Ed. Note: If, on the basis of that title, you can correctly guess the exact topic of today’s post, please award yourself 50 bonus points.

‘How fortunate you are!’ declare the imaginary friends whom I invent from time to time to illustrate some aspect or other of this blog. ‘Every week, you get to write about anything you want!’

The truth, of course, is rather less idyllic. There are certainly weeks when I both know what I want to write about and know more or less what I want to say about it. However, most weeks fall into one of two categories. Either there is really only one topic I can write on, like it or not. In fairness, I am capable of ignoring whole herds of elephants in the room if I feel I have nothing to add that is both on the original side of the trite/ground-breaking spectrum and on the amusing side of the dull-as-ditchwater/scintillating spectrum, so the concept of having no choice is more or less alien to me.

Or (picking up the ‘either’ of the last paragraph after an inordinate time), I can’t think of anything to write about. Those are the weeks when I lock myself in the office, fire up the laptop, and wait for inspiration to spark through my index fingers. When it fails to do so, I churn something out, offer it up at the altar of Bernice, my high-critic, and pray that she will judge it more favourably than I do.

This week, unusually, is one when, for me, in my particular situation, there really is only one topic. You see, four weeks ago, I urged you to go to the cinema to see Harold Fry. Then three weeks ago, I offered a pocket review of the film and urged you to see it again. I did also, in the interests of full disclosure, reveal that my cousin was a producer of the film. We would, I hope, all agree that we have a duty to promote the pet projects of family members we are fond of, especially if we actually think those projects are very worthwhile, as, in the case of Harold Fry, I do.

Which brings me to this week’s topic. You see, in a rash of cousinly creativity, Bernice’s cousin (who is, incidentally, both her first cousin and her second cousin – but that’s a story for another post) published a book eight months ago. I didn’t actually get around to reading it until last week, and now domestic harmony dictates that I must dedicate a post to singing its praises.

Which makes it sound as though this week’s post comes to you out of a sense of duty. It will sound even more so if I admit to you that this is a book that, if I were not married to the author’s cousin, I would never have picked out from a bookshop’s shelves or ordered online. It is so not within my fields of interest.

One day, in the 1960s, a friend and I took the Central Line Tube from Gants Hill to St Pauls to spend a few hours in the public galleries of the Old Bailey watching a murder trial. I have a strong memory of a lot of seasoned wood panelling and a judge looking splendid in scarlet robe and white wig. I have, however, no memory whatsoever of the details of the case. That day represents, to be honest, the birth and death of my interest in the internal workings of the English and Welsh justice system.

Today’s challenge, then, is to persuade you, (who don’t, to be honest, count for very much in this particular equation) and, more importantly, the book’s author (who, to be honest, I see only very rarely), and, most importantly, the book’s author’s first – and second – cousin (who I wake up next to every day) that this book genuinely gripped me from Page 1 and did not let me go until I had finished reading the Acknowledgements page.

The time has come, I think, to get to the actual meat of this week’s post.

Her Honour Wendy Joseph QC (and to think that Bernice’s family thought she was doing well by marrying the son of a delicatessen!) retired as a High Court judge just over a year ago. Six months later, her book Unlawful Killings, subtitled Life, Love and Murder: Trials at the Old Bailey, was published.

Just in case that mouthful is not sending you rushing to order the book, let me stress. This is an absorbing, moving, thrilling and delightful read.

To categorise the book is not straightforward. It is, on the one hand, a layman’s guide to the (sometimes arcane) workings of a trial for murder under the English and Welsh justice system. Written, as it is, from the perspective of the judge presiding over the proceedings, it gives considerable insight into the function and, perhaps more importantly, the thoughts and feelings of said judge. It is, I think, fair to say that the spotlight, particularly in fictional accounts of trials, is more commonly focussed on the lawyers for the defence and prosecution, on the defendant and on the jury. The perspective of the judge is never less than fascinating.

Those arcane workings make, in themselves, very interesting reading. However, the challenge facing anyone attempting to explain them is to show how fascinating they are, because there is a very real danger of making any account seem dry, abstract, bookish and academic. Wendy (now that she has retired I feel more comfortable referring to her as my cousin by marriage, rather than as ‘My Lady’) finds a very clever hook to hang this exposition on, and thereby establishes, in her first chapter, both her very great sympathy for her fellow human beings and her light and delightful sense of humour, which both leavens and spices the entire book.

The next six chapters unpack the convoluted stories of six trials for murder (fictional constructs each drawing elements from Wendy’s personal courtroom experience and each cleverly designed to illustrate particular aspects of the application of the law). Each one of these chapters could provide the material for a gripping murder courtroom drama novel; taken together, they hint at the flexibility, the range, the complexity and the underlying principles of the law in this area.

Anyone who emerges from these six chapters with less than total admiration for the subtle act of presiding that is the function of a High Court judge needs to read the chapters again for homework. There is no doubt that, for anyone with a conscience and a belief in the legal system, being a High Court judge is an almost religious calling and a supreme responsibility.

As we are sucked effortlessly into the gripping and compassionate narrative of each of these cases, we gradually begin to comprehend the robustness and soundness of the structure of the law. I certainly found myself, at the end of those six chapters, hoping that, if I ever do get around to committing murder, or, on the other hand, being murdered, the murderer (whether myself or someone else) will have the case heard at the Old Bailey, by a judge as wise as Wendy.

The final chapter of the book reflects generally on the success or otherwise of the English legal system in coping with murder. Her conclusion may not be earth-shattering, but it is all the more noteworthy both because it carries the authority of her decades of experience and because it suggests that the courts are failing, and cannot reasonably be expected not to fail, in addressing the societal problems that murder poses. She points out that murder only too often is committed because of the particular circumstances of a personal history, and prevention must be better than failing to cure. She calls for more to be done in educating citizens, from childhood, both to recognise the value of the social contract that lies at the very heart of civilisation and to be aware of the consequences of their personal actions. I can do no better than quote her final sentences.

‘…for all potential offenders who pause, think, change their minds, we save them the waste of their lives, we save victims a world of grief, we save society a huge financial cost, we make a better and happier life for everyone. What’s not to like in that?’

And what’s not to like in this?

Ed Note: If any other of my cousins, by birth or by marriage, is planning on publishing a book, releasing a film, staging a play, mounting an art exhibition, or anything similar, could I prevail on you to hold off for a couple of months? I don’t want to overdo the cultural review theme on the blog. Thanks!

Poised as we are, halfway between a brief trip to Budapest and a longer trip to Portugal, I find myself thinking even more than I normally do about how totally unsatisfying an experience commercial air travel is. We flew to Hungary with Ryanair, and were warned by more than one person about what a dreadful experience we would find it. The fact is that the dreadfulness of the experience was almost indistinguishable from the dreadfulness of flying British Airways and Singapore Airlines, which are probably the two ‘best’ airlines I have flown. The fact is that the differences between the airlines are comparable to the difference between being hanged by the neck until you are dead using a polyester or silk noose. I’ve never actually experienced either, but I suspect any nuanced difference would be lost on me under the impact of the entire experience.

You don’t need me to list for you the many individual inconveniences, annoyances and frustrations of air travel – but you will I hope indulge me as I pick out just a handful of my own favourites.

Last December marked the 22^nd anniversary of Richard Colvin Reid boarding an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. On that flight, in an action that sounds as though it comes straight of The Goon Show, he attempted to detonate his boots by setting light to them with a match, having previously packed them with 10 ounces of explosive. Here we are, 22 years later, and select passengers are still being singled out in security lines at airports and asked to remove their shoes and have them inspected, despite the fact that, as far as anyone knows, in the intervening 269 months, not a single person has ever attempted to replicate this fiendishly cunning plot.

We should, I suppose, be grateful that Reid did not conceal the explosives in his underpants, but nevertheless you will agree that the authorities’ continued expectation that terrorists will replicate this particular modus operandi seems to be baseless, and is more about ticking boxes and covering rear ends than preventing disasters.

Then there is the issue of liquids. When we flew from Israel to Hungary, we were able to take bottles and thermoses of cold and hot water on board with us. From Hungary to Israel, of course, we could only take up to 100cc of any liquid in a clear container in a clear bag. At one point, I thought this was because, possibly under some feng shui influence, liquid explosives are somehow mysteriously rendered harmless when they travel from East to West, and are only unstable when travelling from West to East, but apparently this is not the case.

Aggravating as such inconveniences are, if I had to pick what is really rotten about air travel, I think it would have to be the passengers’ total surrender of control of their situation. We are, from the time we check in, entirely at the mercy of the airport and airline authorities. We have no choice but to do as we are told, and there is no way we can influence our situation.

This is, naturally, a particularly daunting prospect for those who pride themselves on being able to seize control of any situation. We actually had front-row seats for a demonstration of this on our flight to Budapest.

The processing at Ben Gurion airport was very efficient, and our flight began boarding only a few minutes later than scheduled. The boarding process went smoothly; the usual confusions over seating were sorted out quickly; space was found in the overhead lockers. I settled back in my seat, switched my phone to airplane mode and settled down to tackle The Times Cryptic Crossword.

At first, nothing happened. And then, nothing continued to happen. We all waited for the pilot to instruct the crew to lock the doors and for the plane to start reversing out of its parking bay. However, all was silent and still.

