A mixed bag of vignettes this week, all designed with the sole purpose of taking my mind off the elephant in the room this week, and all failing miserably in their purpose.

The elephant, in case you haven’t realised already, is almost certain to be let out of the bag (if you can have a cow elephant, I don’t see why you can’t have a cat elephant), later today (Monday). If the Israeli parliamentary opposition’s expected filibuster is particularly effective, that may be much, much later today, indeed in the early hours of tomorrow (Tuesday). The item in question is the first reading of a bill covering one (theoretically less controversial) element of the Israeli government’s proposed judicial reform: namely, the reform of the reasonableness standard. I really don’t wish to antagonise any of my regular readers, who range from the looniest of lefts to the most raging of rights. (How am I doing so far in not antagonising them?)

I’m not sure I can walk the tightrope of explaining this legislation without inflaming someone, but let me try. Broadly speaking, decades ago, the Supreme Court gave itself the right to apply judicial review against any adminstrative decision taken by the government on the grounds of it not being reasonable. Before you ask: ‘What did they mean by reasonable?’, let me ask you: ‘How long is a piece of string?’ The justices did not see fit to attempt to define reasonableness. So (back to Humpty Dumpty) a decision is unreasonable if a majority of the sitting Supreme Court justices deem it unreasonable.

A large segment of the population sees in the government’s total package of planned judicial reform a genuine threat to Israel’s democracy. For many of them, this first piece of legislation is the thin end of the wedge. They are therefore planning a National Day of Disruption tomorrow. The principal target of that protest will be the international airport, Ben Gurion. A similar, but smaller-scale, protest last week disrupted the smooth running of the airport but did not cause flight delays. At least one of the leaders of the protest has stated that it is not the object of this week’s protest to disrupt flights. However, it seems likely that there will be flight delays.

Technically, we land at Ben Gurion not on Tuesday, but in the early hours of Wednesday. In addition, disruption is likely to be caused to departures from and not arrivals at Ben Gurion airport. However, an El Al flight is due to depart from Ben Gurion at 11AM tomorrow morning and land in Lisbon at 3PM. I am assuming that this plane is scheduled to turn around and fly us back to Israel, departing at 10:25PM.

My expectation is that this flight from Israel will be disrupted and our flight will be delayed until Wednesday morning or cancelled and we will have to hope to get onto the following evening’s flight. My hope is that we will find out about the change of plan early enough to be able to change our arrangements without stress. Since Bernice will be reading this, I won’t tell you what my expectation is.

In either event (delay or cancellation), we will not be insured for the extension, since, in common with all travel insurance, we are nor covered for any of the actual reasons why flights are delayed in the real world. We will therefore incur additional costs in extending our travel insurance. An extension of our car rental will also incur an additional charge, which, the small print informs me, is not required to be at the additional daily rate. I will probably suggest to Bernice that we leave Penamacor as planned, return the car on time, and, if necessary, stay overnight in a hotel near the airport.

And after the elephant, we have the vignettes.

First, I have to update you on the neighbourhood supplies front. The neighbour who has been dropping round bags of fruit outdid herself last week. First, she brought about two-and-a-half kilo of plums, assuring Tslil that these were the last of her crop. The following day, she brought a second bag of plums, of equal weight, and a slightly smaller bag of peaches. All of this fruit, I have to say, was deliciously ripe and juicy. The plums were mouth-wateringly tart, and the peaches were sublimely sweet.

Tslil and I spent an hour or so pitting plums and making jam. By the time the jam was ready to pour into jars, the neighbour had brought yet another two kilos of plums round. Tslil has an electric fruit dehydrator, which she put to good use, and the following morning she and Tao went round handing parcels of dried fruit to neighbours. Having brought silan to Portugal, we will now be taking a jar of plum jam back from Portugal.

Next, another quick supermarket story that occurred this last week, and that is a typical foreigner experience. There is a local cheese that Micha’el is very fond of, called Castelões. Before we left for the super last week, I checked the pronunciation with Micha’el. At the cheese counter in the super, I thought I saw the cheese at the back, but the label was obscured by a price stake. When my turn came to be served, I pointed to the cheese wheel and asked ‘Castelões?’ in an almost perfect reproduction (you’ll have to trust me on this) of what Micha’el had said.

The assistant hesitated, looked at me questioningly, and, I presume, asked me what I had said. I pointed again and repeated the name. After three times, I leant as far as I could over the counter and pointed unmistakably at the specific wheel. “Ah! Castelões!!” the assistant declared triumphantly, pronouncing it, I promise you, exactly as I had. My every encounter with this language seems to bring its own humiliation.

