Day 23, as I write, and what is extraordinary is the way in which our new reality has become routine. By which I don’t mean that the pain has become dulled. If I am careless or undisciplined enough to follow one TV or radio story too many, I am still liable to find myself fighting back tears on a daily basis. And, yes, those individual stories of, on the one hand, unimaginable atrocities, and, on the other, inconceivable heroism, continue to surface, even more than 20 days later.

No, the pain hasn’t dulled. As one newspaper columnist put it, in the Shabbat supplement, the entire country is suffering from primary trauma, secondary traumatisation or collective trauma. On top of which, as Israel steps up its incursions into Gaza, the likelihood of more of our soldiers being killed or wounded is, once again, increasing

However, I don’t plan to write this week about the indescribable loss or the heroic altruism, or the trauma. I don’t even have any appetite to attempt political or strategic ‘analysis’. Instead, I just want to offer you a couple of snapshots of life under the shadow of the new reality, as the country becomes aware that this previously unthinkable reality is, for the moment at least, and for an indeterminate time to be, the new routine.

Overheard at the off-licence/liquor store. (Bernice and I are punctilious in ensuring that we always have a good supply of bottled liquid in the house; the Home Front Command suggested water, but we felt it was legitimate to interpret that liberally.) A conversation between the owner and a customer (these are both amcha – the ordinary man-in-the-street):

“Of course, it’s not enough to make sure your gun is ready to use; you have to make sure you have enough ammunition.”

 “At least they’ve relaxed the daily limit, and now you can buy 100 bullets a day, instead of 50.”

And I find myself feeling as matter-of-fact about that conversation as the participants themselves.

These days, when I am in shul, I find myself looking around to check which of the people who I know carry a gun are there. Since the mass call-up of reservists, our armed congregants are almost as likely to be carrying an M-16 semi-automatic assault rifle (the standard-issue Israeli infantry weapon) as a handgun.

Speaking of shul: we have started saying daily the Avinu Malkeinu prayer, normally said only during the 10 Days of Repentance and on fast days. This prayer comprises 44 supplications, each beginning Our Father, Our King; for example, Our Father, our King, forgive and pardon all our iniquities. The congregation read the first 14 lines as individuals; then the person leading the prayers and the congregation say each of the next 9 lines antiphonally (first the cantor recites the line, then the congregation repeats it in unison); then the last 23 lines are said again by each individual.

Now, for me this presents a problem, one I often encounter in shul. My Hebrew is good enough for me to understand what I am reading, but not good enough for me to absorb it instantly. I also have this madness that I like to think of my prayer as a conscious thought process, rather than a rote recitation. As a consequence, I seldom quite manage to keep pace with the congregation as a whole. I have various strategies for reconciling this situation.

In Avinu Malkeinu, I always read the first 14 lines at my own pace, knowing that I will be able to catch up with everyone else at some point during the 9 lines recited antiphonally. For the last 23 lines, I have no chance of keeping up, and so I usually read some of the lines without any conscious thought. This always includes five particular lines that I have never found it easy to connect with personally. They have always seemed to me to be harking back to some earlier painful period in Jewish history; I have always associated them specifically, for some reason, with the medieval massacre of the Jewish communities of France and Germany by the Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land.

In the new world we inhabit, these five lines have become, for me, among the most powerful lines in the entire prayer:

Our Father, our King, have pity on us, our children and our infants.
Our Father, our King, act for the sake of those who were killed for Your holy name.
Our Father, our King, act for the sake of those who were slaughtered for proclaiming Your Unity.
Our Father, our King, act for the sake of those who went through fire and water to sanctify Your name.
Our Father, our King, avenge before our eyes the spilt blood of Your servants.

We have also introduced, at the end of each service, the reciting of one or two from a list of eight or nine psalms that speak uncannily to our new reality. They serve as a vivid reminder of the majesty of the Book of Psalms in spanning the entire human condition.

These two acts of absorbing something additional into the daily routine of prayer make it easier to continue living day to day in these abnormal circumstances.

Changing the focus: I subscribe to two ‘weekly email update’ services: one from the National Library of Israel, and the other from the Academy of the Hebrew Language. (What can I tell you? I’m an intellectual snob…and if that hasn’t changed in 73 years, it’s unlikely to change now.) Both of these august bodies have succeeding in integrating the utterly new part into their particular same old with consummate ease.

In the world before October 7, both the Library and the Academy would always include in their weekly newsletters some item relevant to the season. So, the Library might present, from their archive, at Rosh Hashana, early 20^th Century New Year greetings cards, and discuss the iconography used to illustrate the cards. The Academy might discuss the origins of the names given to the various notes produced on the shofar, and list the correct names for producing music on other specific instruments.

Last week, the Library’s email, and their site, featured the story of the printing press at Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the kibbutzim most horrendously attacked on October 7. It’s a fascinating and uplifting read in English.

The Academy, on the other hand, (and I apologise in advance to those of you who have no Hebrew) looked at the slogans which have sprung up on motorway bridges and inspirational newspaper announcements: נעבור את זה ביחד (‘We’ll get through this together’) and יחד נצליח (‘Together we shall be victorious’).There followed a discussion of the relative merits, and interchangeability, of יחד and ביחד in these slogans. This was followed by a piece about the traditional farewell to soldiers going off to the army: שוב בשלום…..or should that be שוב לשלום. (‘Return in peace’ or ‘…to peace’, respectively)?

I can put you out of your misery by telling you that the Academy rules that the two (-ל-, ב, ‘in’ and ‘to’) are interchangeable in everyday use. However, they then follow that conclusion by pointing out that our Sages distinguished between the two, and they follow that with a detailed discussion of Biblical sources that indicate nuanced differences. I warmly recommend the analysis (in Hebrew, of course), which you can read here.

Aside from this, what adjustments have I made in my own life. Well, on Shabbat I now carry my driving licence with me when I walk to shul, so that in any circumstances I will be easily identifiable. When I go out in the car, I make sure I have a full water bottle and take it with me when I park and walk to wherever I am going, so that, whatever happens, I will have half a litre of water to drink.

Does all that sound slightly paranoid to you? Well, it sounds slightly paranoid to part of me, but there’s another part of me that is prepared to ignore that and do it anyway. Earlier this week, I read the new revised guidelines for eligibility for gun ownership and realized that I am probably eligible, thanks to my three-and-a-half weeks’ basic training 33 years ago and my several years of reserve duty. I then mused, for a short while, about whether I should apply for a gun licence. In this particular case, one glance at Bernice’s face when I ran that idea up the flagpole one evening led me to reconsider.

Since you ask, Bernice and I are doing pretty well. Bernice is basically using me to pass all relevant news on to her, and blocks out the radio, because she finds too much of what leaps out at her without warning too painful. I have cut down on my listening, and particularly viewing, drastically. There is a thrice-daily Hebrew-language news summary that is distributed by WhatsApp that keeps me pretty tuned in, and I catch the hourly news bulletin between times. Beyond that, I am striving to be very selective. (This news bulletin has, in the last couple of days, begun to appear in English as well. I highly recommend it as a non-graphic snapshot of the news in Israel.)

Because of our specific generational position and the ages in our family (including siblings’ families), the generation beneath us are just too old to have been called up, and the generation below them are just too young, so that none of our immediate relatives are at the front. This is, naturally, one less thing to worry about. However, when I think of our friends in shul and elsewhere, and our more extended family, and count those who have children at the front, I realise that this only means I have more spare worry that I can deploy to share their worry.

As part of my effort to keep a handle on normality, I feel I can resume offering you pictures of the grandsons, who are blessedly still too young to be aware of the times we are living in. Tao and Ollie were on the train to Lisbon for a couple of days, and Raphael was on the train in gan, where he is now really feeling at home.

Last week I wrote about the mood in the country, as captured/created in the mainstream media, in the first two days of the war. I also wrote, but did not publish last week, a description of how that mood changed from the third or fourth day of that first week.

A couple of days ago, I started thinking about how I could expand and complete that description as this week’s post. However, having struggled with it for some time, I eventually realised that it made no sense to write an update that, by the time I published it, would be a week and a half out of date.

Instead, let me try to identify and describe all of the successive waves of national mood that we have experienced until now.

“All he wanted to do was to protect his family”

Let’s start by revisiting the same clip from Golda that I asked you to look at last week. You can view it again here.

After Day 2, stories began to emerge of individual heroism: of Israelis who, on that first Shabbat Chag, saw on their phones WhatsApp messages from children, parents, friends, acquaintances, and reacted by grabbing their handguns and ammunition, jumping in their vehicles, and driving to the scene of the carnage. If you’re not Israeli, that may sound surreal. What you must remember is that there is a large, self-selecting group of forty-to-sixty-something men in Israel who all served in combat units. Some of them became career soldiers; others joined police force special units. All have seen live action during their regular and then reservist service over the last twenty years. They all keep a licensed handgun at home. They keep in good physical shape, and practise at the shooting range.

So, when their daughters called them from the festival to say that they were being shot at and there were no police or soldiers to be seen, or when their children called from their safe-room on the kibbutz, where they were sheltering with the grandchildren, and said that terrorists were firing at the door of the safe-room, these men did what their instinct and their training both told them to do: they drove to the ‘front’. On the way they lied their way through army roadblocks by claiming to be policemen called as reinforcement’, or bypassed the roadblocks in their all-terrain vehicles, or pleaded with the soldiers manning the roadblocks to let them through, or, having failed to persuade, they simply said: “I’m driving through. If you have to shoot me, shoot me, but you won’t turn me back”. They passed bullet-ridden cars and abandoned corpses littering the road. They brought the fight to the terrorists in the kibbutzim, moshavim and towns of Otef Aza, and in and around the festival, and in many, many cases they rescued trapped civilians.

