Last week, I promised to keep you posted on the missing documents saga. You may remember that Micha’el was told that their package of original documents returned by the authorities had been picked up from Castelo Branco Post Office, although they did not know by whom; all they knew was that, whoever it was, it was definitely not anybody who had any right to pick it up.
Then, a few days later, a neighbour stopped Tslil on the street, and said: ‘By the way, there’s a package for you at the petrol station.’ 10 months in Portugal have taught the kids that things that make no apparent sense may still have a logical explanation. Sure enough, when they went to the petrol station, there was a parcel waiting for them, containing the documents. Apparently, the clerk who had addressed the envelope had omitted from the address both the house number and the village (Penamacor). Instead of (as it were):
26, Something Street Penamacor Castelo Branco
the parcel had been addressed to:
Something Street Castelo Branco
It had therefore been sent to Castelo Branco, where the postman had, of course, failed to find the street. Realising the mistake, the authorities redirected it to Penamacor, knowing that there is a street of that name in the village. However, since it was missing a house number, the postman could not deliver it, and so he handed it in at the petrol station, to be claimed from there. ‘Why the petrol station and not the post office?’ you ask. Good question! If I had to hazard a guess, I would say because very few people go to the post office regularly, whereas everyone uses the petrol station, and the proprietor, knowing where everyone in the village lives, can mention to the next resident of the street who stops by that, when they see the Orlevs, they should tell them that there is a parcel waiting for them.
‘Why, then, did the postal authorities tell Micha’el that the parcel had been collected?’ you ask. Full of good questions this week, aren’t you! Well, you see, in order to leave the parcel at the petrol station, the postman had to get the proprietor to sign for it.As far as the Post Office was concerned, this meant that the parcel had been delivered. There you are, you see: a logical explanation. It may not make any sense, but it’s logical!
Every confrontation the kids have with Portuguese bureaucracy confirms what I said when we first made aliyah. We started off at an absorption centre: this was a wonderful arrangement, since, whatever bureaucratic nonsense we experienced on any given day, we would always be able to find someone among our neighbours who had had the same experience a few days, or weeks, or months earlier, and who could reassure us that everything would work out in the end. Despite that, someone or other (usually, you may be interested to know, an American – I just report the facts as they are; I don’t comment on them) would regularly rant about the Israeli authorities and their Byzantine bureaucracy and incredible inefficiency. Incidentally, the bureaucracy was indeed Byzantine, since much of it was a remnant of the days when this neck of the woods was part of the Ottoman empire. Israel even adopted a little of the Ottoman bureaucratic vocabulary, notably the splendid Turkish word for rubber stamp – gushpanka.
Whenever I heard such a rant, I would respond in the same way. ‘Have you ever tried to immigrate to the USA? Ask someone who has what the process is like!’ This was, of course, in one sense, an unfair comparison, since we all, as Jews, enjoyed the Right of Return to Israel, which isn’t the case for most would-be immigrants to the USA. However, it is fair to say that no native-born national ever really appreciates how daunting the immigrant experience is. You know none of things that ‘everyone knows’; you only find the right way of doing something by doing it wrongly first; and, of course, you can’t really understand anything anyone says in an office, much less on the phone. The best pieces of advice we were given were: ‘Always bring a small child’ and ‘When all else fails, cry’. We have, of course, passed this advice on to the kids.
What I don’t know is whether Portuguese bureaucracy follows the British or the Israeli model. In Britain (in my experience), if a clerk in a Government office tells you ‘Impossible!’, there is no point in arguing. Even if what you are requesting is, in fact, possible, you will never get the clerk to admit to being in error, and, if it is impossible, then you will never get the clerk to bend the rules.
In Israel, by contrast, ‘Impossible’ is nothing more than the clerk’s opening gambit in a protracted negotiation. We once knew an immigrant from Britain who applied for an Israeli heavy goods licence, even though his British driving licence only qualified him to drive a car. He arrived at the relevant licensing authority at eight o’clock one morning, and, on being told that he was not eligible for a heavy goods licence, argued for an hour and a half, and then announced that he was not moving from the office until he had his licence. Those of you who live here will not be surprised to hear that he left the office at the end of the day with a heavy goods licence (which, thankfully, he never used).
Sadly, official Portugal sounds, at this point, more like Britain than Israel. However, Micha’el’s people skills are so good, and Tao is so adorable, that my money is on them. (Be honest: could you say ‘No’ to this child?)
I’m sure the kids will eventually achieve what they need to do in order to move on to developing the land as they want and achieving permanent housing. Fortunately, Micha’el and Tslil are keen players of Go, and so they know all about playing the long game.
Last Tuesday, my heart leapt when I read the following 6-word WhatsApp from Micha’el: The container is 90 km from here…!!! My heart actually leapt twice. The first leap was because this represented the beginning of the end of a process that has been going on for almost a year. Anyone who has relocated to another country will know what a milestone moment it is when you are reunited with all the possessions that you have been making do without for far too long.
The second leap was because I have felt increasingly guilty over the last weeks. I was even considering, (be warned: there is a very bad pun coming up….in Latin) of renaming my blog Paenemacorrespondent*, because it seems a very long time since I wrote anything about Portugal or the kids. I just hadn’t been able to think of anything new to say about Portugal. Some of you have been kind enough to comment favourably on my last few musings, but, at the same time, I know there are some readers who would rather learn about life in Portugal than follow my thoughts on aspects of culture. So, I am thrilled to announce that today we have the saga of Micha’el and Tslil’s container, with which they have now been reunited….well, what they’ve really been reunited with is all of their stuff that was in the container. In other words, I am really using the container for the thing contained, which is one of the types of the figure of speech known as synecdoche. For example, you can say We downed a keg to mean We drank all of the beer in a keg. I am particularly proud of the synecdoche: Mich’ael and Tslil are thrilled to be reunited with their container, because it is, I would argue, the very best example imaginable of using the container for the thing contained, using, as it does, the container as the container for the thing contained.
I cannot hear the phrase empty nesters without a wry smile forming on my lips. (It all ties up; trust me.) When fledglings leave a nest, they leave behind them an empty shell, which their parents can easily nudge over the edge of the nest, perhaps one or two downy feathers that the wind carries away, and nothing else. When our fledglings left the nest, they left behind them twelve years of school notebooks (Esther), a library of impenetrable Eastern philosophy and shamanic and hallucinogenic studies (Micha’el), a wardrobe of clothes that no longer suited her (Esther), a wardrobe of perfectly decent clothes that he had no intention of ever wearing again (Micha’el), cuddly toys (Esther), death’s-head ashtrays (Micha’el), assorted mementoes, keepsakes, albums, old tents, useful pots for putting things in, useful things for putting pot in….and that’s just the top layer.
However, Micha’el’s room, at least, didn’t stay that way for long. Last August, Micha’el and Tslil gave up their flat in Jerusalem and moved in with us, bringing with them everything they had not sold or given away (paid forward, as it were). Then, five or six weeks later, they flew to Portugal, having boxed up everything they wanted to ship and left it in Micha’el’s room. Their original plan was to buy space in a commercial shipper’s container. However, they eventually decided that things would be less complicated if they took space in the container that their colleague Shir was planning to ship. Things would be less complicated… There’s another one of those clauses that you just know is going to come back and bite you.
Shir had already found two others to share the container. Splitting the transport costs four ways certainly seemed to make sense. Unfortunately, both of those others fell through, but then they found someone else to come in.
Of course, this meant that the kids’ boxes needed to get to Tuval, in the North of Israel, where Shir’s container was leaving from. However, their arrival needed to be co-ordinated with the arrival of the other contributions (date as yet unknown), and with the shipping date (as yet unknown). So, the kids moved to Portugal, leaving us to hope that we would be given at least an hour’s warning of when the removal men were coming. As you would expect in any plan (and I use the word plan in a sense so loose that its original coiner would not recognise it) involving three separate laid-back thirty-somethings, things remained fairly fluid until half-an-hour before the removal men arrived. Bernice is much better at going with the flow than I am (I’m more of a major-blockage-in-the-pipe man myself), so I allowed her to handle that headache, while I muttered about people who swan off to the other side of the world and expect things to just fall into place.
