If this turns out to be a very slight piece, I hope that, in the spirit of the (Jewish) season, you will forgive me. This has been a busy few weeks, what with Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and my brother and sister-in-law arriving for the first time in three years (blame that three-year absence, principally, on Iran and, equally, His Majesty’s Foreign Office, with its guidelines on foreign travel making travel insurance unobtainable for much of the time).

Anyway, they are now in Israel, and we hosted them last Shabbat, which was wonderful. We had a lot of catching up to do, but we managed to cover a reasonable amount of the agenda. Other opportunities are planned for later.

The plan was that, after Yom Kippur, I would be able to devote today to writing this week’s blog post. However, I had to go and select my lulav and etrog this morning, and then, after exercising and before showering, it seemed only sensible, as well as very much approved by tradition, to at least start ‘erecting’ our sukkah. As I have mentioned (‘gloated’, some might say) before, our pergola functions as our sukkah roof, and the house wall, the public shelter wall, and our dividing wall with our neighbour provide the required three walls for the structure to qualify as a sukkah. All that I need to do is remove and replace a single line of slats from the pergola, and, by that act, I have fulfilled the obligation to erect a temporary dwelling.

Bernice and I discussed my going onto the roof of the pergola, as I did last year, to remove the slats, since our pergola is very high and not reachable by our ladder. Inspired by the increased walking I did when we lent our car to Micha’el and Tslil during their month in Israel, and appalled by how out of shape I was, I started a daily regimen of exercises for the senior citizen. Combined with keeping up the walking, this means that I now feel in slightly better physical shape than a few months ago. We’re not talking Kevin Spacey in American Beauty here, but a little less couch potato.

In light of this, and much to my surprise, Bernice agreed that I could go up on the pergola roof, and, if I felt comfortable, I could do the raising and lowering of slates required. I agreed that, if I felt at all unsure, I would swallow my pride and come down. In the event, both the pergola and I turned out to be in better shape than might have been the case, and I breezed through the operation in a few minutes.

Even so, all those odd jobs have a way of adding up, and, by the time we sat down to breakfast, it had actually become brunch. I planned to start writing immediately afterwards, my only problem being that, as seems to be happening with increasing frequency lately, I had no ideas for a topic. In the spirit of the age, I gave the handiest AI on my phone – Copilot – my blogsite address, and asked it to read my posts and suggests a topic for today. Within seconds, I had a list of eminently sensible topics, all very accurately reflecting the flavour of my posts. However, and, perhaps, unsurprisingly, the list was rather uninspired and uninspiring, I find myself hoping that this is a reflection more on CoPilot’s limitations than on the unimaginativeness of my blog.

Just as I was about to lock myself in the office and sit in front of the blank laptop screen, Bernice reminded me that I have a routine specialist appointment tomorrow, and the specialist will want to see my latest blood test results and compare them to the previous numbers. I find the most useful way to present this to the specialist is to create an Excel spreadsheet with the two, or even more, sets of results side by side.

Fortunately, it is easy to download an Excel of each separate blood test result from our health fund’s website, and to combine those separate files into a single sheet. Of course, since the nurse filled 11 separate phials of blood last week (a personal record for me), I had to download 11 files and combine them into one sheet, which took a little time. I then faced the problem that my last couple of sets of tests (the specialist likes to see a full history) did not cover all of the tests I did this time, so I had to write a formula to allow me to match the relevant values on the spreadsheet. I know, of course, that AI could do all of this for me. I also know that it would take me a number of frustrating iterations to find a way to express clearly what I wanted from AI. I will, I suppose, have to face that learning curve at some time in the future, but early this afternoon didn’t really feel like that time.

Creating the Excel also presented another challenge. The test results online are presented in Hebrew format, reading from right to left. Name of test/Result/Normal range (or, rather, Normal range/Result/Name of test. The Excel generated by the site is, curiously, displayed from left to right. (If the one or two of my readers who can explain to me why this is so, they are welcome to try, but I don’t promise to stay awake.) I wanted to switch this to display from right to left. This is straightforward in Excel, but it raises some interesting questions. If you are displaying for a Hebrew reader a range of normality, should the minimum be on the right, so that it is read first, or on the left.

This is a question I first wrestled with when I started running the British Council’s English Language learning centre in Jerusalem. We were advertising evening courses. In a Hebrew-language advert, should a course that runs from 7 to 9 on Sunday (ימי א’) evenings be presented like this:

ימי א’ 19:00-21:00

or like this:

ימי א’ 21:00-19:00

If your eye is reading from right to left, it seemed to me natural to start with the starting time; in other words, to put the starting time on the right, so that the eye sees it first.

Even though we had not been in the country many years at this stage, I already knew that the correct address for such a question, if I wanted an authoritative answer, was the Academy for the Hebrew Language, a body less draconian than its French equivalent, but, nevertheless, the ultimate authority on questions of usage and vocabulary. Unsatisfyingly, the answer I received was that both styles are used. In the end, I chose the second option as less challenging for the reader, and nobody ever questioned it.

It strikes me now that there might be situations where the expression of the time-frame might be ambiguous. If, for example, a particular medical test was conducted using a very expensive piece of equipment, of which a hospital could only afford one, tests might be carried out 24 hours a day. If a test took 12 hours, there would be no way to know whether 09:00-21:00 meant that the test started or ended at 09:00. In such a case, I suppose one would have to write: From 21:00 to 09:00, or: From 09:00-21:00

Anyway, by the time I had manipulated and sanity checked the data in my Excel, and printed out the copy I need tomorrow, it was mid-afternoon, and I still had no idea what I was going to write about today.

Which is why there is no blog post this week.

And, for those who care, the relevance of this week’s title is a line coined not by the long list of politicians who stole it at various times in the 1980s, but, apparently, by Bob Thaves, an American cartoonist of whom I confess I had never heard. In 1982, he drew a cartoon in which three characters are looking at a sign for a “Fred Astaire Film Festival”. One character says the following: “Sure he was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, … backwards and in high heels.”

With Yom Kippur behind us, it is, astonishingly, as every year, already time to wish you Chag Sameach for Sukkot, which begins this Friday evening. Weather permitting, next week’s post will come to you from our Sukkah. (At this stage, it isn’t easy to guess whether excessive heat or a rain shower is more likely to make that an unrealistic hope.)

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