As the first week went on, more and more of these stories were featured on the mainstream media. If you have not heard any of them, here is one featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes. The point I want to stress is that, as outlier as this story sounds, it is one of many that I could reference, each with a storyline that, in a Bruce Willis action film, would make me smile wryly at its far-fetchedness.

Among those civilian first responders were many members of Achim LaNeshek – Brothers in Arms – the reservist group that has, throughout the year, been heavily involved in the judicial reform protests. After members of the group who are Air Force pilots stated, earlier in the year, that they would no longer turn up for their regular reserve training – a step that some commentators argued would significantly undermine the Air Force’s effectiveness – Netanyahu condemned their action in very strong and divisive terms. On that Shabbat, 7 October, when a member of the group who lives in Otef Aza posted what was happening on their WhatsApp group, members of the group responded by making their way to the front.

Over that first week, the country was reeling under the weight of details uncovered every day of atrocities committed. The number confirmed as killed on that first day continued to rise, as did the number kidnapped. At the same time, the country began to rally around and to be inspired by the stories of individual courage. Some of those stories ended as well as could be hoped– such as the father who, in his tender, rescued from a bomb shelter next to a bus stop not far from the festival not only his daughter but also another 29 girls who had managed to stay quiet under the pile of bodies covering the floor of the shelter. Others ended as well as possible; there was more than one story of an individual deliberately taking the full force of an exploding grenade and thereby saving the lives of others close by.

Start-up nation

As the days went by, and civilians were evacuated from Otef Aza, and then as the call-up of over 300,000 reservists began, the national mood changed again. Now the narrative became one of 360,000 responding to the call-up – even though only 300,000 were called. Israelis cut short post-army trips, or other holidays, fighting to get a plane home in order to enlist. In 1967, Israeli black humour asked the last person leaving the country to turn out the lights; now the request was for the last Israeli leaving Europe to turn out the lights.

The massive call-up (of 3% of Israel’s population, the equivalent of calling up over two million in the UK or 10 million in the US) of course meant that the entire population was even more closely involved in the war.. Taking our 50-member-family shul as a microcosm, two of our members have been called up, as well as another 40 children, grandchildren, siblings, brothers-in-law and sons-in-law of members.

With reservists being called to the front, and with communities being evacuated from Otef Aza, individuals and groups began organising volunteer activities: collecting clothes, toys and toiletries for evacuated families, or food, toiletries and ancillary equipment for soldiers at the front; organising activities for evacuated children; even going into the abandoned Otef Aza communities – before they were declared sterile (clear of all terrorists) – to rescue ‘orphaned’ dogs and cats from the homes of massacred or kidnapped families and arrange foster families for them. Some hotels and hostels opened their doors to the evacuees. Some builders made newly completed but not yet occupied apartment buildings available. Brothers in Arms used its existing highly organised structure to open a massive logistics centre for food distribution and other support.  

The whole country embraced the therapy of ‘doing something’. Alongside the countless modest neighbourhood initiatives, larger and more innovative projects were launched. As I write this, on Sunday evening, there are still several hundred bodies that have not been identified. Despite Israel’s forensic scientists working around the clock, with expert help from abroad, some bodies are so mutilated and so badly burnt that neither dental records nor DNA are available. There are still a large number of people officially deemed to be missing, whose families do not yet know whether they have been murdered or kidnapped.

Recognising the anguish of these families, a group of hi-tech workers set up what has become a massive database. They have collected from the families all possible photographic and video evidence of those missing. They have also collected all the video and photographic documentation available from the events of that Shabbat and subsequently. Using AI and specially written algorithms, they are searching for matches, both facial recognition and possible matches of clothing. When I watched a television report on this centre a few days ago, they had been able to pass to the relevant authorities positive identification of many individuals.

Where are our leaders?

As the first week drew to a close, there was another change of tone in the national debate, as conducted in the media, and, increasingly, on the streets. Where was the leadership? This was a two-pronged question: Where was the leadership before October 7? Where is the leadership now? While there was initially widespread agreement that the investigation of any military, security and government failures or errors of judgement in the days, weeks and months leading up to October 7 should wait until after the war, Netanyahu was quick to announce that he had not been made aware of any potential situation until 6:29AM on October 7, when the attacks began.

In the last few days, the Commander-in-Chief, the Intelligence chief and the Minister of Defence have all accepted responsibility for the failure. Netanyahu has not. Government ministers unfortunate enough to be interviewed in the media have given carefully-worded responses along the following lines: “Of course we are responsible”, without mentioning Netanyahu by name or the Prime Minister by position.

Channel 11, a very mainstream broadcaster not overly sympathetic to Netanyahu at the best of times, displayed photos of the other three leading members of the War Cabinet in one column, under the heading: ‘Accept Responsibility’; in the second column, headed ‘Does not Accept Responsibility’, was the lone photo of Netanyahu.

While voluntary initiatives seem to get up to speed in virtually no time, and to run with incredible efficiency and a spirit of co-operation, this weekend saw what seems to be an appalling failure to co-ordinate. The Government offered inhabitants of Kiryat Shemona, very near the Lebanese border, the option to evacuate to hotels in the centre. Individual families were told which hotel was holding rooms for them. When some of the evacuees arrived at the hotels, they were told there were no rooms for them. On the radio this morning, the Mayor of Kiryat Shemona was furious at the incompetence of the Tourism Ministry, while the Minister of Tourism was unable to provide a coherent explanation of what had happened.

Two weeks into the war, there is still no single body to co-ordinate the Government’s initiatives for the home front. Initial attempts to organise such a body under the leadership of the Prime Minister’s office failed, because the directors-general of several of the various relevant ministries simply refused to ‘waste their time’ attending meetings of a body which would not achieve anything. Increasingly, this breakdown seems like an inevitable consequence of offering Government ministries to inexperienced members of minority parties, as a reward for joining the Government, and to incompetent members of the majority party, as a reward for remaining faithful to Netanyahu,

Members of the Government were very slow in visiting affected families in the South. This is, in fairness, partly out of a very real fear that they would encounter hostility, as one minister did when she attempted to enter a hospital to visit the wounded. At least one family warned Government representatives not to attempt to attend the funeral of their family member killed in the attack.

Where now?

Without a doubt, the country is more united, at the grassroots level, than it has been since the beginning of the year. Tzahal has announced that it has received 2000 requests from ultra-orthodox men to serve, and that it will be launching a suitable program tomorrow (Monday).

However, this unity does not move upwards. The open criticism of the Government, and especially of Netanyahu, both in the media and on the street, is becoming more strident. Given the fact that we are at war, this criticism seems to me very troubling, although I completely understand it.

The one issue above all others on which the nation will, I am sure, be truly, and savagely, divided, is the question of the country’s priorities. The basic question to consider is: How do you rank in importance the following three goals: The complete destruction of Hamas; the safe return of the hostages; the minimising of loss of life among Israel’s forces.

Adding to the complexity of the situation is the question of what will happen in Gaza after Hamas is completely destroyed (if that goal is even achievable). Further added to the complexity is the question: How is Israel most likely to achieve the safe return of the hostages? I have heard experts argue that a prisoner exchange is the only way; others argue that when we have Hamas by the throat they will release the hostages; yet others say that we need to carry out an Entebbe-style rescue.

These questions are, of course, immensely complex. I have not even added in the question of how Israel’s action in Gaza, against Hamas, will affect the stability of the Northern border. Will our action trigger Hizbollah to escalate hostilities? Will Iran be drawn in through Syria?

When I started thinking about this week’s post, I planned to call it ‘The Start-Up Nation’ and I intended to focus on how Hamas’s miscalculation was to think that its pogrom would destroy our morale rather than uniting us and leading us to forget our differences. That was the mood a week ago. Since then, the mood has shifted. The government, and the Prime Minister, have appeared to lack purpose, ability, and sensitivity to the mood of the nation. In addition, the geo-political ramifications of the situation have become clearer to us. As our ground troops wait impatiently on the Gaza border, and drown in home-made cake and shaving foam sent from the home front, and wait, and wait; as our troops wait anxiously on the northern border, and drown in coca-cola and soap sent from the home front, the way forward through the next weeks and months seems very far from certain.

However uncertain they seem for us, how much more so must they be for the families of the hostages – and for the hostages themselves?

What seems like a lifetime ago, but was, so the calendar tells me, less than two weeks ago, Bernice and I went to see Golda. One of the most powerful moments in the film occurs during a telephone conversation between Golda Meir and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. To understand today’s post, you must first watch this clip.

In the cinema, at that moment, the feeling among the audience of national pride was visceral. You could taste it in your mouth.

I don’t intend to analyse in detail what made the events of Shabbat/Simchat Torah ten days ago possible, but it looks increasingly like a combination of a whole kitbag-ful of elements: a level of planning, training, and secrecy from Hamas that far exceeded anything they had previously displayed; a disproportionate deployment of troops to the West Bank leaving the border with Gaza woefully under-protected; an over-reliance on technology and an accompanying decline in the level of training and discipline of the troops on the ground. Underlying all of these was a mistaken confidence on the part of Israel – its political leadership, its military and security leadership, many of its people.

Ten days ago, the national pride we had tasted in the cinema was exposed as hubris, and the confidence we had felt was revealed to have been complacency.