However, despite my scepticism (I had envisioned Esther having to dispose of the kids’ stuff when she was clearing the house after Bernice and I both die), the day did come, and the boxes did go, and we were able, once again, to enjoy looking at the walls, and opening the wardrobe, in Micha’el’s bedroom. Life is full of small pleasures; we felt as though we had just followed the Rabbi’s instructions and moved the goat out of the house again.
So, everything arrived at Tuval, where the container was packed, driven to the port, and shipped to Europe.
There are two ways to organise shipping a private container to Portugal. The expensive, hassle-free way is to hire a shipper to pick up the container in Israel, drive it to the docks, ship it to Lisbon, release it from the docks and drive it to Penamacor. Hassle-free is undoubtedly good, but expensive is less so; indeed, Shir felt that the good of hassle-free was outweighed by the bad of expensive, and so the kids decided to let him handle the whole process, instead of paying someone,
Unfortunately, because of Corona, the journey took longer than expected, but, eventually, Micha’el was notified that the container was at the docks in Lisbon, and they could start the process of releasing it. Since Shir is currently in Israel, it fell to Micha’el and Tslil to handle that process. This first involved registering with the shipping company as the people picking up the container. Micha’el submitted all the documentation, which was approved. The kids wisely decided that, rather than attempting the round trip in one day (a three-hour drive in each direction with who knew how many hours at the docks in the middle), they would book themselves into an airbnb in Sintra, a beautiful national park adjacent to Lisbon, and have a couple of days’ break.
Those of a nervous disposition should probably stop reading here.
The kids had been having some trouble with their car overheating, which had been fixed by their garage in Penamacor. We’re talking here about a car that has seen a lot of mileage, but that seems to be in pretty good shape for its age. Since our first car cost us £10 (the equivalent of about £130, or US $165, today), we have sympathy with their lifestyle choice. Our first car, incidentally, broke down frequently, but never more than half-a-mile from home, which, considering that we used it to travel 180 miles from South Wales to London several times, was remarkably generous of it.
Micha’el and Tslil decided to drive to Lisbon in the early evening, in the hope that Tao would sleep for most of the journey. However, along the way, the car started overheating, and they had to stop repeatedly and let it cool down before topping up the radiator. Their journey took seven hours, rather than the expected three, so that they arrived in the middle of the night, exhausted and very worried about how they were going to manage.
A search online revealed a garage a 7-minute drive from where they staying, with warm recommendations from several customers, and Micha’el drove the car over in the morning and managed to explain the problem to the mechanic, who agreed to take a look and then contact them so that they could decide on how to proceed. Micha’el then took the 40-minute walk back to their bnb.
Next stop was the port, where he learnt that, although they thought they had paid all the required fees, they had indeed paid the necessary taxes to the shipping company, but not the customs fees. Nobody had mentioned the customs to them because, as Israeli residents importing their personal and used possessions into Portugal, where they now resided, they were entitled to a customs waiver. However, in order to qualify for this waiver, they needed to have received a letter of authorisation from the Portuguese embassy in Tel Aviv that it was, indeed, the case that they were Israeli residents importing their personal and used possessions into Portugal. Nobody had mentioned this authorisation to them. (Speaking personally, this is the point at which I would have regretted not arranging shipment door to door.) Without the authorisation, they could not release the container from the port. Apart from the fact that this meant that their entire journey had been wasted, they were also in danger of incurring prohibitive storage charges while they sorted out the paperwork.
In the middle of all this, the garage mechanic phoned Micha’el to discuss the car. Now, I don’t know about you: I am told there are people who, while not themselves car mechanics, can understand car-mechanic speak. I’m not sure I believe that; in any event, I am not one of this super-breed. I certainly can’t understand a mechanic speaking to me in Hebrew – and that is after 33 years in Israel, and also regardless of the fact that much of Hebrew car-mechanic vocabulary is derived from English. (I believe this is a result of British mandatory army vehicle repair before the state was founded, when the Hebrew language was being dragged into the 20th Century.) I am, therefore, full of admiration for Micha’el, who was able, after less than a year in Portugal, to discuss car repairs with a mechanic, in Portuguese, over the phone.
In the event, the garage was able to carry out repairs, replace a few parts, and make the car roadworthy again, for less than the car had cost the kids originally! Their journey home from Lisbon was smooth and uneventful, and the car has not overheated at all since then. So, that was one good outcome.
Once home, the kids, and, independently, Shir in Israel, applied to the Portuguese Embassy, and, after some delay, Shir obtained the necessary authorisation. We still haven’t received the kids’, but that may be a reflection on the efficiency of the Maale Adumim postal service, rather than the Portuguese Embassy. Shir fedexed the original documents to the authorities in Lisbon, and, a week ago, the container was released. A couple of hours later, Micha’el sent us the message I started with today.
Sure enough, a little while later, the lorry arrived, with the container on its bed. The driver leapt cheerfully down from his cab, and asked: ‘So, where’s the crane?’, just as Micha’el was thinking: ‘So, where’s the crane?’. Micha’el pointed out that he had ordered and paid for a crane together with the lorry, and that the haulage company was supposed to provide it. After some hasty consultation, the hauliers agreed that it was their responsibility, a nearby 12-ton lifting crane rental company was found (no, I wouldn’t know where to look for one, either) and, in almost less time than it takes to tell, the kids had a container sitting on their land.
When Shir is next in Portugal, he will move the container to his own land. Meanwhile, the other family who took space have collected their boxes. Micha’el and Tslil have started taking their stuff, most of which they will transport back to the house, to use straight away (musical instruments, tools, clothes) or to store in the loft (most of the equipment whose purpose I know nothing about). The big furniture (their bed and a chest of drawers) they plan to keep in the container until their tipi is erected.
Incidentally, when I sent my notes to Micha’el, for him to confirm the sequence of these events, he added that there is a new and exciting development this week. Someone else in Castelo Branco apparently signed for the package containing all of the original documents they had been required to submit, and so it has not arrived. Micha’el is ‘trying to sort it out now’, so this horror story may well still have a twist or two left in it.
To learn how Micha’el and Tslil manage to stay sane through all this, view their latest YouTube video.
*If you didn’t have a Classical education, then, just this once, I’ll tell you that paene is Latin for almost. But please try to plug the gaps in your education before the next Latin pun comes along.
In any normal year, Monday night this week would have been a time in Israel for staying indoors and closing all the windows, because, as many of you know, Lag b’Omer started on Monday night. As with many Jewish traditions, just exactly what we are marking on Lag b’Omer is open to argument discussion: the ceasing of the plague that killed thousands of Rabbi Akiva’s students; the beginning, almost 1900 years ago, of the rebellion against Roman rule that was led by Bar Kochba, and supported by Rabbi Akiva; the death of one of the very few of Rabbi Akiva’s disciples to survive the revolt, Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai, the putative author of Judaism’s major mystical work, the Zohar (which could be translated as Incandescence). Or, possibly, all of the above.
Hundreds of thousands, mostly ultra-orthodox, Israelis flock on Lag b’Omer to Mount Meron, to the grave of Rabbi Shimon, to celebrate the mystical secrets that he allegedly shared on his death-day, by singing, dancing, and, principally, by lighting large bonfires, evoking the spiritual light that the Rabbi brought to the world.
This ritual is replicated thousands of times, in every community in Israel, as teens and pre-teens indulge their pyromaniac tendencies. Indeed, from the day after Pesach, from Metulla in the north to Eilat in the south, no piece of wood that is not firmly nailed or glued in place is safe, and the streets are full of purloined supermarket carts laden with planks, offcuts, branches, all pushed by young boys, some not old enough to see over the handlebar.
Then, on the night itself, I don’t recommend driving down Road 1, the main artery in Jerusalem leading from the North and East. At one point, this road skirts the Old City walls on one side, and ultra-religious neighbourhoods on the other side; on Lag b’Omer, ranged along that side of the pavement, a series of huge bonfires blaze away between the traffic and the apartment buildings, and threaten both. If you’ve ever wondered what the height of stupidity is, look no further: it’s about 2 metres.