After perhaps 15 minutes, the captain’s voice came over the tannoy, informing us that the immigration authorities were refusing one passenger permission to board. The airline was attempting to resolve the situation; the pilot apologised for the delay and thanked us for our understanding.

Over the next 15 minutes, it is fair to say that certain elements among the passengers became a tad restless. In particular, a couple of would-be alpha males took it upon themselves to sort the situation out. In turn, two or three of them marched purposefully to the front of the plane to explain to the cabin steward that it was unreasonable to expect 239 passengers to wait while the fate of the 240th was being weighed scrupulously in the scales of justice. The cabin steward, no doubt more used to these situations than the passengers, explained that that wasn’t how the airline saw it, and that heaven and earth were being moved at that very moment to resolve the situation.

To my astonishment, all of the protesting passengers very soon realised that they were on a very unfair playing field, where there was absolutely no point in their attempting to influence events or persuade by the force of their arguments. There was, unsurprisingly, a certain amount of muttering, grumbling and posturing as they made their way back to their seats, but make their way back to their seats they did.

In the end, an hour or more after our scheduled take-off time, the airline accepted that it would not be able to resolve the problem with the authorities. After another fifteen-minute delay while the non-passenger’s case was removed from the hold, we eventually took off 90 minutes late. We actually made up about 20 minutes during the flight, but the whole business was, of course, a considerable annoyance, adding, as it did, to the length of an already long day and stealing, as it did, time from our holiday. I have been known to declare, in the past, that the holiday begins when you get on the plane, but that certainly wasn’t the case this time.

The cracked icing on the stale cake of this particular experience came at Budapest airport, a couple of minutes after I had connected to the free airport Wi-Fi. One of the fringe benefits that we enjoy with the travel insurance policy we take out is the following: if our flight is delayed for 90 minutes or more, we are entitled to free entry to any of a large number of airport lounges around the world. So, in Budapest airport, I received an email informing me that, because of the delay in our flight, we could use the airport lounge in Ben Gurion free of charge while we waited for our delayed flight.

This news would probably have done a better job of warming the cockles of my heart had it not been for several facts. By the time I received the message, we were no longer in Ben Gurion airport; we were in Budapest. even if we had been in Ben Gurion, as soon as we qualified for the benefit, our flight took off. Furthermore, had we still been in Ben Gurion airport, we would have been trapped on the plane and unable to enjoy the benefit. Even if we had not yet boarded, our flight left from Terminal 1, where we would have been trapped in the terminal, which has no lounges, since they are located in Terminal 3, to which we had no access.

I sometimes find it hard to imagine how air travel could be made any less civilised an experience than it currently is. However, I find it equally hard to escape a nagging feeling that I might just find out in two weeks, when we go to visit the kids.

Having said all of which, even this Eeyore readily admits that the prize at the end of the flight, just like the prize at the end of the sometimes traffic-clogged drive to Zichron, is so worth the aggravation.

We found ourselves only 15 minutes south of Netanya last Thursday, so, of course, we did what you’d expect. We went to IKEA. It was a successful trip. We found almost everything we were looking for, and one thing we had given up looking for. Loyal and attentive followers of my blog (and I know, dear reader, that you are both loyal and attentive) will remember that we had, at one point about a year ago, visited IKEA principally to buy dividers for our wardrobe sock, tights and underwear drawers. It was there that we discovered that these items had been discontinued.

As we were going round IKEA this time, we saw the very dividers we had been wanting to buy and had given up hope of ever possessing. So, I am delighted to announce that the days of my blue and black socks surreptitiously co-habiting are well and truly over.

Of course, to compensate for the delight that we felt, and to maintain the overall balance of happiness and unhappiness in the universe, our journey back home from IKEA took three and a half hours, at an average speed of just over 28 kph. Three and a half hours! Good grief! You can fly from Hungary to Israel in less time than that!

I know this for a fact, since we had indeed, only the day before, done exactly that, in three hours and ten minutes, in fact. We were flying back from a mid-week city break in Budapest. Let me share with you some highlights of our trip.

Before we went, we naturally did some online research. One of the things we knew was that Budapest is famous for its many spas, and many people make a point of ‘taking the waters’. On our trip, we didn’t actually have to go out of our way to take the waters; the waters came to us without our seeking them out. Unfortunately, they came in the form of heavy rain, which was a major feature of two of our three days in the city.

It has to be said that no city, with the possible exception of Paris, looks good in the rain. There were times during our stay when Budapest looked a little less like Vienna and a lot more like Communist Eastern Europe because of the persistent drizzle. Nevertheless, we still kept expecting Orson Welles to appear, mysteriously, in the shadows of a doorway, at any moment. (Ah the zither! What an underestimated instrument.)

Both Bernice and I regretted the fact that our proper raincoats now live in Portugal, where they get a lot of use, and our Israel coats are designed more to keep out the cold than the rain. On our second day, we managed to find, and buy, a couple of umbrellas, which certainly made a significant difference.

On our second day, we took an excellent walking tour of the Jewish quarter entitled: Nazism and World War II. I was impressed both by the local guide’s excellent English and by his explanations of details of Jewish religious practice. He was able to provide accurate and clear explanations for the non-Jewish members of the group, of whom there were a surprising number, including couples from Malawi and India.

In the course of the tour, the guide made, as expected, several references to some of the non-Jewish Hungarians (and foreign diplomats) who have been recognised as Righteous among the Nations for their efforts in saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust. However, he in no way suggested that these actions were the norm among Hungarians. He explained very clearly that the Hungarian authorities welcomed the German occupation of Hungary in 1944, and were complicit with the Nazis in their actions against Jews. He spoke in detail about the ultra-nationalist Arrow Cross party’s antisemitic ideology, independent actions against Hungarian Jews and full and enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazis.

I must confess that the straightforward honesty of this account was both refreshing and surprising. Nevertheless, even this did not prepare me for an even greater surprise the following day, when we took another walking tour. This one was a general introductory tour of the city.

In the course of this second tour, we were taken to Szabadsag (Liberty) Square. There we saw and learnt about the Memorial for Victims of the German Occupation. The memorial was approved in a closed cabinet session, and erected during one July night in 2014, to mark the 70^th anniversary of the March 1944 German occupation of Hungary. Budapestiek (inhabitants of Budapest) woke up one morning to discover this monument.

It features a stone statue of the Archangel Gabriel (a traditional symbol of Hungary), holding the orb of the Hungarian kings, the national symbol of Hungary and Hungarian sovereignty. This orb is about to be grabbed by an eagle with extended claws that resembles the German coat of arms, and represents the Nazi invasion and occupation of Hungary in March, 1944. The date “1944” is on the eagle’s ankle. The inscription on the monument reads “A memorial to the victims of the German occupation”. The statue is a re-interpretation of the Millenium Monument of the Heroes Square in Budapest, which celebrates the founding of Hungary in the early middle ages.

The plan to set up the monument was heavily criticised by the Jewish community, and also by opposition parties and Budapest civil society, as soon as it was announced. Those opposing it contended that it was aimed at distorting the nation’s role in the Shoah and absolving the Hungarian state and Hungarians of their active role in sending some 450,000 Jews to their deaths during the occupation.

Protests against the monument began in central Budapest on the very day it was erected. The protesters in Szabadsag Square formed a live chain that included several MPs, among them past and present leaders of the Hungarian Socialist Party, the leader of the Democratic Coalition and the co-chair of the Dialogue for Hungary party.

Democratic Coalition leader Ferenc Gyurcsany said Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was “falsifying the Holocaust” by getting a monument “confusing the murderer and the victim” erected “under cover of the night.” He accused Orbán of dishonouring all Jewish, Roma and gay victims of the Shoah, and added that it was “characteristic of the regime that it did not dare set up the statue of falsehood during the day.”

Initially, the opposition campaigned for the monument to be removed since it “fails to serve objective and peaceful remembrance, and attempts to deny the responsibility of the Hungarian state.” However, when these attempts failed, the opposition took another, innovative, approach, one which has effectively transformed the installation into “a memorial to the arrogance of the Hungarian government”. The entire 30-metre stretch of path in front of the statue is lined with photographs and documented accounts of Hungarian victims of the Shoah. A large QR code is displayed, that links to a site that declares, inter alia: “Did you know? Between 1920-1945 600,000 Hungarian people were outlawed, robbed and sent to death by the Horthy authorities. Not the Germans! This statue is a lie!” The authorities appear to have decided that their most prudent policy is to tolerate this protest, and they have done so for the last nine years.

I had a conversation with our guide, a young man who has dual Canadian-Hungarian nationality but who has spent most of life in Budapest. He explained that the bulk of support for Orban is in the provinces. Budapestiek are typically more liberal and more left-wing, as well as better educated and more affluent, than other Hungarians. When I asked whether the average Budapesti ‘buys into’ the monument, he assured me that, since Hungarian schools teach the truth about Hungarian complicity with the occupation and the Shoah, nobody is fooled by the monument.