We have been heartened by the many, many messages of support we have received from family and friends abroad. One such message expressed the hope that “this unrest ends very soon”. I hope that, by now, nobody abroad mistakenly believes that what Israel underwent in the first half of last week was “unrest”. I am not going to post any links to videos from those first days: messages from families trapped in their houses for more than a day and begging for soldiers to come and rescue them; videos of acts of unspeakable atrocity committed by Hamas terrorists and filmed by them on their victims’ phones then uploaded to those victims’ families via social media.

The residents of the towns, kibbutzim and moshavim in Otef Aza – the area inside Israel bordering the Gaza Strip to the North and East – and the thousands attending a music festival in the same area were subjected to a pogrom, or, perhaps even more accurately, an Einsatzgruppen attack. As the details of the full extent and the exact nature of that massacre emerged over Sunday, Israel sank into a mood that it has not known since 1948, and possibly has never known.

As always happens during a war in Israel, the mainstream Israeli broadcaster switched all of its programming to news, analysis and background stories around the situation. For the first two days, these programs all focussed almost exclusively on interviews with survivors of the massacres, or with the families of those either known to be dead or declared missing presumed dead or abducted across the border into Gaza. From Day Two, added to these were interviews with soldiers and civilians who had gone into the towns and settlements that had been massacred, speaking about what they had found. There was an almost exclusive focus on the loss, the deaths, the carnage, the suffering, the anguish.

It is true that the family that is Israel always embraces those grieving, and encourages them to speak of the loved ones they have lost. However, this time the media experience was qualitatively different in two ways. First, the focus was exclusively on the way in which the victims had suffered and died, or been abducted, rather than the usual focus on celebrating the life that had been lived rather than the murder that had been inflicted. Second, the radio station I listen to (Reshet Bet) devoted virtually no time to any story other than those of individual suffering.

Let me offer two statistical comparisons to attempt to put the ‘size’ of the suffering into perspective.

Every day last week, the numbers of total dead announced rose by at least 100. Only a handful of that number were ‘new’ deaths; the remaining 90 or more were bodies that had been discovered over the previous 24 hours, bodies from the carnage of one day, Shabbat/Simchat Torah. On that day, I estimate (at the time of writing) that 1000 or more civilians were murdered. (By the time you read this, that horrendous number may even seem optimistic.) By comparison, in the entire Yom Kippur War, which, until 9 days ago was Israel’s greatest security failure, not a single civilian died.

1000 civilians murdered in a single Einsatzgruppen Hamas action constitute just over 0.001% of the total population of Israel. An equivalent percentage of the population of the UK is 6,750 people; of the US: 33,500. (2,600 died in 9/11.)

Two levels of remove: there cannot be a single family in Israel that does not have a relative, a friend, a work colleague, a fellow-congregant or a near neighbour who does not have a relative who was murdered or abducted or who experienced first hand the terror of the pogrom and survived deeply scarred emotionally, even if physically unharmed.

On a personal note: Bernice and I belong to a shul that has some 50 member-families. Two of those families have, between them, five cousins who are missing (presumed abducted), and our own daughter-in-law narrowly survived, thankfully physically unharmed, the massacre at the music festival. Every shul, every school, every social club in the country could tell the same story.

And even if you don’t know a particular victim personally… Here’s a piece that has been doing the rounds on social media that captures my point eloquently.

Someone asked me if I know anyone who was killed in Israel. I was puzzled by his question.
“I know all of them,” I answered. He was puzzled by my response.
So I wrote this to explain it.
——————————–
I don’t know you, but I saw you at that bar.
I don’t know you, but you took my parking spot.
I don’t know you, but our parents are friends.
I don’t know you, but I can hear you playing matkot on the beach.
I don’t know you, but your smile made me smile.
I don’t know you, but we argued in a WhatsApp group.
I don’t know you, but we ate together at Chabad.
I don’t know you, but you almost ran me over with your korkinet.
I don’t know you, but you were once my waitress.
I don’t know you, but you gave me your seat on the bus.
I don’t know you, but I saved your place in line at the bank, at the post office, and at the grocery store.
I don’t know you, but we loved the same music.
I don’t know you, but we learned Torah together.
I don’t know you, but we shared a joint in Sinai.
I don’t know you, but we stood next to each other at Mount Sinai.
I don’t know you, but we stood next to each other on Kaplan.
I don’t know you, but I know you.
I don’t know you, but I love you.
I don’t know you, but I will always remember you.

The mood in the radio studios was unnaturally subdued over those first few days; radio and TV presenters were sometimes close to tears, and even, occasionally, more than close. There was no sense, as there usually is during a war, of needing, of being able to attempt, to rally national morale. For a couple of days, until Tzahal was seen to be taking control in Otef Aza, the whole country felt powerless. The Prime Minister and the other political (and military) leaders seemed to be missing in action; there were no rousing addresses to the nation. A cartoon depicting all of the Government ministers cowering under the Cabinet table, some clutching their draft sectarian legislation, some wetting themselves, required no caption.

For over two days, we were that little girl hiding in the cellar, and those were the most chilling two days the country has ever experienced.

-o0o-

In the second half of last week, as Otef Aza was gradually cleared of all terrorists, and as 300,000 reservists were called up, some to the Gaza front, and some to the Northern border, there was a distinct and significant change of mood.

However, I want to leave writing about that change of mood until next week. (At this moment, I feel I want to switch back to publishing every week in the current situation.)

For today, I want to leave you with two last thoughts.

As I came downstairs to ask Bernice to read this post (as she always does, and offers her wise advice), I saw that she had lit a yahrzeit light – a memorial candle. She told me that we had all been invited to light a candle at 6PM as a mark of solidarity with Kibbutz Be’eri, a kibbutz less than five kilometres from the Gaza border. At that exact time, on Kibbutz Be’eri, the funerals were being held of 100 members of the kibbutz.

If what happened in Israel last week moved you, if your heart and your mind are with Israel at this dreadful time, please remember what this massacre is really about.

Some people will tell you it’s about removing Israeli control of Gaza. They don’t understand. Some people will tell you it’s about removing Israel from the map. They don’t understand. Some people will tell you it’s about removing Jews from the face of the earth. They don’t understand.

To understand what it’s really about, read and internalise the words of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Zahar, as reported last year by MEMRI: “The entire planet will be under our law, there will be no more Jews or Christian traitors.”

And please read this week’s post as a dispatch from the world’s canary cage.

As soon as I have published this post, Bernice and I will be setting off for Zichron to visit Raphael. The grandparents of these children are, at this moment, unable to do the same.

I had a nice little piece of trivia all ready to be written up for this week’s post, a light-hearted look at dental flossing and the vagaries of Google searches. But then, of course, life intervened, as it sometimes does, and calls of ‘Hold the front page!’ were heard in the editorial room of my head. So, personal hygiene will have to wait for another time, while we contemplate, instead, events in Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur eve.

For the last three years, Rosh Yehudi, an orthodox religious group, in a conscious act of outreach, has held two prayer services, at the start and the end of Yom Kippur, in Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv. These services have become very well attended by a range of congregants, from orthodox to secular (albeit a breed of secular that seems characteristically Israeli – secular but with a sense of respect for the traditions). The services have, in the past, accommodated both separate seating areas for men and women, with a dividing mechitza of wood or metal, and, further back, an area of mixed seating. The services have been largely celebrated as an inspiring example of mutual tolerance and of across-the-board identification with the Jewish nature of the state.

This year, in the build-up to Yom Kippur, the following happened.

1. Rosh Yehudi applied for a licence to hold its traditional services.
2. The Tel Aviv – Yafo municipality, under mayor Ron Huldai, refused to license gender-separated prayers in Dizengoff Square, arguing that gender separation is not permitted in the public space in the city.
3. Rosh Yehudi appealed the decision, and both a local court and, subsequently, the Supreme Court, upheld the municipality’s decision.
4. Rosh Yehudi decided to proceed with gender-separated prayer, as in previous years, albeit with Israeli flags replacing the solid mechitza of previous years.
5. On Yom Kippur eve itself, police made no attempt to enforce the municipality’s ban as upheld by the Supreme Court.
6. Demonstrators, finding the square impassable, then prevented the erection of the ‘mechitza’ of Israeli flags; some disrupted the prayers by shouting, sitting on seats designated for the other sex, and, in some cases, eating in front of congregants.
7. There were angry scenes between congregants and protestors. Many congregants appeared deeply upset by the anger. One protestor who dismantled a flag was detained and questioned by police.
8. Rosh Yehudi eventually decided to withdraw to a nearby synagogue and hold the service there.

Let me start with a couple of observations on the ruling of Ron Huldai and his municipality. Presumably, in the public swimming baths and in the beachfront facilities in Tel Aviv, there are separate changing rooms for men and women. Similarly, public toilet facilities in Tel Aviv are gender-separated, In other words, it is accepted by everyone that there are exceptions to the general rule that there is no gender separation in the public space. The municipality has therefore made a conscious decision that the halachic requirement to segregate the genders during prayer services should not be supported as an option at a prayer service in the public space. This is a decision that the municipality needs to explain, rather than hiding behind the general rule, to which it recognises that there are exceptions.

While it is at it, the municipality could also explain why it did not, at the end of June this year, similarly refuse a permit for the gender-segregated Muslim prayer on Tel Aviv beach marking Eid-al-Adha.