Or so I thought, until last year. Take a trip with me, now, through space, from the Eastern end of the Mediterranean to the Western end, and through time, from mid-May to late December, and join me at the madeiros of Portugal. Another religion, another tenuous tradition, and another set of bonfires.
In very many towns and villages throughout Portugal, in the days leading up to 25 December, piles of firewood are brought from the forest to the town square, where a huge bonfire is built, and lit, on 24 December, symbolically to warm the newborn infant child. Historically, the gathering of the wood was undertaken by young men about to be enlisted in the army. These days, the collection is non-gender-specific. Historically, there were two methods of collection. Generous landowners would have their contribution of wood paraded into the town centre, with festivities and glasses of the traditional wine-based spirit, jeropiga, all at the landowner’s expense. Less generous landowners would have wood stolen from their lands by the peasants, and these ‘offerings’ would be deposited in the town square at dead of night, with no ceremony. These days, the felling, sawing and transportation of the wood is a highly controlled process, coordinated with the Forestry Commission.
Ideally, the fire, once lit on the night of 24 December, should burn constantly for the next 12 nights. Over the years, quite naturally, rivalries grew up between neighbouring towns, as to which could produce the biggest and best madeiro, and it was not unheard of for the young bloods of one town to steal the firewood from the pile of a neighbouring town, again under cover of darkness.
A brief etymological aside. When I first encountered the word madeiro, which I assumed meant bonfire, my excitement was intense. The word for bonfire in Hebrew is medura, and the two seemed like cognates, words (often in two different languages) that have a common etymological origin and, in this case, an identical meaning. I suspected that the Portuguese Sephardic Jews had adopted the Portuguese word. However, my research revealed that medura is a word used by the prophet Ezekiel, and is from the root DOR (דו”ר) with the meaning circular. From the same root come the words dor meaning a generation, and davar meaning a postman, who delivers letters on his round. A medura, as any good boy or girl scout knows, is made by placing logs in a circle and then lighting them.
Now I was excited in the other direction: perhaps the Portuguese had borrowed the word from the Sephardi Jews. Alas, it seems not: madeiro actually means a log or beam, and is from the Latin materia, meaning wood, or material/matter, and ultimately deriving from the Proto-Indo-European for mother, presumably in the belief that all matter is born from the Mother.
So, I now have a philosophical question. If two words in different languages look very similar, and have the same meaning, but are not etymologically related, should we regard them as true cognates, or false cognates? At this point, I’m guessing that some of you don’t find this quite as urgent a question as I do, so let’s get back to the main theme of today’s meander.
I was interested to learn that Beira (the province in which Penamacor is situated) is the area of Portugal most ‘into’ madeiros, and that the string of villages and towns north of Castelo Branco are the most fanatical, and that the jewel in that crown, the biggest, tallest, longest-burning madeiro in all Portugal is the one gathered, erected, and ignited every year in Penamacor. On 6 December, the logs are brought into town, the bonfire is erected, and the Penamacor fire is actually lit on the night of 23 December, a day earlier than everywhere else.
The biggest, tallest, longest-burning madeiro. But what, exactly, does tall mean? Or, to repeat my question, what is the height of lunacy? Well, early last December, the kids took Tao down to the village square, when the bonfire had been erected.
I am informed that in Penamacor – in, you may remember, the heart of forest-fire country – the madeiro, which, as you can see, is erected less than two metres from buildings on either side of the village square, has sometimes been built over 10 metres high.
Incidentally, you can see a sign near the top of the woodpile. I originally assumed the sign, with its legend Malta 1999, was commemorating Penamacor’s gold medal in the Mediterranean Madeiro Games of 1999, held that year in Malta. However, it actually means Cohort of 1999, referring to the 20-year-olds who in 2019 took the lead in wood collection, and who were, of course, born in 1999. The background of the sign actually shows a pile of logs, each of which bears the name of one of the cohort.
Despite the fact that, once it is alight, firemen play hoses on the edges of the bonfire continuously, the kids decided it would not be responsible parenting to bring Tao down once the fire was lit, so I can only offer you some footage from the provincial news station. You can see the madeiro in all its glory here.
I mentioned responsible parenting earlier. In this context, let me share a couple of recent pictures of Tao with you.
Another birthday present? You really shouldn’t have!You mean it’s not for me?
Well, there’s a topical….topic, eh? But don’t worry: I’m not going to harangue you about toilet paper or eggs. The stockpiling I am talking about is considerably more metaphorical than that. When I started writing this blog, I very quickly discovered that a) many of my best ideas came to me in the small hours, when I was lying in bed trying unsuccessfully to persuade my bladder that it really didn’t need emptying and b) many of those best ideas would, by the morning, have melted away like the snows of yesteryear (What a clumsy phrase, with its harshly sibilant ‘s’ and ‘z’ in ‘snows’ and its ridiculously excessive indulgence of ‘y’ and ‘e’ in ‘yesteryear’; how much more appropriately evanescent are the softly nasal, liquid, ‘nei…’ and ‘an…’ of ‘neiges d’antan’.)
The solution, I soon discovered, was to jot down a note on my phone. Once I had started to do this, I found myself diligently adding to it, both in real time when we were in Portugal, and while recollecting in tranquility in Israel. In very little time, I had a list of 15 or so topics; armed with this stockpile, which I have occasionally added to even in the last few weeks, I have never been at a loss for what to write about in my next post.
However, this morning, in one of the fits of obsessive-compulsive spring-cleaning that the current unpleasantness has brought out in me, I got out the metaphorical stepladder and climbed up to go through the entire list with a critical eye, stretching to retrieve those packets stuck at the back of the cupboard that were well past their sell-by date, pulling out a couple of cartons that I’d already served up at least once, seizing one or two jars that I decided I couldn’t possibly serve to a mixed audience. All of these I binned, and discovered that my stockpile had dwindled down to the literary equivalent of two tins of baked bins, a packet of stale crackers and the following (I hope slightly more appetizing) snack.
In that spirit of virtual cultural tourism that we are all, I suspect, seized by these days (before we settle down to watch The Lego Movie), let me guide you round Penamacor’s municipal museum. This is something of an anomaly, being funded not by the EU, but rather by the municipality itself. The museum was founded by the local council in 1949, with the sole and very specific initial intention of preserving Penamacor’s charter (explanation later).
After a long period of stagnation, a new director was appointed in 1982 to reform the museum. This reform has included stocktaking (you see how I’m sticking closely to this week’s theme) and dusting off the exhibits, rehousing the museum in the old Military Headquarters and carrying out extensive renovation, and finally mounting an entirely new major exhibition. The result is a museum that is a surprisingly handsome asset for the village, and that does not charge an admission fee.
The new exhibition is the first that visitors encounter when they enter the museum. It is devoted to the development of man’s measurement of time. This is a more appropriate subject for the museum than you might first think, given that the villagescape of Penamacor is dominated by the castle bell tower, and that the silence of the village is punctuated every quarter hour by the chiming of the bells in the tower’s belfry, and, on the hour, by the striking of the hours from that belfry. However, rather undermining the general thrust of the exhibit, which celebrates the accuracy of human timekeeping, the chiming on the hour of the castle bells is followed an aggravating one-and-a-half minutes later by the striking of the same hours from the main church’s belfry. Mind you, this could be viewed as testament to the message of the exhibit, since the interval between the two chimings is always an undeviating 90 seconds.
When I visited, not knowing anything of the museum’s contents, I was a little nonplussed (now there’s a word I don’t get to use anywhere near often enough) to be confronted as I rounded the first corner by a splendid photo of Big Ben by night (or rather, as the explanatory text explains, ‘the bell tower of the Palace of Westminster, which is popularly known as Big Ben, whereas Big Ben is , in fact, the 14-tonne bell‘). Anyway, this sight made me feel anchored, and I enjoyed the rest of the exhibit, which explained clockwork mechanism and traced the restoration of Penamacor’s clock towers, overseen by a renowned local horologist.
This exhibit led to a second room, a large hall divided in two by a row of potted plants. The first half of the hall houses a number of displays, behind glass. These include the development of the sword and the musket through Portuguese military history, a collection of historical coins, and a range of historical scientific instruments. In the centre of the floor space are two rather splendid 19th-Century carriages. This room served to remind me that Portugal was not always one of the poorer backwaters of Europe, but indeed enjoyed what can be regarded as a glorious, or, conversely, ignominious, history as a naval imperial power. As I walked round, I found myself humming Rule Britannia.