I suspect that part of the motivation for the vehemence of the reaction to the monument is socialist opposition to the right-wing government of Viktor Orbán. Nevertheless, the fact that our tour guide chose to include this monument, and the concomitant readiness to accept the fact of Hungarian complicity, are very impressive to experience first-hand, not least because this is not a readiness echoed, in my experience, in many East European, nor even some Western European, capitals.

This fact alone made Budapest, for me, a surprisingly much more comfortable city to visit than Warsaw or Vienna. Although, in advance of our visit, I had decided that I would not wear my kippa in public when in Hungary, in the event I wore it all the time, and attracted no attention whatsoever. We both felt Budapest to be a safe city to walk in, by day or night, and a very friendly place.

Indeed, there was only one fly in the ointment of our trip. I apologise in advance to the half or more of my readership for whom the next couple of paragraphs might as well be written in Hungarian.

(Just a quick aside. I have now spent time in Helsinki, Istanbul and Budapest, and I have yet to be convinced that Finnish, Turkish or Hungarian are anything more than gibberish spoken to disconcert foreigners. During a week in Helsinki, the only word I ‘recognised’ was ‘apteekki’ for ‘pharmacy’ (presumably related to ‘apothecary’). Incidentally, the Turkish and Hungarian equivalents are ‘ekzane’ and the even less plausible ‘gyógyszertár’.)

Budapest is one of the trendiest cities in Europe. Many abandoned buildings in the Jewish quarter have been converted into so-called ‘ruin bars’, indulging the Hungarians’ fabled love of food and drink and having a good time. The area has also been given character by the municipally-sponsored street art. We were proudly shown one magnificent mural portraying the Match of the Century, 70 years ago.

This was, of course, the moment in 1953 when the myth of English national football supremacy died. The world’s number one ranked team, on a run of 24 unbeaten games, beaten at home only once in history, the inventors of the game: of course the England team didn’t take Hungary seriously as opponents before the game!

Hungary won 6–3. Our guide pointed out to us that the only non-royal buried in Budapest’s magnificent St Stephen’s Basilica is Ferenc Puskas, the legendary star of that 1953 team. The basilica contains, we were told, two relics: the miraculously undecomposed sacred right arm of King Stephen, and the sacred left foot of Puskas.

To dispel the bitterness of those still fresh wounds, here are Tao and Ollie on holiday on a boat ride (to be honest, they look a bit as if they need convincing they’re having a good time, but Micha’el assures us everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves) and Raphael greeting Nana again enthusiastically after our holiday.

It is, we readily admit, our own fault. More than a decade ago, Bernice and I started an annual subscription to the Cameri theatre in Tel Aviv, where we saw an impressive range of modern and classic straight and musical theatre, including original Israel works and works in translation. We eventually decided that a journey home of an hour or more was getting too much, and so, when our local cultural centre offered a theatre subscription, we happily signed up.

Without a doubt, it is wonderful being able to walk out of the theatre and arrive home after a ten-minute stroll (or a six-minute power-walk – Bernice and I have never really agreed about how to translate ‘a steady walking pace’ into kilometres per hour). In addition, in the first years of our subscription, we enjoyed several memorable productions. Every year, each of six or seven of the mainstream Israeli theatre companies brings one production to Maale Adumim.

In those first years, there was a good balance of serious and comic drama. However, in the last couple of years it feels as though the balance has tipped towards comedy – and for the most part ‘comedy’ means the slapstick that seems to go down very well with our local audience. In fairness, we are not really in touch with a lot of local popular culture or some modern slang, and this means that we miss a certain amount of the humour. Even allowing for that, slapstick and farce are simply not really our scene.

The other disadvantage of this particular subscription is that each production comes to Maale Adumim for one performance only. Since we aim to be in Portugal three times a year for a month, this sometimes means that we are unable to see a play that we would like to see, and are forced to take a second choice, or to miss out altogether.

Anyway, as we walked home from the last production, when, once again, we had sat stony-faced among an audience of people screaming in delight and struggling to breathe through their laughter, we both decided that enough was enough, and that we had to find another way to feed our habit of live, serious theatre. Enough light, frothy, mindless comedy: let’s see something we can get our teeth into.

After six years of calling me every six months, I had finally persuaded our contact at Cameri that we would never be renewing our subscription. However, I also get a call every year from the Khan theatre in Jerusalem, where we had a subscription many, many years ago. This year’s call, as luck would have it, came a couple of days after Bernice and I had had the conversation, and we decided that we would transfer our allegiance back to the Khan.

For those of you who don’t know it, the Khan is situated in a renovated 19^th Century Ottoman travellers’ inn (or khan). The renovation has retained the architecture and atmosphere of the original site, and the theatre includes an inner courtyard with some seating as you wait to be admitted to the auditorium, a foyer with a modest bar, and two stages: a ‘large’ hall that seats 269, in a stone-walled, -domed and -pillared space that is intimate but airy and has a unique atmosphere, and a small hall that seats 69. Situated just behind the First Station, the theatre is a short walk from a large car park and, on a good night, we can be home in 25 minutes.

The theatre boasts a very talented permanent company of actors, and produces four or five new plays each season, as a well as maintaining a repertoire of 10 productions from the classic repertoire. We have already seen two productions at the highest level, the second of which we saw this past week. It was Early in the Summer of 1970, a monodrama adapted from the novella by the Israeli novelist and peace activist A B Yehoshua, who died 11 months ago.

This is the story, recounted by an Israeli high-school Bible teacher, of his adult son returning to Israel in 1970, with a wife and young son, after several years in academia in the United States. Shortly after his return, the son is called up for reserve duty during the War of Attrition. Not long afterwards, the father is informed that the son has died in action. The play focuses on the father’s reaction to this news, his breaking of the news to his daughter-in-law, and the details of identifying the body, which proves very complicated.

Without revealing any more of the story, let me turn to the production. It starred Yehoyachin Friedlander, a very fine veteran member of the company, whose swan-song this production is to be. It was staged in the small hall, which we had never been in before. The intimacy of the space, and the closeness of the actor to all of the audience, intensified what was already sure to be an intense theatrical experience. From the moment he stepped out on stage, and appeared to focus his eyes on each member of the audience, Friedlander held us rapt for an hour.

During that hour, we explored, through his mesmerising performance, themes of loss and bereavement, the relation between fathers and sons, the peculiarly Israeli situation of parents repeatedly sending their children to die in wars that seem never to end. It was a spell-binding performance, on a stage furnished only with a chair, a table, a Bible and vases of white lilies. Spell-binding, and, at the same time, utterly un-self-conscious. Regular readers will know that I am a sucker for coups de theatre; I thrill to a great theatrical performance. Here, in this tiny space, there was nothing ‘theatrical’ about Friedlander’s performance. It was so understated as to appear completely natural – which is surely the greatest theatrical trick of all.

At the end of the hour, we left the theatre totally drained, and drove home wondering whether comedy was such a bad idea after all.

I should mention that we have also, in the last month, watched a streamed (English) National Theatre production. Prima Facie is about a successful barrister whose career and life are destroyed after she is raped by a colleague at her chambers. This is a bravura monodrama performance, but, once again, it is a draining and bleak evening of theatre.

And then last night we went to the cinema to see The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. If you haven’t read the book, and intend seeing the film, I should insert a spoiler alert here.

Let me attempt the briefest of summaries.

Harold Fry, a retiree, receives a letter from Queenie, an ex-work colleague, who has cancer and is in a hospice 500 miles away. He writes her a brief, feeble note and goes to post it, has second thoughts, and walks to the next post box, and the next. He phones the hospice from a call box and leaves a message. He is coming and she should wait, stay alive while he walks to her. A girl at the petrol filling station where he stops for a snack says something that acts as a catalyst for his nascent project. He tells her he is on foot, delivering a letter to someone with cancer. ‘If you have faith, you can do anything, ’she replies.

As he walks, he reflects: on his marriage to Maureen, with whom he shares a house but, it seems, no intimacy or meaningful relationship and on his son David, from whom he is apparently completely estranged.

As his walk across England, his pilgrimage, progresses, he encounters a string of characters, many of whom respond to his apparent simple decency with honesty, understanding and a willingness to help. He also becomes something of a celebrity, eventually attracting a train of ‘fellow pilgrims’, from whom he ultimately breaks free under cover of night to continue his walk alone.

His walk across England is also marked by his sudden realisation of the beauty, and gradual understanding of the nurturing quality, of the nature that surrounds him, a beauty he has somehow not been aware of previously. “Who knew!’, he murmurs as he looks over a rolling landscape. In an astonishingly eloquent cinematic scene later in the film, when Maureen’s rage breaks through her prim reserve, she rips down the net curtains that have tastefully dressed every window in their home, and we suddenly see an equally beautiful landscape that they might always have admired from their bedroom, were it not for their oh-so-English net curtains.

As the film progresses, we gradually learn, through very short (often dialogue-free) scenes, of his inability to express a connection to David from birth, of David’s troubled adolescence and young adulthood, ending in drugs, alcohol and suicide. It becomes clear that Harold is walking in part to confront, or make amends for, his own feelings of guilt and inadequacy and failure to act.

At the end of the film, Harold reaches the hospice, where Queenie has survived, against medical odds, apparently waiting for Harold’s arrival. She is, however, not able to communicate. Harold’s platitudes at her bedside are as shallow as his original note to her was. However, just before visiting her, he finally surrenders to his anguish over David’s suicide, and breaks down in tears. Immediately after his visit, Maureen arrives, and, in a final scene, they sit together on a bench facing the sea, barely communicating, but finally holding hands.