Let’s turn now to the leaders of Rosh Yehudi. Having, quite legitimately, taken their protest at the municipality’s ruling all the way to the Supreme Court, and had their appeal rejected, did the organisers genuinely think that creating a mechitza out of Israeli flags was not in contravention of the court’s ruling? Even if they did, did they honestly imagine that opponents of this plan would let it pass in peace? Are they really so tone-deaf to the discord that has been sounding on the streets of Tel Aviv and elsewhere for nine months now? Did they truly believe that their action would further their declared aim of creating a space for inclusivity, of attracting secular and non-religious traditional Tel Avivians. Or did they rather feel that to back down would look like weakness and would reward victory to ‘the other side’?

Next, consider the demonstrators. Their concern that the public space not be blocked or closed off and that the law be upheld does not appear to extend to every Saturday evening, when parts of central Tel Aviv become impassable, and when breakaway groups of demonstrators repeatedly, and illegally, block the major artery of the Ayalon, frustrating hundreds, if not thousands, of drivers and passengers. Equally, their outrage at Rosh Yehudi taking the law into their own hands and defying a municipal order led to them taking the law into their own hands, rather than allowing the legal authorities such as the police to decide on the appropriate action.

Following the events of Erev Yom Kippur, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security and head of the far right-wing Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, announced that he would hold a gender-segregated prayer service on Thursday evening in Dizengoff Square. After many other politicians publicly condemned this idea, Ben-Gvir backed down. In displaying what seemed suspiciously like restraint (but mat simply have been political expedience), Ben-Gvir ended up looking like the closest thing to a mature adult in the room. This in itself gives some indication of just where we are as a country. As I may have remarked in an earlier post, we are never going to be able to begin our essential journey back to a feeling of national unity until key players start caring less about who is right and more about what is right.

Meanwhile, on a lighter note, supermarket shopping in Portugal is clearly a more enjoyable experience than it has been recently in holiday-season Israel, and, in Zichron, the first rains arrived this Sunday, bringing Raphael toe-to-toe with his first rain puddle. Does life get any better than this?

Blogger’s Note: Apologies if you received notification that this post was published last Thursday, and were then unable to open it. I had an issue last week with the post not displaying in paragraphs, and I was trying to troubleshoot it when I accidentally published this post in draft form.

Blogger’s Second Note: According to my Excel tracking sheet, this is the 200th post that I have published, since I started the blog in November 2019. This means that, at an average of 1500 words a post, for the same investment of effort I could have written a 300,000-word novel and made my fortune. And there’s my life in a nutshell, really.

Let me start by wishing you all a happy and healthy 5784. In this post, in a rather roundabout way, I celebrate the everyday miracle that is the passage of the year.

From the mid-1960s until, in its second resurrection, a one-off special in 2011, BBC television featured, on and off, a celebrity panel game show entitled Call My Bluff. Two teams of three competed to earn points by identifying the correct definitions of obscure words. The teams took turns to give three definitions, one true and two bluffs. If the opposing team correctly identified the true definition, they earned a point; if not, the bluffing team earned a point.

Examples of words used in the show include queach, strongle, ablewhacket, hickboo, jargoon, zurf, morepork, and jirble (which clearly indicates that the show was designed to be a place where people who loved words could meet to share their enjoyment of the idiosyncrasies of the English language). The show also had an inbuilt upper-class pomposity, the original teams being led by Robert Morley (noted for his numerous film portrayals of archetypal pompous upper-class establishment characters) and Frank Muir. The latter was a wordsmith best known for his partnership with Denis Nordern, writing comedy for radio – Take It From Here, Whacko, Brothers in Law (no hyphens, since it was a sit com about a law firm). However, he was also characterised by his upper-class accent (particularly his slightly weak, unrolled ‘r’ sound) and his pink, spotted bow tie. Later team leaders included a genuine lord (Patrick Campbell, 3rd Baron Glenavy) and the very upper-crust actress Joanna Lumley.

You will doubtless not be too shocked to discover that I, or rather my even more pretentious late-teen to early-adult self, loved the game.

I mention it only as an introduction to the Call-My-Bluff-type challenge I set you today. I am going to offer you no fewer than four explanations of the origin of a well-known phrase or saying, and ask you to guess which, if any, is the correct one. (I am already picking out in my mind a select group of potential readers who will actually know the correct answer.) Full disclosure: until a couple of weeks ago I laboured under the delusion that one of the bluffs was, in fact, the correct explanation. Further full disclosure: Just because an explanation is not the correct basis for the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’ does not necessarily mean that the facts stated in the explanation are false.

A couple of weeks ago, on 31 August, we had the rare occurrence of a super blue moon. You can see it here, as it appeared over Darwin. The ‘super’ refers to the fact that it was a full moon occurring at the point in the moon’s orbit around the earth when it is closest to the earth, resulting in the moon appearing to us as larger than it does at any other time. The ‘blue’ refers to…what, exactly? We assume that it is something rare, because it has given rise to the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’. However, it is far from clear exactly what that rare occurrence is. So, which of the four explanations below do you buy?

Just before we dive into the explanations, some background in simple astronomical arithmetic is probably a good idea. About halfway through the next six paragraphs, you may, however, start to disagree that it is a good idea. It’s not in the test, so feel free to skip it.

We need to understand the relation between the lunar and the solar cycle. The Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar, whose two basic units are the day (the length of time it takes the earth to spin on its axis one complete revolution) and the year (the length of time it takes the earth to orbit the sun once).

• A solar (or tropical) year is approximately 365.24 days long (which explains why we add a leap day every four years – and why we also don’t add a leap day when the year is divisible by 100 but not divisible by 400, because 0.24 is just a bit less than a quarter).
• A lunation (one lunar cycle – a lunar ‘month’, if you will) is 29.53 days.

This means that, if we want to have a calendar based on lunar months, but also want it to align with the solar calendar, we have a problem, because 365.24 divided by 29.53 is 12.37.

In other words, if we had 12 lunar months in a year, the year would be about 11 days shorter than the solar year. If we had 13 lunar months, it would be about 19 days longer than the solar year.

For this reason, several civilisations developed a calendar based on a cycle of 19 years (known as a Metonic cycle, after the Greek astronomer Meton who ‘discovered’ it). 11 days is about 7/19 of a solar month. So, if we add a lunar month 7 times in every cycle of 19 years, then every 19 years our calendar will realign with the solar calendar.

This is how the Jewish calendar works (by adding – or intercalating – an extra month every two or three years during the 19-year cycle). It is also the way the Babylonians, the early Romans, the Bahais, and probably the Iron Age Celts and Polynesians, among others, constructed their calendars, some of them at least 1500 years before Meton.

And so to the explanations of the origin of the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’:

Explanation A

Explanation B

The term ‘blue moon’ originated in an anti-clerical pamphlet (attacking the Roman clergy, and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in particular) by two converted Greenwich friars, William Roy and Jerome Barlow, published in 1528 under the title Rede me and be not wrothe, for I say no thynge but trothe (Read Me and Don’t Get Angry for I Say Nothing but the Truth), . The relevant passage reads:

O churche men are wyly foxes […] Yf they say the mone is blewe / We must beleve that it is true / Admittynge their interpretacion.] (O, churchmen are wily foxes…If they say the moon is blue, we must believe that it is true, accepting their interpretation.)

The context of the passage is a dialogue between two priest’s servants, spoken by the character “Jeffrey” . The intention may simply be that Jeffrey makes an absurd statement, “The moon is blue”, to make the point that priests require laymen to believe in statements even if they are patently false.

From here, it is a short step to saying that something happens only when the moon is blue: in other words, never.

Explanation C

Because there are 12 solar months in a year and, in some years, 13 lunar months, there are occasions when two full moons occur in the same solar month. (This cannot happen in February, because even in a leap year February has too few days to fit in two full moons). For example, in 2023, there was a full moon on 1 August and again on 31 August. When this happens, printed calendars traditionally print the second full moon in blue; hence it is known as a blue moon.

Explanation D

The phrase ‘blue moon’ derives from ‘belewe’, which is an Old English word meaning ‘betray’, because the extra full moon betrays the usual perception of one full moon per solar month.

Now we come to what I believe is known in the trade as ‘the big reveal’. The answer is that, in fact, none of the answers is correct. If you feel cheated, I would point out that, in the fourth paragraph of this post I invited you: “to guess which, if any, is the correct one.”

I always believed it was Explanation C, but, in fact, this is based on an incomplete piece of research by a writer on astronomy. Which leads us to Explanation E, the genuine explanation.

Explanation E

The Maine Farmers Almanac, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, divided the year into four ‘average’ seasons, each three solar months long. Normally, a season would include 3 full moons. Each of these full moons had a specific name, as follows:

• January: Wolf Moon
• February: Snow Moon
• March: Worm Moon
• April: Pink Moon
• May: Flower Moon
• June: Strawberry Moon
• July: Buck Moon
• August: Sturgeon Moon
• September: Full Corn Moon
• October: Hunter’s Moon
• November: Beaver Moon
• December: Cold Moon

As you can see, these names very much reflect the agricultural and natural world of North America.

In a season that included a fourth full moon, the third full moon of the season was designated a Blue Moon, and the first, second and fourth full moons of the season used the normal full moon names. In other words, a blue moon is not necessarily the second full moon in a month (although it often happens to be that as well); it is, rather, the third full moon of a season with four full moons..

Which is probably more than you wanted or needed to know on the subject, but I hope at least some of you enjoyed Explanations A and B, which are factually correct, but do not account for the use of ‘blue moon’ in the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’, and Explanation D, which is spurious speculation.