Incidentally, I spent many years lustily singing that anthem without once thinking about the arrogance of the lyric. Listen with me (the emphasis is mine).
When Britain first, at Heav’n’s command Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of the land And guardian angels sang this strain:
Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves Britons never shall be slaves
The nations not so blest as thee Must, in their turn, to tyrants fall. ……
You get the idea!
The second half of this large, airy room houses a collection of Christian statuary. I must confess that I gave this only a quick glance, because I had postponed my visit to the museum until a couple of days before we were coming back to Israel, and I only had 30 minutes before closing time.
Beyond the hall is a narrow vestibule, on the long walls of which hang what I imagine were the original exhibits: Penamacor’s charter and coat of arms, and a small exhibit devoted to Antonio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, who, as the more attentive of you will remember, is Penamacor’s most famous son. Having devoted an entire post to Ribeiro Sanches, let me talk about the charter. The legality of any city, town or village in Portugal was established, in medieval times, by the granting of a royal charter, or foral. Penamacor’s foral was granted in 1209.
This included the institution of a rather splendid coat of arms for the city (as it was then), featuring the following symbols:
Crescent – marking the Moorish conquest
Scimitar – indicating that it is a military stronghold
Key – alluding to the castle being close to the border
Balled Cord – representing a single will in the defence of the national territory
Leading off this vestibule are two further rooms. One houses a collection of everyday household furniture and tools, including a splendid loom, and the other features examples of the taxidermist’s art, in the form of the most notable of the local fauna, arranged in dioramas. I hope the photograph captures the eerie lifelessness of the exhibits. What it does not capture is the darkess of the room, lit only by the light in the dioramas. I felt as though I had walked into the tunnel of a fairground ghost train, or onto the set of a zombie film. The most prominent creature here is the Iberian lynx, which, having died out in the wild in Portugal, has been bred in captivity and is being reintroduced in many areas of its natural habitat, including the Serra da Malcata, the range of hills east of Penamacor that form a national park and nature reserve.
That concludes our tour of the Penamacor Municipal Museum. Admission is, as I stated, free of charge, but, should you wish to tip your guide, you might care to visit the kids’ latest video on their youtube channel, which features some lovely close-ups of their land and their son (who also happens to be our grandson – did I mention that?)
I’m not really keen on using a song title from My Fair Lady. I agree that the film looks ravishing, with its Cecil Beaton costumes; Rex Harrison and Wilfrid Hyde-White are beautifully matched as Higgins and Pickering; Audrey Hepburn as Eliza manages a cockney accent that is considerably better than Dick van Dyke’s in Mary Poppins (mind you, that isn’t setting the bar very high) and Stanley Holloway is magnificent as Doolittle. The music is always worth listening to, and, in addition, the plot, much of the dialogue, and even many of the song lyrics, are extremely faithful to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, on which the musical is closely based. “And yet” (to quote from Accustomed to Her Face), there is, for me, a moment when it all falls apart in an act of outrageous treason to the story it has told. Let me explain.
At the end of the last scene in the play Pygmalion, Eliza, exasperated by Higgins’ imperious treatment of her, tells him that she will never see him again. He then asks Eliza to “order a ham and a Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves, number eights, and a tie to match that new suit of mine, at Eale & Binman’s. You can choose the color.” Eliza disdainfully tells him to buy them himself and sweeps out. In a typically didactic epilogue, Shaw explains that Eliza marries Freddy. He prefaces this explanation with the following comment:
The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories.
Perhaps it would be kindest to assume that Alan Jay Lerner did not read this sentence, because his book and screenplay display exactly the enfeebled imagination that Shaw writes about. At about 6:30 minutes into this clip from My Fair Lady, Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza comes sheepishly back to Higgins’ home, and, at about 7:15, when Higgins reverts to domineering type, Eliza simperingly gazes at him, in a cinematic moment that never fails to gast my flabber.
Okay. That’s the end of a rant that has been building in me for about 40 years, and I feel much better for it.
Turning to our home in Portugal (not so much a segue; more a tectonic shift), Tao is very much an outdoors kind of guy, which is probably a good thing, considering what his parents have in store for him. If he is upset (which is very rare), he always calms down if he is taken outside, and regularly during the day, when taking the saucepans out of the cupboard and putting them back begins to pall, or when he tires of hiding blocks under the sofa, he will ask to be taken out, either to the backyard or to the street at the front of the house. If he wants the back, then this is usually a two-centre holiday. He will almost certainly want to climb the outside metal staircase to the balcony leading off the kid’s bedroom, a climb which he takes in his stride; nevertheless, even though Tao is remarkably careful in his climbing, the climb leaves me with my heart in my mouth, since this is a fairly open staircase; I have to stay right with him, ready to grab. Bernice refuses to let him climb with her; her heart can’t take it. Tao’s reward for making it safely to the top is that he gets to test the friability of the soil in the pots on the balcony.
The second activity in this excursion is a walking tour of the flower beds that line two sides of the patio. These beds are currently home to, in order, a handsome Portuguese laurel bush, a mature lemon tree, a fairly immature loquat (shesek) tree, an aloe vera, a couple of roses, some more modest ground-cover flowers and a clementina tree.
On his walking tour, Tao, who is a very tactile child, needs to rub the leaves and petals of each of these plants; fortunately, he already understands the need to be gentle with them, and there are very few accidents.
On the other side of the patio, along the ledge of what is, in fact, the outside wall of our neighbours’ covered swimming pool, is an array of sawn-off milk cartons with various vegetables and fruits being grown from seed by Tslil. These also require a proper inspection, ocular and digital, as did the plum sapling that was a gift to Micha’el and Tslil from Esther and Ma’ayan. This tree has now been transferred to the land, and – very exciting – already has a plum showing. After a 15-minute tour, Tao is usually happy to go inside again.
At the other end of the house is the front door, and, beyond that, the street. The sounds of passing traffic aroused Tao’s attention from a young age. This is not entirely surprising: since the street is cobbled and narrow, the tyre noise from passing cars is considerable, and is trapped by the houses. Indeed, when we first arrived last October, I initially wondered whether the house was on the flight path to Lisbon airport!
Once Tao realised that the sound meant a passing car, he did not want to miss any of the action, and would ‘ask’ to be taken out, or at least to the window, to see this traffic. (It has to be said that cars are a relative rarity: we don’t exactly live on a main road.) Every Wednesday, we have the excitement of the gradual approach of what sounds like a Mr Whippy ice cream van. The chimes are, in fact, those a mobile shop, selling meat, fish, fruit, veg, and we can hear them a few streets away, 10 or 15 minutes before they reach our street.
If Tao can persuade someone (usually Bernice) to take him out to the street, then, as in the backyard, he has his set points of interest that he needs to visit. These include ‘the doll’, a life-size but very stylised, almost cubist statue of a young girl that stands on our neighbours’ porch. Next in order, continuing to walk up the street, are some lovely flowering shrubs a few houses along. And finally, the highlight of the tour: seven or eight houses down from us live a family who have a dog. The dog sleeps in a tent-like kennel outside the house-front, dines alfresco in the street, and spends the day sunning himself, often in the middle of the road.
We are very fond of him, partly, no doubt, because he looks remarkably like our dog, who died about 12 years ago, and who was a similar long-haired dachshund mix. Those of you who remember our dog must agree the similarity is striking: so much so that we actually call our Portuguese neighbour Chocky. Like our own Chocky, he is very fond of people, and, if you stop to pet him, he will go up on his hind-legs and hook his forepaws around your thigh, desperately clinging on to you and begging you not to leave. Tao loves going to see him, and we are reminded how, in Micha’el’s early years, when he and Chocky were a similar age, they were inseparable.