When we first came out of the cinema, I admit to feeling a little cheated. Over the next half-an-hour or so, in talking about the film with Bernice, I realised that my disappointment was due solely to the fact that I had been anticipating a more uplifting conclusion, to match what I remembered from reading the book. Instead, what the film gives us is a final small gesture of intimacy between Harold and Maureen. Rejecting the perhaps glib happy-ever-after conclusion of the novel, the film instead suggests that this pilgrimage has brought Harold, and Maureen, not to a successful resolution of their horrific family history, but to a point where they can begin working towards that resolution.

Jim Broadbent is completely believable as Harold, in all his tortured anguish and guilt, his impracticality, his basic decency, his gradual opening up. It is not difficult to understand how such an innocent man was completely unable to meet the challenge of David’s troubled life. Penelope Wilton is just as convincing as the wife who has lived with her own secrets and guilt, maintaining a veneer of propriety that Harold’s actions force her to abandon, and, ultimately, making her peace with him and seeking his forgiveness.

A measure of the film’s integrity is that it invited me to reflect, very seriously, on my own experience of parenting. That a story that is so far removed from my own provoked those reflections is, I think, a tribute to the honesty with which the film has been made. As Bernice observed, the fleeting scenes between Harold, Maureen and David were searingly honest and heart-breaking and utterly convincing.

But I hope you will understand that the next thing, indeed the next three things, Bernice and I want to see are something along the lines of Toy Story 5.

On a lighter note (not difficult, you’ll agree), I’m not sure what was absorbing Ollie this week, but Raphael was enjoying a water day in the garden and Tao was being treated on Zoom to one of Nana and Grandpa’s lolly-stick puppet shows. This week was The Three Little Pigs, with a proper happy ending…unless of course you happen to be a wolf.

[First, an almost public service announcement. The film adaptation of the novel The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry has opened in cinemas in Britain and Israel – and quite possibly elsewhere that I don’t know about. Early reviews have been largely very positive. Bernice and I plan to see it this week, but I already know I shall be in tears long before the end. While I can’t quite give a personal recommendation yet, I can tell you neither of the two leads – Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton – is capable of giving a bad performance. In addition, the film stars the English countryside at its finest, which, alone, is surely worth the price of admission. As if that were not enough, one of the co-producers is my cousin, and I can assure you that if she is satisfied with the film then you are very unlikely to be disappointed.]

Under normal circumstances, nobody’s mind is broader than mine when it comes to questions of British and American English usage. I will often be found manning the barricades in defence of ‘defense’. I once even dived into very choppy waters to argue for the legitimacy of ‘dove’. When I discovered only a few weeks ago that a ‘jumper’ is understood by Americans to be a pinafore dress rather than a sweater, I didn’t jump, or even break into a sweat. I have spent many hours explaining to pedants that the English language is not the private property of the British, and that there is no single ‘correct English’, but, rather, a variety of correct Englishes.

However (you must have felt a ‘however’ looming up, surely; you probably even heard those staccato strings that warn you it actually isn’t safe to go back into the water), however, as I say, there are just one or two American usages that (and you might feel this is illogical and inconsistent) stick in my craw. I’m not proud of this (well, not usually), but I thought I would explore one with you today. This particular usage is eminently timely to visit in this of all weeks. Indeed, this past week has been more or less the first legitimate opportunity for 70 years.

I first encountered ‘coronate’ as a verb a year or so ago, on the lips of an American rabbi whose lecture series I subscribed to. While he was extremely erudite and eloquent, there were a number of words that he mispronounced. I suspected that this was because he had only ever read them in books, and never heard them spoken aloud. This probably reflected the fact that most of his formal education was within the Jewish world, and his considerable secular knowledge was gained primarily from reading. I was reminded of the passage in Richard Llewellyn’s novel about a South Wales mining community, How Green Was My Valley, in which the narrator recalls how as a sensitive and academic young boy he was humiliated by his teacher for pronouncing ‘misled’ as ‘mizzled’, having only encountered it in his reading. The irony there, of course, is that having, as a young child, a reading vocabulary that exceeds your listening vocabulary is probably something to be admired, rather than mocked.

(Incidentally, in trying to find the actual text of that extract from the book, I stumbled across the fact that although Richard Llewellyn always claimed to be a miner’s son born in St David’s who worked down the pits at Gilfach Goch, where his novel was set, he was, in truth, born in Hendon, London, the son of a publican, and didn’t go near Wales until he became famous. You can read the whole sorry story here.)

As so often happens in this world of coincidence, within a week of hearing the original rabbi speak of kings being coronated, I heard two other Americans commit what I was starting to realise I could not simply dismiss as an error. A little research was sufficient to establish that ‘to coronate’ is a verb used in modern American usage even more often than ‘to crown’.

At this stage, I reached for my trusty Complete Oxford English Dictionary, to discover, as I already suspected I would, that the first recorded usage of ‘coronate’ as a verb was in 1603, which means that this is something that the Pilgrim Fathers stowed away in the hold of The Mayflower as a neologism (‘to crown’ having been used in English since 1175). As with so many other words, usage diverged over the years in an America and a Britain that had relatively little day-to-day interaction with each other for 200 years, the Americans favouring ‘coronate’ and the British ‘crown’.

I think that what I find unpalatable in this particular American usage is that it prefers the longer, more formal, Latinate word to the shorter, more homely, Anglo-Saxon one. Even as I type this, I realise how inconsistent I am being, since, when I turn from the verb to the noun, I far prefer Johnny-come-lately Latinate ‘coronation’ (1388) to Anglo-Saxon ‘crowning’ (1240). All I can say in my defence is that the noun represents the whole shebang: the entire two-hour ceremony in Westminster Abbey, in front of a congregation of 2,200, plus the journey back to the Palace, accompanied by 4,000 service personnel, along a route lined by an additional 1,000 service personnel and tens of thousands of spectators, a domestic viewing audience of 20 million and a global audience of 300 million. I feel that warrants a Latinate, formal noun.

To crown the King, on the other hand, is to gingerly place the 2.08-kilogram St Edward’s Crown on the royal head, to jiggle it a little, and carefully centre the subtle mark added to avoid what happened at Elizabeth’s coronation, when the Archbishop of Canterbury apparently placed the crown back-to-front on her head. To crown the King is a simple physical act involving just two people. It seems to me appropriate that the simple action be captured in a simple word.

I can’t actually remember the last coronation, although our family was one of the many in Britain that bought their first television set especially for the occasion, and I assume I watched it, aged almost three-and-a-half, together with over 20 million others in the UK. It is estimated that an average of 17 people were gathered round the nine-inch screen of each TV set in Britain, making even watching the event on TV a communal act.

Bernice and I both felt that, having failed to pay much attention last time, we really ought to watch this time, and so, on Saturday night, we sat down to watch the Coronation of the Day highlights from the BBC. After 10 minutes of some rather-too-precious pre-match talking heads, we switched to the unedited coverage, and judiciously used the fast forward at strategic moments. This meant that we may have missed one or two unscripted moments, but we certainly got a sense of the whole extraordinary sweep.

At this point in the post, I planned to offer a critique of the coronation as an event. However, as I started to write, I found that I was doing little more than rehashing the old familiar arguments for and against the monarchy while at the same time making a few cheap jokes that seemed to me to jar with the awe and solemnity with which King Charles himself clearly faced the day. So let me just say that whether you view the elaborateness of the ceremony, and the extraordinary names and arcane symbolism of its various elements, as preposterous or profoundly moving almost certainly says more about you than about them. The simple fact is that Charles became the 40^th monarch to be crowned in Westminster Abbey, in a line going back 957 years, to 1066. The major elements of the coronation ceremony have remained unchanged for over 600 years. You may find that ridiculous; you may find it inspiring. You can probably guess which side of that argument I am basically on, but I won’t bore you further.

Meanwhile, in our own personal dynasty, No 2 is trying out the throne, No 1’s gaze is on higher things, and No 3 didn’t even turn up this week. Thus it is in most families, I suspect.

Now that we have moved the clocks forward, Shabbat afternoon is a much longer thing than it was a month ago. The major impact this has on us is that it means our conversation with our good friends when they drop by on Shabbat afternoon – as they habitually do, I’m delighted to say – can progress beyond catching up with each other’s week, and move on to matters more philosophical.

Which is exactly what it did this week, when Bernice asked: “If you could go back to your 18-year-old self, and make career and life decisions that would mean you were likely now to be much better off materially, what decisions would you change?” (Incidentally, you may be interested to know that most of those present decided that they would not be prepared to make any compromises in terms of a satisfying working life in order to gain materially, and the rest of us admitted that we still had no idea what making a sound financial decision would look like.)

We all agreed, eventually, that we had many, many blessings to count (principally our wonderful respective families – even those members of them who have chosen to take themselves and our grandchildren far away, a choice that would be more incomprehensible if it were not the identical choice that we all made when younger). Nevertheless, I do find myself from time to time musing how wonderful it would be to win the lottery. I would, of course, probably increase my chances of winning if I ever bought a ticket. If I were to buy a ticket, this week would undoubtedly be the week for me to buy one.