Fortunately, I can usually bank on getting at least one picture of each grandson having a good time far more frequently than once in a blue moon!

When I was growing up, I would, from time to time, feel that life had dealt me some injustice or other. Not that it often did, you understand, and I am prepared to concede that some of what I perceived as injustices might, objectively, have actually been ‘justices’, as it were. Be that as it may, in my eyes injustices they were. On such occasions, I would usually turn to my mother, complaining to her that ”It’s not fair!”. To which she would inevitably reply: “No, it’s dark.” When you’re eight, or ten, or twelve, there’s no response to that. I ended up feeling that one further example of the world’s unfairness was that my mother was clearly on the side of injustice. Sadly, my mother died 20 years ago, and so I can no longer apologise to her for the injustice that I did to her in my childhood and, in all honesty, for many years afterwards, in resenting the unwavering nature of her reply to us. I hope that this week’s post can serve as an apology to her memory, for the fact is that “No, it’s dark” is one of the best of the many lessons that she strove to teach us. This childhood memory has come back to me this week as I have been reflecting on, and attempting to digest, a story from the British press. Come with me, if you will, into the fantasy world that is woke Britain in the 2020s. In 2021, Carl Borg-Neal, a manager in Lloyds Bank, was attending an internal race education training session, held remotely, because of COVID. At the time, Borg-Neal was a mentor to three workers from varying backgrounds. At the beginning of the session, participants were encouraged to “speak freely” and to “learn and be clumsy”. During a discussion of “intent vs effect”, Borg-Neal “asked how he should handle a situation where he heard someone from an ethnic minority use a word that might be considered offensive if used by someone not within that minority. He was thinking partly about rap music.” The trainer did not immediately respond, and so Borg-Neal, seeking to clarify his question, added that the most common example was black people using the n-word. (For the benefit of anyone who has spent the last 50 years in Antarctica, the n-word rhymes with the name of Christopher Robin’s young big cat friend.) However, the problem wasn’t that Borg-Neal said “the n-word”; it was that he actually said the n-word. (And there are those who say punctuation isn’t really important.) At this point, the story becomes unreal. The trainer immediately attacked Borg-Neal verbally. A witness stated: “After saying at the beginning this would be a safe environment and it is acknowledged we may make mistakes, she launched into a vitriolic attack.”. Borg-Neal then immediately apologised for using the term. At this point, the story becomes surreal. Lloyds Bank conducted a racism investigation and ultimately dismissed Borg-Neal, who had been with the bank for 26 years, for gross misconduct. Borg-Neal sued Lloyds for unfair dismissal and disability discrimination. (He suffers from dyslexia, which, he claimed at the subsequent tribunal hearing, meant that he sometimes blurted things out without being able to monitor them beforehand.) Last week, the tribunal hearing ruled that the bank’s bosses unfairly sacked Borg-Neal, as while his use of the word had been “ill-judged”, there had been “no intention to cause hurt”. In its ruling, the tribunal also noted that the bank manager’s comment had involved a “well-intentioned relevant question”. At this point, you might be observing that, with the tribunal hearing’s ruling, good sense has prevailed. However, I have one more fact to add to this account: the fact that leaves the unreal and the surreal gasping in its wake. Come with me into the world of the mind-bogglingly can’t possibly be real. The trainer conducting the session was so distressed after Borg-Neal said the n-word that she went on five days’ leave to recover. Let me say that again, lest you think you misheard: The trainer conducting the session was so distressed after Borg-Neal said the n-word that she went on five days’ leave to recover. I know! I had to read it twice, as well. I’m really not sure where to start. The trainer was, presumably, deemed qualified to give this training, which, you will remember, encouraged participants to “speak freely and to “learn and be clumsy”, an environment in which it was accepted that participants might “make mistakes”. What are we to make of the fact that such a qualified trainer was so affected by the use, in a theoretical, illustrative, abstract, academic, unthreatening context and in a virtual medium, of the n-word, that it was five full days before she was sufficiently recovered to return to work? What kind of an upbringing and education has someone had if, as an adult professional, they take five days to recover from hearing a word spoken online? Any word? The answer to that question, I would suggest, is an upbringing in which nobody ever pointed out that the world isn’t (always) fair; it’s (at least sometimes) dark. There is no guarantee never to be surprised, disappointed, made to feel uneasy. Life, unavoidably, means risking exposure to ideas that you may not agree with, situations you may not be comfortable with. The world does not revolve around you, nor should it. Any upbringing that seeks to ‘protect’ you from exposure to the challenges that life poses ends up ensuring that, when you are eventually exposed to them, as you inevitably will be, you will be unable to cope. You will, rather, need to take five days off work to recover from hearing the n-word spoken online. (No: it doesn’t matter how many times I write that; it still makes no sense.) Of course, there is a balance to be struck here between leaving a newborn child to survive the elements unaided and smothering a child in cotton wool. It is possible to argue about the appropriate age for a child to start learning the meaning of the word “No”; it is not, I would suggest, possible to argue about whether it is a parent’s responsibility to ensure that a child does learn the meaning of the word. These days one hears very little about the ‘school of hard knocks’. It is hard to imagine a modern popular song recommending that you ‘pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and start all over again.’ Things were different when I was a boy, and things were very, very different for my parents’ generation. I have, for the last couple of years, been transcribing and annotating my father’s many letters to my mother during the Second World War. They met and became friends immediately before the War. After my father was called up in October 1939, and until several months after his evacuation from France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, there was, it seems, no contact between them. (In fairness, he had other things occupying his time and his mind.) As soon as my father, now stationed in the UK, did renew contact with my mother in July 1940, their relationship grew closer, fed over the next 18 months by very regular correspondence, occasional phone calls, and even more occasional leaves spent by my father in London. In December 1941 they decided to become engaged. However, they did not announce their engagement then and, in early January 1942, Dad was shipped with his regiment to India. It was exactly a year before they ‘went public’ with their engagement. The next time Dad saw Mum was a few days before their wedding, after he had disembarked in Britain after the voyage back from India, in August 1945. During the war years, Mum had been living through the blitz in London and then serving in the ATS (the Auxilliary Territorial Service, a branch of the armed forces for women) as a secretary. At the start of the war, Mum was 19 and Dad was a few months short of 21. By the time they were able to marry, Mum was 25 and Dad was a few months short of 27. The phrase ‘the best years of their lives’ comes to mind. Those years were basically stolen by the war. I am not making any special pleading for my parents; their experience was, I suspect, stereotypical of their entire generation. My point is that, having lived through those years, they were wonderfully well equipped both to embrace the opportunities, even relatively modest ones, that later life gave them; they cherished the opportunity they were given to share over 50 years of married life together; and they were well able to deal uncomplainingly with both the grind of daily routine and the challenges and hardships that life from time to time threw at them. Bernice and I recognised long ago that that entire generation in Britain acquired, through their wartime experiences, a resilience and inner strength that equipped them to face whatever life threw at them later. Judged objectively, Bernice’s mother had a very tough life, but nobody ever saw her without a smile on her face and a concern for everybody else. And now, almost 70 years later, people need five days off work to recover from hearing the n-word in an unthreatening environment, online. In Israel, I am happy to say, this lunacy has, as yet, not taken hold as it seems to have done in the UK and the US. I suspect that the very real threat of the existential and internal challenges facing the country helps us all to keep a better sense of perspective. Yet another good reason to live here. Meanwhile, here are three young men  who seem to be coping well with life’s challenges. Raphael is settling in to his new life in gan. Tao thoroughly enjoyed the puppet theatre at his summer activity, and he and Ollie are learning all about brothers sharing. (Of course, it’s not difficult if you’re the one whose big brother agrees to share his sunglasses with you!)

Sartorial elegance: that’s just one of the many things for which I was not known among my circle of friends growing up. It’s fair to say that, in my teens, I had an under-developed dress sense. Bernice managed to drag me into the 1970s, when I sported a denim suit (from Burton’s, I believe, which rather undermines the image I’m going for here), and a velvet jacket (but not simultaneously). Beyond that, my wardrobe was markedly unnoteworthy. I did buy a brown corduroy cap – at Lake Bala in mid-Wales – which I flattered myself made me look like Tom Paxton. Mind you, since I thought around the same time that I played guitar and sang like Tom Paxton, my judgement was possibly not entirely to be trusted.

However, some fifteen years ago, having largely relied over the preceding 35 years on Bernice’s impeccable judgement in matters concerning my wardrobe, I started buying my own clothes, sometimes even unaccompanied by her. This more or less coincided with my discovery of Zip, a mid-market clothing chain where I could almost always find what I hadn’t realised I was looking for until I walked in and saw it.

Fortunately, Zip opened a store in our local mall, and over the next few years I basically replaced my rather tired wardrobe. The store recently closed, leaving me very relieved that I now have enough teeshirts, collared shirts, polos and sweaters, jeans and what my brother and I are probably the only two remaining men to call slacks, to see me out. However, not long after, it reopened, so if I ever do need to buy clothes again, I shall be alright.

All of which is a prelude to something that happened a couple of weeks ago. We were in Zichron when Bernice received a WhatsApp from a very close friend of ours that her mother-in-law had just passed away. This was a not unexpected event: since her 100^th birthday a few months previously, she had grown steadily weaker. The funeral was to be that evening, at 9PM, in Jerusalem.