In other news: While the Portuguese heath service is highly spoken of, it is probably true to say that it is more efficient in the large cities than the rural backwaters. Several months ago, Micha’el trod on a branch, and it seems that there may still be some foreign matter in his foot. The doctor has told him to have a CT at the hospital in Castelo Branco, for which he expects there to be a three-month waiting list. The other day, he phoned the hospital to make an appointment. After a fairly lengthy call, he reported to us that, in order to make an appointment, he has to physically bring the necessary papers to the hospital, which is, of course, 40 minutes’ drive away. Presumably, the documents exist in the health service’s computer system. However, he is still required to present them. He cannot email the documents, or upload them to the hospital website, or fax them; he has to bring them in person.

And finally this week, a car story. When I was growing up, the joke that did the rounds was of a friend who had applied to join the police force, but was rejected because they discovered that his parents were married. (This joke represents more or less the extent of my teenage rebelliousness. Pathetic, I know.) Well, we think we have discovered another ‘profession’ that has the same entrance requirement: vehicle road test examiner. The kids’ experiences in Portugal have been about the same as ours in Israel.

The examiners, who clearly relish the power they wield, appear to assume that every driver both understands car mechanics and has mastered the entire arcane vocabulary of the subject in (in our case) Hebrew or (for the kids) Portuguese. They also assume that every driver already knows the procedure for the test, and that when a mechanic who does not enunciate clearly, and who is standing in an inspection pit directly under the car, shouts a command that can barely be heard above other shouts, and revving of engines, and whirring of power tools, then the driver will hear and understand the command. When the driver makes a not unintelligent but mistaken guess at what he is being asked to do, the mechanic becomes either sarcastic or belligerent.

Tslil had to take their truck for its annual road test last week. In preparation, Micha’el replaced a damaged headlight cover and their mechanic (a near-neighbour) checked the truck, finding no reason why the vehicle should fail. On the day, more in hope than expectation, we all awaited the result. The truck failed the test, for the following, most aggravating, of reasons. When Tslil took the truck last year, it passed; she returned home triumphant, with the green certificate and the disc to display on the windscreen.

This year, when she arrived at the test centre with last year’s green certificate, the examiner tested the truck and then asked why none of the repairs required last year had been carried out. ‘What repairs?’ asked Tslil. “These four’, the mechanic replied, pointed to four clauses on last year’s green certificate that neither Tslil nor Micha’el had read.

In their defence, they took the truck to be tested last year and they got a green certificate, meaning that the truck had passed. Nobody pointed out to them at the time the list of repairs that had to be carried out before the next year’s test. If someone were to ask the mechanic why this wasn’t pointed out, he would probably reply that ‘everyone knows about it’. So now the kids have a week’s grace to carry out these repairs, and, in this part of the world, there is no such thing as a garage mechanic who will carry out repairs within a week. Time moves much more slowly here. All very frustrating!

To end on a happier note. Tao and Ollie enjoyed a day at the pool last week, and Raphael enjoyed a morning at the supermarket!

Ed Note: When Bernice read this post, she commented that it all sounded as though I wasn’t very happy with the world. I hereby undertake that next week, whether I am writing from the comfort of our own home office, or the discomfort of Lisbon Airport, I will endeavour to be less Eeyore and more Piglet.

By the time you read this, we will have been in Portugal for three weeks, which is a lot of book-reading, nursery-rhyme singing, rocking to sleep, playing in the park, magnetile construction (and destruction), puppet shows, craft projects, serving on pirate ships, and not a huge amount else. (Not that we are here for a huge amount else, to be honest.)

 I haven’t even managed to get my regular daily walk with Lua, who seems to have lost her enthusiasm for walking with me. On several days, after I let her off the lead at the start of the path off the road into the forest, she refused to go any further, whereas normally she relishes her walk. I must admit that the weather, even relatively early in the morning, has been oppressively hot, so I can’t completely blame her.

On the last couple of days she has spent a few minutes just standing looking at me walking on. She is completely unmoved by any amount of calling or whistling. When I gave up and attempted to walk back towards her to put her on the lead again, she simply turned around and trotted back home. So, I have lost the external incentive for my morning walk, and now it is a question of whether I have the discipline to go out anyway, by myself. I might try one more day with Lua, much earlier in the morning, although, to be honest, on the one morning I suggested that, she gave me one of her: ‘Have you completely lost your mind? It’s the middle of the night’ looks.

We did all go last Sunday, en famille, to a dammed-river reservoir ‘beach’ about a 35 minute drive away, which was very uncrowded (it did not officially open until 1 July), quite beautiful and great fun. There was a small children’s playground, a sand mini-football pitch, a huge clean sandpit, grass and vegetation, picnic tables, and a very pebbly beach, as well as a cafe-kiosk (that was not open yet) and clean toilets (that were). The river bed was equally pebbly, but the water was clear and cool. We all thoroughly enjoyed two or three late afternoon and early evening hours there, including a delicious picnic, until the sun set and we headed for home.