Which is as Errol Garnerish an intro as there is (see my blog post from 17 December 2019 if you haven’t been paying close enough attention) to sharing with you what a lucky week I have had these past seven days. Five events have made this a very fortunate week.

First of all, exactly a week ago, I accurately predicted the winner of the competition to find the nation’s favourite song for the 75^th anniversary (see my blog post of 25 April 2023 if you haven’t been paying any attention at all). Not only did this produce a delicious feeling of smugness in itself, but it also meant that, since Thursday morning, every time I have read a story reporting the results and explaining why the winner was such an appropriate choice (four articles so far), I have had an even more delicious feeling of rapturous smugness at having scooped most major Israeli media outlets. I really don’t pay me enough!

Second, on Yom Ha’atzma’ut itself, I watched, as I usually do, the World Bible Quiz for Youth. This is usually a humiliating affair for me, since I manage to get right only a handful of questions, and am left feeling in awe of the book-learning of Jewish teens from around the world. This year, typically, as the original field of 16 (whittled down from hundreds of applicants in non-televised rounds over recent months) narrowed to 8, then 4, then 2, most of the contestants from outside Israel fell by the wayside. Atypically, 6 of the last 8 remaining contestants, and both of the finalists, were girls.

The winner only answered one question incorrectly over the entire quiz. Of the four questions I answered correctly this year, one was the question that she answered incorrectly. (“What was the first recorded occasion on which David cried?” I’ll print the answer below, to give you the opportunity to feel as smug as I.*)

The third incident actually took place two weeks ago, and is a little less dramatic, but it is proving for me to be an ongoing game-changer. One of the biggest advantages of stopping eating meat (for Bernice, at all; for me, at home) is that we now have enough kitchen cupboard space to accommodate our year-round and our Pesach dishes. Changing over requires only some condensing of the everyday, and bringing some of the Pesach stuff down from the less-accessible cupboards to a more convenient level.

We have a fairly deep double cupboard above the fridge, which is difficult to access because the fridge protrudes. We have always used this cupboard to store trays and other items that are too wide for an ordinary cupboard, as well as a number of items that we rarely, if ever, use: a teak meat carving board, knife and fork (a wedding present, and too good to get rid of), a pizza stone, and so on. Our other deeper cupboard, which is a single cupboard above the oven and microwave, houses the wide Pesach items (Seder dish and so on).

As we were packing away after Pesach this year, it suddenly occurred to me that the double cupboard is very under-utilised, since we have, over the years, passed on and otherwise retired several items we never used. On the other hand, all of the Pesach cupboards are jam-packed. I therefore switched the contents of the two deep cupboards, allowing me to relieve the jam in the other Pesach cupboards, and also making more readily accessible such items as the Havdalah mats, which are now no longer above the fridge. I am torn between congratulating myself on my astonishing vision and creativity, and wondering how it can possibly have taken me 10 years to think of this rearrangement.

Fourth, just when I thought I had exhausted ways of using up our shesek (loquats), which will have yielded about 10 kg by the time I harvest the last crop this week, Esther came up with another. In addition to the jam, the chutney, the ice-cream and the liqueur – and, of course, the fresh fruit itself, particularly juicy and sweet and flavourful this year – I am now attempting shesek vinegar.

I’m delighted to report that the bubbles and clouding, which should, according to the recipe, begin after one and two weeks respectively, were already visible after one and two days respectively, and are now very well advanced, which means, I hope, that I should be able to bottle before we take a mid-week break in Budapest in mid-May. As with my sourdough starter, I have been struck by how full of bacteria and microbes our home is. Let me stress that this is a good thing.

Lastly, when I turned to Bernice 90 minutes ago and confessed that, despite thinking of little else for the last two days, I still had absolutely no idea what I was going to write about this week, she said: “Well, whatever it is, after the last couple of weeks it had better be something light!” and hey presto, by a trick of literary alchemy, by the time I got upstairs I knew exactly what I was going to write about.

So, if this week’s effort has left you singularly unimpressed, please blame Bernice.

*When it became clear that Saul’s anger at David was not to be assuaged, Jonathan shot the arrows as a sign for David, and David fled. Before he left, the two embraced and wept. (Samuel 1, 20:41)

Meanwhile, in the tradition of King David, all of our grandsons seem to be music-makers.
(I could segue for Israel, couldn’t I!)

Postscript – written after, but placed as an introduction to, today’s post. Today (Tuesday) is Yom Hazikaron, that most painful day in the Israeli calendar when the nation unites to remember its fallen. This year, the nation is also holding its collective breath, to discover whether the social fabric will actually hold over today, and tomorrow, Yom Ha’atzma’ut. In the 20 hours since I wrote the rest of this post, that social fabric, the essential core of the country, as exemplified on two very different WhatsApp groups of which I am a member, has been sorely tested. I have felt compelled to leave one of the groups, and may possibly leave the other. If I were writing this post today, rather than yesterday, the tone I would use would no longer be as light as it is. However, I have decided not to change the post, because the content already belies the lightness of the tone.

I urge you, in the words of Psalm 122: שַׁ֭אֲלוּ שְׁל֣וֹם יְרוּשָׁלָ֑͏ִם – Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

For the benefit of those on whom the reference in the title of this post is lost, the long running BBC domestic radio programme Desert Island Discs each week invites a different celebrity to select which eight recordings they would want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island. At the end of each programme, the presenter traditionally asks them: ‘And if you could only take one recording, which would it be?’

This Wednesday, on Israel’s 75^th Independence Day, Israel’s state broadcaster’s popular music radio station will be announcing which song its listeners have voted to be Israel’s ‘Song of 75’. While I would not claim to be anything of an expert on Israeli popular song, the choice seems to me obvious. So obvious, in fact, that I am going to stick my neck out and go public with my prediction, so convinced am I that this is the only real contender.

In fact, I’ll be very surprised if at least some of you do not react, when I share my selection with you, by saying: ‘Well duh, of course that’s going to win.’  

But just before I do let you know my choice, let me reflect on another, more official, symbol of the last 75 years – Israel’s national flag. The months since the present Government announced its intention of rushing through a far-reaching program of judicial reform have been marked by consistently large mass demonstrations in Tel Aviv and all other major cities, and many minor locations, throughout Israel. There have been several notable features of these protests.

First, the numbers attending did not fall off after the first flush of protest, nor did they fall off in the bad weather of late winter. Instead, the demonstrations have continued to attract consistently large numbers. Second, both the demonstrators and the police have, by and large, maintained a civilised relationship over the past weeks and months. Third, the demonstrations have attracted not only the to-be-expected secular, middle-class, left-wing Tel Avivians, but also a much broader cross-section of Israelis, across the religious, social and political spectrum.

Fourth, the demonstrators seem to have reasserted their identification with the Israeli flag. In recent years (in recent decades), there has been a tendency for the political right to ‘appropriate’ the flag to a certain extent. In the last couple of months, the flag (together with the Declaration of Independence) has been a constant and ubiquitous presence at the demonstrations. It has also been a constant and ubiquitous presence at the counter-demonstrations that have been gathering momentum. It seems to me a sign of national strength that both sides of a dispute that has threatened to rip the country apart should continue to identify so strongly with the national flag.

Indeed, there have even been stories of what has happened when those opposed to the judicial reform programme leaving the demonstration cross the path of those supporting the programme arriving for a counter-demonstration. The latter reportedly asked to use the flags of the former and, according to the reports, the opposers handed their flags to the supporters. (I have no first-hand evidence of the accuracy of these reports, but, even if they are only apocryphal, the fact that the stories are repeated so widely and have gained such traction in itself reflects a very positive aspect of the national mood.)

This embracing of a cultural symbol by opposing sides leads me neatly to my choice of song. There are few, if any, Israeli songwriters more beloved, or better able to capture the national mood, than Ehud Manor. I have mentioned him before as a remarkably skilled translator of English-language musicals into Hebrew (he translated over 600 such works), but he was also, indeed primarily, a chronicler of Israel through over 1200 original song lyrics.

In 1968, Manor’s younger brother was killed while serving in the Israel Defence Forces during the War of Attrition. Manor wrote a song – אחי הצעיר יהודה, My Young Brother, Yehuda – which became very popular, In the mid-1980s, he wrote another song, reportedly also in reaction to the loss of his brother – אין לי ארץ אחרת – I have No Other Country – which was perceived as a protest song by those opposing the First Lebanon War, and has continued to be embraced by those who are unhappy with the direction the country is taking, but who nevertheless fiercely identify with the country.

Sadly, Israel’s first 75 years have been characterised as much by such patriotism and dissent as by any other national emotions: from the disdainful and patronising treatment of the immigrants from North Africa and Iraq by the ruling European Jewish ‘aristocracy’, through the ‘occupation’ of Judea and Samaria in the wake of the Six-Day War, through the first and second Lebanon Wars, the first and second Intifadas, the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Remarkably, every successive wave of dissenters and protesters has heard, in Manor’s song, the resonance of their own feelings.

