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 20^th 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.