Apart from that, it’s been the usual cycle of playing, shopping and cooking. A week after arriving, we did our second big shop, going to Castelo Branco this time. This actually qualified as a day out for Bernice and myself, without the kids. We combined it with a couple of other errands – a guitar string for Micha’el (which we got right), a phone cover for Tslil (which we got wrong), and lunch at our favourite vegan restaurant, which every day offers a full set meal at lunchtime, including a main course comprising a tasting platter of four small portions.

This time, since the waitress spoke no English, the chef came out to explain the dishes. One of them was what he described as a traditional Portuguese dish comprising a cooked leaf in a dressing. He did not know the name of the leaf in English, but he explained that it is, in itself, quite bland, and the dressing makes the dish. The Portuguese name he gave sounded to me like ‘shparkosh’, and I tentatively asked if it was asparagus, but he assured me it was not. When it arrived, Bernice thought it looked like spinach or kale. In the dressing, it was very tasty.

A few days later, the kids’ near-neighbour, a very sweet, elderly lady who constantly brings them produce from her land, arrived with a huge bag of shredded leaf, which we realised was what we had been served at the restaurant. She explained that she has a special machine for shredding it very fine, since the leaves are very tough, and that it is cooked by boiling in water and used as the basis for a national dish, caldo verde, a soup or ‘green broth’ that often includes, in addition to onion, garlic and potato, a spicy pork sausage. Some research online convinced us that what we had was collard greens, which I see made their way to the Southern states where they were originally boiled in a broth and eaten by African-American slaves.

What is puzzling is that online, the Portuguese translation is given as ‘couve’, which is a (semantic) root that is used in cauliflower (couve-flor), brussels sprouts (couve de bruxelas) kohlrabi (couve-rábano) and so forth. I cannot find anything that sounds like what the chef told me was the name. I can only assume that it is a regional name.

The same neighbour who brought the collard greens, incidentally, has been plying us with figs (as well as plums and a couple of aubergines) since we arrived: large, ripe, sweet, bursting figs. Since only Tslil, myself and, we discover, Ollie, enjoy them, I am having a field day. They certainly add another layer of flavour and texture to my morning fruit salad and granola.

Back to our Castelo day. At the supermarket, Bernice and I divided, as usual. I shopped for the fresh fruit and vegetables, the nuts and dried fruits I use in making granola, and the fresh fish, while Bernice took on everything else. She covers more mileage than I do, but my cart is more fully laden at the end. Not that it’s a competition, you understand!

Just as I was finishing, Bernice came over to remind me that the last time (the first time) we had used this super, we had discovered at the checkout that we should have weighed, and printed out labels for, all of the items that we bought from dispensers (the loose nuts and dried fruit). It was quite embarrassing when we discovered this, and had to wait in mid-checkout while an assistant took these items and weighed and priced them, as the queue grew inexorably behind us.

Warned by Bernice, I now had to dig out these items, which were, of course, at the bottom of my very full cart. I then had to retrace my steps to the dispensers, and, for each item, find its particular dispenser, memorise the four-digit item code displayed there, go to the electronic scales (one on each counter), place the bag on the scale, punch in the code, then take the price-tag printout and stick it to the bag.

As I was finishing this for the six relevant items, I noticed, on the next counter, that all of the loose fruit and veg needed to be priced in the same way. This meant that I now had to juggle 90% of the items in my cart, praying that I didn’t miss anything buried under a mound of produce, then remember where the tray was that I had chosen the produce from, memorise the four-digit number, find the nearest electronic….you get the picture.

At some point in this process, I started musing whether the supermarket was offering its customers a service in this way, or exploiting us as unpaid labour. On the one hand, this method allows you to keep track of just how much each item is going to cost you. In addition, your checkout time is significantly reduced, and cashiers do not need to memorise dozens of codes.

On the other hand, even if you remember to weigh your items as you buy them, printing out your own price tags takes some time and effort. I genuinely cannot decide whether I regard it as a cunning ploy or a reasonable business policy. I will probably have to wait until our next trip, when, I hope, I will remember to weigh as I buy, to see how much of a bother it actually is, if you get it right the first time.

One way in which our shopping has been made easier is that I have discovered a list of kosher fish with their names in various European languages, produced by the KLBD (Kosher London Beth Din). Until now, I have had to google translate all of the names written (often barely legibly) on price stakes at the fish counter. This has often proved frustrating, for example when I do not recognise the name in English.

Bizarrely, the KLBD list is printed in alphabetical order of the English names, which is not much use for looking up Portuguese names. However, it was the work of only a few minutes to copy the list, paste into Excel, sort by Portuguese name alphabetical order, scale down the font and print out a list of 28 kosher fish that I can carry in my wallet. Of course, we have never seen more than four or five of them in any supermarket in this part of Portugal; however, we are now ready for any contingency. (If it is of interest to you, the list offers names for most European countries, and some destinations further afield from Britain.)

Which brings us more or less up to date. Meanwhile, our video chats are now with Raphael, for a change (and Esther). We see that his walking has come on, he is getting taller, and he says “Bye bye” when he’s had enough. All healthy developments.