For the benefit of the two or three of my readers who don’t know the song (and for the rest who do), here it is as originally sung by Gali Atari. I’d like you to listen to it first, and then I’d like to reflect on what seem to me the secrets of the song’s enduring success.

Here are the lyrics, with my tweaking of the translation given on the video:

אין לי ארץ אחרת
גם אם אדמתי בוערת
רק מילה בעברית חודרת
אל עורקיי, אל נשמתי
בגוף כואב, בלב רעב
כאן הוא ביתי

לא אשתוק, כי ארצי
שינתה את פניה
לא אוותר לה,
אזכיר לה,
ואשיר כאן באוזניה
עד שתפקח את עיניה

אין לי ארץ אחרת
עד שתחדש ימיה
עד שתפקח את עיניה

אין לי ארץ אחרת
גם אם אדמתי בוערת
רק מילה בעברית חודרת
אל עורקיי, אל נשמתי
בגוף כואב, בלב רעב
כאן הוא ביתי בגוף כואב, בלב רעב
כאן הוא ביתי

I have no other country
Even if my land is on fire.
Only a word in Hebrew can pierce through
To my veins, to my soul
With an aching body, with a hungry heart
Here is my home

I will not be silent, because my country’s
Face has changed.
I will not give up on her,
I will remind her,
And I will sing here in her ear
Until she opens her eyes
I have no other country

Until she renews her days
Until she opens her eyes

I have no other country
Even if my land is on fire
Only a word in Hebrew can pierce through
To my veins, to my soul
With an aching body, with a hungry heart
Here is my home

With an aching body, with a hungry heart
Here is my home

The first thing to say is that the range of both the words and the music is very limited; there is very little variation in the song. It is obsessively focused on the main message: ‘I have no other country’. I have omitted, in the lyrics above, one complete repetition of the opening 12 lines. This means that, in a three-minute song of 35 short lines, the opening line ‘I have no other country’ is sung four times, each time to the same seven notes, in a musical motif that is closely echoed throughout the song, I believe, 28 times. The Hebrew vocabulary is not complex, and the syntax is very straightforward.

When the song is sung these days, it tends to be sung more slowly, with more raw emotion in the voice of the singer. However, there is something in the slightly flat, almost matter-of-fact treatment of the song by Gali Atari that emphasizes that the fact that the songwriter feels he has no option is a given, something to be taken for granted.

Note also what seems to me a deliberate ambiguity in the following lines: ‘I will not be silent, because my country’s / Face has changed.’ Does this mean: ‘The fact that my country’s face has changed is not a reason to be silent’? (If I may be allowed to ‘translate’ this into the situation Israel is in, that can be paraphrased as: ‘The fact that the country has changed is not a reason to move abroad.’) Or does it mean: ‘The reason I will not be silent is that my country’s face has changed’? (‘The fact that the country has changed is the reason why I feel compelled to take action.’)

One further reason for the power of the song is the following. The emotional and physical state of the songwriter is very specifically described in lines 3–5: ‘Only a word in Hebrew can pierce through / To my veins, to my soul / With an aching body, with a hungry heart.’ However, the specifics of the way in which ‘my country’s face has changed’ are not mentioned at all; it is, of course, precisely this which has allowed so many disparate groups over such a long time to hear in the song their own anguish, and their own determination not to give up.

Let me quote from the tribute to Ehud Manor when he was awarded the Israel Prize for Hebrew Song: ‘Ehud Manor never wanted to be a shaliach tzibbur – (in other words, to speak on behalf of others). In his poetry there is usually no place for the phrase “we”. According to his view, no lyricist can speak except for himself. Indeed, he brought to Hebrew song his private voice, an intimate, revealing and sensitive voice, but miraculously his song of the individual became the song of many.’

It feels, in these days, as though the lyric of this wonderfully simple, simply wonderful song has never rung truer. However, I know that it has felt like that in each successive social challenge that the country has faced. Like all great art, the song speaks to each generation in its own voice. That is why it is my choice as the song of the 75^th anniversary. I’ll let you know next week whether the great Israeli public has got it right!

Meanwhile, Tao and Ollie are enjoying the comforts of the tipee (including sofa with integral oven), while Raphael also went camping last weekend.

It all started with recorded sound, as produced by Edison’s tin foil phonograph, invented some time in 1877.

Incidentally, if you happen to be looking for proof of Edison’s visionary powers, just peruse this list he offered in North American Review in June 1878 of the following possible future uses of his invention:

1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
2. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.
3. The teaching of elocution.
4. Reproduction of music.
5. The “Family Record” – a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.
6. Music-boxes and toys.
7. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.
8. The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing.
9. Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment, and spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to memory.
10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication.

Of that impressive list, the item we will be looking at today is, you will not be surprised to hear, Item 4 – reproduction of music. In the early years of the phonograph, it is fair to say that piano rolls played on a reproducing piano offered a listening experience that was at least as faithful to the original live performance as, and certainly far more pleasurable than, the distorting, crackling, tinny phonograph discs of the time. From the last years of the 19^th Century until 1930, a very impressive list of composers and pianists had their interpretations captured on roll: among them Mahler, Saint-Saens, Grieg, Debussy, de Falla, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Scriabin,

By 1927, phonograph technology had become increasingly sophisticated, and from then on the gramophone record dominated. While most classical musicians were enthusiastic, one, perhaps the greatest pianist of the age, Artur Schnabel, steadfastly refused to record, until eventually, in 1932, he reluctantly allowed himself to be persuaded to record all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. His opposition was basically on two grounds. First, technical limitations of the new medium meant that the longest possible recording was four minutes and, in addition, post-recording editing was impossible. Any recording had to be of a series of short, single takes. As he wrote to his wife, in the middle of this mammoth recording project, which was, for him, a living nightmare:

“You can only play for 4 minutes. In those 4 minutes, you sometimes have to strike around 2000 keys or more. If 2 of them are unsatisfactory, you have to repeat all 2000. And when you do that, the original mistakes are corrected but you make another 2, so then it’s another 2000 to do over. This goes on 10 times, always with a sword of Damocles hanging over your head. Finally, you give up and now leave in 20 mistakes.”

For Schnabel, even worse than the physical and mental strain of this striving for an unattainable perfection was the underlying philosophical point that a recording is unavoidably viewed as a definitive performance:

“…from now on I shall rightly and constantly be condemned because I took it upon myself to declare something finished that wasn’t, because I released something to be used that was not fit for purpose, which means I lied. Because I released as definitive something that is essentially always unfinished as long as it breathes, which means I lied.

“I asked a music and record enthusiast (a peculiar talent) whether it bothered him if a musician makes small or even big mistakes in a concert. He replied with a smile, ‘No, not in the least, that doesn’t bother me at all.’ What about if it happens on a recording, I asked. ‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘I’m quite strict about that and won’t accept any blunders, I’m critical in a different way.’”

I have quoted Schnabel at such length both because he was a deep-thinking and articulate commentator and because he reflects one extreme of the debate about the virtues of music recording. He also displays the scepticism with which technical innovation is almost always regarded by at least some.

At the other end of the scale, and at the other end of the development of editing of recorded music, sits Glenn Gould. (I would distinguish, here, between editing and more intrusive manipulation, of which more later.) Gould’s creative process, most notable, probably, in his second recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in the early 1970s, was very much a two-part process. The first stage was the capturing on tape of multiple live (studio) renditions. The second stage was cutting and splicing together from those multiple renditions a ‘version’ whose every bar consisted of a segment of one of those renditions that best represented Gould’s understanding of the piece.

The end result was, essentially, a piece of absolute artifice, representing an ideal. (This was, incidentally, an ideal that Schnabel always rejected. He wrote: “I don’t want to play that well; I want to have something in front of me, not just behind me. Man’s constantly changing nature cannot be reconciled with the eternally unfeeling machine.”)

With Gould, we reach a point where the technology is sufficiently sophisticated to make a ‘performance’ that was artificially constructed in the editing room sound indistinguishable from a continuous live performance. If you feel this is cheating, then you should ask yourself why you accept it every time you see a feature film, and do not complain that this is cheating, and a live theatre performance is the only authentic acting experience. Is it because we are all aware of the role of editing in film? If so, then Gould’s complete openness about his editing technique should earn him the same tolerance on the part of his audience, which it largely has done.

These days, of course, digital editing allows for the correction of a singer’s or instrumentalist’s errors of pitch, adjusting the balance between individual instruments, or sections, in an orchestra, adjustments of tempo and so on. The recording studio can now give us a level of perfection that could never be sustained in the concert hall for the duration of an entire piece.

At this point, I leave the world of classical music, and move, with extreme caution, into the, for me, uncharted waters of popular music. In the pop music world, intense editing, and other manipulation of the recorded sound, is omnipresent and universally accepted, so much so that there have been groups that cannot perform live, because the recorded sound that is their trademark cannot even be approximated in a live concert.

Let me offer you some further food for thought, in the form of a number of real-life scenarios and the questions they raise. Frank Sinatra’s last project was a series of duets with artists whom he never, actually, shared a recording studio with. His contribution, and their contributions, were recorded separately and brought together only in the editing room. Is a song recorded in this way, in which there can be no chemistry between the artists, genuinely a duet?

