming angry or frustrated…and eventually succeeding.

He shows the same level of concentration when I sing to him. He quickly learnt that Hickory Dickory Dock, The Grand Old Duke of York and Ride a Cock Horse are accompanied by really fun actions, and starts laughing as soon as I begin one of them. After initially resenting yet another person laughing at my singing, I realized that he was relishing anticipation, which I was soon milking shamelessly, making him wait an unconscionable time between ‘The clock struck one’ and the accompanying ‘Boi-oi-oi-oi-oing’ at which point I gently shake my head and his body. While my mouth forms and holds the ‘B’ shape – lips turned in and pressed tightly together – Tao sits on my lap, watching my mouth as intently as if he were a cat tensed to pounce, patiently waiting for the mouse to emerge from its hole.

OK. That’s it for the dote.

On that first evening, we chatted with the kids, ate the last of our food from home, unpacked our new bed linens, made our bed, and collapsed into it.

Our Sages say that One who prepares on Friday, will eat on Shabbat. This is not simply a warning parallel to the famous verse in Proverbs: Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider his ways and be wise. It is also a reminder of how shabbat ideally shapes our entire week. We look forward to the coming Shabbat, anticipate its pleasures and ensure that we make the preparations necessary to be able to enjoy it. In light of all this, it is no surprise how much we enjoyed our first shabbat in Penamacor. Because we certainly prepared for it. We had bought the house furnished, and that included a kitchen with appliances, utensils and crockery and cutlery. This proved very useful to the kids, who are not observant Jews; it meant that they could move into a fully functioning house. However, since Bernice and I are observant, before we could use the kitchen we needed to kosher what could be koshered, and replace what couldn’t. So, on our first morning in the house, we launched our second military campaign.

Stage One of this operation was clearing out the old, and sorting it into three piles of utensils and equipment: what could be koshered; what the kids wanted to store for when they move to their own home; what was too shabby or too hideous or too arcane to be useful. This third was a very small pile, since Micha’el and Tslil fervently believe in recycling resources and are possessed of a fertile imagination that sees potential in the least likely objects. For Micha’el at least this is, I must confess, an inherited trait. It is only in recent years, and only to a limited degree, that Bernice has succeeded in persuading me that we do not have to keep every piece of bric-a-brac, in the fond hope that the day will dawn when all that I am missing to build my better mousetrap is an old broom handle and four rusty screws. For the best exposition of this syndrome I know, anyone who has somehow missed Michael McIntyre’s riff on the Man Drawer should watch it immediately, here.

Stage Two was an outing to the local corner shop, to buy an entire range of cleaning, scouring, scrubbing and disinfecting lotions, potions and implements. That was the fun part!

Stage Three was actually applying to the kitchen everything we had just bought. At school, I always preferred pure maths to applied, and the same is true of cleaning: the theory is so much more fun than the practice. Having said that, working as a team, and seeing the results, and knowing why we were doing this, made it all easier, and, in a relatively short time, we were done, and ready for the really fun part – unwrapping everything we had ordered online to be delivered to the house.

Turning to the 20 or so Amazon parcels, we started unpacking: a food mixer, a set of egg cups….and everything in between. As we unpacked, we were able to decide on where to place things, bringing all of our experience of setting up a kitchen together over 47 years, on seven different occasions (five very different homes, in two of which we renovated the kitchen after several years). Once we had finished, it was very satisfying to see Tslil’s delight at having a properly organized, fully equipped kitchen.

All that was missing now was food! However, that had to wait until the following day, and Bernice and I made do with pita and cheese that we had bought in the kosher shop in Lisbon, followed by fruit.

The only other task we achieved on this, our first full day in our new home, was to put up mezuzot…but that will have to wait for my next post.

At the end of my last post, Bernice and I were standing on the doorstep of our new second home in Penamacor, Portugal, about to be reunited with our son and his family, who had moved into the house from Israel five weeks earlier. I’m going to leave you waiting with us on the doorstep for a little longer, because, as it is always does, something more urgent has come up.

Just in case it is not immediately obvious to you in what way a blog post is like a gas bottle, let me explain.

In the house, we use bottled gas to heat the water, and to fuel the hob. On our second Sunday in the house, the gas ran out. It transpired that the kids did not have any spares, so Bernice and I set off in the car, with two empty bottles, to the hardware store in the centre of Penamacor. We very bravely told Micha’el he did not need to come, calculating that if two customers walk into a gas bottle supplier’s shop carrying two empty gas bottles, the supplier should be able to work out what they are looking for.

All well and good, except that the shop was closed, it being Sunday. In fact, I would have expected all shops in rural Catholic Portugal to be closed on Sunday, but it turns out that several of them open on Sunday afternoon. (Less reprehensible than going to Spurs on shabbat afternoon, I suppose.)