One day in the middle of our last trip to Portugal, when Tao and I were in the living room, we heard a sound from the street that neither of us could identify. It sounded like a fairly small power tool. When we went out to investigate, we found a municipal maintenance worker mowing the pavement. Our street, like all of the sidestreets in Penamacor, is cobbled; the cobbles cover both the roadway and the pavement; indeed, the only way to tell where the road ends and the pavement begins is to notice the very slight dip at the side of the road and incline at the start of the pavement. Between the cobbles grass grows; apparently, this grass is mown regularly with a strimmer. Tao was interested in this, but I was fascinated. I’ve never lived on a street where they mow the pavement before.
At first sight, Rua Pereira de Macedo seems a rather sleepy sidestreet, but, as you can see, it is in fact bursting with life, if you know where to look, and if there is no other action, you can always sit on your doorstep and watch the grass grow.
I don’t know about you, but, at the moment, what I would really like more than anything else is to go on a good long walk along the wadi paths of Maale Adumim. Somehow, 20 minutes on the treadmill doesn’t quite cut it, and once round the block doesn’t even come near, especially since, for those stretches where I am technically more than 100 metres from home, I’m listening out for the sound of an approaching police car, looking out for a foot patrol, and readying myself to dive into the bushes if necessary.
So, this
week, why not join me on a leisurely virtual stroll around Penamacor, while I
point out some of the major tourist attractions?
Weather
permitting, Bernice and I like to take Tao out for a walk in his buggy every
day, and we have a set route that we often take. Our house is towards the north-west
corner of the village, high above the centre, but not at the top of the hill.
So, we turn left out of the house and walk up to the top of the street (always
better to walk uphill at the beginning, we feel, and to have the downhill slope
to look forward to when we head back). We can then turn left and walk along the
ridge of the hill, with a steep drop to the valley that includes the kids’ land on our right, and, beyond
that, the next range of hills with its array of white turbines slowly turning
in the wind.
This high point is dominated by a couple of radio towers and masts, but also at the top of the village are several reminders of what membership of the EU has meant for Portugal. We first pass the sports centre, and, shortly after, the indoor swimming pool, both of them built with EU funding. On both occasions that we have visited Portugal, these buildings appear to be closed, and there is another pool on the other side of the village that is apparently the one that people use. I am wondering whether EU funding covered construction but not ongoing expenses, and whether both of these buildings are white elephants. However, an online search suggests that the sports centre at least offers a wide range of activities. I suspect the locals get out a lot more in the summer than the winter.
Can you work out which is the pool and which the sports centre? Pavilho Desportivo and Piscinas Municipais
On the other side of the road, perched on the very edge of the ridge, is a 6-a-side soccer pitch, built with the support of the Portuguese Football Federation, UEFA, The Portuguese Sport Institute and the Secretary of State for Youth and Sport. As you can see from the goalmouth, it offers a very impressive view of the valley. Clearly, the emphasis in training is on passing the ball along the ground rather than in the air, because any ball that clears the metre-high fence on the far side would run downhill for about 2 kilometres before coming to rest.
Beyond the
football pitch, the ground to the left falls away; we have now walked beyond
the north-west corner of the village. The ridge opens out a little from this point,
as we walk towards the pine and oak forest to the west of Penamacor.
This ridge took a severe battering in the storms that hit Portugal a few weeks before our February visit. Extremely strong north-easterly winds blew across the valley, and felled a large number of mature trees along the ridge and in the forest. It is a strange sight to see them all perfectly aligned on the ground.
There are a couple of trails through the forest, fairly wide and with a compacted-dirt surface, which are well-marked by posts with coloured stripes. One of the paths is designated as pedagogical, and includes neat labels giving the Portuguese and Latin names of the various trees and shrubs that line the route. There is even a picnic spot with wooden tables and benches, which, for anyone coming from Israel, is blissfully deserted.
Fortunately, because Tao’s buggy is designed for all terrain, and has better independent suspension than several of the first cars we owned, he is able to enjoy this walk, at a reasonable speed, without risking losing either of his teeth.
If, instead of walking out of the house and turning left, we turn right, and walk downhill to the centre of the village, we can carry on walking and discover that the terrain of the village is saddle-shaped, so that, once through the centre (which takes about one minute to traverse) we have to start climbing again, towards Penamacor castle and the site of the medieval town.
To be honest, not much remains of the medieval streets, but the ruins of the castle and the old city wall are quite evocative, and the views are stunning, both back over the saddle with the village laid out across it, and south over the plain towards Castelo Branco. In the first photo below, you can see, on the opposite ridge, several radio masts and one of the radio towers (which looks more like a water tower) where we started our walk today.
I first took this walk because I had found, on a local tourist map, the location of the house of Antonio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, the 18th Century physician and intellectual I wrote about several weeks ago. The house was, apparently, along the street that leads to the castle. However, when I arrived at the exact spot, I saw, rather than a centuries-old structure, what looked more like an airport warehouse. I walked all the way round it, and found only one door and no windows.
As I was wondering whether I might have mistaken the location, I took a closer look at the door and noticed the unusual design of the very large doorknob. Clearly, there is an interesting story here, which I hope to find out more about on our next visit (whenever that turns out to be).
And now,
of course, since this is Penamacor, we have to plunge downhill before the final
ascent back to the house for a cup of tea and a well-earned rest. (Not a lot of
words today, but, if you add in the pictures at the conventional exchange rate
of 1 pict to 1000 wd, it comes to 14,000 words, which is quite enough for one
post.)
You know what? Here’s another 1000-words-worth to close on.
To learn more about the latest developments in the kids’ plans, you can watch Micha’el and Tslil talking about them, and Tao stealing the scene, in the latest videoon their YouTube account.
The challenge in writing my blog from Portugal is that much of our day is spent with Tao; so, when I sit down to write, my mind is filled with thoughts of him. I am acutely aware that banging on about one’s amazing grandchild can be very boring for the reader, so, instead, let me dedicate this week’s post to……my amazing children.
When Bernice and I first started talking about my then upcoming big birthday, I really didn’t want to make an event of it. I was eventually persuaded that changing your prefix is not insignificant. (That extraordinarily clumsy phrase ‘changing your prefix’ is a leaden attempt to capture the essence of the phrase in Hebrew. Area dialing codes in the Israeli landline phone system consist of zero plus a single digit – 02 for Jerusalem, 03 for Tel Aviv and so on. These codes are known as ‘prefixes’. The big transitional birthdays, from one decade to another – in my case, from 69 to 70 – are referred to as ‘changing prefix’.)
A large part of the reason why I was
initially reluctant was that I didn’t want to celebrate without the family all
being together. Our solution was to have a modest evening at home with our
local friends, and then for Esther and Maayan to fly out to Portugal for a
week, overlapping with our visit, so that we could celebrate as a family.
So the seven of us enjoyed the whole of last week together…and it was wonderful. The kids all went out into the country, to walk and do a little sightseeing, and also went to Micha’el and Tslil’s land a couple of times, leaving us to babysit. Apart from that, for most of the time, we didn’t do anything much, but just sitting around of an evening with the family was very special. Tao shared himself out between us very fairly, so that we scarcely ever came to blows, and I got to indulge in one of my favourite spectator sports, which is watching Esther and Micha’el – in recent years, Maayan and Tslil as well – simply enjoying each other’s company. To have two children who are, in many ways, so very different from each other, yet who are so close to each other, is a source of pure joy to me.
During the week, we all went to a vegan restaurant in Castelo Branco for what I imagined was to be a celebratory meal. (Good grief – I’ve turned into someone who blogs about what he’s eating!) I only mention this because we actually were photographed together, and I have been asked, offline, to provide some photos of the kids. Not the least enjoyable part of the meal for me was the bill: a mere 52 euro (under 200 shekels) for six adults.
Happy Families
The meal was initially made even
more special for me by the fact that I was anticipating my birthday surprise. I
didn’t know quite what to expect, although I was praying I wouldn’t get waiters
bringing to the table a ‘shaving foam’ dessert replete with sparklers, while
singing Happy Birthday, in Portuguese, off key. As the meal progressed, it
gradually dawned on me that nobody was going to make a big thing – or indeed
even a small thing – of my birthday. I can only hope that I managed to conceal
my disappointment from the others.