Celine Dion, coincidentally, has ‘performed with’ Frank Sinatra. Interestingly, that was in 2007, nine years after he died. Is that a duet? A perhaps more interesting question is whether it seems as though Celine Dion is seeking to enhance her status by association with Frank Sinatra, an association that he is not in a position to bless or refuse. Is this homage or exploitation?

Our final, and arguably most bizarre, scenario this week is a new recording of a song featuring a duet by two iconic Israeli popular singers. The song was written this year. The singers, Zohar Argov and Ofra Haza, have been dead for a combined total of 59 years. The song was produced in honour of Israel’s 75^th Independence Day next week at the initiative of the Israel Broadcasting Corporation.

Before we get on to the question of how this record was produced, a little background. While Ofra Haza enjoyed the status of an establishment performer, Argov was never, in his lifetime, embraced by the establishment. He was a convicted rapist and drug addict who committed suicide in his prison cell the day after being arrested on another charge of attempted rape. Some might argue that this makes him an odd choice to bring honour to the state on its 75^th birthday.

The record was produced by an Israeli company, using artificial intelligence technology to analyse the recordings of the two legendary artists from the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation’s archive and other recordings, and produce a simulation of their voices. If this is beginning to sound like a cheap commercial gimmick on the part of the Israel Broadcasting Corporation, let me fail to set your mind at rest by pointing out that the title of the song is Here Forever, or, in Hebrew, Kan l’Olam, and the fact that the name of the IBC television network is Kan is, you might choose to believe, purely coincidental.

I have heard differing comments on the accuracy of the impersonation. I have a suspicion that those who claim that it is a poor approximation are influenced by the fact that they know it is a simulation. If they didn’t know, I suspect they wouldn’t detect it. I watched a video recently where a professional pop drummer and a performing classical pianist competed to see which of them could better distinguish between recordings of actual instrumentalists and AI simulations. Neither of the experts scored highly.

So, is Here Forever tribute or exploitation? If the object of the exercise is not to reinterpret the work of the artists, but to produce something indistinguishable from the work of the artist, should the artist, even after death, be protected by copyright laws? Or should we rejoice in the fact that artists’ creativity may soon be able to live forever.

I also find myself wondering about other, non-artistic scenarios. I have long felt that it is a great pity that Ian Botham flourished before the era of T20. It would be wonderful to watch him in a simulated match. Or, again, imagine seeing Rod Laver go head-to-head against whichever of the Big Three you think is the GOAT. It seems very likely that all of this, and much, much more that I (not being a Thomas Edison) cannot even imagine, may be just around the corner.

Editor’s Note: In keeping with the theme that I wanted to explore this week, I thought it would be interesting to ask ChatGPT to write 1500 words, in the style of my blog. The post you have just read is the result that ChatGPT came up with.

Editor’s Second Note: Just kidding! But did I have you wondering for a split-second there?…In a year or two, this may not be a joke…and then I’ll be able to enjoy my Sundays!

No picture of Tao this week, I’m afraid. I’m not sure he stands still long enough. But the two younger grandsons are both clearly enjoying their Sundays, and Mondays, and Tuesdays…

First this week, a bit of housekeeping (actual, genuine, housekeeping, as it happens):

Following my description of Pesach baking last week, I had feedback (boom! boom!) from a couple of people, asking for recipes . Ever ready to oblige, I offer you not only a PDF of the recipes, which you can access here, but also, at no additional charge, a bonus. Since, by the time you access the Pesach recipes, I can’t imagine anyone will want to do any Pesach baking, you will have to keep the recipes until next year. (I have been told that the recipes work during the rest of the year as well, but I’m not sure I really believe it, and I have absolutely no intention of finding out.)

By the time you get around to reading this week’s blog post, Pesach may even be over already, in which case what you will be looking for is a good bread recipe. Unfortunately, sourdough starter is almost certainly what the Torah calls se’or, which is the one thing above all others that we are not allowed to possess during Pesach. This means that this year, as every year, just before Pesach, I poured away the last of my starter. The first thing I plan to do after we have changed back after Pesach is mix flour and water in a jar, place it on our kitchen windowsill (or, if the weather is cool, on top of our water machine) and place a large sign next to it that will read:

DEAR BACTERIA.

PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR MOVING YOU TO THE DUSTBIN LAST WEEK. I HOPE YOU WERE ABLE TO FIND ANOTHER FOOD SOURCE THERE.

I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW THAT WE ARE BACK TO BUSINESS AS USUAL AND I HAVE SET UP THE ADJACENT HOTEL JUST FOR YOU.

PLEASE CONTACT OUR STAFF IF THERE IS ANYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO MAKE YOUR STAY COMFORTABLE.

If past experience is anything to go by, the local bacteria will be very quick on the uptake, but, even with the best will in the world, the starter won’t be robust enough to perform its magic in bread dough for four or five days. Meanwhile, of course, Bernice and I will be longing for some real bread.

Fortunately, I have a couple of recipes that produce a fairly hearty loaf even though they use only baker’s yeast, and not sourdough starter. This means that the second thing I plan to do after we have changed back is to make a batch of rye bread with caraway seeds (heimishe brown bread). If you can bear to wait just over two-and-a-half hours, you can enjoy a tasty loaf with very little effort.

You can access the fairly quick and simple rye bread recipe here.

Ed Note: It’s just struck me: if someone had told me, twenty years ago, that I would, at some point in the future, be writing a weekly blog in which, among other things, I shared recipes with my readers, I would have laughed in their face. But life sometimes contrives to manoeuvre you into an unexpected corner.

So, here we are, a third of the way into this week’s post, and the question, as ever, is: Where do we go from here?

Let me reference first a thought-provoking haggada produced this year to a commendably high standard in a very short time. It is a conventional haggada, illustrated with very striking photographs taken at the protests against the Government’s planned programme of judicial reform. To the text have been added a range of commentaries on Pesach and the Seder’s relevance to this struggle, contributed by a range of Israeli people of letters. Click the title to view the הגדת החירות – סיפור של מאבק ותקווה, also available with the commentaries translated into English as The Freedom Haggada – A Story of Protest and Hope.

I took a good look through this haggada before our Seder, which we celebrated with Esther, Maayan, and even Raphael, who managed to stay engaged until after he had performed his Ma Nishtana dance. While I do not agree with every sentiment of every reflection in the collection, I was delighted to be able to find enough material that I could bring to the Seder, confident that it reflected the common ground that we and the girls stand on. I know that not all of you will agree with the content, but I hope we can all celebrate the fact that it is, at the very least, an illustration of the continuing relevance to the Jewish people of our reliving the story of the Exodus.

End of lecture. Rapid change of subject.

Walking repeatedly through our front garden in the last couple of weeks, on my way from the house to the rubbish bins as we cleared out our cupboards, from the house to the front hedge as I put the disassembled and scrubbed kitchen drawers out to dry, and then on my way from the house to shul and back again, I could not fail to notice that Pesach is not called Hag He’Aviv – the spring festival – for nothing. Bernice and I were very late in saying the once-a-year blessing on seeing fruit blossom on trees for the first time, and by the time we got around to it our nectarine tree had barely any blossom left. Indeed, I was surprised to see, it already had fruit – and, in comparison with previous years – lots of it.

So, yesterday, I decided the time had come to protect the nectarines from the birds. This was a job that I undertook fairly early in the morning, before Bernice was up and about. Let me explain why that is necessary.

Among the television programmes Bernice ‘enjoys’ watching are programmes that follow the stories of patients who arrive at the A&E/emergency/casualty departments of hospitals. It appears that almost all of these patients are men in their 70s who fail to realise that they can no longer zip up and down on ladders: arthritic knees, sudden spells of dizziness, wasting leg muscles, impaired inner-ear balance mechanisms, all conspire to make going up on a ladder a very stupid thing for a man in his 70s to do. All of this means, of course, that I have to do it when Bernice isn’t looking.

I am, naturally, tremendously careful, and all the time I am balanced up there I take tree-hugging to new heights, but nevertheless I do realise that it is a very stupid thing to do and, if it makes you feel any better, I promise I won’t do it next year and will, instead, wait for either my daughter (or, more probably, my acrobatic daughter-in-law) to arrive from Zichron, or for one of our neighbours’ strapping sons in their twenties, stamping their alpha male-dom all over my deflated ego, to breeze in from next door, and attach the netting in 10 minutes, doubtless while balancing on a slender branch on one leg.

The fact is that I spent 70 minutes yesterday wrestling with a nectarine tree that has undergone an adolescent growth spurt in the last year and could now play basketball for The Summer Fruits in the Israel tree league. After all that time, I was sweating heavily, I had managed to dislodge about 30 immature nectarines (which is arguably more than the birds would have eaten), and the tree still looked barely protected, even to the untrained eye.

I plan to tackle the shesek (loquat) tree tomorrow (now today – Tuesday), which is much more straightforward. I have a deal with the birds that I cover this tree only up to a height where I can safely reach. Anything above that is theirs. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure all of the birds understand the small print of this agreement.

As for the much smaller and more manageable peach tree, with its very modest harvest, I won’t have any netting left over, so I may have to play a game of chicken with the birds, and see if I can manage to pick each individual fruit just before the birds get to it.