We decided immediately that we would attend the funeral. However, with the temperature in the high 30s, I had travelled to Zichron in shorts, and I told Bernice that I wasn’t comfortable attending a funeral in shorts. We therefore considered driving home, where I could change into long trousers before we left to go to the funeral. The expected flaw in this plan was confirmed when we checked on Waze: we discovered that, in order to arrive home in time to change and leave home again in time to get to the cemetery at 8:50, we would have to leave Zichron at 5PM.

We also knew that even that might not be early enough. For any journey home around the evening rush hour, Waze tends to start off with an optimistic estimate, which it then adjusts upwards as the journey continues, so that, at some point, you begin to feel like Achilles in Zeno’s paradox: you don’t think you will ever get home.

At this point we decided that, rather than risking being late, we would cut our travel time by over two hours, and drive straight to the cemetery. This meant that we did not need to leave Zichron until 7:20. Esther then brilliantly suggested a solution to my sartorial problem. Esther frequents a wonderful second-hand charity shop in Zichron that offers clothes (and other goods) of excellent quality at ridiculously low prices: adult clothes are 5 shekels an item and children’s clothes are 1 shekel an item. I felt sure I would be able to find something suitable there.

So we all set off for the second-hand store. This proved to be a big tactical mistake on my part, as will become clear. Once there, I discovered that the selection of menswear was severely limited. Of the trousers on offer, only one pair fitted me around the waist. Unfortunately, these were a pair of drainpipe (skintight) jeans. Fortunately, they were in a stretch cotton which made them easy to put on and comfortable to wear, but I was concerned that they might be – how shall I put this – a little young for me. Or even – which sounds even worse – that I was a little old for them.

Esther was kind enough to say – although she confessed that this was not a sentence that she had ever imagined saying to her father – that I had the legs to carry it off. When Bernice also gave her guarded approval, I decided that, given the straits I was in, I was prepared to be in the straights, particularly since, for 5 shekels, I would not feel bad about donating them back to the second-hand shop immediately after they had done their funereal duties.

I was also comforted by the fact that I would be perhaps the most peripheral participant in the funeral, and being concerned about the impression I would make on other people was unhealthily self-centred. Finally, I reminded myself that a 9PM funeral in the main Jerusalem cemetery is conducted in pitch blackness, so nobody would actually be able to see what I was wearing.

Of course, in the time it had taken me to find and try on the jeans, Esther and Bernice had both found multiple items, and we then sorted out some plastic fruits and vegetables for Raphael’s play kitchen. So, in the end, my 5-shekel trousers cost me 40 shekels. In fairness, even that was a bargain.

Our journey to the cemetery was very smooth, and we arrived at exactly the right time. I felt a little self-conscious in my jeans, but, of course, even though some lighting was provided by everyone’s smartphone torch, nobody gave me a second glance. The jeans were very comfortable to wear, and, as I peeled them off at the end of the evening, I even contemplated, for a fleeting moment, holding on to them, and adding them to my permanent wardrobe. On reflection, perhaps not. I certainly ought to get rid of them before any of my grandsons are old enough to laugh at me for wearing them.

I leave you today with a rare treat: a single picture featuring all 5 of our direct descendants. We were in two different countries at the time, but Tao and Micha’el thought it would be nice to call us while we were with Esther and Raphael. As Micha’el pointed out, you need to use your imagination a little, since not one face is full, but I hope you feel it’s worth the effort. Anyway, it is a kind of prelude to the autumn, when, bli neder, Tslil and Micha’el, Tao and Ollie will be coming to Israel for a month, and we will all be physically, and not just virtually, together. Something to look forward to!

Bloggers Note: I wanted to give you all a heads-up. I’ve decided that, for at least the next few weeks, and possibly permanently, I’m going to switch to publishing a post every two weeks, rather than every week. I don’t kid myself that this will mean I have the post ready to publish days before publication date, but at least my Mondays will be stressful only every other week. I realise this probably will make no difference to your life, but I wanted to avoid Bernice having to field a lot of questions next Tuesday about rumours of my demise.

For the benefit of the two or three people who may not know about it, I offer this week the ultimate in binge watching.

When the TV series I am about to recommend to you first came out, viewers were not able to binge watch; they had to wait patiently for the next episode. Normal practice, in these situations, was for the episodes to be screened a week apart. Whether it was Quatermass and the Pit in 1958, The Forsyte Saga in 1967 or Dallas in 1978, that week-long wait was an undeniable part of the enjoyment of the series.

However, in the series I am suggesting to you, you originally had to wait 365 times as long as seven days – a full seven years.

I am referring (as some of you may have guessed) to the Up series. This was originally conceived as a one-off programme – Seven Up! – looking at the individual lives of a number of seven-year-old English children in 1964 and interviewing each of them about their interests, ambitions, hopes and fears. The original director intended a programme about the beauty of childhood, but a researcher and interviewer on the programme, Michael Apted, had a much more aggressive social agenda: he ‘hijacked’ the project to demonstrate how entrenched the class system still was in English society. To quote from the original programme: “Why did we bring these children together? Because we wanted a glimpse of England in the year 2000. The union leader and the business executive of the year 2000 are now seven years old.”

At some point, someone had the brilliant idea of revisiting these children seven years later. Michael Apted was appointed the director… and the rest is history – a history that now spans 56 years and may not yet be finished (although Apted’s death in 2021 may actually mark the demise of the series). We will have to wait until 2026 to see.

If, by some chance, you do not know the series, then you have the ultimate 9-hour binge watch waiting for you. Three warnings. First, the original programme is a product of its time, and features ten boys and only four girls. Once they had started with that mix, the makers had it baked in, and this is a great pity. Having said that, the four girls/women punch way above their weight, in each episode.

Second: each episode, quite reasonably, reprises a lot of archive material from earlier episodes. I say ‘quite reasonably’, because without ‘the story so far’ you would have had to retain a detailed memory of the last episode for a period of seven years. So, if you are binge watching, you may find yourself fast-forwarding quite a bit.

The third warning is that I don’t advise you to follow this link to the Wikipaedia entry on the series. You will find there lots of spoilers which will significantly impact your enjoyment of a story which, in many cases, has all the unpredictability of real life (literally).

All of the above is actually just an aside. I was musing this week on our different experience of our grandsons in Portugal and our grandson in Israel. A month at a time three times a year – the binge watch – as opposed to one episode a week. One effect of the weekly visit to Zichron, in the last couple of months, has been the chance to see, on each visit, Raphael’s progress in language acquisition: both his comprehension and his speaking. Esther speaks to him exclusively in English, and Maayan exclusively in Hebrew, but it is noticeable that his choice of language (in what are still, at the moment, one-word utterances) is marked. In almost all cases, although he understands the word in both languages, he only uses one language for any given concept.

So, for example, ‘bath’ is always in English. Of course, I am tempted to say, ‘bath’ is much easier to pronounce than ‘ambatya’, However, he favours ‘kadur’ over the English equivalent ‘ball’. It doesn’t seem reasonable to claim that ‘kadur’ is easier to pronounce than ‘ball’, so I don’t think that explains his choice. It is possible that Maayan plays more ball with him than Esther. However, it is usually Maayan who baths Raphael, so I suspect it is best to avoid simplistic explanations.

Then, of course, there are the occasions when Raphael gives us a glimpse of his, and almost every other child’s, formidable intelligence, in fashioning his own use of language. So, for example, ‘doovdoov’, which is his word for cherry (properly ‘doovdoovan’), is also his generic word for fruit, despite his knowing very well the words for about a dozen fruits. (This is a child who, left to his own devices, could easily exist exclusively on a diet of fruit, despite thoroughly enjoying all of the wonderful meals his mother and nana cook for him, and also enjoying grandpa’s chopped herring and rye bread.)

An even more striking ‘coining’ is in the world of food preparation, which Raphael is really into. He loves helping Esther make bread, or muffins, and is particularly good at mixing dough or batter. (Tao, by now, is virtually a competent independent cook, since he has been eagerly helping his parents in the kitchen for all of the last three years.) As well as wanting to help in the grown-up kitchen, Raphael also enjoys toy kitchen play. He has his own whisk and is always asking for a ‘bowl’, and also pressing any vaguely concave object into service as a ‘bowl’. A box, a cup from his stacking tower, a plastic mug with a handle, a saucer: all can be a ‘bowl’. If, as they say, all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you have is a whisk…

Also remarkable, to me, is the way children near the beginning of their language journey discover how to use language not just to comment on, or categorise, the world, but also to make requests. Raphael now understands that he does not have to push away a spoon, or scatter food from his tray onto the floor. ‘Down’ is a more effective way of explaining that he has had enough to eat and would like to carry on playing. It is wonderful to see the civilising effects of language in action.

I find it impossible to remember when Tao was at this stage, despite it being such a relatively short time ago. The differences we hear in his language every time we fly to Portugal are, of course, still very striking. At this stage, this expresses itself in an ever-expanding vocabulary and an increasing complexity of sentence structure. Even though we speak every week, our calls tend to be more of a storytime and puppet show; chatting on a WhatsApp video call does not come all that easily to Tao, or, indeed, to me.

Tao and Olly are exposed to much more English than Hebrew, and Tslil knows that she has her work cut out to ensure that their Hebrew keeps up with their English. Raphael is in the opposite situation (and will be even more so when he starts going to gan every day next year – a situation I suspect he will adapt to more painlessly than his mother). Esther knows that she will have to work equally hard to maintain his English, and I suppose we will just have to resign ourselves to continuing selflessly dragging ourselves up to Zichron every week, just to point out the difference between a cup, a mug, a saucer and a bowl. It’s a miserable job, but someone has to do it.