And one more thing. All three of the boys enjoyed the sunshine and water in their garden(s) this week.

Last week I promised two examples of what can go wrong when you travel…and then had time to tell you about only one. So, this week, let’s start with the second.

There are, I am told, some people who, when tackling a jigsaw puzzle, just put their hand into the box, pull out a piece, look at the picture on the box-lid and decide where the piece goes. I’m very pleased to say that I’ve never actually met any of these people, but I suppose I have to believe that they exist, in much the same way as I believe in pygmies, despite never having met one.

Any truly civilised person knows that the correct way to tackle a jigsaw is to sift through the pieces, sorting out all of those with straight lines, and then to sift through the straight-line pieces, sorting out the four corner pieces. Once you have those four, you can put them in place; then you are free to continue to complete the frame, and then, and only then, can you tackle the middle.

Preparing to come to Portugal is rather like tackling a jigsaw. Every time we plan our next trip, we start with the four corner pieces, which allow us to set our dates. The first corner is checking with the kids, to ensure that our visit will not clash with a visit from Tslil’s parents, or other family or friends. Next is checking the Hebrew calendar, to see what constraints there are regarding any Jewish holidays. Next is our personal calendar, to see whether we have any unbreakable commitments. These days, these are more likely to be medical appointments than family celebrations. Finally, armed with all of this information, we see what our flight options are and make a firm booking, based on price and convenience.

The next set of tasks involves finding and putting in place all the jigsaw pieces with one straight side. There is a clear division of labour here. I deal with all of the ancillary arrangements: car hire, transportation to the airport in Israel, travel insurance, transferring money to our Portuguese account. Bernice, meanwhile, finds and puts in place far more pieces. She solicits from Tslil (and, these days, also Tao) a shopping list, and starts acquiring whatever clothes, food items, pieces of household equipment the kids need or would like. This trip, for example, included silan, shorts and a telescope: included, but was not remotely confined to, these items.

As we draw closer to our departure date, scarcely a day passes when Bernice doesn’t return from the mall with something. Ritual requires that she then make a declaration that “It really doesn’t matter if we don’t have enough room for this. It isn’t vital. We can take it next time.” I am required to reply: “Don’t worry! We’ve got plenty of room. We’ll manage easily.” This dialogue continues with little variation until the morning before we leave, when we start filling in the middle pieces of the jigsaw. This involves gathering from the four corners of the house everything we are taking and bringing down the suitcases.

Once everything is laid out on the sofas in the salon, I divide each pile into two, so that if one suitcase is lost in transit Tao will at least have some t-shirts, Micha’el will have at least one pair of sharwalim, we will have one bottle of grape juice for Tao and Tslil, and so on. At some point during the morning, I introduce a brief variation on our dialogue: “You know, I’m not 100% sure we’re going to be able to take everything.” However, in the end, through some alchemical process, everything we want to take is distributed between the pieces of luggage in such a way that the El Al clerk will let it pass, and, so far, we have never had to leave anything behind.

Apart from the flight, the only other preparation that I make very early is car rental, which almost always offers cancellation with full refund up to a day or two before the rental begins. This trip was no exception: I actually booked a car, through an online booking company (VIP Cars), three full calendar months before we flew. It is always a very reassuring feeling to print out the rental voucher and know that a second corner-piece of our trip is firmly in place. Or so I used to think, before this trip.

Picture my reaction when the following happened. On the day of our trip, we arrived at the airport in good time after a smooth trip by taxi and train. Checking in took a very long time, but everything went smoothly., We then made our way to Aroma in the departure lounge for a salad, while we waited for our flight to be called.

While I was sitting waiting for Bernice to bring our order, I received an email from VIP Cars, and was, by turns, puzzled, then horrified, then outraged, to read that (sic): “We have got an urgent update from the supplier, due to some technical issues Keddy car rental cant honor the booking, hence, instead of Keddy we will be providing you FREE UPGRADE car from Klass Wagen car rental from the same location in Lisbon airport and at the same price…Please acknowledge this email” (Puzzled, because Klass Wagen sounded to me like a joke; horrified, obviously, by the very sloppy punctuation; outraged, that our agreement was being broken so cavalierly at such short notice.)

I immediately acknowledged receipt of the email and sought further clarification. The key question was whether the pick-up point was still at the airport terminal. This is a big factor for us; since we have a lot of luggage and a three-hour drive from the airport, having to take a shuttle bus to an off-airport location is a major drawback, costing us effort and time. At Lisbon airport, car pickup is a level four-minute walk from the Arrivals terminal.