When our gardener suggested several years ago that he plant three small nurslings – peach, nectarine and lemon – it seemed a charming idea. Nobody explained to me the expenditure of physical effort and mental strain that this would entail. Where the prophet Micah writes that “each man shall sit under his grapevine or fig tree with no one to disturb him”, I always thought that the vision of the Messianic age was one free of war and strife between man and his fellow-man. I never realised it also encompassed freedom from the war between man and birds, and, indeed, between man and gravity. I think I must be acquiring the wisdom of age, or something.

Meanwhile, if our three grandsons continue to explore the world around them with the same curiosity and enthusiasm they are all showing now, they will probably, on their way up, meet me, on my way down, somewhere on the slopes of the mountain-range of human wisdom, some time frighteningly soon.

In a normal week, Sunday morning sees this week’s blog post as my number one priority. In a normal week. This is not a normal week.

In a normal week, by Sunday evening, the post is done and dusted. It’s been written, reviewed by me, read and approved by Bernice, revised by me, set up in WordPress and scheduled to go live on Tuesday morning. In a normal week. This is not a normal week.

I am writing this at 8:30 on Monday evening. Despite the lateness of the hour (Go Live minus 12:30 hours), I have no idea what I am going to write about and, to be honest, I feel more asleep than awake. But my public (such as it is) awaits me; the show must go on. So here we go.

This is not a normal week since, as you will hardly need me to remind you, Pesach begins on Wednesday night. All religious holidays obviously require a certain amount of spiritual preparation; for me this usually involves study, in the form of reading a book or some articles or shiurim or listening to recorded or live talks and shiurim. However, on no other holiday am I, are we, so thoroughly tested on our degree of preparation. On Pesach, we are expected to provide stimulating questions, discussion points and observations. No pressure, then.

Pesach is also unusual in that it involves physical preparation. Not uniquely, of course: before sukkot there is a lot of physical preparation: flimsy temporary structures that are liable to collapse don’t, after all, build themselves. However, building a sukkah pales into insignificance beside the logistic challenge of cleaning a house for Pesach while, at the same time, living and cooking and eating in it.

Of course, I realise how lucky we are. We no longer have six-year-olds who post wafers into their money-boxes and don’t think to mention it to anyone. (In fairness we never did have a six-year-old like that.) We no longer have twelve-year-olds who leave a sandwich in their schoolbag at the beginning of the year and forget about it, only for it to be discovered in late March. (In fairness, we did have a twelve-year-old exactly like that. I leave you to guess whether it was Esther or Micha’el.)

I also realise how lucky I am. I have never played my part in preparing meals, so the waves of chag, shabbat, chag, shabbat have never struck terror into my heart as they do into Bernice’s.

But Pesach is something else. First of all, to make up for all those years when I was out clubbing sabre-tooth tigers while Bernice was scrubbing cupboards, I strive to play my part in Pesach cleaning. We start what one ex-colleague of mine regarded as ludicrously late: he and his wife started cleaning for Pesach every year immediately after Hannukah. Others might regard it as early. I tackle each of the kitchen drawer units in turn, giving them a really thorough clean so that the final clean can be much quicker. These days, I feel I can only tackle one unit per day, so I spread that over two weeks.

Meanwhile, we confine eating to the kitchen and dining room, so that Bernice’s pre-Shabbat house cleaning can, over two weeks, be even more thorough than usual.

This year, we moved on to Phase 2 towards the end of last week: getting rid of, or putting aside for pre-Pesach eating, our odd bits of hametz in the freezer and the cupboards; cleaning the overflow fridge and freezer in the utility room, ready to move over all the non-Pesach perishables; doing our big Pesach Rami Levi shop; condensing the non-Pesach food into half of the kitchen drawers.

Yesterday (Sunday) morning, we were up early for our big push. We teamed up to tackle the kitchen fridge-freezer; Bernice took on the oven and hob, while I got the microwave, wine-fridge. (I know this sounds as though I’m not pulling my weight, but ever since the year when I cleaned the oven really thoroughly and couldn’t quite put it back together again, Bernice has declared it off-limits for me.) Finally, I condensed the non-Pesach dishes and cutlery into half of the kitchen drawers.

These days, I seem to pack ever more efficiently, so that finding drawer space for all the bits and pieces that normally live on the worktop – the mixer, peanut jars (yes, two jars, since you ask: one for raw peanuts in their husks and one for home-roasted – this is a serious peanut-eating household), coffee machine, condiment set, butter dish – seemed ridiculously easy.

By the time we collapsed into bed last night, we were all set for a post-breakfast switch-over today, which went more smoothly than ever. Having cleared away after breakfast, we took a moment to admire the stark elegance of an uncluttered kitchen, and agreed that, despite the fact that this was the way our interior designer urged us to live, it seemed completely lifeless. (Personally, I would be happiest with something halfway between unlived in and cluttered, but there you are.) Then Bernice swept and washed the floors, while I attacked the work surfaces. In no time at all, I was ready to retrieve, from the cupboard under the stairs, the polygal (corrugated plastic) sheets with which we cover the work surface, and the plastic sink inserts.

In previous years, I have struggled to work out exactly how the various pieces of polygal (which I cut, several years ago, with cunning skill, from only five sheets we bought) fit together round the kitchen. This year, it all fell into place. Even manoeuvring the water machine to fit the polygal under it produced no disasters, and in no time at all I was up on the stepladder, handing down to Bernice all the Pesach dishes and glassware and kitchen equipment. 

By 11:30, we were able to enjoy a cup of tea, which in my case was Chai Masala, which I thought I liked, but now discover I do not. If anyone would like a box of Adanim Chai Masala, with only one bag missing, you’re invited to come and collect it.

Perceptive readers will be wondering what I was doing between 11:30 and now, that prevented me writing my post during the afternoon. Funny you should ask.

My father, alav hashalom, once he retired, always loved to bake for Pesach. He would make almond macaroons, cinnamon balls, and a French chocolate cake that, even though it was in Evelyn Rose’s kosher cookery book, and even though it used potato flour, was not, unaccountably, listed in the Pesach section of the book. It was, however, obviously, ideal for Pesach.

After we moved to Israel, my parents visited us from England over Pesach, and Dad continued to bake, wonderfully, every year. After he died, I felt I had to take up the mantle, and so I continued the tradition. Bernice generously agreed to give me first dibs at the kitchen every year after we change over, so I traditionally take the rest of changeover day.

I soon added to my repertoire coconut pyramids, originally simply because they use yolks only, and I was easily able to bake quantities that meant using equal numbers of egg whites (four each for macaroons and cinnamon balls) and yolks (eight for coconut pyramids). The French chocolate cake, very efficiently, uses equal numbers of yolks and whites.

Unfortunately (purely from the aspect of egg efficiency), a colleague at work shared a recipe for florentines that is so ludicrously simple, and so delicious, that I readily adopted it for Pesach. (Bung egg whites, sugar, chocolate chips, chopped dried fruit and chopped almonds in a bowl, stir, and dollop onto a baking tray.) So now I have to make a heavily yolky omelette on the day I bake.

Over the years, I have, in theory, perfected this baking day. I tackle the recipes in order, so that the baking time of item x is a little longer than the preparation time for item x+1. Fortunately, all of the recipes call for an oven at 170^o-180^oC, so oven use is efficient. The instruction manual that I have written for this entire enterprise gives total kitchen time as 3.5 hours. This, of course, assumes that everything goes according to plan, and every baton change, as it were, is effortless.

Today, it didn’t, and it wasn’t. First of all, I finished mixing the ingredients for pyramids, carefully shaped 20 of them, using my favourite eggcup, and only then realised that the reason the mixture seemed a little wet was that, although the number of eggs I had used was correct for the double batch I always make, I had followed the original recipe for single quantities of coconut, sugar and lemon, so that I now had to dump my 20 perfectly formed pyramids back into the mixing bowl, weigh and mix more coconut, sugar and lemon, and start shaping again.

A little put off my stride by this setback, I plunged into more confusion with quantities of ground almonds for the cinnamon balls. I normally grind my own almonds. However, this year Bernice found that the ground almonds were cheaper than the whole almonds, and so she bought enough for my recipes. It was only as I was setting up that I remembered that I had discovered years previously why commercial cinnamon balls are so dark inside, whereas home-baked ones are usually much lighter. The secret is not the cinnamon, nor kiddush wine, as I used to think, but rather the almonds. Commercial cinnamon balls are made with almonds that have not been blanched.

So, I decided to use home-ground, unblanched almonds for a third of the mixture, to give the colour I wanted. However, when I came to weigh and mix together the two kinds of ground almond, I unaccountably ended up with 250 grams more of mixture than I needed. Fortunately, I had, at that stage, not mixed the two kinds of almond together thoroughly, and so I spent a few exhilarating minutes carefully scooping blanched ground almond out of the mixture.

All of this helps to explain why the three-and-a-half hours expanded to just over five! Bernice was kind enough to remind me that I had a set of similar, but, of course, not identical, hiccoughs last year before Pesach. I am beginning to suspect that several days of intensive cleaning and a feeling of terminal exhaustion are not the best preparation for a smooth afternoon of baking, but what can you do?

So, now you understand why I have no idea what to write about this week. Sorry! You’ll just have to make do with some pictures.