However, I needn’t have worried, because the actual celebrations took place at home on shabbat. (Yes, our house in Penamacor does already feel like home, which is a lovely feeling, and a great relief, since when we bought it Bernice hadn’t seen it yet.) The kids took total charge, with the exception of Bernice’s signature curry and rice on Friday night and lasagna for shabbat lunch. We were also allowed to provide the wine.
Every Pesach during my childhood, my father, of blessed memory, would order some bottles of Israeli Carmel hock to serve at the festive meals. At that time, Carmel winery produced kiddush (sacramental) wine – syrupy-sweet red – and one or two dry wines. Buying the hock represented the triumph of optimism over experience: every year, Dad would open and pour the wine in eager anticipation, take an initial sip, and swear that he was not going to buy any next year…but he always did.
Since then, of course, Israeli wine has undergone several transformations, and is now at the point where many of its wineries have won international awards. Bernice and I always open a bottle for shabbat. I am guided in my purchases by a comment from Adam Montefiore – the English-speaking voice of Israeli wine – who advises that if you pay less than 25 shekels for a bottle of wine, you are paying principally for the glass bottle, and if you pay more than 150 shekels, you are paying principally for the label. Fortunately, there are many really enjoyable wines in the 35-65 shekel range, which is our particular sweet spot (although I can hear one or two of my readers tutting about our cheap taste).
When we first came to Portugal, in October, we picked up a few bottles of Portuguese wine at the kosher food shop in Lisbon. On our first two shabbatot, we tried two different wines: the first was execrable, the second barely drinkable. Some hasty online research revealed a European Kosher wine supplier based in Brussels, who ships throughout Europe, with free delivery if you buy a case (which can be mixed). So, I sat down one evening and looked through their list. I decided to give up on Portuguese wine but to stay with Iberia, so I ordered 12 assorted bottles of Spanish wines. I also followed my usual policy, of starting with the cheaper bottles, and only moving up-market if we didn’t enjoy them. A very sturdy and well-protected case arrived 3 days later, and, so far, we have enjoyed the bottles we have tried. To be honest, nothing has been as good as the Israeli wine we drink at home, but I regard this as an ongoing long-term research project, and it seems a little ridiculous to pay more here to drink Israeli wine than we do in Israel.
Anyway, back to our celebratory Friday night meal. After we had eaten in Castelo Branco, Esther (on the right in the photo), Maayan (on the left) and Micha’el went off to do their own thing, while Bernice and I drove home with Tslil and Tao. It transpired that ‘their own thing’ was buying the ingredients for the shabbat meals. Esther rose to the challenge of cooking in a strange kitchen magnificently, serving a chestnut and mushroom soup that both nodded at Portuguese cuisine’s love of the chestnut and was deliciously warming and comforting.
She then excelled herself with a dessert that, if you have a sweet tooth, was to die for (and, if you have several sweet teeth and no self-control, to die of) – a chocolate and caramel tart, served with whipped cream lifted by a hefty slug of amaretto.
This delicious meal was accompanied by an original creation from Micha’el, which I will come to in a minute. But just before I do, I have to give you a little background.
After our first decade in Israel, when people asked me what I missed of Britain, I could honestly reply that there was very little, apart from BBC Radio 4. In those days, we would listen to BBC World Service on longwave radio. Fortunately, there was a powerful signal relay from Jordan, which meant tolerable reception in Jerusalem. There were a couple of programmes broadcast on the World Service that I loved: One of these was Round Britain Quiz – a cryptic general knowledge quiz between teams of celebrity experts. In its heyday, the programme boasted several competitors whose erudition and powers of deduction were worthy of the questions set: Irene Thomas and John Julius Norwich being the most worthy. Over the years, the teams have become much less impressive, but the questions have pretty much maintained their high standard. There are only eight questions in each half-hour episode, but each question is multi-part, and answering it usually involves a fair amount of discussion among the team – and often hints from the question-master. If that sounds like your thing, you can sample the programme here.
As well as trying to answer quiz questions, I am, as some of you will know, very fond of setting quizzes. Over the years, I have carved for myself a niche, creating bespoke quizzes for family celebrations. When I started, 50+ years ago, this involved spending days in the reference library. These days, the research can be carried out online, which is much faster and more efficient (but less satisfying, to be honest). The art of a good bespoke quiz is to make it difficult enough to be challenging, but not so difficult as to make people give up, and also to tailor it sufficiently to the interests and strengths of the celebrant (the birthday boy or girl, or anniversary couple), so that they can do better than anyone else, while not making everyone else feel excluded. Apart from the frustration of occasionally having to reject a question as being too challenging for the audience, I really enjoy the craft of themed quiz construction.
Micha’el (in the middle in the photo, flanked by Tao and Tslil) presented us on Friday night with an exquisite quiz, just sufficiently challenging to keep us fully occupied between courses, but ultimately solvable. Everyone pitched in – except Tao, but I’m prepared to cut him some slack at this stage – and, between us, we cracked all of the questions.
Micha’el had brilliantly devised questions that played to some of my strengths; he had also included some questions that required a knowledge of Hebrew, and some that were focussed on Jewish tradition, while others were genuinely general knowledge. It was tremendous fun to solve the riddles, and immensely gratifying to see Micha’el sharing some of my passion for the genre, and matching, if not exceeding, my talent.
Let me leave you with a taste of the
quiz. All of the questions were to do with 7 or 70. Here is one – general
knowledge – question. If you can find the letters for the spaces under the
pictures, you may then be able to fill in the answers 1–7. Please feel free to
comment.
If you want to see what Micha’el does when he isn’t setting fiendish quizzes, you can follow his,Tslil’s and Tao’s youtube channel.
Time traveller alert. This post is being written not in retrospect, but, more or less, in real time, because…
I am writing this sitting at one end of the table in our Penamacor kitchen, while Tao eats his supper at the other end of the table, watching me peck away at the keys, and every time I look up at him he rewards me with a beaming smile. As I captioned the video I sent my brother earlier today – a video of Tao leafing through the wonderful baby book Peepo! and reading it aloud in fluent gibberish – ‘In case you were wondering why we’re here.’
Bernice and I arrived on Sunday night after a very uneventful direct flight from Tel Aviv to Lisbon, and a two-and-a-half hour drive to Penamacor. We left very cold, wet weather in Maale Adumim, fully expecting that the one benefit of such wintry weather would be a kind of acclimiatization in advance for a Penamacor winter.
How wrong we were! We landed in a Lisbon bathing in the last rays of a bright, warm sun, and our entire drive was through a mild and still winter evening. This was in strong contrast to our drive back to Lisbon airport in November, which was through alternate driving rain and very patchy fog. On balance, I wouldn’t recommend driving, at 3:00AM, along a road you are not very familiar with, a road that in some sections winds through wooded valleys, where you occasionally come out of a bend and drive straight into a bank of fog, all the time hoping that your calculation of how much time you need to allow in order to catch your flight has sufficiently taken into account driving conditions. In the end, that journey ended safely and with time to spare; nevertheless, this week’s drive was much more relaxed, not least because it was towards our family and not away from them, and because it would not really make any difference if we arrived a couple of hours later than planned. In fact, we arrived more or less at the time I had expected, 10:15PM local time, which felt to us like 12:15AM the next day, of course. Tao was, naturally, fast asleep, and Tslil had also gone to bed. She very wisely takes advantage of Tao’s sleep pattern, and, no doubt partly for that reason, looks very well.
So, our welcoming committee consisted of Micha’el, who is
suffering with a cold and sore throat that are leaving him more tired than
usual, and Esther and Ma’ayan, our daughter and other daughter-in-law, who are
here for a week, to help me continue my birthday celebrations. You can, I am
sure, imagine how good it feels, for all the family to be together, especially
for all of us to be together without having to worry about organizing a wedding,
for a change. This is pure quality time for (I hope) all of us.
After chatting for a while, and enjoying a cup of tea, Bernice
and I left for our bed.