An exchange of emails followed, the upshot of which was that VIP were unable to provide me with any car from the airport. I assured them that I did not want an upgrade; negotiating the narrow, cobbled streets of Penamacor is enough of a challenge in a budget car. Even so, they claimed there was not a single car available at the airport. They assured me that Klass Wagen’s office was only a four-minute ride by shuttle bus from right outside the terminal, and sent me what seemed like clear details of where to pick up the shuttle bus, and the phone number of Klass Wagen in case anything went wrong, “but,” they assured me, “nothing will go wrong.” (Stop sniggering at the back.)

Basically, we had no choice but to accept. They sent me a new voucher and instructed me to print it out and present it at the desk. I pointed out, as my patience ebbed away, that I was already at the airport and hadn’t brought my printer with me. They quickly assured me that would not be a problem, as I could show the voucher to the company on my phone.

Our flight went smoothly (apart, of course, from the fact that I was worrying the whole time that picking up the car would prove a nightmare). Lisbon airport is in the middle of renovations, which meant that our walk from passport control to baggage pick-up was not the direct three-minute affair it usually is, but rather a twelve-minute trek against the traffic through the gate area and then the duty-free area for departures.

Despite the longer walk (which, to be honest, is never unwelcome after several hours in economy), we still arrived at the carousel some time before our luggage. However, both cases arrived safely, and we made our way out, as per instruction, through Exit 4, opposite the Vodafone shop, and the shuttle stop is in the second traffic lane.

There was, you may not be entirely surprised to learn, no shuttle bus waiting, and, indeed, no shuttle bus-stop waiting. Or, more precisely, there was a shuttle bus-stop, but it was a little too far from the Vodafone shop to be accurately described as “opposite”, and it gave no indication that it served “Klass Wagen” (although, to be honest, if I served a company called “Klass Wagen”, I’m not sure I would advertise it). I decided it would be wise to phone the rental company.

When I did so, I got an automated multi-option system. I had great difficulty hearing it, because we were standing in the middle of a four-lane drop-off and pick-up area. When I managed to tune my ear in, I realised that all of the instructions were in Portuguese, rendering it useless for me.

There was a taxi rank 50 metres away, and I was armed with the address of the rental company, so we trundled our cases over there to take a taxi, which I fully intended to charge to VIP Cars (a name that was acquiring a more ironic ring by the minute). The taxi dispatcher was very pleasant but too busy to really listen to our pathetic story and simply confirmed where the shuttle bus-stop was.

While we were attempting to make progress with him, a shuttle bus pulled up at the bus-stop and Bernice (who had just one case) raced to ask the driver to wait while I (who had a case and a carry-on case) lurched behind, expressing, at every kerb, amazement that the architects had not thought to provide ramps.

By the time I arrived, Bernice had established that, as I had suspected, this bus was an internal airport transfer bus. However, the delightful driver agreed to listen to the Portuguese menu on the rental company’s phone number, and to put me through to the right extension. I dialled the number, and heard the first message (the one I had missed when I phoned because of the ambient noise): “For English, press 1.”  The driver was kind enough not to look at me as if wondering whether I was allowed out alone, and wished us luck, while I got through to an English-speaking receptionist, who assured me that the shuttle-bus had already left their office for the airport, and that although there was, indeed, no bus-stop, he would stop opposite Vodafone.

So, it’s a four-minute ride, and the driver has already left. You do the maths. When did he arrive? That’s right, ten minutes later, which, in case you’re wondering, is just a little more than long enough for a couple of septuagenarians who started their journey 12 hours previously to start wondering whether they are going to be spending the night at the airport.

In fairness, from the moment the shuttle-bus arrived, everything went very smoothly…apart from the fact that the driver had obviously agreed to drop off his colleague who was going off-duty on the way. It actually did not seem to take us out of our way, and the entire drive was only about 12 minutes. The driver spoke very good English. He loaded and unloaded our cases, without being asked. The clerk who processed us was efficient and pleasant.

There was one small further twist when for some reason I couldn’t retrieve the voucher on my phone and the clerk couldn’t find our order on his printout, but everything was resolved in a minute or two (which, in case you’re wondering, is just a little more than long enough for a couple of septuagenarians who started their journey 12½ hours previously to start wondering whether they are going to be spending the night at the car rental office).

We eventually drove off in our Opel Corsa about half-an-hour later than we probably would have done if we had picked the car up at the airport. Incidentally, the clerk was in shock when I rejected the larger and more luxurious Skoda. I didn’t tell him that, if you drive a Kia Picanto – a car we really love – then a Corsa seems like a luxury car.

Fortunately, the rental office was only five minutes’ drive from the motorway that we take out of Lisbon, and we enjoyed an untroubled night-time drive, over three-quarters of which was on cruise control, which makes concentrating on the road so much easier and driving so much simpler.

Next week, I will endeavour to tell you something about what we have actually been doing here in the first half of our stay. Where did those two weeks go?!

Meanwhile, here’s something to tide you over.