Meanwhile, everybody is still enjoying the summer!

Blogger’s Note: I apologise to those of my readers who also follow another blog of a mutual friend who has, in recent weeks, been giving a blow-by-blow account of his middle-heavyweight bout with the Israel real estate market. I am not setting up in competition, but this week’s topic reflects how certain issues seem to be dominating my waking life at the moment.

It is now over two months since I casually dropped into the conversation that Bernice and I had taken the decision to move to Zichron Yaakov to be close to Esther and family, and one or two of you have been tentatively inquiring how our plans are going. So I thought this week I would bring you up to date.

There are two ways of doing this. The first is a one-sentence summary, which is, as it happens, fairly easy.

No progress has been made.

The second is rather more fraught, and complex, and, I hope, interesting, and will bring me closer to my magic 1500-word target, so why don’t I throw that in as a freebie?

Moving is, like everything in life, a process. It involves two distinct sub-processes: selling and buying. Or should that be buying and selling? Or perhaps we should be aiming for buyselling as a complex process that occupies a single moment in time.

We moved to our current home in Maale Adumim in the autumn of 1996, which the calendar tells me will imminently be 28 years ago. The fact that, for Bernice and myself, it seems like the day before yesterday apparently counts for nothing. However, the fact that it is so long ago means that I can no longer actually remember the emotions I assume I experienced throughout what is commonly described as a domestic experience more traumatic than any other except divorce. What I find myself asking every day is: Supposing we find the home we are looking for? How can we commit to buying before we have signed a contract to sell our home? At the same time, how can we accept an offer for our home before we have found our next home? It all seems very daunting.

As the spoiler a couple of paragraphs back already hinted, we are managing to live with this conundrum by, as of yet, failing to find either a prospective buyer or a prospective new home. Bernice and I have a couple of theories as to why this is.

Regarding our own home, the price we are asking reflects to some extent, and quite legitimately, the money we have invested in our three renovations over the years. As far as we are concerned, we have now brought the house to the point where we feel we have done everything that we need and want to do. However, Bernice’s theory, which seems to be backed up by what we see whenever a new family moves into a house in the area, is that Israelis don’t care what state a home is in, when they buy it they want, they need, to stamp their personality on it immediately: in other words, to gut it.

So, we have had viewers come in and discuss moving the front door a metre and half to one side (thereby gaining nothing, as far as I can see). Our estate agent (realtor) points out to prospective buyers that they can easily turn our snug (the extension back room that leads into the backyard) into a master bedroom and the adjacent utility room into an ensuite bathroom. So far, Bernice and I have resisted the temptation to scream: “But then, access to the backyard will be through the master bedroom! Unless you plan to knock an exit through the kitchen wall, and lose all of the impact of the design of the kitchen!”

In addition, Bernice is convinced that most viewers want a completely open-plan kitchen, dining and living area, whereas there is, chez nous, a load-bearing wall that partly divides the area in two.

Whatever the reason, we haven’t yet been made an offer that we can accept. However, as I (the Polyanna in this particular married situation) keep pointing out, selling a house is not a gradual process, where you make incremental gains that eventually reach a critical mass and topple into a sale. It is, rather, a light-switch situation: 19 people see the house and nobody makes an offer, then one day a couple walk in and half an hour later you have a buyer.

Which brings us to the other end of this tango for two. Until two months ago, Bernice and I had a home-buying record of which we were fiercely proud. When we got engaged, in 1971, we originally planned to live in London, where I was at college and Bernice was working. A few weeks’ research revealed that we could just about afford half a derelict house in the rundown area where my college was situated. We couldn’t actually bring ourselves to view any of these slum houses.

During this period, we spent a weekend visiting a friend in South Wales, where Bernice had spent her childhood. Out of curiosity, we looked in estate agents’ windows, and discovered that in the market town she had grown up in, we could afford to buy a semi-detached bungalow on a brand-new estate. The following weekend we travelled down again, saw three properties, and bought one.

I don’t want to ruin anyone’s day, especially anyone who is just starting out and trying to get on the property ladder, but that two-bedroom bungalow cost us ₤5800, which was the equivalent of just under ₤96,000 (NLS 470,000) today. Just to twist the knife in the wound: we were able to secure a mortgage for over 90% of the value, and were required to pay a deposit of only ₤500, about ₤8,260 or NLS 40,300 today.

Seven years later, on a whim, we saw two large houses in villages up the valley from our home, and bought one of them. This was not a sound economic move, but we spent seven happy years there before deciding to come on aliya.

After 15 months on an absorption centre in Gilo, we felt ready to buy a flat in Jerusalem., Friends from the absorption centre had recently bought in East Talpiot, and when the flat across the hall from them went on the market, they told us about it. We viewed it the same day, and bought it.

Nine years later, when we felt Esther and Micha’el really deserved separate bedrooms, and 55 square metres wasn’t enough for four people and a dog, even a small one, we started looking around Jerusalem. We didn’t actually view any properties, because we could tell from the advertisements that, within our price-range, no reasonable-sized flat was in an area we would consider living in, and no flat in an area that we would consider living in was significantly larger than our existing home.

At this time, Bernice went to a house-warming for friends who had just moved from East Talpiot to Maale Adumim. I didn’t accompany her, because I was in mourning for my late father. She came home and could not stop enthusing about the house our friends had bought…and the price they had bought for. Shortly afterwards, we viewed two houses, and bought one of them.

So, our record, until a couple of months ago, was: Viewed: 8. Bought: 4.

The last two months have, sadly, destroyed that outstanding record. We have to date viewed 9 properties, and we are not going to buy any of them. It was only yesterday that I realised why this is so. Until now, every move we have made has been to a bigger, better property. That has made us much easier to please. In addition, we have never, previously, had any pre-conditions, other than wanting to upgrade. We were not really tied in terms of location or specific requirements.

This time, we are being considerably more fussy. We want to be in Zichron Yaakov, and, ideally, within walking distance of Esther and Maayan’s new flat, which they are due to move into on 1 September. We also want to be within walking distance of an Ashkenazi shul that we will be looking to to provide us with a ready-made community (as happened so handsomely both in East Talpiot and Maale Adumim).

We also require to be no more than two floors above (or indeed, below) street level, or, alternatively, to be in a building with a shabbat lift. Zichron, we have discovered, is not packed with buildings with shabbat lifts.

We also require either a garden apartment or an apartment with a sukkah balcony. (I have been astonished to discover that there are estate agents in Israel who are not sufficiently versed in the laws of sukkah to understand what actually constitutes a sukkah balcony.)

We spent a week flirting with a 14^th-floor mini-penthouse in Pardes Hanna. The 1-metre strip of the long balcony nearest the railing was not under the balcony of the penthouse on the floor above, and so we would have been able to set a long table and seat all the guests on one side, with everyone being in a kosher sukkah. However, the effect would have been less Sukkot, and more Seder night (as in da Vinci’s The Last Supper), which we eventually decided against. This was, I must say, to the great relief of almost everyone we spoke to – including family, and friends who lived for decades in Pardes Hanna – who were all convinced that we would not be able to make friends there. Indeed, just about the only person who thought the location and flat were ideal for us was the Pardes Hanna estate agent.

We are by no means certain that our family and friends are right, and we also have no unrealistic expectations of being able, at this stage in our life, to make friends anywhere as close as the friends we have in Maale Adumim. (This, of course, applies primarily to Bernice, who is the partner in this marriage principally responsible for HR. I handle things like working out whether Micha’el’s wardrobes will fit in the third bedroom, and largely leave people to her. This arrangement works for us.)

I don’t want you to think that viewing these nine properties has been a waste of time. We have a number of valuable takeaways. First is a much better understanding of the internal geography and neighbourhood variations within Zichron. This is particularly true since, these days, with Israel’s security agencies jamming GPS, Waze is liable to tell us at any moment that we are in downtown Beirut.

In addition, every place that we see that is not right makes it clearer to us what our requirements, and our priorities within those requirements, are.

Finally, if we hadn’t viewed properties this week, I wouldn’t have spotted, in one of the flats, the following box, packed ready for moving. Just one month exactly after the 30^th anniversary of the release of Forrest Gump, I couldn’t not include it here.

Somewhere out there, I am sure, is an almond praline of an apartment with our name on it. Perhaps we will, at some point, bite into it, and spend happy years in Zichron with the family, liberally sprinkled with month-long excursions to the other family in Portugal. Perhaps we won’t, and we’ll continue to enjoy the home and the friends that have, by now, had all the rough edges rubbed off them, and we will make do with a weekly trip to Zichron and still have Penamacor. We happen to believe this qualifies as a win-win situation, and we really do know just how lucky we are.

In my first year at teacher training college, in a piece of cutting-edge technology, one of our literature lecturers arranged the filming of a panel discussion of a poem, the panel consisting of three students. When we viewed and analysed the discussion afterwards, several of my fellow-students told me that I was a natural in front of the camera and should consider a career in television. I knew then that I lacked the particular kind of fluency, of quickness of response, that the camera loves, and so I begged to differ.

When, several years later, the GPO (General Post Office) was searching for a new voice for its speaking clock, the headmistress of the school where Bernice worked was convinced that I would be perfect for the job. While this certainly avoided the problem of constant spontaneity, I found the thought of spending twenty-four hours a day standing in front of a microphone, saying: ‘At the third stroke, it will be eight, forty-two, and thirty seconds’, and so on, less than appealing. (Yes, I know that’s not how they really do it!) So, in the end, it was Brian Cobby who took over in 1985. Incidentally, for those of you from Britain, and of a certain age (ten years younger than me), Brian Cobby had, in a previous life, been the voice that announced: ‘5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1… Thunderbirds are go!’