When we were planning our first trip to the kids, we decided to take a leaf out of my parents’ book. In the 1980s and 90s, my Mum and Dad, of blessed memory, would visit us in the Jerusalem suburb of East Talpiot for 2 weeks, once a year. At the time we lived in a three-room, 55 m2 apartment. That’s under 600 ft2, if that means more to you. If neither of the numbers means much to you, then let me give you a few indicators. Indicator 1: If we had not had direct access from the flat to the communal garden (a large grassed area with a couple of trees), and if we did not live in a country where we (and particularly Micha’el and the dog) could be outside for most of the year, then it is likely that not all us would have survived the 9 years we lived there. Indicator 2: Bernice and I slept on a futon, because our bedroom was so small that it was impossible to open the wardrobe until the futon had been folded up. Even with the futon closed, we could not both get dressed at the same time. Indicator 3: We could vacuum the entire apartment with the cleaner plugged into one socket, and without using an extension lead. That should be sufficient indicators for you to get the idea. The first few times my parents visited, they slept in the kids’ bedroom, which was a little larger than ours. However, it didn’t take them long to decide that they would rather stay at the hotel in Ramat Rachel, and spend all day every day with us.
One of the shortcomings of our Penamacor house is that there is only one toilet and bathroom (combined). For six adults and a baby, this seems like a challenge, albeit a first-world challenge. Another shortcoming, and one that is more significant for us, is the location of the combined bathroom and toilet: on the ground floor. Once the kids have moved onto the land, we plan to convert the third bedroom into a bathroom. Until then, for those of us whose nights are punctuated by not infrequent trips to the bathroom (I can already see some of you men, and maybe even some women, nodding in total understanding), the prospect of traipsing down the 15 stairs and through the salon in a Penamacor winter in the small hours, after the wood fire has burnt out, is not particularly attractive. The fact that there is an outside chance that, at whatever hour, Tao will be awake and downstairs is a significant compensation, but even so…
I hope you can understand why Bernice and I decided that, rather than staying with the kids and Tao in the house, we would stay in Penamacor’s only hotel. It is still not clear to us why there is a hotel in a one-horse town like Penamacor, and, having now stayed there twice, it isn’t clear to me how the hotel stays in business, because, for most of my stay last June (when I came over alone to look at property), there seemed to be only 20% occupancy, and, when Bernice and I stayed in November, we never saw more than two other families on any one day. I am beginning to suspect that the entire hotel is just an elaborate front for Portuguese mafia money laundering.
Having said that, it is a very pleasant hotel: the staff are very friendly and helpful, all the rooms have balconies with lovely open views of the surrounding country and the distant hills, and not only does the breakfast that our rules of kashrut prevent us eating look very good, but the buffet table also boasts a good selection of quality fresh fruit, as well as plain yoghurts and a selection of Kellogg’s cereals, both of which are on the kosher list issued by the Lisbon Jewish community. The trend of the last 30 or so years, of hotels offering a more healthy, non-cooked, breakfast alternative, has proved a boon to the observant Jewish guest in a non-kosher hotel.
The view from our hotel balcony
After a couple of days here, we feel, on the whole, much more at home than during our previous trip, even though the entire experience still seems (and, I suspect, always will) very much ‘other’. We have no dramatic plans for this visit. People keep suggesting that we visit Lisbon, or Porto, or the Algarve, or Madrid, or Gibraltar, but, for the moment, spending an evening sitting and schmoozing with the family, and agreeing to babysit Tao while the four kids spend a half-day hiking in the nearby national park is all we need, or would ask for. Promise not to tell the kids, who think we are bring remarkably selfless, but enjoying a few hours with Tao is, as I suggested at the start, the reason for this entire venture. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some rather pressing business involving some increasingly complex shapes and a posting box.
Don’t forget that you can learn more about Micha’el and Tslil’s plans, and how they are progressing, by following, subscribing to, liking and otherwise spreading the word about their youtube channel.
Let’s start this week with a clarification, for the benefit of my transatlantic readers. When I speak of “The Times”, I am referring to the newspaper that, since 1 January, 1788, has carried that name – The Times – on its masthead. Note that the distinctive font that has been used on that masthead since 1929 is known as Times New Roman, and not as Times of London New Roman.
Should I ever want to refer to TheNew York Times (which is 63 years younger than The Times, despite its pseudo-Gothic font), I shall call it The New York Times.
In short, there is only one The Times.
Now we’ve got that out of the way….
On my birthday last week, the Crossword Editor of The Times gave me, albeit unwittingly, the best present I could have asked of him: I was able to solve that day’s cryptic crossword in just over 11 minutes. In my prime, from the mid-70’s to the mid 80’s of the last century, I set myself the target of solving The Times crossword every day in under half an hour, and managed that often enough (and failed often enough) for 30 minutes to be a meaningful target. I believe my best ever time was around 7 minutes. Then, of course, in 1986 we came to Israel, and over the next 32 years I only occasionally attempted the crossword. Two years ago, when I retired, I bought myself a book of Times cryptic crosswords, and was horrified to discover how rusty I had become. We recently took out an online subscription to The Times and, as a man of leisure, I now indulge myself every day again.
Those of you who know me well won’t need to me to tell you how
self-satisfied that birthday crossword solution time made me. Until, that is, I
remembered what (or rather who) I had already decided would be the subject of
this week’s post. Because I want to tell you about the greatest man in
Penamacor’s history.
Your expectations of a quiet, backwater village of 2000 inhabitants having produced a man of stature are probably no greater than mine were, but let me issue a trigger warning. If you have a tendency to suffer from feelings of inadequacy or low self-esteem, do not read on, because I want to introduce you to Antonio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches. If you are saying to yourself ‘Who?’ then you can already join me in feeling inadequate. His is a name that should be familiar to us as one of the significant clinician–scientist–philosopher–political theorist–socio-cultural commentators of 18th Century Europe. There is a theory that, had he been born in, or developed his career in, or focused his attention on, European states less marginal geographically than Portugal and Russia, he would be far better known than he is.
Sanches was born in Penamacor in March 1699, the son of New Christians, or conversos. The Municipal Museum of Penamacor devotes one wall to his memorabilia and artefacts. (The museum is itself an interesting institution, and I must make a note to tell you more about it some other time.) The display includes his baptismal certificate, both a photocopy of the formal record in the Genealogical Library of Lisbon, and a copy in his own hand.
This was, clearly, an important document, asserting as it did that he was a member of the Catholic Church. However, this was seldom enough for New Christians to escape the clutches of the Inquisition. A century earlier, the Catholic Church had introduced the concept of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood). For anyone who was not able to prove the ‘purity’ of their ancestry, an official baptism was not proof against the many professional, vocational and academic restrictions imposed on Jews, and, ultimately, was not proof against investigation by, and even torture and death at the hands of, the Inquisition.
Sanches’ father was a wealthy merchant, and his two uncles
were, respectively, a doctor in Lisbon and a well-known jurist. When Antonio left
home for the city of Guarda, to further his education in music and letters, he became
interested in medicine, although his father preferred the ring of ‘My son, the
lawyer’ to that of ‘My son, the doctor’. The son spent 3 years studying Arts,
Law, Philosophy and Medicine at the University of Coimbra, but he found the
teaching old-fashioned and the students reactionary and boorish. And so he went
to Spain, to study medicine in Salamanca University for three years.
Returning to Portugal, he practiced medicine, first with his uncle, caring for patients suffering from the yellow fever epidemic that killed 6000 in Lisbon (about 3% of the city’s population) and later in practice on his own, before, at the age of 26, he decided that life under the Inquisition was too unsettling, and also that he wanted to expand his horizons; he spent time in Italy before heading to London, where he attended medicine and mathematics lectures, until the English climate drove him back to the Continent. Clearly, it is possible to feel oneself a citizen of Europe even without the EU. In France, he learnt that one of the medical giants of the age, Boerhaave, was lecturing in Leyden in the Netherlands. Having enrolled at the university, Sanches spent three years attending lectures in philosophy, chemistry, anatomy, physics and pharmacology, as well as Boerhaave’s medical lectures. Sanches kept his existing medical qualification a secret, until his studies were almost complete. At that point, the Russian Tsarina Anna Ivanovna requested of Boerhaave that he send her three of his best pupils, for whom honorary posts in her empire were waiting. Boerhaave selected Sanches as one of the three, and urged him to complete his Bachelor’s degree. When Sanches revealed that he was already a qualified doctor and could leave immediately, an astonished Boerhaave refunded all his tuition fees.