Let’s start with the good news. We arrived safely in Penamacor after a very long day last Tuesday. I had woken at 4AM on Tuesday and been unable to get back to sleep. It appears that, as I get older, I worry more about travel arrangements not working out. We didn’t reach the house in Penamacor until 1:45AM. after a very easy drive: easy, but still almost three hours. Lua, taking her duties as guard dog very seriously, chose to bark warningly as I fumbled with the front-door key. (The door has always been temperamental. Sometimes I manage to catch it just right, and the key actually works, but Tuesday night was not, it is fair to say, one of those times.) This meant that we disturbed Micha’el’s sleep, which was not an entirely bad thing from our point of view since he took care of shlepping in the heavier luggage.

Everyone very kindly allowed us a lie-in on Wednesday morning…until 6:30. Bernice, of course, went straight into Nana mode, entering into all of Tao’s games, and offering a shoulder to Ollie which she was delighted that he took to almost immediately. It is no longer a surprise that Tao is very comfortable with us, but it was a delight to rediscover what a friendly, sunny and trusting soul Ollie is. We really are made to feel very very welcome by everybody (even Lua, once she had established that we weren’t breaking and entering),

Late morning we went to the excellent supermarket 30-minutes’ drive away. The boys had taken it in turns to come down with colds in the week before we arrived, and so Micha’el and Tslil hadn’t managed to do a big shop. We actually broke our Portuguese supermarket bill record this time, ably assisted by Tao. I am by now used to the fact that cashiers ask me whether I need a tax bill, because they assume we are buying for a modest hotel. Small-town Portuguese tend, so Micha’el tells us, to shop daily, buying small amounts each time. We seem to buy enormous quantities, and still seem to need to shop almost every day.

I just about managed the drive back from the supermarket before crashing for a three-hour nap, which made up for my twenty-two-and-a-half-hour Tuesday. Bernice, on the other hand, didn’t manage to catch up with herself until Shabbat, when she actually slept until 9AM. I think we are now both recovered from the exertions and stress of the journey, and are into Portugal mode.

The non-stop thunderstorms that Micha’el had warned us of disappeared just before we landed, and our weather has been hot (mid-high 30s) and sunny ever since. Fortunately, the house seems to enjoy its own mini ecosystem: the narrow street at the front is shaded by the houses on both sides, and is therefore significantly cooler than the backyard. The result is that, with the front windows, the glazed double doors between the living room and the kitchen, and the back doors all wide open, there is a cooling breeze blowing through the house for most of the day. This suits us.

The open windows and doors, unfortunately, also suit the house flies, but we choose to regard them as a necessary evil. It is remarkable what one can adjust to when there is no alternative. Lua devotes quite a lot of time to attempting to catch them in her mouth, but has yet to succeed.

Returning to the “exertions and stress of the journey”, I never fail to be surprised by the creative ingenuity of the unappeasable god of air travel. He always seems to be coming up with new ideas for things that can go wrong. This time he excelled himself in the stress stakes, with two original ideas.

When we come out to Portugal, we take an ‘overseas package’ of data and local calls and SMSs through our mobile provider. This is a very straightforward arrangement, in theory. (My more sensitive readers may have picked up on the fact that behind that casual phrase (“in theory”) lies a whole world of possibilities of practice deviating from theory.

To repeat: this is a very straightforward arrangement, in theory. I simply go online, log in to our account, select the package (available in a ‘buy one, get one free’ offer, so that Bernice can take the offer as well) and click Approve. So, on the Thursday before we flew (over four days before our departure) I went online. (My more sensitive readers may have picked up on the fact that behind that casual parenthetic phrase (“over four days before our departure”) lies an entire animated discussion with Bernice about the appropriate amount of time in advance that I should have arranged the overseas package.)

To repeat: I went online, then I logged in to our account, selected the package (available in a ‘buy one, get one free’ offer, so that Bernice could take the offer as well), and clicked Approve. At which point, up popped a message saying how excited out provider was that we were buying this package, explaining that we needed to speak to them directly to complete the process, and inviting me to WhatsApp them. I naturally retrieved my heart from the bottom of whatever hearts sink into when they sink, and WhatsApped a short message explaining the situation.

It is true that the more modern AI chatbots are uncanny in their impersonation of a human being. It is, sadly, equally true that the kind of automated messages that most service providers use gives themselves away as soon as they don’t open their non-mouths. This one responded to my message, in the cheery tone they all effect:

Hi! Thanks for contacting us on WhatsApp (smiley face icon)
We’re doing everything to respond just as quickly as possible. Meanwhile you can carry on with what you’re doing and we’ll be in touch soon. (smug smiley face icon)
You can also go into your personal zone on our webite and carry out all sorts of activities easily, quickly, and without waiting for a rep.

Pausing only to explain icily to the phone that “Actually, no, I can’t, because you won’t let me”, I carried on with what I had been doing (which was, you will remember, discussing ever more animatedly with Bernice what the ideal time would have been to order the package).