Incidentally, if you have spent the last minute or two wondering why the Post Office, of all institutions, should want a speaking clock, let me enlighten you. Before the beginning of the railway age in Britain, many towns still operated on local time. A village would set its clocks and watches by, usually, the church clock. Because of the limited accuracy of most mechanical clocks, over the years all of these local times started drifting apart. When it was midday in London it might have been only 11:49 a.m. in Bristol.

The introduction of rail travel, and of timetables, made it essential for everywhere to be operated on a standardised Greenwich Mean Time. To ensure this standardisation, when the mail train arrived and the villagers gathered around the postman to get the news from London, he would announce what the time was according to his timepiece, which had been set in London. This custom is thought to be where the phrase ‘passing the time of day’ originated.

(If you want to have a look at the various generations of technology used for the speaking clock in Britain (‘Just dial T-I-M!’), check it out here.)

Probably because I lack the inventive spontaneity needed for the job, I have great admiration for those who can carry off the job of TV presenter successfully…and even more, I think, the job of radio presenter, where no body language or facial expressions can fill the gaps; radio presenters have only their voices to rely on. I often listen to interview and discussion programmes on Israel’s Reshet Bet, and have found myself, in recent months, reflecting on the contrasting styles and talents of the various presenters.

For me, one of the pleasures of the best of these programmes is that they demonstrate that, even in an Israel that is very conflicted and divided internally, it is still possible for two people to argue and disagree in a civilised way, and to remain respectful of each other. I first heard this in action on a weekly program of the early 2000s, called ‘על ימין ועל שמאל‘, ‘On the Right and the Left’, in which two national figures sat down to discuss current affairs. The figures were: on my right (on almost everyone’s right) Geula Cohen and on my left (on many people’s left) Eli Amir.

Geula Cohen had been a member of Etzel (a mainly revisionist breakaway from the mainstream pre-State underground defence force Hagana, Etzel followed a stronger line of response to Arab terror) and Lechi (which acted principally against the British Mandate forces). Cohen was Lechi’s underground radio broadcaster. After the establishment of the State, she became a politician, eventually cofounding the right-wing political party Techiya in 1979, in opposition to Camp David. She supported Jewish settlement of all parts of Eretz Yisrael, and herself briefly moved to Kiryat Arba, which is about as deep in cowboy country as you can get. She was in later life a recipient of the Israel Prize.

Eli Amir is an author and social activist. Having served as Advisor on Arab Affairs to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, he was later appointed Director General of the Youth and Aliya Department of the Jewish Agency. He repeatedly met with literary and other figures in the Arab world and advocated for co-existence, campaigning for more Israeli books to be published in the Arab world, and asking: ‘How can there be peace without us knowing each other?’

Each week, these two, whose world views and the arcs of whose lives were so different, sat in a radio studio and discussed the events of the preceding week. They never, to the best of my memory, found any significant island of agreement between them, but they always listened to each other respectfully, responded to each other’s points seriously, and parted, every week, as adversaries who recognized the right of each to disagree with the other, and who also each recognised that the other cared deeply about the country they both loved.

Something of the same spirit lives on, with, it must be said, a little less gravitas (but then we live in a very different age from the early 2000s, and certainly from the 1930s and 40s, Geula Cohen’s formative years, and even the 1950s and 60s, Eli Amir’s formative years). Currently on Reshet Bet, on Friday mornings, Emily Amrousi and Professor Yuval Elbashan jointly present a programme (‘Emily and the Professor’), in which they both discuss the week’s events and interview people in the news.

‘Emily’, a children’s author, journalist, and ex-spokesperson of the Yehuda and Shomron Council, lived for many years in Talmon, a yishuv close to Ramallah, and now lives in Jerusalem. In her childhood, her family became religious, and she grew up in a modern-orthodox, Bnei Akiva atmosphere. ‘The Professor’ is indeed a professor, of Law, and has been closely involved for 25 years with a non-profit organization advocating community and social rights for the weaker sectors in Israeli society.

Again, as with Geula Cohen and Eli Amir, Amrousi and Elbashan are (almost always) respectful of each other’s arguments, although it has to be said that the events of this year so far have put that tolerance to the test on more than one occasion. They are clearly friends, not only in the studio, and they welcome the opportunity to debate real issues in a civilized manner.

When I listen to programmes such as these, I find myself able to sustain some hope that Israeli society may be able to heal the fractures that threaten us.

This hope is nurtured in other ways as well. On Friday mornings, Omer Ben-Rubi presents a programme looking at the cultural news of the week. Ben-Rubi is not only a presenter; he is also an experienced administrator. He served as the founding manager of Reshet Bet, having previously run Galei Tzahal, the army radio station.

His culture programme is, I suspect, a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. In his introduction every week, he always gives the Hebrew calendar date, and mentions the Bible portion of the week. Last week, an unusual item could be found nestling between the segment where he invites three other observers of culture to give their recommendations for events of the forthcoming week (among them Barbie) and his playing of a recent pop release. On the day before the Shabbat when we begin reading the Book of Devarim (Deutoronomy), with Moses’ farewell speech to the nation, Ben-Rubi interviewed Micah Goodman, Israeli philosopher and a leading voice on Judaism, Zionism, the Bible, and the challenges and opportunities facing Israel and world Jewry. The subject of the interview was the message of that speech for our time, and what it teaches us about Moses as a political leader.

What is remarkable is not only that Ben-Rubi chose to include this item, but also that he gave no indication that he regarded it as anything other than a perfectly normal choice for a popular culture programme on a general public radio station in Israel.

Unfortunately, not every presenter on Reshet Bet has the same sensitivity, understanding, or knowledge. There is one particular presenter whose programme I am going to have to stop listening to, because she always makes my blood boil, and I end up shouting at the radio.

Rina Matzliach is, so I understand, a serious Israeli journalist, and presented ‘Meet the Press’ for 10 years. She has lived in Israel for over 65 years, since she was a year old. She has a BA in Israeli Literature and a Masters in Communications. She has been a broadcast journalist for 40 years. And yet…and yet.

In the last century, John Cleese made a series of management training videos which worked by demonstrating how not to do it. They are still very funny to watch, not least because they star John Cleese as the incompetent manager (in the days before he started taking himself too seriously). Every time I listen to Rina Matzliach, I find myself hoping that schools of radio journalism are recording her, so that lecturers can demonstrate to their students how not to do it.

Let me give a brief list of some of her most flagrant errors. When interviewing a guest, she constantly interrupts the guest’s answer to her last question, and frequently interrupts her co-presenter’s question with another question of her own. When interviewing a guest she knows personally, she always makes more than one personal reference, always of no relevance to the topic on which the interviewee has been invited to be interviewed. She appears never to filter her thoughts before expressing them out loud.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, she interviewed an Israeli who, with his wife, had been trapped by floods in a remote part of Nepal. They had walked a considerable distance to an area from where they were able to arrange transport back to civilization. This was so that they could return to their young children in Israel. They had, however, been forced to leave all but their essential possessions behind. He was on air to assure the listening public that the dozens of (mostly post-army) Israelis who were also trapped in the same area were well, had food and drink, and were in no danger. This must have been a tremendous comfort for parents who had lost contact with their children trapped in an area without mobile reception. Matzliach wasted a minute or two of this important interview ‘joking’ that, in their place, she would have stayed out of contact and enjoyed a longer holiday away from her children.

Matzliach frequently appears to forget that there is a radio audience of at least tens of thousands listening, and behaves as if she is at home alone. So, for example, she always sings along with the record chosen to break up the programme, despite her having, at best, a mediocre singing voice. To give another example, in a recent interview with someone she knew personally, she urged her co-presenter, on air, to ask the interviewee to send him a complimentary copy of the interviewee’s recent book (a book on a topic irrelevant to the interview).

However, what amazed me two weeks ago, was that, when her co-presenter, who is religious, mentioned that he would not be in the studio last Thursday because it was Tisha b’Av, she said: ‘Oh! Isn’t Tisha b’Av always in August?’ Maybe it is me that is being unreasonable, but it seems to me that an educated woman, with a BA in Israeli Literature, who has lived in Israel for over 60 years, should know that the Jewish religious calendar is not the same as the Gregorian solar calendar, that it includes leap-years in which an entire month is added, and that, in consequence, the timing of festivals and fast-days can vary from year to year by as much as 30 days, according to the Gregorian calendar. How can she not have noticed that Rosh Hashana is sometimes in early September and other times in early October?

It is difficult for me to escape the feeling that it is not that she does not know so much as that she has gone out of her way not to know, because she has convinced herself that there is nothing in the entirety of the Jewish religion that is worthy of her attention. She certainly makes a point of displaying her contempt for religion at every opportunity.

On the other hand, I find it very moving that this year a number of people who have never observed Tisha b’Av, and who, indeed, do not identify as religious, feel the threat of the country splitting apart is so strong that they decided to fast last Thursday.

Well, thank you for letting me get that off my chest.

All the kids and grandkids are back from their hols, but I can squeeze another week’s worth of pictures out of it. For Raphael, Storm the octopus seems to have overtaken Tiger as his constant companion, Ollie clearly loves his dad, and Tao has just been not-very-white-water rafting, taking all due precautions.