I had intended to try to dredge up online something illuminating to say about Portugal, to satisfy those of you who claim to find an outsider’s view of Portugal more interesting than an insider’s view of my mind. However….

I am sitting writing this in my sukkah. If I’ve lost you already (my readership being to some extent heterogeneous), then you can get a quick background on the sukkah by reading the first four paragraphs here.

It’s noon on Sunday, so I’m feeling much less pressured than last week, and anyway sitting out under my schach and decorations feels very relaxing. Mind you, since many of my weeks at the moment consist of sitting outside doing very little it’s not easy to understand why this feels different. To explain why, let me tell you the history of our sukkot.

For our first year in Israel, we used the wood of our shipping crate to construct a sukkah on the balcony of our apartment on the absorption centre.

When we moved to a ground-floor apartment in Jerusalem, we bought a metal-frame, material-wall sukkah, three metres by two, which we erected on the grassed area outside our salon window. Until we put in French windows, accessing the sukkah involved negotiating kitchen steps placed on each side of the salon window, but it was all good fun…and we were much younger then.

Mind you, climbing through a modest salon window while holding a pot of hot soup or a tray of stuffed vegetables was a skill you had to start practising around four weeks before in order to be able to carry it off with aplomb on the night itself, all the while with a white linen serviette draped over your left forearm.

Now, in Maale Adumim, we are blessed with a backyard that is about five metres by four, walled on all four sides; it is therefore fairly well protected from the wind and outside noise. We are further blessed with a climate that allows us to eat outside for most of the year: in summer, breakfast and dinner; for some of the rest of the year, lunch.

Not long after we moved to Maale Adumim, we acquired a second sukkah, identical to the first. I then bought a couple of T-junction uprights, which enabled us to combine the two into a single four-metre-by-three sukkah, which fitted our backyard very nicely. In the years after the kids left home, erecting the sukkah became more of a challenge with each passing year, involving as it did bringing heavy rolls of bamboo schach down from Micha’el’s bedroom, and also taking the sukkah and schach-retaining planks down from their chest-high cradle in the backyard, then, after Sukkot, performing a weightlifting clean and aborted jerk to get them back into the cradle.

And so, two summers ago, when we were having the backyard turned into more of a garden, we decided to install a pergola. Not only would this give us much needed shade that would significantly extend the hours we could spend outside, but it could also double as a sukkah, solving the problem of what we were going to do when, at some point in the next fifty years, erecting a frame sukkah became too much for me.

The pergola extends over all but a metre-wide strip of the far end of the backyward; the existing walls act as the minimum three walls required for a kosher sukkah, and the wooden slats of the pergola act as schach. As an added bonus, there are no material walls blocking the light from the garden, so I now no longer need to rig up cables for lighting inside the sukkah.

These days, ‘building a sukkah’ means, for me, going up a ladder, lifting and replacing one slat from each row of slats across the entire width of the sukkah. This year, that took me 4 minutes, not counting decorating the sukkah.

Except, of course, that you have to count the decorating. Let me tell you about our decorations. Most of our friends decorate their sukkah modestly, showing impeccable taste. We have always favoured a style of decoration that I like to think of as Rococo-Gaudi. This is largely attributable to two of Bernice’s trademark characteristics. She is a sentimentalist hoarder when it comes to the children’s artwork, and she adores anything like the Blackpool illuminations. As a result, when the kids were young and came home from kindergarten every year with another one or more artwork decorations for the sukkah, these had to be added to our existing stock. Every year we would also buy another paper ball, or pomegranate, or other bauble.

I was once on business in Atlanta in early December, and found, in a Walmart, coloured, flashing Christmas lights. As I took them to the cash desk, an assistant manager came over to me, leant in, and said quietly: ‘Perfect for the sukkah.’ When I presented them to Bernice on my return home, her eyes lit up more brightly than the strings of bulbs.

One Sukkot in Jerusalem, a freak storm on the first night completely soaked our sukkah, and quite a lot of the kids’ artwork was lost. (It’s fair to say that this upset some of us less than others.) Since then, our decorations have been a little more sparse, but the untrained eye would probably not detect the difference.

A few years ago, Bernice finally allowed some further rationalization, and we put aside a lot of the decorations. However, we still have more than enough, and, to be honest, I am glad that we do. Now that we have a pergola, the only thing that distinguishes Sukkot – that makes our sukkah different from our pergola – is the decorations. We come into Sukkot having eaten under the pergola all summer; we need the decorations to make this week special.

Putting the decorations up under the pergola has presented a new challenge. We like to have paper chains and rows of small flags spanning the sukkah. I have drilled hooks into the walls at just over two metres above the ground, so that I can easily hook on the decoration strings while standing on a kitchen stool. However, with that long a span, the decorations sag in the middle. Since our pergola roof is unusually high, at 3.2 metres, I cannot attach decorations directly to the roof.

This year, I came up with a typically Heath Robinson (Rube Goldberg) solution. I tied two equal lengths of nylon fishing line onto a metal washer, which I then ‘cast’ out of an upstairs window so that it landed on the roof of the pergola close to the centre. I then climbed a ladder, screwed an eye into the central roof strut in the centre, retrieved the nylon lines, untied them from the washer, threaded them through the eye and reattached them to the washer. With the line fully extended, it dangled at an accessible height above the ground. As I put up each span of decorations, I threaded it through this loop. When all was finished, I went back upstairs and reeled in the line, until the washer reached the eye, through which it was unable to pass.

At the end of sukkot, I will let down the line, unthread the decorations, and reel the line in again, so that, for all of the rest of the year, there will be a small eye and washer on the underside of the pergola roof, which would be unnoticed by anyone if I could only resist the temptation to point them out in order to demonstrate how clever I am. The photo gives you an idea of the final effect, and also gives you a view of Micha’el’s 28-year-old, rain-damaged, hand-drawn Israeli flags.

All of which explains, I hope, why I am unsure whether to regard our pergola-sukkah as permanently temporary or temporarily permanent.

Speaking of temporary permanence, Micha’el and Tslil have posted a new video on their YouTube channel documenting the erection of their tipi (which, when I was at school, was called a teepee). You may want to view, like, comment, share, subscribe, or all of the above.

Time for a meanwhile, I think. Looks like by this time next year Tao will be ready to go up the ladder for me, although I may suggest to him that he try it without holding a corn cracker.