Astonishingly, not another minute had passed before a living, breathing rep WhatsApped me. It took just a little longer to explain the situation to him than I was prepared to allow him without wondering about his general intelligence, but, once we were on the same wavelength, he was soon able to clarify that the problem was that my current SIM card did not support the overseas package (although it had supported it three months previously, when it was in my old phone). All I needed to do (he informed me, employing even more smiling and heart-eyed icons than his bot colleague) was to collect a SIM card, free of charge, from any branch of a national chain of electrical retailers or an alternative chain of mobile shops, and then contact the provider to associate the new SIM to my mobile number.

I pointed out that we were flying on the following Tuesday and asked whether the whole process could be postponed until our return, but he regretted that that was not possible. He assured me there were several branches in Jerusalem, but I had already established that there was one only six kilometres from us, in Mishor Adumim. He was delighted to hear this, and we parted in very good humour.

On the morrow, I made my way to Mishor Adumim, and was given a new SIM with very little fuss. When I returned home, I phoned the provider, and spoke to a delightful rep who established, in just a couple of minutes, that I had been given a 4G SIM, whereas I needed a 5G one. I pointed out that it would have been useful to have had that explained to me in the first place. To her credit, she agreed. She asked where I had obtained it from, and, when I told her, she explained that that particular branch did not stock 5G SIMs, I mentioned, almost as an aside, how useful it would have been if her colleague of the previous afternoon had known that. To her credit, she agreed.

More than that. She seemed genuinely mortified, and assured me that she would instruct her Jerusalem office to courier the SIM to my house. Since this was now Friday noon, she explained that the office wouldn’t be able to process the request until Sunday, and the SIM would arrive only on Monday. She told me that if it had not arrived by 3PM on Monday, I should contact her again, so that there would still be time to deliver it.

In the event, the courier company made contact early on Monday, the SIM was delivered in the early afternoon, and it was associated to my mobile number in a matter of minutes. To our great surprise, our package worked as soon as we arrived in Portugal, both on my phone and on Bernice’s, even though she had not been told that she needed a new SIM. She had, indeed, been told (and I clarified this several times, believe me) that she did not need a new SIM, and this proved to be true.

So this first instance of exertion and stress was all in the days leading up to our departure…unlike the second instance, which, my word count tells me, I will have to leave for next week.

Just time for a reminder of what we come to Portugal for, and what we leave behind.

The world, they say, is divided into two groups of people. (Ed. Note: ‘They’, in that sentence, can be translated as ‘I’, as so often. Last week I invented friends to illustrate a point I wanted to make. Today, I’ve invented an entire swathe of society. Next week, the world!)

The world, they say, is divided into two groups of people: those who have one or more dirty little secrets that they don’t care to share with others, and – depending on which particular group of ‘they’ I am favouring today – either those who don’t, or those who pretend to themselves that they don’t.

I thought today I would remove another of Salome’s seven veils and share one of my dirty little secrets with you. When I read articles in The Times online, I am addicted to reading the comments from readers. Most people are shocked and horrified when I admit this, but let me attempt to justify my habit.

 A couple of different factors feed this addiction. First, it is always interesting to see how many comments it takes until two or more readers descend to personal abuse. Despite The Times’ algorithm for filtering and blocking comments based on the language used, creative readers are still quite able to be very unpleasantly abusive. Clearly, some of these readers come with a prior agenda. However, in other cases, it is simply part of the social media phenomenon that allows otherwise civilised individuals to feel no restraint in engaging in the kind of insulting exchanges that they would be horrified to witness, let alone to instigate, in a face-to-face encounter.

A second factor that draws me to these comments is that sometimes readers are able to contribute a personal anecdote that confirms, contradicts, or otherwise sheds more light on, the news story, op-ed article or obituary they are commenting on. These personal insights often add another dimension to my appreciation of the original story.

And then there are the serendipitous moments, one of which arose last week. A casual comment from a reader led me on a Google trail that uncovered a story that I found fascinating, and that I hope will tickle your fancy as well. It is a tale of tragic loss, hubris, irony, urban development and popular culture, and it begins on the Obituary pages of The Times.

On June 1, less than two weeks ago, Cynthia Weil died. I readily confess to wondering who she was when I first saw the obituary. However, experience has taught me that the Obituary pages are often the most interesting, and sometimes the most enlightening, in the paper, and certainly consistently contain the most uplifting stories in the paper – not that the bar is set very high in that regard.

I soon learnt that Cynthia Weil was the lyricist, and her husband Barry Mann the tunesmith, of an astonishing and wide-ranging collection of popular songs from the early 60s. Together, they wrote, inter tin-pan-alia, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ for the Righteous Brothers, On Broadway for the Drifters and We Gotta Get out of This Place, recorded by the Animals. I felt less embarrassed by my ignorance when I learnt that when Mann and Weil, staged, in 2004, a musical revue based on their songs, they named the show, ironically, They Wrote That?