So, at the age of 32, Sanches found himself chief medical doctor of Moscow. Two years later, he was called to practice in St Petersburg, close to the Russian court. A year later, he became First Doctor of the Imperial Army, and saw active service in several campaigns. In 1740, when the Tsarina was taken ill, and her physicians could not agree on a diagnosis, they wrote to Sanches, describing her symptoms. On the basis solely of that letter, Sanches correctly diagnosed kidney stones, and warned that the Tsarina would be unlikely to survive. When he arrived at court too late to treat her, and the autopsy confirmed his diagnosis, which none of the other physicians had made, Sanches became, at the age of 40, the official medical doctor of the Russian court.
For the next seven years, Sanches balanced a brilliant
clinical career at court with attempting to navigate a path through the intrigues
and socio-political upheaval over the imperial succession that gripped Russia
until Catherine II restored order. During this time, Sanches was appointed a State
Counsellor, but at the same time he was accused of Judaism and, at one point, imprisoned.
Eventually, Catherine granted his request to leave Russia, in 1747.
He headed for Paris, where, from the age of 48, Sanches devoted
his last 36 years largely to writing. During this time, he experienced
financial difficulties, which were mitigated by a generous annual pension from
the Portuguese government, and a further pension granted by Catherine II.
His written output included what was to become the standard medical
text on venereal disease, which he had observed and treated widely during his
military service. In addition, his early experience in Lisbon, and his army
service, sparked an interest in public health and hygiene. He wrote a treatise
about the hygiene of urban latrines and air pollution, and stressed the
importance of proper ventilation of hospitals and prisons.
During his years in Russia, using the services of the commercial caravans that travelled between St Petersburg and Peking, Sanches established and maintained contact with the Jesuit missionaries to the Chinese court. He was one of the first Europeans to study, and introduce in his practice, the Chinese use of medicinal plants.
In addition to his catholic (if not Catholic) interest in all aspects of medicine, Sanches was passionate about a broad range of subjects, which brought him into contact, in person and through correspondence, with leading humanists of the Enlightenment. He wrote articles for inclusion in Diderot’s Encyclopaedia; he advised on educational reform in Portugal and Russia; he studied physics, history and politics. The subjects of his nine substantial written works, and scores of papers, ranged from a theory on how the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 had improved the climate, to an in-depth study of the politics, economics and culture of Portuguese America, uncompleted at his death, and from guidelines on the administration of justice to plans for the establishment of a school of agriculture. His writings on the education of the young formed the basis of the Royal College of Noblemen in Lisbon. By the time he died, Sanches was a member of the St Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences, the Lisbon Royal Academy of Sciences, the Paris Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Medicine. (It may not have escaped your notice that, as with The Times, British academic institutions feel no need to denote their nationality. The same is, of course, true of postage stamps. In many fields, it is the reward for getting there first.)
Today, his bust stands on a pedestal in the square in front of the Câmara – the municipality building or town hall – of Penamacor. It portrays an ascetic man, deep in contemplative thought, uninterested in the physical pleasures of this world. I have certainly found no record anywhere of his personal life, nor any mention of a wife or children. When Catherine II granted Sanches a coat of arms, the inscription selected was Non sibi, sed toti gentium, which even some of us who were fortunate enough to receive a classical education in the finest tradition of 1960s’ Britain may need reminding translates as Not for himself, but born for everyone.
Sanches left his library of over 2000 books to the St
Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences. He also left 27 volumes of unpublished
manuscripts, which were printed posthumously.
And I feel good if I can manage to finish writing my blog post by Monday evening, which I have done! Never mind: I bet Sanches never solved a crossword in just over 11 minutes.
If you are more interested in Micha’el and Tslil’s 21st Century adventures than Sanches’ 18th Century ones, don’t forget that you can follow, subscribe to, like and even disseminate their youtube channel.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Sitting in front of the
computer in mid-September, watching the price of direct flights to Lisbon
spiral upward as I searched, I saw that flying Austrian Air with a layover in
Vienna offered a considerable saving. After the airline had assured me that
Vienna is a small airport, and a 50-minute layover left plenty of time to board
our ongoing flight, I booked it.
It seemed like a less good idea as we landed in Vienna 20 minutes late and sprinted to the gate (without, of course, knowing where we were going). We actually made it with 5 minutes to spare, although since take-off was delayed 90 minutes, this was of purely academic interest. Bernice had all along told me we were getting too old for layovers, and we should be flying direct even if it did cost more; to her eternal credit, she did not remind me of this as we slumped panting onto the departure gate bench. We are, however, both agreed that we will fly direct from now on.
So, by the time we landed and collected our luggage and our rental car, it was about 12:30 at night. Portugal as a country favours manual-drive cars, and the cost differential between hiring manual and automatic is prohibitively steep. Of course, I had opted for the cheaper option, hoping to persuade them at the desk to give us a free upgrade to automatic. They did give us an upgrade, but laughed when I suggested an automatic. Still, Bernice and I both learnt on manuals, and drove them for many years before switching. Surely it’s like riding a bicycle, I thought.
Have you seen a modern bicycle!? I climbed into the cockpit of our Fiat 500, to discover that, in the intervening 20 years, someone had removed the handbrake and exchanged it for two additional forward gears. I also found myself completely disoriented with regard to the location of the pedals, so that I tried to change gears by depressing the brake, and then, close to panic, tried to stop by depressing the accelerator pedal. A rental car parking lot after midnight is not the best practice track for the learning curve I had to negotiate, but we somehow made it.
I had selected a cheap air bnb quite close to the airport, in what we discovered as we drove was a fairly seedy part of town. We eventually found a parking space, and then the building, and then the lockbox with the house key, and then, after several minutes of rising apprehension, we worked out how to access the keypad for the lockbox. By 2:30 we were in a very comfortable bed and very ready for sleep.
The next day was planned like a military operation. Reveille, drive into Central Lisbon in the morning rush hour, to arrive at the kosher food store at 10, when it opened. We were actually in the shop by 10:15, which we thought was a considerable achievement. The shop, however, was a disappointment. If you are staying in Lisbon in a hotel or airbnb , especially if you are staying over shabbat, then the store – Portuel – is well worth a visit, but it didn’t quite serve our very specific needs. Several of the goodies offered online, including the takeaway tuna rolls we had ordered, were not available. So, we bought what we could, and, nourished by the nuts and raisins and fruit we had brought from home, drove on to IKEA.
We had spent the previous month ordering bulkier household goods on Amazon to be delivered to the house in Portugal. Although we had bought the house fully furnished, we obviously needed to fully equip the kitchen. We had also decided that certain goods (such as crockery, glassware, bed linens) were cheaper in IKEA. Since the nearest IKEA store to Penamacor is in Lisbon, two-and-a-half hours’ drive away, it made sense to shop there before we drove to the house. Our only limitation was that they all had to be fairly small items, since we needed to fit them into a car that already carried all our luggage and groceries.
All IKEAed out
So, armed with our shopping list of 56 items, grouped according to location in IKEA (how fortunate that all IKEA stores are the same worldwide), we hit the store running. Two hours later, with a trolley containing 53 of the 56 items on our list, plus a couple of extras (but no cuddly toys….and no cabbage), we refuelled with a cup of tea and a banana each, packed the car, and drove to our new home.
The drive from Lisbon to Penamacor is very simple – 120-kph motorway for the first 220 km, and basically one one-lane country road for the last 50 km. Since almost all the motorway traffic travels at exactly 120 kph and observes lane discipline, the drive was not stressful. We arrived as twilight descended, so that Bernice got a first idyllic view of Penamacor’s red-tile roofs hugging the hillside, and we were able to drive through the town before night fell.
Our new home
The only uncomfortable part of the drive for me was the fear, which had been growing since June, that Bernice would stand on the doorstep of the house, look around, say “What on earth induced you to buy this?!” and march straight back to the car. Not a very rational fear, but nevertheless…. In the event, and to my great relief, she instantly fell in love with our two-up, two-down terraced house, whose style and quaintness and quirks remind her of Wales. (Have you seen How Green Was My Valley?)
So, here we finally were, on the doorstep of our new home in Penamacor. In my next post, I’ll invite you to step through the door with us.
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