So, we had to wait for gas until Monday morning. This meant no cooking on the hob, no hot water for washing and washing up, and, for Tao, an experience that took Bernice back more than 60 years. The living room in the house is dominated by a large fireplace, in which, at this time of year, a wood fire is usually blazing. So, we built up the fire, put on the kettle, got out the large blue plastic bowl that the kids use as a laundry basket, and filled it with water from the kettle.

Soon, Tao was playing happily in his extemporized bath. Only one thing was missing: his favourite bath toy, the plug. Fortunately, it was easy to detach the plug chain from the bath and bring it in to him. Now, his joy was complete, although I don’t think he was quite able to work out why, when he lifted the plug up, the water level in the bath remained the same.

The following morning, Bernice and I went back to the shop and picked up two gas bottles. When we got back to the house, we suggested to the kids that, the next time a gas bottle ran out, they should change it for the spare in the storeroom, and immediately go down to the shop to buy another one!

And what, I hear you ask, has all this to do with blog posts? Good question. I thought long and hard about starting a blog, but, once I took the decision to start, I rather plunged into it. No sooner had I launched the blog, than people started asking when I was next going to post. Although I had several ideas of what to write in the second post, I had nothing on paper, and, as luck would have it, this was now the last few days of our stay in Portugal, so there was a lot to do. And shabbat in the middle. And group photos with the kids. And dashing off to photograph parts of the town that we had seen on our shabbat walk, and been unable to photograph because of shabbat. And sorting out what clothes to leave and what to bring back to Israel. And doing a final laundry.

Which is why you are reading this second post only a couple of days after we arrived back in Israel. However, I have learnt my lesson. Blog posts are like gas bottles. Write two, and, as soon as you post the first one, write another one. That way, you’ll never be caught out. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and write my next two posts.

For any of you who don’t know, our son Micha’el, daughter-in-law Tslil and grandson Tao (then six months old) moved from Israel to Portugal a couple of months ago, having bought 2.8 hectares of land (that’s about 7 acres in old money). Their plan is to join with others to share the vision of creating a permaculture-based eco-village. (If you want to follow their adventure, visit their YouTube channel here. Subscribing and liking would also not be a bad idea.)

As soon as the kids announced their plans, Bernice and I decided that we weren’t prepared to miss out on being a part of Tao growing up, and that we would aim to visit Portugal for a month at a time, three times a year. Once we sat down with the calendar, and factored in that we wanted to spend the major chagim (festivals) and our parents’ yahrzeits (anniversaries of their passing) in Israel, we decided on, roughly speaking, October-November, February-March and June-July (depending on the Jewish calendar). After a couple of days of reflection, we realised the near-impossibility of spending three months every year in an airbnb or hotel, packing and laundering clothes for a month at a time, keeping kosher in rural Portugal, and staying healthy, sane and married. The obvious solution was to buy a flat or small house in Penamacor, the town just over a mile from the kids’ land. (For reasons that I plan to explain in a later blog, property in the area is cheap, ridiculously cheap in comparison to  property in Israel.)

So, I paid a flying visit in June, and in four days I acquired a NIF (the equivalent of a social security number, and the sine qua non of bureaucratic life in Portugal), gave a lawyer power of attorney, opened a bank account, and viewed a half a dozen properties, one of which I thought ticked as many of our boxes as we were likely to get ticked. Five weeks later, after an experienced builder/renovator checked and approved the house, we exchanged contracts.

This meant that the kids could move straight into the house when they arrived in Portugal and live there while they are building their own home on their land.

And, three months later, we are out here with them on our first stay in our new house in Penamacor. This is certainly not the relaxed, indolent first year of shared retirement that Bernice and I planned, but, as the saying almost goes: Parents propose and children dispose. So far, we are really enjoying the ride, and I hope you will enjoy reading about it.

Content Warning

I am, in many ways, a prisoner of (or rather a voluntary inmate in) my past. The relevance of this to you, the reader, is that I am almost certain to pepper my writing with references to the popular culture of the lost England of the 1950s–1980s. I have no intention of stopping each time to explain these references. If you had the lack of forethought not to be raised in Britain, and/or the lack of consideration to be under 40 years old, then the problem, my friend, is all yours.

Acknowledgements

To our children, Micha’el and Tslil, whose pursuit of their vision started us on this bizarre journey.

To my wife,Bernice, whose diligent writing of her diary every evening has meant that my defective memory does not prevent me writing this blog of our first trip.

But, above all, to our grandson, Tao, whose childhood we have every intention of being a significant part of.