The obituary made reference to the couple sharing a cubbyhole in New York’s Brill Building in the 1960s, a building that boasted many such upright-piano-equipped cubbyholes.

One of the commenters on the obit asked: ‘Who was Brill?’ For some reason, I found the question intriguing, and so I did some research. This is the story I uncovered.

A property on the corner of Broadway and 49^th Street was leased early in the last century to a men’s clothing store, Brill Brothers. In 1929, the Brills sublet to property developer Abraham Lefcourt, with the requirement that he build a structure to be completed no later than November 1931. Lefcourt, whose ambition exceeded his practicality, announced plans for the tallest building in the world at 1050 feet, with a $30 million price tag. This was a deliberate attempt to upstage both the Chrysler building, on which work had started, and the Empire State building, on which work was about to start.

Two factors made Lefcourt’s plans unrealistically grandiose. The first, for which he must take responsibility, was that the site he had sublet was a third of the area of the Chrysler lot, and a seventh of the size of the Empire State lot. Such a small area could not reasonably be expected to support so tall a building.

The second unfortunate fact, which Lefcourt, like many others, failed to foresee, was that, 25 days after he announced his plans on October 3, 1929, the New York Stock Market crash would begin. Ever an enterprising businessman, Lefcourt calculated that investors who survived the crash would prefer to put their money in bricks and mortar, and he started rethinking.

Then, just four months after his initial announcement, Lefcourt’s 17-year-old son Alan, who was the apple of his father’s eye, died of anaemia. Within a month, Lefcourt had filed plans with the authorities for a 10-storey office structure on the site, to be named the Alan E. Lefcourt Building, in his son’s memory.

The building was completed, in art deco style, in the spring of 1931. In a niche just below the parapet, 10 storeys above the main entrance to the building, sits a recessed plaster bust. In a second, lower, niche, just 20 feet above street level, and directly above the main entrance, is a much more prominent bronze bust. Both busts are believed to be of Alan Lefcourt.

Within a year of the building being completed, Abraham Lefcourt defaulted on his sublease, and the building reverted to the Brill Brothers, who reopened their store there. As early as 1932, the building became known as the Brill Building, and the only reference to Alan’s memory was the busts, which bear no plaque.

When Lefcourt Sr died, in December 1932, his net worth, which had stood at over $100 million in 1928, was declared as being $2,500, none of it in real estate.

Originally, the office floors above the store were leased by the Brills to a variety of ordinary businesses. However, by the 1940s, the building was already full of musicians. The composer Johnny Marks, who wrote Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer in 1949, had space in the Brill no later than 1950, and his firm, St. Nicholas Music, (don’t you love the name!) still has offices there. Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington and Nat King Cole were among others who rented office space in the building.

By 1962, the Brill Building contained 165 music businesses. A musician could find a publisher and printer, cut a demo, promote the record and cut a deal with radio promoters, all within this one building. The creative culture of the independent music companies in the Brill Building and the nearby 1650 Broadway came to define the influential “Brill Building Sound” and the style of popular song writing and recording created by its writers and producers.

Composers and lyricists who worked in the Brill Building in its heyday included (deep breath): Burt Bacharach, Jeff Barry, Bert Berns, Bobby Darin, Hal David, Neil Diamond, Luther Dixon, Sherman Edwards, Buddy Feyne, Gerry Goffin, Howard Greenfield, Ellie Greenwich, Jack Keller, Carole King, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Barry Mann, Johnny Mercer, Rose Marie McCoy, Van McCoy, Irving Mills, Fred Neil, Laura Nyro, Tony Orlando, Doc Pomus, Jerry Ragovoy, Ben Raleigh, Teddy Randazzo, Billy Rose, Neil Sedaka, Mort Shuman, Paul Simon, Cynthia Weil.

Here’s Carole King describing the atmosphere in the building:

Every day we squeezed into our respective cubby holes with just enough room for a piano, a bench, and maybe a chair for the lyricist if you were lucky. You’d sit there and write and you could hear someone in the next cubby hole composing a song exactly like yours. The pressure in the Brill Building was really terrific—because Donny (Kirshner) would play one songwriter against another. He’d say: “We need a new smash hit”—and we’d all go back and write a song and the next day we’d each audition for Bobby Vee’s producer.

These days, the building houses more offices related to the film-making than to the music-making industry, but in 2017 (the latest reference I could find) Paul Simon still had offices there.

In 2010, in recognition of its art deco design, its impressive facade and its contribution to the cultural history of the city, the Brill Building was officially designated a New York City landmark.

And yet who now remembers Abraham Lefcourt or (which would probably have grieved him more) his son, Alan?

Now, can you blame me for reading the comments following the articles in The Times? You really never know what you are going to turn up next.

Unlike readers of my blog, who always know what (or, rather, who) is going to turn up next. And here they are, right on cue: the lyricist, the performer and the tunesmith. Take your pick.

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.